Timothy Gager's Grand Slam: A Coming of Eggs Story (Big Table Publishing, 2016)

 

Timothy Gager's Grand Slam: A Coming of Eggs Story (Big Table Publishing, 2016)

A Review by Mignon Ariel King

The first thing one notices in Timothy Gager's Grand Slam: A Coming of Eggs Story is the Holden Caulfield-like anti-hero protagonist Woody.  There is an ensemble of characters in the novel who make up the staff and management at a chain diner, Grand Slams, and Gager deftly weaves their backstories and inner lives into the fast-paced narrative.  Despite the often more bizarre and troubled manifestations of the other diner workers' lives, Woody is clearly the focal character.  Woody is a young almost-man who is emotionally distressed and unfocused.  He is in an emotional and social limbo a year post high school, and still living with his parents, yet he is focused enough to seek and find work over the summer break from college.  The two characters who are also Woody's age are working their part-time diner gigs around college schedules, would-be college schedules, and pre-career funks.  It is unclear at times whether the trio have any clear plans.  They do, however, have dreams and passions, the passions often misdirected.  Of the three, Woody is the most attuned to what is going on around him, very invested in how other people's lives are turning out, whereas Sugar and Bobby are just going through the motions, enduring their surroundings and coworkers.

Woody's mother (Mrs. Geyser) attempts to monitor and guide; his father, a political progressive who named his son after Woodrow Wilson, grumpily tunes out his family to focus on favorite television shows.  A comparison is drawn between Woody's father and his "work mother," Maura.  Maura is fifty-something and seems plunked in the diner with her crumply stockings and middle-aged wide middle; Woody's father is plunked in his living room in a Michelin man body.  It is no wonder that the Grand Slams "work family" is so dysfunctional with Maura as its matriarch.  She keeps things moving, but she emotionally detaches from everyone at work to go home to nobody after she picks up her check each week.  Maura left her daughter behind for a better life...perhaps, but really her life is only simpler, uncluttered by the needs of others.  She has no suitors, no girlfriends, just her job and subtle dreams of making more, having more, materialistically speaking. 

Most of the low-level workers in the diner are more invested than their superiors.  Keating, a nasty bastard of a boss, does as little as possible while screaming at his employees, most notably emotionally abusive toward Kayak Kenny, a developmentally challenged bus boy who fantasizes about buying a canoe.  Kenny believes girls will fall in love with him if he has a canoe, swept up in the romance of floating on the pond with him.  Keating floats on cocaine and a rather sleazy sex life.  He sweeps women off their feet with the lure of free drugs.  Sugar is the diner's beauty; she is lusted after by every man who comes within reach of her pretty, pony-tailed, short skirt- and cowboy-booted beauty.  More power to the male author who makes Sugar one of the most intelligent, focused, compassionate characters in the book.  Her flaw is pathologically bad taste in men.  She has a small life and thinks small, but she evolves and matures faster than her age-appropriate male interests.  Sugar's introspection leads her away from the sweaty, portly, mustard-stained tie and rumpled suit grasp of Keating.  Her next conquest is a socioeconomic upgrade, Sayid, an Egyptian man who is too sexually repressed (for religious reasons) to use Sugar as a sex object.  He courts her, and this is obviously something to which she is unaccustomed but which she grows to realize she deserves.  Meanwhile, Woody pines for her from afar, as he did in high school, while being her platonic friend.

There are standard types throughout the narrative. Marisimo, the half-blind ex-boxer with cauliflowered ears, is less than fluent in English and over invested in his dishwasher job.  Dyed-haired Bob, the transplanted new boss, could not care less about anyone who works for him; he re=trains the staff with an iron fist.  Woody resists the ridiculous, superficial changes in a hilarious sequence of passive-aggressive actions, such as hiding the clip-on bowties.  Even the chilly Maura begins to warm up to coworkers as her career waitressing is challenged by the new regime.  She at least is proud of her work and her 20-plus years' commitment as the company girl.  The last romantic hope she had divorced then paired up again without noticing Maura's romantic hopes for him.  Maura is a bridge between the detached elders, with their selfishness, rigor, and paternalistic actions only in the condescending sense, not in any way caring about role modeling for or promotion of the Grand Slams staff.   The three young characters are not slammed over the head of the reader, and Gager manages to use character typecasting without making the characters seem wooden, stiff props in the narrative.  In fact, the characters are so realistic, and subtly nuanced with uncharacteristic personality traits as well as those expected, that the reader is frustrated by wanting to hug or slap them.  Throughout the novel, the almost-adults keep the momentum going in the midst of the socially odd and borderline tragic, invested adults.  How will this trio grow up while surrounded by infantile, base, or simply lost adults?  The reader is invested by the third chapter in finding out.

