Book of Beasts by Kerry Shawn Keys

Book of Beasts
Kerry Shawn Keys
Presa :S: Press 2009
ISBN 9780980008142
$12.95

Review by Irene Koronas

vignettes similar to a hair net, which keeps hair in place while cooking, maybe the net works while writing. Keys has caught small beasts and their friends or roommates. the pages turn smoothly, one to another:

“be careful of eagles.
they’re not friendly like beagles.
evil empires place them on seals
and greedy dollar bills.
they reform babies and sparrows
with claws like arrows.
they’ll kill you for a meal,
a good deal or a limo full of petrol.
O’ they’ll catch you for a lark
and throw you to the sharks.

the poems’ sense of humor, like a snake wearing a sombrero, may strike your fancy or hit a nerve, depends on the pantomime
or turtle progress:

“…hermes once burbled over
a turtle-shell lyre,
and his cowbell songs are
paradigms of desire.
turtles and bunny rabbits
run the race of time,
and both end up as road kills
in this world’s platonic pantomime.”

I’m reminded of the island of moreau. the doctor/scientist tries to transform animals into humans. he is half successful. keys tries to create beasts like a politician on a campaign trail. each vignette exposes subjects we may not be willing to look at:

“I could just dig being a pig,
not a guinea pig, mind you, but
a real bigwig porker swigging
slop in his own stylish brig.
just imagine being king of my own
creation’s farm, casting devils
(and angels) into swine, being holy
unclean, not some boring
cow or chicken…”

Dorian Brooks: A poet who ponders what is behind "The Wren's Cry"

(Poet and political activist Dorian Brooks)



Dorian Brooks: A poet who ponders what is behind "The Wren's Cry"



Interview with Doug Holder

Dorian Brooks is not a self-promoter, but if one was to read her poetry he or she would surely be hooked. Reviewer Barbara Bialick wrote of her latest collection from the Ibbetson Street Press "The Wren's Cry,"

"She both enriches and breaks our hearts with well-edited, polished lyrics carved out of love, nature and memory. But don’t stop till you read the last poems, which will almost kill you with their powerful anti-war messages, one after another, landing as a dead monarch butterfly on Sitting Bull’s hat…"


Brooks is a widely published poet, an editor for the Ibbetson Street Press, an independent scholar of women's history, a politcial activist, a graduate of Harvard, to name a few accomplishments. I interviewed Brooks about her writing life and her new collection.






Doug Holder: Why did it take to your 30's for you to take your writing of poetry seriously?

Dorian Brooks: I was always writing, but as a child of Sputnik I felt torn between poetry and science, studying science and the history of science in college and grad school. When I was about 30, living in Connecticut, I took a poetry workshop, and I remember the woman who ran it saying she liked my work but found it distant, academic, and at one point said to me, “Dorian, when are you going to get in touch with your gut?” A few years later we moved to Minnesota, where poetry was big—in the schools, in the streets—as I imagine it’s been in Russia. I took several workshops there that encouraged me to write more about what I felt strongly about, which at that time tended to be personal relationships, family.

DH: You were a technical writer in the corporate world. Many poets I interviewed have been journalists and they found it a good training ground for being a writer—how about technical writing?

DB: I suppose that in forcing you to write clearly and economically it’s a bit like poetry. But there wasn’t much emotion involved (unless you count my increasing dislike of corporate America!) The principal of the high school I went to said that a poem has to begin with an emotion, and he was right.

DH: You first thought you had to write poems that were difficult to understand. Later you changed your tune. Why?

DB: I gradually realized there was no point in being obscure; it was a kind of affectation. I used to haunt the poetry sections of libraries, taking out books of contemporary poetry I liked, and they were usually by poets whose work spoke simply and directly in ways I could understand, like Sylvia Plath, Denise Levertov, Louise Bogan, James Wright, John Haines. When I lived in Minneapolis in the mid-1970s to mid-1980s, I had a wonderful teacher, Jim White. I remember him saying of his own work, “I went from opaque to translucent to transparent.” I think that was true of mine as well.


DH: How does your concern for the environment, and for women's history, play out in your new poetry collection The Wren's Cry?

DB: Several poems come out of a concern for the environment, mostly in the section “The Earth I Travel On”—such as “Back Road,” “At Martha’s Point,” and “Ground Zero,” in which I touch on our disengagement, our split from the natural world. In “Green Man” I suggest a little more directly that our dominant religious traditions have been part of that split.

As for women’s history—in poems scattered throughout the collection, but especially in the section “Who She Was,” I draw on the theme of silenced women’s voices, as in “Historical Marker (also an anti-war poem),” “In Memoriam,” and “Who She Was.” “To Brigit” and “Sea Child” express my strong interest in female spiritual figures and women’s voices in folklore.



DH: You say poetry for you is a way to come to terms with things. You say your new collection concerns the great themes of love and death. Have you come to terms with the fact that we die...even love dies...?

DB: Well, some of the poems are on those themes. Poetry is a way to connect with, to clarify, to express one’s deep feelings and thoughts, whether about love or death or whatever—hopefully in ways others can relate to. Maybe writing itself comes out of an awareness of the transitory nature of all things, ourselves included. I guess many of the poems in The Wren’s Cry are more or less elegies—for loss of the earth as we have known it; loss of those whom I, or we, hold dear.



DH: You have a great affinity for Native American cultures. Do you find a certain purity in native cultures ... or is it wrong to characterize them as such?

DB: It’s not that I have such an affinity for Native American cultures, though I’ve tried to learn what I can about them, or some of them. It’s more that I’ve come to realize how much of those cultures we (Euro-Americans) have destroyed over the past several hundred years. As a country, we’ve never really acknowledged that part of our history, and I think that until we do, it’s just lying there like a wound festering beneath the surface of things. Indians were mainly to be got out of the way—by assimilation, removal, or outright genocide—so we could take their lands and resources; and this taking is still going on, most recently in the appropriation of their spiritual traditions. I know “it wasn’t me” personally that did it, but it was my culture, whose hallmarks of dominance and greed are with us still and I believe directing much of what our country is doing vis a vis the rest of the world today.

As for Native cultures being “pure,” I wouldn’t put it that way, but I do think they often reflect important values that we in the dominant culture have lost sight of, such as a closeness to and spiritual affinity with nature, and a sense of community, of interrelatedness with others. I think that some older, pre-Christian, pre-industrial European cultures have held similar values, but they were mostly lost, and we’d do well to revisit them now.

DH: How does editing the magazine "Ibbetson Street" help or hinder your work as a poet?

DB: It doesn’t hinder my work. To some extent I think it helps it in the sense that it makes me aware of how many good poets are out there these days, writing on all manner of subjects, and that’s a source of inspiration.



August




By late summer, the maples

have gathered so much darkness

among their boughs,

we finally concede

our own maturing.



We hear crickets and mourn

an earlier music,

the days grown shorter now,

even our few words

a measure of acquiescence.



And in time,

longing itself dwindles

to a single leaf—

fine-veined and lucent,

yet trifling.



Day closes

and we are one

with the vesper sparrow,

at home with solitude

and night descending.

* From The Wren's Cry." ( Ibbetson 2009)


To order "The Wren's Cry" contact ibbetsonpress@msn.com Or send $17 check or money order to: Ibbetson Street Press 25 School St. Somerville, Mass. 02143

Work & Days: Academic Freedom & Intellectual Activism Edited by Ed Carvalho

Works & Days
Academic Freedom & Intellectual Activism
in the Post 9/11 University
Volumes 26-27, 2008-09
Edward J. Carvalho Editor
ISSN: 0886-2060 $15.00

“…since 9/11 there have been many startling instances where the
dominant culture’s rhetoric of terrorism and fear have cast a pall
over the terrain of academic freedom.” Edward J. Carvalho

The above sentence sets the ground work, premises of what follows in each essay; the subject being terrorism, how the word itself effects, in a given situation and in an actual sense of meaning, and its effect on academia. Each essay or interview imparts knowledge by experts, within the range of their capabilities and intellectual understanding and research. Carvalho has assembled and puts forward these important dialogues: “now more than ever, rational, purposeful discussions on the future of our society must emerge so that the controversies outlined in this collection remain a relevant topic of concern for all citizens…”

Works & Days, contains some of the best, complete understandings, from historical to prophetic outlooks, and the role of the present state of regulations and deregulating, in colleges and universities. “Caught in the Crunch,” by Ellen Messer-Davidow. Her essay creates an conducive and inclusive atmosphere for what one may understand as observation and reporting. In reading her essay, I realize, trying to quote her in minuscule, is almost an impossibility, an injustice to what is being presented, but, I will attempt it, in an incomplete way:

“To harness research to their agendas, conservatives have wielded
defunding more blatantly. The basic strategy for defunding
progressive research was devised by Lynne Cheney, when she
chaired the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) from
1984 to 1994. She openly used her position to issue NEH reports
denouncing the scholarship on gender, race, class and theory,
and behind the scenes she packed the NEH council, staff,
and peer review panels with conservatives who in turn marked
this scholarship down in grant competitions.”

Each writer introduces a similar, yet different, experience and study. In an interview with Cornel West, Edward Carvalho asks, “…can you talk a little about the impact of these forces (imperialistic) on academic freedom and intellectual activism?” Cornell West, being a prolific speaker and writer, launches into a discussion which includes the Patriot Act and its influence on the academic environment:

“… So you’ve got these three forces-you’ve got 9/11 connected to the
Patriot Act, which is political; consensus, in terms of economic
ideology, and so forth; and then, of course, you’ve got the military
presence and imperial occupation, with the Israeli-Palestinian issue
looming large in relation to 9/11, and the academy unable to have
a Socratic dialogue about it.”

Cavalho has chosen his writers carefully, with certainty, and emphatic substances; they discuss some of the problems, connected to and with 9/11, within the academic society and the ramifications brought on by that particular day and thereafter the changes wrought upon the higher places of learning. The reader will find an exact fit, a voice worthy of their liking. My favorites are similar to Socrates questioning Cebes in Phaedo. “Why, when you add one to one, I am not sure either that the one to which one is added has become by the addition, two. I cannot understand how, when they are brought together, this union or placing of one by the other, should be the cause of their becoming two, whereas, when they were separated, each of them was one, and they were not two…” All the conversations within this book are one, each essay placed beside each one another, as one indication. I especially related to the interviews:

Edward Carvalho: In speaking of the relations between resistance and labor, what are some of the fundamental differences between dissidence, insurgence, and terrorism…?

Martin Espada: My own feeling about vocabulary that your addressing is that, yes, on the one hand, it’s certainly very subjective; you can talk about point of view as a major factor in labeling people as terrorists, or dissidents, or subversives, or whatever it might be. On the other hand, I think we can and should come to some agreement about what these words mean. Rather than simply dismissing it as an entirely subjective process, it’s more responsible of us as writers and activists to stop and say, “Okay, let’s decide what these words mean,” instead of just dismissing these words out of hand and never using them again.

EC: …have such terms been corrupted by the war in Iraq?…

ME: What we as poets can do is reconcile language and meaning and to put the blood back into the words. The fact of the matter is that words are perfect engines of meaning. Words are not simply noise, and words are not simply there to distract, frighten, or manipulate us. With that said, if we can simply reconcile language and meaning in ways to deliberately counteract the separation of language and meaning carried out by the people holding political and economic power, then we will have done our job as poets…

There are so many worthy writings in this book that I can only recommend buying it and gleaning from it what you will find relatable.

Karren Baird-Olson, “Learning-Centered” Urban University. Baird-olson gives an in-depth research/look into some of the problems after and before 9/11. She presents a subtitled list of subjects from her research: Cultural Imperialism, Economic Discrimination, Hyper-Surveillance, Marginalization and Exclusion. Each of these subjects backed-up in paragraphs, thoughtful explanations:

Ignoring these and other financial realities facing students, a
number of administrators, educational policy-makers, and
politicians continue to view students as consumers of a service
and to speak of their higher learning in terms of a “purchased good”
rather than “as a rite and a right.” above and beyond this obvious
corporative model, the same administrative strata erodes educational
opportunity by recommending that students incur additional debt
by taking supplemental loans to pay for their education. Few will
openly acknowledge that the ideology of privatization in education
is code for racialized thinking, which uses tropes for scapegoat
certain underrepresented student populations, in this case, First Peoples
and persons of color. The consequent justifications for shutting
out those groups from higher education undermines and/or destroys
“ethnic studies” programs, and thus excludes or silences the voices
of the less powerful…

Carvalho’s own expression, to which a reader can access, relate to what is being put forth: “But beyond the discussions and theorizing, past the vista of mere spectatorship, the ideas outlined here must become living things and through concerted agency be put to sustainable action…”

The book, Works & Days, presents a comprehensive, cohesive cross section of deliberations by the various writers. Each writer intones their perceptions through qualified research and experiences that reinforce their truths; their writing leaves an opening, so that a reader may come to think or believe or find an insightful way or course of action. This then becomes the building; how we might come to learn what the academic administrative systems try or not try to decree, how their actions effect us, according to an atmosphere of terror; terror being an implied word, presenting and implementing certain stipulations that accord an action on the part of the implementer; the leaning toward restrictions. This book takes on a huge subject and huge questions are asked of the academics and Cavalho presents, to us the reader, some of the answers, some of the thoughtful dialogues and historical data; with a sense of integrity, with an understanding of what is
happening within our educational facilities that effect us, a nation of individuals.

Irene Koronas
Poetry Editor & Reviewer
Ibbetson Street Press
Poetry Editor
Wilderness House Literary Review

Going Home. A Horror Story. Lawrence Millman

Going Home

A Horror Story


by Lawrence Millman



sunnyoutside, Buffalo, NY

Copyright 2008 Lawrence Milman

ISBN 978-1-9345513-15-6

Paperback 25 pages $8







Review by Zvi A. Sesling







Lawrence Millman calls this a horror story which it well may be based on three things: the story, the mother and Millman's writing. That is not to say Millman's writing is a horror. In fact the exact opposite. He is very funny, very clever and very dead on. Not every Jewish mother is like Lawrence Millman's Going Home mother. However, I am sure there are many a Jewish male who may feel that their mother in some way or another - as cliche ridden as this may be - the kind of mother Peter's (the protagonist's) mother is. Even the hero's (??) name is central to the story which I refuse to giveaway because it is, as I said, very funny, very clever and very dead on.



As a horror story, Millman redefines what a horror is. It is a very funny and had me laughing out loud, not usual fare for horror. In fact, having read a few horror stories here and there, and not having read any of Millman's previous works (for which I now feel deprived), I would say he may be in a class of his own.





The Going Home characters are all too believable, particularly the interplay between Peter and mother. Their relationship is not unique in mother-son relationships, until of course, Millman adds his touch. Throughout the story Millman maintains crisp dialogue, tension coupled with humor and, of course, an ending that leaves you .... well, let's say, aware of the dark side of maternal instincts.



Reading this short story I definitely want to read at least some of Millman's eleven books. A book of his short stories, if they are anything like this would rival one of my favorite short story writers, Lawrence Block and putting Millman at that level says a lot for my like of this story. Read it and enjoy.