The Sunday Poet: Molly Lynn Watt

Molly Lynn Watt

Molly Lynn Watt’s poetry memoir “On the Wings of Song: A Journey into the Civil Rights Era” Ibbetson 2014, poems “Jazz Riff” will soon be installed in a Cambridge sidewalk, and “Civil Rights Update” is required reading in Dallas paired with Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream”, co-creator/performer for “George & Ruth: Songs & Letters of the Spanish Civil War” also on CD, “Shadow People,” Ibbetson 2004, curator of Fireside Readings, Bagelbard Anthology editor and ukulele player.


UNFINISHED ON NOVEMBER 10, 2016

I am not in mourning

I will rise from my periwinkle bed sheets

watch the sun cast shadows on the garden

I will wrap myself in purple

remember playing in the lilac bush and

grandma’s lavender-infused linens

I will be warm energy

and cool serenity going forth—

a blend of red and blue

I will fly ribbons in the wind

write love poems with purple crayon

I will not let despair build a nest in my heart

                                    Molly Lynn Watt, Nov. 10, 2016

Collisions on a Non-Existent Highway By Rosalyn Marhatta

Collisions on a Non-Existent Highway

By Rosalyn Marhatta

Red Dashboard LLC Publishing

www.reddashboard.com

Princeton, NJ

ISBN-13: 978-1535469135

46 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Avoid the musk of Orient jungles and the threat of tiger paws. Or don’t. Rosalyn Marhatta’s Collisions on a Non-Existent Highway doesn’t. Instead, she entices her readers into a movable feast of dangerous love, loss, and longing. She infuses her stanzas with cardamom-spiced passions in a pulao of cultural contradictions. From the first poem, Beware the Tiger Burning Bright, the exotic captures the imagination (not to mention the lust) of Marhatta’s youthful persona. She opens the piece this way,

His scent assailed me in the dorm stairwell,

Moved the staircase sideway till I stumbled.

It lingered in my nostrils, lured me to a lagoon

Where palm trees sang and he served skewered lamb

Sauced with love songs.

Marhatta sets the atmosphere for one coming cultural collision in her poem Epicurean Love. After a meal of curried chicken the poet reveals a bit of the magnetic attract-and-repel dynamic going on. She recounts her lover’s cautionary stories and her smitten reaction,

You spun a tale of a tiger

who leaped from a photograph

to kill a king in a locked room,

because the king could not escape his fate.

We argued about fate’s inevitability

On our second date.

You led me with your stories

To a land of silk sarees

And husbands who were gods to their wives,

And I touched your curved khukri,

the weapon of the Ghurka warriors

who pushed past fear to deliver death to the enemy.

We create the accoutrements of harmony in life’s composition, arranging them methodically to reinforce our personal narratives. Marhatta’s persona does this in her poem Himalayan Tea Song. Sitting with “angels in saris,” she breathes in the scents of masala tea and cow dung. The presence of mountain blue pervades all. But interruptions do occur. The poet notes one such intrusion,

My niece in pink silk

brings me chai tea

with milk, cinnamon,

sugar—four teaspoons—my tongue

revolts, stung by its sweetness;

a brown neighbor boy with a cherub grin

saunters by, his stomach a balloon,

arms and legs spindles

like a “Feed the Children” ad from Vogue.

I want to feed that boy

Dal, vath turkarie : rice, beans,

curried vegetables, but the sun

reminds me I’ll be gone

in a month …

Taste becomes geography in Marhatta’s poem Tea and Virginity. Detail dominates the mnemonic canvas. Little rituals more than equal the loom of the massive mountain ranges as gatekeepers to exotic hidden worlds. The poet explains this equivalence in her concluding lines,

The eldest sister

pours me tea in a glass. I wonder

how to lift a hot glass

with no handles

without burning my fingers,

how to sip like a lady

without drinking that milk skin

that floats on the top.