* Zvi Sesling is the editor of the Muddy River Poetry Review

Review of The Tide Clock And Other Poems by Tanya Contos

Review of The Tide Clock And Other Poems by Tanya Contos, Somerset Hall Press, Boston, MA, 2008

By Barbara Bialick, author of TIME LEAVES (Ibbetson Street Press)

The beauty of The Tide Clock poems is the feeling you get as you undulate up through the lives of the people of the sea, where life and death are intrinsic to the scene (like shards of glass or a seal’s carcass)—then you sadly partake of the collectables and dryness of the landlocked, for whom death is sickening like a dead grandmother’s “mummy”-like wig in an attic found by a curious little boy. Similarly, “great grandmother cannot sleep…”as you lie on her old bed: “In her portrait she wears black bombazine/and a Byzantine virgin-martyr’s air of noble resignation.”
In contrast, near the ocean: in “Midnight Swim”, “The new moon slices the sky like a scythe/and scatters its harvest of hundreds of stars/across the dark water in sight of the beach.”

As you end the book, you will probably feel compelled to start it all over again, as if it is the circle of life, for her ancestors, as well as a relative or a past love who died, with the tide recorded on The Tide Clock: “Until (everything could change, with a new man friend?) then your tide clock tells me/whether the rocks are submerged or exposed/at the spot on the point where they scattered your ashes.”

Even the family set of Dresden angels has suffered as they moved “for better than half a century in transit/in trunks of cars and holds of ships…the cellist and the violinist/contemplate their broken bows/as if there must be some mistake/…the only one intact/is the conductor/her perfect palm is raised/…she seems to say Look I know I know but play”

In this intriguing collection, the author is the conductor, as she brings you these vignettes of ocean people, their “flotsam” and how they react to moving “off island”… She concludes along the way that “the land has a heartbeat as strong as the tide” as the old-timers and the almanac have said. “We take this on faith,/we listen anxiously, straining against the wind.”

But as she points out in her preface, she’s “someone who can barely breathe, much less write, more than a few miles from open water…” This would be a good book to take with you on a personal voyage to the sea, or to grab if you live there all the time.
The book’s glossy cover has a beautiful and mysterious orange figure rising up near an ocean, a painting by George Kordis, that is as fascinating to study as are the poems within.

--Barbara Bialick, author of TIME LEAVES (Ibbetson Street Press)

Self-Portrait With Severed Head by CD COLLINS

Self-Portrait with Severed Head
CD Collins
Ibbetson St. Press
Copyright 2009
Pages =56



REVIEW BY LO GALLUCCIO


A thoroughbred herself, CD’s dedication (epigraph) for the book underscores her love of contradictions and her canny sense of humor; not to mention her love of horses:

She ran with the heart of a locomotive,
On champagne-glass ankles.”
From a Washington Post writer on the death of Eight Belles
from fractured ankles.

The book’s production, with a violet and black cover of a dark-haired woman lying dead or unconscious and a woman on the upper-right holding a camera between her naked knees sets up the use of photography in the collection: four gorgeous abstract b&w photos marking the four sections: “Element,” “Spoken Songs,” “Incognito,” and “Prodigal.”
(The “Spoken Songs” section opens with an on-stage shot of CD at Berklee College of Music.)

In this book there is an almost perfect fusing or alternation between narrative memory, rhymed and unrhymed, and pop-culture imagery and dream. The musicality and the female presence or essence is strong. It’s like Chrissie Hynde’s wailing: “Gonna use my arms, gonna use my legs, gonna use my style….” And while CD sure knows how to spin a story and create beautiful metaphors in and around it, she herself never leaves the poem, as if it were a special room she won’t leave unlocked.

“I love the fragrance of grease
from exhaust fans
into the winter morning,
walking past on my way to the factory,
how steam billows into clouds
my hands
two blue stars
in my coat pockets.” P. 7, “Subtracting Down”

Hands, her hands, the labor of hands, is a popular theme in this book – used literally and metaphorically. As if, jolted from a nightmare or a surreal dream, CD always finds her own hands to recognize her humanity and reality of self. Eyes are the other mighty part of the body—as she says, “they shoot with a camera instead” – talking about hunters in “Moon Again.” Or, in the poem “Diamonds,” she writes:

“Diamonds

are so necessary,
for cutting emeralds, rubies, glass
the perfect substance for the task.
Give me diamond chips in a velvet box.
I’ll grind them with my eyes to dust.”

And in the poem “Everyeye,” a signature poem for the collection, she writes:

“I can see but my eyes are closed.
I can see but I keep my eyes in my pocket.” P. 24

In the title poem, “Self-portrait with a Severed Head,” CD displays what Joni Mitchell once wrote was “the hope and hopelessness I’ve witnessed all these years….” It is an example of a brilliant juxtaposition that Collin’s uses to startle us into reflecting throughout the book:

At first she says: “To touch is to change.” And that freedom to love, to intertwine, to “finish a lover” as she says in a later poem, seems the essence of sensual bond and hope. But the poem ends with a very different image:

“I imagine all our cascading faces
smiling larger than ourselves,
fixed and absorbed through my eye,
and think how small
our souls must be by now.”

When hunters “shoot with a camera instead” this seems a metaphor for poetry also, for it is a means of survival and sometimes a way of the thief, capturing the world around him/her, when the world has no real choice but to be captured. That is also a way of describing the craft of poetry, I think, though others might disagree. And it also seems an allusion to the photos in the book that serve as exquisitely strange place marks.

Again in spoken songs, CD infuses her dry (maybe Southern?) humor into an epigraph: a popular joke to some in the world of celebrity tracking. But the joke serves only as the tip of a poem that is about much more. It’s called “The Blues.”

“If Mama Cass had given Karen Carpenter that ham sandwich, they’d both be alive today.”

I must admit, never having heard the joke, I had to giggle. It’s so absurdly funny the way we know that Mama Cass died on a ham sandwich and Karen Carpenter died of self-starvation.

The actual story of the poem intermixes memories of high school parties and her relationship to the boys, the boys that may or may not have been sent off to the Vietnam War.

“You needed to be smaller than him
so he could protect you,
Once he starved himself for a month,
eating only bananas.
He was a pacifist.
He looked like Jesus,
With his long hair and suffering face.” P. 32

She invokes the music of Abbey Road and Purple Haze, Janis Joplin
And the sit-com characters Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore…

“You listened to their voices,
Described them like wine.
At least they had voices,
you seemed to lose yours,
drinking White Russians in snowstorms, running fast….”

p. 31 The Blues

And then the joke at the beginning; the fateful twist of Mama Cassie’s choking and Karen Carpenter’s anorexia comes down to hunger, famine even, or cannibalism that we all eat each other’s faces and images and stardom somehow: Or want them, or sacrifice for them. There are martyrs and there are Queens and it doesn’t matter when you’re young, you “eat them” because you actually want, as CD has brilliantly and through years of evolution found, her own voice.

“It was Karen singing,
in the end she looked like your old boyfriend, Jesus.
You are starving,
And she is singing,
And this is what you ate.”

p. 33 The Blues


“Spanish Mountain” – one of my favorite more abstract poems takes the landscape and objects of a foreign land as metaphors for other things: For me, it gives the section a fine Mediterranean glaze:

“Roof tiles are candysticks
Sun is white smoke
God is brown dust
Marble chip is dawn shard
Sleep is colossus.”

p. 35 Spanish Mountain


There are fairies in the gloaming, there are her mother’s old dogs she hears over and over despite their absence, there is always a CD finding her heart against a severed head but dangling that head into so many road maps we can barely fathom it. She is one of the best poets at word play I have read in years and her feminine intuition is matched by her great respect for the grounded strength of the real world. I would highly recommend you read this book, from Doug Holder’s indie operation that gains depth, range and excellence every year in its writers works. Brava to CD Collins.


Lo Galluccio is a writer and vocal artist who lives in Cambridge, MA

**********To order CD COLLINS' book go to http://lulu.com/ibbetsonpress

Boston National Poetry Month Festival April 4 2009

PRESS RELEASE


PRESS RELEASE

THE BOSTON NATIONAL POETRY MONTH FESTIVAL

Now In Its Successful NINTH!!! Year

CO-SPONSORS: Tapestry of Voices & Kaji Aso Studio in partnership with the Boston Public Library, SAVE the DATE, Saturday, April 4th 10:00 A.M.- 4:45 P.M. OPEN MIKE: 1:30 to 4:00P.M. The Festival will be held at the library’s main branch in Copley Square. FREE ADMISSION

53 Major and Emerging poets will each do a ten minute reading; ALSO

Featuring six extraordinarily talented prize winning high school students: Dianna Willard & Joshua Mejia from Boston Latin High School; Yolanda Cruz, Peter Li & Yamira Serret: Boston Arts Academy; Gabriella Fee: Walnut Hill School for the Arts. These student stars will open the Festival at 10:00 A.M. SAM CORNISH, Boston’s current and first Poet Laureate will open the formal part of the Festival at 11:00 A.M. 52 additional major and emerging poets will follow with a

POETRY MARATHON

Some of the many luminaries include SAM CORNISH, Diana Der Hovanessian, Richard Wollman, Jennifer Barber, Afaa M. Weaver, Barbara Helfgott-Hyett, Dan Tobin, Ellen Steinbaum, Charles Coe, Ryk McIntyre, Elizabeth McKim, Regie O’Gibson, Kate Finnegan, Michael Bialis, Gary Tucker, (Kaji Aso Studio), Marc Widershien, Sandee Story, CD Collins, Marc Goldfinger, Diana Saenz, Stuart Peterfreund, Valerie Lawson, Joseph DeRoche, Frannie Lindsay, Ifeanyi Menkiti, Dick Lourie , Mark Pawlak, Lainie Senechal, Harris Gardner, Joanna Nealon, Susan Donnelly, Irene Koronas, Doug Holder and a Plethora of other prize winning poets.

This Festival has it all: Professional published poets, celebrities, numerous prize winners, student participation, OPEN MIKE.
Even more, it is about community, neighborhoods, diversity, Boston, and Massachusetts. This popular tradition is one of the largest events in Boston’s Contribution to National Poetry Month. FREE ADMISSION !!!
FOR INFORMATION: Tapestry of Voices: 617-306-9484 or 617-723-3716
Library: 617-536-5400

Wheelchair accessible. Assistive listening devices available. To request a sign language interpreter, or for other special needs, call 617-536-7855(TTY) at least two weeks before the program date.

The Book of Colors and Painters by Korkut Onaran

The Book of Colors
And Painters
Korkut Onaran
Cervena Barva Press
1007 Chapbook Award Winner 7.00

Review by Irene Koronas

Korkut Onaran creates in two parts; the first part imparts how the artist thinks about colors. “then, what remains is reflected on the water surface.” each color, each pigment, represents his personal perspective, “like phallic flowers” or “black has brought titanic silences.”

In part two we meet the painters; chagall:

“…the full moon is taking them into a pool
of blue, a deep dark bright blue,
and they swim in it
eating the plums, the grapes,
eating the tiny bananas,

and they speak of the flowers
-word by word, the flowers-
and they speak like fireworks…”

we meet Paul Klee:

“full moon
falls
into the pond
and bounces

then touches the window
glows on the ceiling
lands on child’s cheeks
and enters his dreams…”

This chapbook is bound to call attention to itself and to you the reader who will enjoy all the implications of color.

INTERVIEW WITH POET MIGNON ARIEL KING: THE WOODS HAVE WORDS.

(Photo: Jack Scully)


INTERVIEW WITH POET MIGNON ARIEL KING: THE WOODS HAVE WORDS.


Mignon Ariel King is a dyed-in-the wool Boston poet. In her introduction to her new collection of poetry “The Woods Have Words,” she invites the reader to:"…stroll along the Charles River… walk through the streets of Boston,…or zip under and over the state of Massachusetts on the country’s oldest subway.” King was born some 40 odd years ago in the bosom of Boston City Hospital. She grew up in Roxbury,later earned a couple of advanced degrees, and was an adjunct professor of English at several local colleges.

She describes herself as a woman who is happily single, bookish, urban, multicultural, nocturnal; a complex woman of refined sensibilities, but she can just as easily down a few beers, and yelp for the home team.

King said she was introduced to poetry as a young kid when she was given a “fat” anthology of children’s poetry edited by Helen Ferris. She read it cover to cover, and soon started to write her own poetry. And finally, after all these years, she has penned her own poetry collection.

King said that poetry is her favorite medium because she said: “ I can’t write fiction.” King lists some of her favorite poets and writers as: Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros, to name a few.

“The Woods Have Words” is of course set in Boston—a place that King will always consider home. She can’t imagine a city without a river, and Boston has the Charles, and as the song goes: “She loves that muddy water.”

Interestingly enough King said she views Boston as a character in her book. She explores the different sections of Boston, many of them which she has lived in and worked in. “They all become part of you,” she reflected.

And this denizen of the asphalt, this walker in the city, considers herself a nature poet as well! She laughed: “ Skyscrapers are as natural as trees to me.”

King is no wallflower at the party, a weeping willow in the woods. She said her poetry is the poetry of a strong woman – a message that is clearly evident in her work. King doesn’t want to be know as an “African-American” poet. She won't be typecaste by biology, she insisted. She simply wants to be known as a writer with a capital W. She identifies with no school of poetry. She says simply and firmly that her work is multicultural.

King said she finds a lot of women writers write about their kids and gardening—a subject matter she see too much among her peers. She lists Sharon Olds and Deborah Garrison as poets who break the mold. Local poets Carolyn Gregory and Jessica Harman are poets she greatly admires.

She is currently working on a new collection “View of the Charles,” that will be a straightforward, Bukowski-style collection. It will be a lyrical journey through Boston, the home of the Bean, the Cod, and the King.



To order “The Woods Have Words” go to: http://lulu.com/ibbetsonpress




Chestnuts

Sox-capped men with silvered white pushcarts peddle
honey-roasted peanuts on the Boston Common.
Whatever happened to roasted chestnuts, clutched
in tiny brown paper bags, crooked in fedora-topped

daddies' grey-tweeded arms, the evening edition
of the Globe absorbing the extra heat? My officemate
offers a dissertation on today's male after I am foolish
enough to ask her opinion on the vanishing breeds.

It seems wrong not to love trees and men
and the fruit of them while shuffling the pulp of
a thousand murdered trees in an attempt to make
a living without missing another life.

--from The Woods Have Words, p.7

If The Delta Was The Sea by Dick Lourie

If The Delta Was The Sea

by Dick Lourie

Hanging Loose Press, $18

Brooklyn, NY

Copyright © 2009 by Dick Lourie

ISBN 978-1-934909-02-7



Review by Zvi A. Sesling



Let me preface this review by saying I have never been a big fan of Dick Lourie’s poetry. There were some poems in Ghost Writer (Hanging Loose Press) that I liked a lot and some that I just liked. The totality was mostly unsatisfying.



Now Lourie has a new volume of poetry which, for me, would have been much better as a memoir or even a non-fiction travel piece. Yet as poetry, it provides insight into things few of us know about: the blues, the Mississippi Delta and Dick Lourie’s thoughts and experiences. Of particular interest is Lourie’s “eastern liberalism” which reflects his deep felt feelings for minorities and women.