I grasp The glass

At the top,

Tip tea into my mouth,

Swirl its sugar on my tongue,

Inhale the cinnamon-cardamom

Infusion and taste the Himalayas.

Vicarious satisfaction in art, specifically the cinema, often saves the day by absorbing raw emotions and delivering a resolution of sorts. In her edgy piece, Bollywood Noir, the poet seems to relish the lead-up to an obvious violent denouement,

Maybe you never wanted

to brush your face against her breasts

that pointed to a heaven

where angels ply sitar

on your temple to soothe

away nightmares of Yeti fangs

at your throat.

Maybe I never took that cab

To the pink neon sign

Blinking “Desert Rose Inn”

Or saw through that window

How she perfumed

The light bulbs and fed you chocolate sex,

How she caressed your toes

I had kissed early that morning.

The poet embeds the title of this collection in her poem Riyadh Odyssey, 1982. Beneath the surface of Saudi society knots of foreign women chafe against medieval restrictions. On the other hand hospitality reigns supreme in this complicated culture. Marhatta observes the obvious from her protected confines,

Saudi women glided down streets

cloaked in abayas and veils—

black ghosts to most—

hiding everything womanly,

except wrists jingling gold bangles

and feet flashing fuchsia shoes from Paris.

Saudi men, all in white, flailing swords,

danced together on TV.

Fred and Ginger embraces

would have been erased

by religious police.

And we Americans craving commercials

with women in bikinis,

titled an onion-domed building

“the pink tit.”

Setting out her last best meal of salmon with caper sauce, Marhatta’s persona imagines her former lover in his alternative universe, with an alternative wife, and eating an alternative meal. Her recipe of pathos with a touch of humor captures the time-scape perfectly. Here is the heart of the poem,

My meals must bite.

Once you would have fed me chunks of curried meat,

spiced and sliced through the bone,

with notes of cilantro and cinnamon rising high,

fed me raisins with sea foam rice,

and cucumber pickle in sesame sauce.

But now, you cook for another wife,

or probably she cooks for you.

Does she glide her body across the stove,

to spark a light to boil your beans?

If you have an appetite for spicy food and percussive passion, you’ll like this book.

The Hastings Room Series Friday Nov 18, 2016 Daniel Tobin/Marc Vincenz 7PM

Click on pic to enlarge

The Sunday Poet: Bert Stern

Bert Stern

Bert Stern writes of himself, "Bert Stern is an old man who keeps writing.poems and learning to love."

After the Election

Dear Du Fu asks, “Does anyone like the poems I write

after drinking the wine of the rich?” Now America

drinks the wine of the rich. How can poems

get written at all? I know, I know, the dharma

is still the dharma, love, though it must lie low,

is still the fire that warms us, the sky, though

gray, hasn’t been jostled loose nor the sun

and moon and stars and earth out of their orbits.

Maybe the soot that’s fallen over everything

will one day wash away.

--Bert Stern

A TRIBUTE TO GEOFFREY HILL at BU’S CASTLE ON THURSDAY EVENING Nov. 10, 2016

GEOFFREY HILL

A TRIBUTE TO GEOFFREY HILL at BU’S CASTLE ON THURSDAY EVENING

by Michael Todd Steffen

On Thursday November 10th at 7pm, at the Castle, 225 Bay State Road, Boston University, the second Fall BU Poetry Reading, directed by Meg Tyler, will pay tribute to Geoffrey Hill (18 June 1932 –

30 June 2016), an English poet, professor emeritus of English literature and religion, and former co-director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University. Hill taught at BU from 1988 – 2006.

Like Herbert or Hopkins, Hill’s poetry is religious in its mindfulness of God. Yet, with open eyes to the age, his expression, rather than resorting to them as attitudes, intends remoteness and irony, often commenting on the contemporary world through history. In his much-anthologized poem “Ovid in the Third Reich,” Hill says that “God/Is distant.”