For example in “Three Recent Trips To The Golden Past: East Village, Clarksdale, Athens” Lourie reminds the reader of what the “old south” was like as well as his humanitarian views about slaves and women:



“in Athens I walked through the Agora

where the ancients shopped gossiped argued sent

slaves on errands and male citizens met

for democratic decision making”



However, he also has keen sense of what it was to be Native American, particularly Chicksaw, and since that particular tribe were in the Delta and Memphis areas, back in the 1950s the Chicago White Sox had a minor league team in Memphis called the Chicksaws, Chicks for short. But rather than digress with my trivia here is more of Lourie who has explained how the Chicksaw were treated and what kind of reward they received. It comes from his poem “Rights”:



“...after the

Chicksaw wrote this to Andrew Jackson

in 1831 they were moved west –

in Mississippi the white pioneers

thrived with black slaves cleared swamps planted cotton”



or take this piece from “Dear Manager” in which Lourie discovers all is not what it appears to be:



after lunch with Andy Carr at the Rest

Haven my wife and I joke that there are

some topics we must manage to avoid

discussing with Andy his politics

being conservative and quite far from

our left end of the spectrum but then it

occurs to me that (as so often in

Clarksdale) the joke is on me...”



To find out what the joke on him is, you might want to read this poem.



Overall, I wish this were a prose travel piece, then it would have a wider circulation and provided non-poetry readers with some education they could probably use because as purveyor of Delta blues and Delta history, Lourie provides a good read.

*Zvi Sesling is the editor of the Muddy River Poetry Review

Review of The Curvature of Blue by Lucille Lang Day

Review of The Curvature of Blue by Lucille Lang Day, Cervena Barva Press, 2009

By Barbara Bialick, author of TIME LEAVES (Ibbetson Street Press)


The Curvature of Blue is a fascinating collection of poems from a great small press whose publisher is particularly fond of languages. But the language from which the power of this volume evolves is not eastern European but the language of science. Like other poets who love nature, the author, who has a Ph.D. in science and mathematics education from the University of California at Berkeley (and several other degrees, including zoology and creative writing), has a palette of words that gives her a unique voice.


Here is how she dealt poetically with the death of her father in “A Death”—

“It was inevitable as the day the universe lit up/after a hundred million years of blackness,/as clouds of gas collapsed and ignited/…It was impossible as the intricate movements/of millions of creatures since the dawn of life,/each one finding its only mate to enable/my father’s life to blaze for a moment, eons/later, on a blue-green planet, in a sea of stars.”


She’s certainly a scientist, but is she a mystic? She sometimes acknowledges a sense of the divine, but she doesn’t seem to be religious. She’s wide eyed in amazement, but not directly spiritual. She addresses this in “God of the Jellyfish”:


“The god of the jellyfish/must be a luminous, translucent bowl/the size of a big top,/drifting upside down/in an unbounded sea…And the god of the jellyfish/gave them ocelli/that shine like the eyes on a butterfly wing/…and does not/expect worship or even praise…”


In “Birding: A Love Poem”, the dance of DNA continues on: “I surrender my molecules, too,/swirling in flocks, layer upon layer,/in my cells, like so many birds/with hollow bones and rapid hearts/heading south, the air full of wings,/dazzling, alive with offerings.”


A great villanelle and love poem is “Color of the Universe”, where she addresses a startling scientific claim by John Noble Wilford, who wrote in the New York Times, “The universe is really beige. Get used to it.”


“I can’t believe the universe is tan,/Not red or green or lavender or blue./I feel carnelian when you take my hand—“ But one poem over, she writes of “A Blessing in Beige”: “A bird in flight outshines its silver cage./If the sky’s too bright the stars shine unseen./May our stars burn brighter as we age./Hurray, the color of the universe is beige!”


But the most important question of this book is who is this poet,Lucille Lang Day,
and why haven’t I heard of her before?! She’s written four previous collections and three chapbooks. She’s also the director of a small press, Scarlet Tanager Books, and is the director of an “interactive children’s museum” in Berkeley, California.




Once again the small press gives voice to poets just as deserving of being a “known” as the bigger, commercial houses, who fortunately have captured at least some of the greats.


But Day also proves she can write in other voices altogether in her poetry repertoire. In a section of the book called “Strangers”, she gets into some political and other themes such as “The Liberation of Baghdad”, “The Product is Safe”, and “At Dulles International After Visiting the Holocaust Museum”, to name a few.


She also shows her keen eye for detail in such poems as this one about a flood in her home, “After the Deluge”: “…when the water floods office and bedroom,/then drains into the hall and dining room downstairs,/filling the chandeliers like vases/and staining the ceilings/whose paint now hangs loose/like curling sheets of ancient parchment…”


These are modern, yet ancient pages well worth reading. I strongly encourage you to read “The Curvature of Blue”!


--By Barbara Bialick, author of TIME LEAVES (Ibbetson Street Press)

Paul Steven Stone: “It was if someone hit me on the side of the head and said: ‘Now you are going to write the novel you are supposed to.’”

Paul Steven Stone: “It was as if someone hit me on the side of the head and said: ‘Now you are going to write the novel you are supposed to.’”

By Doug Holder

Paul Steven Stone is the creative director of W.B. Mason, and the author of “Or So It Seems” released by the local Blind Elephant Press. He is a regular at the Bagel Bards, a literary group that meets in Somerville, Mass., and since he has promotion in his blood, he is never without cards and bookmarks to tout his novel. “Or So It Seems” deals with a Woody Allenish, neurotic, type of guy, who searches for truth, spiritual salvation, and sex, guided by an odd and avuncular Hindu deity figure. This all takes place in the environs of Boston and Cambridge, Mass. With this unusual conceit of eastern religion and borscht belt humor, Stone takes us on a rollercoaster of a ride that only lets up when we finish reading. I spoke to Stone on my Somerville Community Access TV Show, “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”

Doug Holder: When you started this novel “Or So It Seems” you were divorced, bitter and angry. How about when you finished the novel?

Paul Stone: It is an interesting arc that I traveled. The novel evolved into something bigger and less driven by the forces that made me start the novel. There has always been a novel in me. When I started “Or So It Seems’ I was bitter, I needed to feel like the victim, and my now ex-wife was the guilty party. I was told that my first attempt with the novel lacked narrative tension. I sat down to reorder events. As soon as I did this, this spiritual aspect came in to play. It was if someone hit me on the side of the head and said: “Now you are going to write the novel you are supposed to.” All of a sudden all these concepts and ideas came flooding in. I really hadn’t wanted to rewrite.

DH: Was it therapeutic for you?

Ps: Absolutely. It saved at least 20 years of paid therapy. It allowed me to vent…the time to look closely at something. I moved on from feeling like a victim all the time. I am no longer a victim but the author of a novel.

DH: Before you started your rewrite of you said it was like you heard a voice guiding you. If you had to personify the voice who would it be?

PS: Well I am not hearing voices! But I feel there is someone, a muse, or some force, an elder, whatever that helps me. An entity that wakes me up at 3AM with ideas. I’m in advertising. I get ideas for my work as well that way —they come from somewhere. I get a lot from these “voices”

DH: The protagonist, Paul Peterson, constantly steps back with his spiritual guru—to observe the material world/ reality. In a way this is like the novelist, right?

PS: I think so. One of the intriguing conceits of the novel is that Petersen talks in the present moment sharing the action with the reader, as if the reader was there. It is almost as if the narrator and the reader are there at the same time together—going through it. The first time I wrote this I didn’t need the conceit. The 2nd time it made sense.