I have learned one thing: not to look down

So much upon the damned. They, in their sphere,

Harmonize strangely with the divine

Love. I, in mine, celebrate the love-choir.

Seamus Heaney noted, “[Hill] has a strong sense of the importance of the maintenance of speech, a deep scholarly sense of the religious and political underpinning of everything in Britain.”

Wikipedia also tells us Hill defended the right of poets to difficulty as a form of resistance to the demeaning simplifications imposed by “maestros of the world.” He argued that to be difficult is to be democratic, equating the demand for simplicity with the demand of tyrants.

The tribute at BU on Thursday evening will include readings by Archie Burnett, Saskia Hamilton, Kenneth Haynes, Marcia Karp, George Kalogeris, Christopher Ricks and others. The series is sponsored by BUCH, the Arts Initiative and CIT at CGS.

Among his many awards, Geoffrey Hill received an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His Collected Critical Writings won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, the largest annual cash prize in English-language literary criticism.

Considered to be among the most distinguished poets of his generation, Hill was called the “greatest living poet in the English language.” This is a wonderful opportunity to gain familiarity with and insight into a guarded albeit rich spirit of poetry.

The Sunday Poet: Karen Locascio

Karen Locascio is a graduate of the MFA program at UMass, Boston, where she won an Academy of American Poets prize. Her work has appeared in Paper Nautilus, Cider Press Review, and Window Cat Press, among others, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her debut collection, May All My Wounds Be Mortal, won the first Ron Schreiber Poetry Prize and will be published by Hanging Loose Press in early 2017. In her spare time, Karen enjoys genealogy research and fantasy football, and reads submissions for Spry Literary Journal. Originally from New Jersey, Karen currently lives in Dorchester.

The Fool

I dream you swoop in

on wings I can’t see. You burn

off like dust on a candle,

my skeleton radiating

hypnotic from my breastbone.

You’re better as visitation

or morning sickness,

and me as a padded room,

a concavity.

Flip the shell.

Pick a card, any card.

I’ll break a plate

then the sky. Rain, rain…

The sperm is rain,

the rain is sperm.

The ovum’s the only human cell

visible to the naked eye.

I’ve got cavities in my ovaries

and sperm in my mouth.

When you tell me to leave, you mean it

half the time. You slap me

on the ass, chain-smoking,

sink full of empties.

Search for a new Somerville Poet Laureate begins!

Nicole Terez Dutton-- First Somerville Poet Laureate

 ***** Harris Gardner and myself, along with the Director of the Somerville Arts Council, Greg Jenkins-- jump-started the first Poet Laureate position in Somerville, Mass. in 2014. Nicole Terez Dutton was the pick of the committee, and she has done a fine job. Now the search begins, yet again. Here is the application process...



Somerville Poet Laureate
Application and Overview
Statement of Purpose


The City of Somerville announces the creation of a Poet Laureate for Somerville. The City views the position as a means to further enhance the profile of poets and poetry in the city and beyond. The Poet Laureate is expected to bring poetry to segments of Somerville's community that have less access or exposure to poetry: senior citizens, youth, schools and communities. The Poet Laureate will be a person of vision with the ability to enact his/her vision.

Duration
The Poet Laureate will serve for a two-year term, 2017 & 2018, and will be provided an honorarium of $2,000 per year. A contract will be derived with expectations detailed as to the public benefit required of the position, which will be jointly determined with the final applicant and review committee. The expectation is that the position will support and expand poetry in the city. The Somerville Arts Council/City of Somerville will support the Laureate in networking within the community but actual work must be accomplished by the chosen candidate.

How to apply Deadline: Postmarked by November 29, 2016
Candidates for Somerville Poet Laureate must provide the following:
• One page contact info sheet with name, address, phone number, email, website (if applicable)
• Proof of residence demonstrated by sending a copy of a utility bill, lease, phone bill. (a jpg image of a current bill or statement is fine if emailing application, or a photocopy of statement if mailing application)

• Curriculum Vitae / Poetry-Related Bio
• Up to 20 pages of original poetry
• One to three-page vision statement with details as to how you will implement the public benefit component.