DH: The writer Thomas Wolfe holed up in the Chelsea Hotel in NYC and wrote (standing up) for hours on end. It was described as “automatic writing” Anything like that happen with you?

PS: No. I have had experiences where things get done through me so easily all I have to do is make the pen hit the paper. Other times I have to sit down and think about it.

DH: A lot of writers self-promote these days. How do you going about getting the word out for your book?

PS: I took a workshop at Grub Street, given by this lady who recently had a successful book. I was amazed at how she had treated marketing her book as if it was an advertising campaign. Up until this time I had not thought about it this way. But she was very methodical. She had a website in place; she had pieces that she would send out to the different publishing arms. She had different elements—it seemed all part of a brand. So I saw what I was supposed to do. The way I approached it was I looked at every avenue that was low cost. I made business cards. I have unique cards that fold out like little books, with reviews from readers inside. I try to take the least expensive avenues and try to do it at a high level. A level that people don’t expect from someone who is doing it himself. If you act as if the book is important in everything you do it will seem important. The book will be treated importantly.

DH: In the book you write about the advertising world. It is not a flattering picture.

PS: I think the world would be a much better place without advertising. But there is always going to be advertising, and it is a business, so I think of myself as a positive influence. So it is good to have people in the industry like that. The work I do for W.B. Mason is fun stuff. People enjoy seeing the TV commercials. But I think there is something shallow where art is second to commerce.

DH: Can you tell us about your next book that will be a collection of columns you wrote for a south shore newspaper.

PS: Yes. They were written in many different voices and with many different subjects. Some were short fiction pieces, one column celebrated adversity. The columns deal with things I found of interest or concerned me at the time. The book will be called “How to Train a Rock.” I wrote a series of columns on training rocks. This will be a diverse collection.

The Light of Fields by Michael Kriesel

The Light of Fields
Michael Kriesel
Propaganda Press 2009
alt.current@gmail.com
Pocket Protector Series: book seven

two inches by about three inches; this book of poems fits in the palm of a hand like something new born; the soft tiny words barely audible:

“how to come to the frozen numb
bodies
speaking of fields showing gold

knowing no cold
that the warmth of flesh cannot survive

and to come to these starving
whose tongues sing their stomachs of
air

telling of bodiless songs rising in them
whose sight follows stars against
darkness

to come to those silhouettes
pressing themselves against ledges
to listen for wind

and to tell them of others who listen

and know it is true”

the succinct continuality is established from the first poem to the last poem,. they read like a small novel, a small telling, “with a terrifying love I’ve seen, unreasoning, clings past its season…” don’t let, ‘the light of fields’ slip out of sight, or off your hands. keep the tiny flecks written within the yellow pages, “go beyond the poking stubble to the stand of spruce.”

Irene Koronas
Poetry Editor
Ibbetson Street Press

A Z Two: Words of Travel by David Giannini

A Z Two
Words of Travel
David Giannini
Adastra Press
ISBN 10: 0-982249500
2009 $18.00

David Giannini slows the process of reading poems, of thinking about the surroundings, the space and all therein. letterpress print on a hand-feed C&P, the
collating and hand sewing of each book, each book becomes the entire world memory:

the rasp of something
owning very little-

perhaps an old man
filing the edge

of his voice, wanting
to receive

and be received
only if

outside of
rain.

the taught lessons in each poem, the way the cliffs jut, make shadows, seem stuffed. like a prayer book, A X Two, follows the up and down of a spring stream, river rock, muddy boots stuck by the door. the poems run their current:

up
on
a
hill
looking
ahead at my
tracks already
there as if
begging
me
to
keep
up

spiritual is a word that wants to describe everything, anything in nature, anything someone thinks is beyond nature or one-self. Words of Travel, has all
the elements of leaving behind, letting words go, lighting a fire and sitting with a song of sorrow, the sunset rose peach motions, time ethereal passing..

highly recommended.

Irene Koronas
Poetry Editor
Ibbetson Street Press

Poet Rebecca Schumejda: Pens a Collection of Verse “ Falling Forward”

Poet Rebecca Schumejda: Pens a Collection of Verse “ Falling Forward”


Rebecca Schumejda stopped by my interview show “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer” for an interview on her way to visit the New Hampshire poet Nate Graziano. Both are young writers who have published books with the former Somerville, Mass. press “sunnyoutside.” Rebecca’s latest book of poetry is “Falling Forward” ( sunnyoutside-2009). Rebecca lives in Kingston, NY with her husband and daughter, and teaches English at a local alternative school. She got her B.A. in English from SUNY New Paltz and her MA in Poetics from San Francisco State University. She was the coeditor of the little magazine “reuben kincaid” for a number of years. She has a number of collections of poetry out the most recent is “Falling Forward.”

Doug Holder: You wrote that your father Doug, a roofer, was the first advocate for your poetry. You had a troubled adolescence, and wrote “‘dark” poems. What did your father see in your poetry that the authorities in your school didn’t?

Rebecca Schumejda: My father and I didn’t get along, but he had energy, and that energy he saw in me. I had a lot of energy with writing—that was my thing. I think he wanted me to be educated. He wanted me to get out there and say what I felt, whatever it was. I had actually gotten in trouble with school officials and they were looking at my dark poetry and were saying:” I think she needs some help.” My father said: “No, she is just writing. This was the first connection I made with my father that was through my writing. He wanted me to write. And he said write whatever you want. He kind of laughed at the school administration, and the school teacher. So I became comfortable with my writing.

DH: Philip Roth said you have to be honest in your writing, to the point of insulting your own mother if need be. Your take?

RS: I am willing to insult myself in my writing, as well as anyone else in my life. But I wouldn’t insult them in a way that would hurt them as people. You should share your experiences whatever they are.

DH: Do you think poetry provided you with a “center that held” throughout your life?


RS: I don’t think I would have survived anything in my life without writing. Anytime I am going through a difficult time I write. It’s grounding and it is a way to save a lot of money. I would have spent a lot of money on therapy. I might as well spend my time on writing.

DH: Do you write with a specific audience in mind?

RS: I am not about getting my work out there and published as much as some other writers. I do write for myself. I write because I can’t imagine not writing. You record your history—the way I see it, my perception. But of course I want people to read my work—I want people to read a good story.

DH: You published an early chapbook with Ian Griffin of the very prolific Green Bean Press. Can you talk about Griffin and the press?

RS: I was sixteen or seventeen when I met Ian. I had submitted work to him. We both grew up in Long Island, NY. He published me in his literary magazine “brouhaha” We got together and hung out. He no longer has the press. He lives in Brooklyn, New York presently.

DH: In your new collection of poetry “Falling Forward” you write about your fears around having a baby. Is there a similarity between a birth of a baby and a birth of a poem?

RS: Yes. Because when we decided to have a kid we had these ideas where we wanted our lives to go. Just like when you start out to write something and it comes out totally different.

DH: How do you handle motherhood, and writing?

RS: At this time I am writing more than I have ever written, in this last year—the year I had my child. We have childcare. I work fulltime as a teacher—but I still find time. I write at school, on my lunch break—a lot of inspiration comes my way. My husband and my mother also help with the children.

DH: You tell me you are working on a poetry collection on pool halls?

RS: Yes. My husband and I met at a bar in New Paltz ( while playing pool) where I was going to college. It was my husband’s dream. We opened one but it didn’t work out. The economy in Kingston, NY was depleted. Pool, the game, isn’t what it used to be.

DH: Who frequented your hall?

RS: Old school players. The stories they told! Pool players are poets. I got to watch them in their element—a place a lot of young women would not be allowed to go. So I got to hear stories about their lives. There were stories about life around the game, marathon pool matches, etc…There were outlandish stories, drug stories…you name it.

DH: Do you know the celebrated upstate New York poet Alan Catlin?

RS: We have been emailing each other lately. He was a bartender in Albany, NY for many years. I will be reading with him in Schenectady real soon at the Café Luna. He has a great poetry collection out; “Only the Dead Know Albany.”


When the Check Clears

he’ll buy a package of corn-dogs
a bottle of ketchup, seven boxes
of macaroni and cheese
a newspaper. A spider weaves
a hammock across the trophy,
he won in a third grade spelling-bee.
A fly buzzing around the room
crashes into the blinds over
and over again; he chuckles,
life melts like ice cubes
he chews
to forget
hunger.

He wants to be cremated:
no obituary notice, no flowers
no grave marker, just ashes tossed
indiscriminately into the wind.
After the days’ second AA meeting,
he assures himself that good times
are waiting between the serenity
prayer and the horizon, so he
keeps walking past gas stations,
laundry mats, parked patrol cars
back and forth across
the same bridge
six times
as the sky turns
dusty feet sore.

Back at home, he waits for the spider
to notice the fly, twisted in the web.
For a brief second, he considers
running his fingers through the web
to sever the fly from its fate
but he knows better than to prolong
the struggle, instead he walks
to the window, peeks out through
the blinds to count the cars that pass by.
He considers the icicles clinging
to steering wheels, hopeful fingers
starved
and searching
for direction.

The Woods Have Words: Poems of Tribute by Mignon Ariel King

The Woods Have Words: Poems of Tribute by Mignon Ariel King





The Woods Have Words: Poems of Tribute
by Mignon Ariel King
Ibbetson Street Press
Somerville, MA 02143
Copywright 2009 60 pages

To order: http://lulu.com/ibbetsonpress

Review by Lo Galluccio

Apparently, Mignon had a Grammie too, to which she dedicates this vivid, rooted, musical collection of poems that seem to grow like the sycamores, out of Boston’s earth. My Grammy was on the Welsh side of my family, but I must confess it really grabbed me; Mignon’s little portrait of the old North End –obviously Italian-- where you are hard-pressed these days to buy a Ricotta pie on Easter. In “Mario the Tailor Works on Wednesdays” she writes:

“and bistros where the bisotti
is mwah and the gelati a tapestry
of smooth, rippled almond.” p3

In Mignon’s book, the City issues reverence, imagery and drama in formal and idiomatic language and so much more -- out of objects and food and people of all stripes….including visceral scenes in institutions, job-sites, apartments, and historical avenues. In King’s book, it’s not just the graceful trees talking, though they do pack their wizened meaning along rivers and parks in Greater Boston, a Greater Boston Mignon knows inside and out. It makes me realize how much of a snob I am for always touting New York as the truly great metropolis in the USA, “fire of my loins,” my Gotham.

What I especially like is the fable-like-realism that Mignon is able to employ for most of these exquisitely concrete episodes of life as she comes of age and then colorfully sketches her fair City’s environs and happenings. Shut up in Brigham and Women’s Hospital, after some procedure, Mignon is fiddling with the oxygen tube and the CD player to get a pumped in bang of Aerosmith, the great Boston rock band. In a delightful punk unraveling, Mignon envisions Steven Tyler in his “nails shiny black, sculpted face and perfect teeth pleading for me to dance with him.” p.14 “Oxygen and Aerosmith {To Steven Tyler.} In her pneumonia-induced dream-state she must decline a dance with the Cherokee-boned rockstar and in the end, humorously reports,

‘Steven was truly hurt, but very forgiving:
Maybe another time, then?”

In her introduction: A City of Trees, she says she hesitates to call the book “autobiographical” because she herself is an embodiment of many women and their perspectives –“urban, multicultural, bookish, educated, creative, professional, happily single, nocturnal, or some combination thereof.” And what is striking about the collection is how comfortable with all these emblems she is while also capturing the love and ambivalence that reigns between the male and female, in poems like “Love without Sex” p .44 and “My First Love” p 37.

In “Another Creation Legend” she invokes the pagan origins of love and poetry from a matriarchal point of view. In a simple ode she runs it down this way:

‘When god was a woman….pagans worshipped
Mere human endeavors, like love.” And ends with:

“I guess when god was a woman
is when poetry was born.” p. 27


In “A Real Job at 9:11 am,” Mignon brilliantly describes the strictures she’s facing, the “prissy temp in wedge heels stuffing envelopes as of with valentines…..” And ends on an ominously poignant note: “Sink-water draining in the ladies’ room sounds like something being strangled.” In a couplet she sums up what others might have just called that sick feeling in the pit of their stomach when they’ve got to face a “real” or “corporate” job. She gives us something more….precise and scary.

Mignon pays tribute to her Daddy – gone now – while also in a kind of choked up nightmare poem describes how his going and coming imprinted her as a child:

{WHEN YOU LEAVE ME}

“I know it seems finished.
You only left me once,
Yet in my dreams

you are always leaving,” p 30

The bond between them is manifested especially in another great poem about a Boston pub and its fare, pastrami, where she and her Dad used to go and imbibe the great messy stuff. In”Ken’s Pub: When my Father was Alive,” she describes:

“The pickles lured us in, floating like an experiment
In avoiding temptation. But the pastrami’s black edges
sealed the deal for me –“ p 32

That poem is dedicated at the bottom as many of Mignon’s works are to her favorite and local poets – this one to Ed Galing. There are many other finely crafted and fascinating scenes dedicated or let’s say influenced in some mysterious way, to Michael Afaa Weaver, Regie O’Hare Gibson, Doug Holder, Walt Whitman and Sharon Olds, among others.


In a tribute to Regie Gibson, (SCOWL: Ballad of a Face), the streets are the varied constructs (colors?) of race and they also shout their critical relevance:

“I still hear you, there in Roxbury! So here is
one truth written across the face of America.
Feel free to label it my scowl as it trails quietly down
the tan, bronze, caramel, mahogany, black street.”
p. 58

In “Freedom Trail” King perhaps epitomizes her credo as a poet and an artistic person, one which makes her poetry both fascinating and generous to those around her: in Ariel’s work there is an explicit balance between the objective and the deeply-felt subjective:

“Contradictions are okay. One hopes anyhow
that it makes cosmic sense to love both trees
and books, the city and the dirt trails, breathe salt….”

Freedom Trail, p 49

I very highly recommend this wondrous collection. Mignon Ariel King’s work encloses my spirit like a sister of the Boston-planet.

Lo Gallucio is the author of "Sarasota Vll" (Cervena Barva Press)

Bird Effort by Ronald Baatz

Bird Effort by Ronald Baatz, Kamini Press (Sweden and Greece)


By Barbara Bialick

When turning to read Ronald Baatz’ new chapbook, BIRD EFFORT, first you note it’s undersized with a handsome bird watercolor cover and some 24 pages of minimalist poems without much punctuation by an experienced poet. Will it be easy to read, you wonder, but no, the book is very deeply written about death as visualized through nature imagery, particularly of birds…

But who is the poem’s persona speaking to? That remains a mystery, though now and again he’ll mention either the presence of or a memory of his mother, his dead father, old girlfriends, his three-legged dog, a dead pet canary, and yes, the lord. There in the foothills of the Catskills in New York, nature and the seasons are always present, ultimately leading him to conclude “how soft my ashes will be…” He maintains sadness throughout, wishing he could be as happy as his dog “just being let in”…

You wonder who else is there because the goal or theme of the book is expressed early:
“You sing to the bird in me/I sing to the bird in you/an effort/we love to face/each dawn.”
With that line’s staccato rhythm, he also suggests a pace like bird songs.

“If time had a shadow…,” he says, “It’d be a swiftness having/no nest to return to”.
“enough/sleep is so difficult/now dreams of my dead father/have come to/spend the winter/Oh lord, let me stay drunk somehow/without all this drinking…”

The life in the poems is often cold to him. There are “crows in fog-/their backs turned to me/ignoring me”; and “winter’s white shoulders--just how beautiful and cold/they really are.” Or his old three-legged dog ”chasing after/a winter sun/that’s cold and/hobbling on one leg”.

To go on pulling beautiful quotes would be unfair to the author and reader. Readers there certainly should be. It’s a nice pocket-size book to carry with you on a nature walk when you might wish to ponder poems about the cruelty of death in the elegance of nature. By all means read them out loud…


By Barbara Bialick, author of Time Leaves (Ibbetson Street Press)

Women’s Work: Modern Women Poets Writing in English

Women’s Work: Modern Women Poets Writing in English
Eva Salzman and Amy Wack, Eds.
Seren Books
www.seren-books.com or http://amazon.com
ISBN 978-1-85411-431-0


A review by Mignon Ariel King


The editors of Women’s Work intend to counteract the “glaring gender imbalance” in anthologies of modern poets, incorporating both famous and lesser-known women poets from the US, UK, and Ireland. This admirable and complex goal is combined with a reluctance to detract from the poetry itself by reducing the poets to political pawns in a radical, separatist feminism. In a fair world, Salzman’s introduction assesses, “the writing is all that should count,” but in the absence of such fairness the scales must occasionally be tipped in the direction of “positive discrimination” (8).



These editors are an American whose bio is as vibrant as her poetry and a classic British poet-scholar, both of whom have been working with words for their entire lives. The reader is in very good hands with this pair. Salzman points out that editors who are charged with judging the importance of poets generally know too little about modern women poets to have an informed opinion about which women poets have earned the term “important.” The highly learnéd yet extremely entertaining introduction explains that the purpose of the anthology is not to “take gender politics as [its] main subject” (17); however, the fact that anger and resistance still confront the mere discussion of gender inequalities in canonizing literature hammers home the need for this work.



Separated into fourteen themed sections—rather than being arranged in chronological order—this is no gloomy tome. Remember compare and contrast papers from high school English class? Here the editors make such connections for the reader, helpfully placing compatible poems for the reader’s true enjoyment as well as understanding. This format allows the non-scholar to simply enjoy the poems at will. That is, read from the “Culture…” section at night and save “History…War” for daylight hours, if you please. Read according to your current mood. The diversity of voices represented roots this collection in the 21st Century. It is all quite good poetry, no low-quality work appearing because of a poet’s demographics. Here is a sample of the 283 pages of poetry, spanning one-hundred-plus years and three major English-language locales:



“Please can I have a man…Who when I come trotting in…
opens his arms like a trough for me to dive into.”
—Selima Hill, “Please can I have a man”


“Now, when he and I meet, after all these years,/
I say to the bitch inside me, don’t start growling.”
—Carolyn Kizer, “Bitch”


“What does she do with them all?/They warm her throat like pearls/
They fasten her dress, stud her shoes….”
—Amy Wack, “Tooth Fairy”


“In my dream I take the white man/slap him til he loves me.”
—Diane Glancy, “Kemo Sabe”


“When I am old…I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves/
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.”
—Jenny Joseph, “Warning”

“Here comes another alpha male--,/a man’s man, a dealmaker,/
holds tanks of liquor,/charms them pantsless at lunch….”
--Deborah Garrison, “Please Fire Me”


“…What would we have called each other laughing/
joking into our beer? Where are my gangs,/
my teams, my mislaid sisters?”
--Lucille Clifton, “The Lost Women”


The anthology is an excellent read, a sourcebook for writers and students, and a formal scholar’s delight(with outstanding front and back matter, brief but relevant bios, an index, and flawless organization.


English teachers from secondary to college level could not ask for a better text. It is also good for men who have a clue about modern women’s poetry or for those who would like to get one from experts. Impatient readers who could not be paid to read an intro can crack the book open anywhere and be absorbed. Read it because you are in love, or doing your laundry, or lonely, or truly annoyed. It weighs comparatively little, a fine companion on the train at 8am. For women poets there is almost the urge to be discouraged. Instead, be humbled. Be inspired. Be prepared to throw an “it’s about time” party when this anthology becomes required reading in modern poetry courses. Women’s Work has just begun.

--available on amazon.com




Mignon Ariel King is an alumna of the Graduate Program in English at Simmons College, a former adjunct professor of English, and a multicultural woman poet

Falling Forward by Rebecca Schumejda

Falling Forward by Rebecca Schumejda

Copyright 2008

sunnyoutside

PO Box 911

Buffalo, NY 14207



ISBN: 978-1-935613-12-5



Rebecca Schumejda’s titular poem is also the last one in the collection, set off by its own section heading and center justified. It’s a special poem that acts as a sort of afterword and comments, in a fairly direct manner, on the collection as a whole. The image one gets is of a prayer, but not just any prayer—a prayer of supplication in the face of adversity.



Indeed, the collection as a whole works on that level. The section titles are all lines or images from the title poem, “The Truth Is Too Heavy,” “Folded Like Two Hands in Prayer,” “Overgrown with Weeds and Regrets,” and “Falling Forward.”



The first poem begins “This afternoon / I buried your cat / while you were at work.” It is economical language broken into clauses, but the enjambed first line lends a sense of tension, which is borne out through the rest of the poem. The narrator dreads the idea of relating this event when her significant other returns home from a day at work.


Other poems follow a similar theme—two characters with distance between them, avoiding topics that need to be addressed and fumbling through crumbling or crumbled relationships, all in an attempt to maintain grip on the ungrippable.



This tension between the things that ought to be said and things that are not said creates a space of broken relationships and cross-purpose discussions. It’s similar to a Pinter play in that the space between spoken thoughts is as much a character as the actual characters within the poems.



Ultimately, the reader is left with the last poem as an answer to all the problems within. “Falling Forward” is an apt description of the lives of Schumejda’s characters. They don’t so much move through time as stumble, trying to keep their feet in an uneven world. But “[w]hen the truth is too heavy…[t]here’s no way to avoid failure,” says the narrator. This is the very essence, the underlying motif of each poem, that the only thing you can do is “just lean forward / let your knees cushion your fall.”



Very much recommended.



Review by Cameron Mount

Blue Collar Poet. G. Emil Reutter.

Blue Collar Poet. G. Emil Reutter. ( Stone Garden Net Publishing 3851 Cottonwood Dr. Danville, Ca. 94506) http://www.stonegarden.net

Poet G. Emil Reutter has worked in factories, steel mills, and other hard knock type of jobs across the Mid Atlantic region of the U.S. He makes no bones that he is mostly self-taught. He is not a product of an MFA mill, maybe a steel mill. So when he was dubbed with the title “Blue Collar Poet” he stuck with this designation with pride.

And the poems in “Blue Collar Poet” are solid, tight, workman like pieces that leave you thinking. The poem “sweet inside” has a delicious innuendo,

“sweet center
surrounded by fruit
tongue glides along
slowly entering
tasting sweetness
of all
that is inside
ah
nothing is quite
like
a creamsicle
on a hot summer day.”

And in the poem “Moment” Reutter captures it and reels it in:

“she sits
on edge of bed
long wavy hair
covering frame
silhouetted by
early morning sun
i sit up
our bodies meet
her head rests
upon my shoulders
a moment frozen
in time
a moment
that will always
be in my mind.”

Recommended.