How to submit
1. Either email PDFs of the above items to Gregory Jenkins at gjenkins@somervillema.gov with Poet Laureate in the subject header:
2. Or mail the following documents to: Somerville Poet Laureate, Somerville Arts Council, 50 Evergreen Ave., Somerville, MA 02145

Podcast : Doug Holder interviews poet Joyce Peseroff

 

Doug Holder/Joyce Peseroff

https://archive.org/details/Z0000085 ( Click on)

Here is a podcast I conducted with noted poet Joyce Peseroff-- Peseroff was one of the original members of the Alice James Collective in Cambridge, the first director of the MFA program at U/Mass Boston, friend to Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon, and many other things in her long and accomplished career. We also discussed her new collection "Know Thyself." —

From Nothing By Daniel Tobin

From Nothing

By Daniel Tobin

Four Way Books

www.fourwaybooks.com

New York, NY

ISBN: 978-1-935536-69-7

39 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Melding together physics, mysticism, and mathematics, Daniel Tobin, in his epic paean to Jesuit priest and scientist Georges Lemaitre entitled From Nothing, creates and choreographs a twentieth century re-conjured world of cosmological wonder and Dantean horror. He conveys his tale to us in extraordinary lines of narrative poetry.  Tobin’s writing explodes onto the page with white-hot intensity, its numinous words and birthing suns expanding and cooling first into elegance and then into a compassionate understanding of our human condition.

Tobin’s subject, Lemaitre, just for his acquaintances and geographic address, deserves substantial intrinsic interest.  A friend of Albert Einstein, Lemaitre visited with him often after Einstein had fled Germany for the temporary sanctuary of Belgium.

No stranger to savagery, Lemaitre fought in the trenches during the First World War and was awarded the Croix de Guerre. Lemaitre remained in Belgium up until and through the 1940s and the Jewish holocaust. He witnessed the horrors first-hand and was himself questioned by the Nazis because of his friendships with multiple Jewish scientists.

In his work Lemaitre anticipated and solved many of the problems inherent in Einstein’s physics. He disagreed with Einstein on issues of quantum mechanics and his insights were later proved correct. He also developed the theory of cosmology that became known as the “Big Bang.”

Though writing mostly in the third person, Tobin occasionally speaks in the voices of preeminent scientists of the time such as Lemaitre himself, astronomer Edwin Hubble, Robert Oppenheimer, and George Gamow. The technique works wonderfully by infusing emotion, humor, and, generally, other points of view into the text.

A consideration of Lemaitre’s deeply felt faith and his scientific persona opens this collection of distinct, yet intrinsically connected, poems. In this piece entitled (Fountain) Tobin expounds on the attraction between matter and anti-matter before ending his argument with Lemaitre’s own words,

… your physics and your faith,

the divergent roads with their singular horizon

where the radius of space converges into zero,

where what was, is, will be waxes without boundary

into seed and sand grain, a Cepheid luster of eyes—

news of the minor signature keyed from everywhere,

the primal radiation, omnipresent, the prodigal

wave arriving from its Now that has no yesterday,

the proof of your calculus, the tour of the expanse:

“The evolution of the universe might be compared

to a display of fireworks that has just ended,

some few red wisps, ashes, and smoke. So we stand

on a well-cooled cinder to see the fading of suns,

to glimpse a vanished brilliance, the origin of worlds.”

At the Battle of Yser Lemaitre details a chemical gas attack and pivots from realty into a work of art. The poem, (De Rerum), is spoken, amidst the spattering of machine guns, in Lemaitre’s voice. Here’s the heart of the piece,

Why is it, O my Precious Christ, we do this to each other,

crouching in transverse, trench, the barbed, deadlocked lines,

who might have joined like harvesters among hedge and fold?

A hiss, and from enemy dug-outs the strange cloud curls

in waves, grayish, yellow to green, darkest at the bottom.

And I know we are in a biblical plague, the men fumbling

for bits of flannel, cotton pads, the gassed in spasm, clawing

at their throats, their eyes, vomiting, crawling off to die—

the way the forsaken do in Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death,   

its black plumes of smoke and burning cities, its scythes

and armies, skeletal, their coffin lid shields, the slit throats,

wagonloads of skulls, that dog nibbling a dead child’s face.

At his most provocative Tobin summons up Pope Pius XII, the mystic and Vicar of Christ, loathed by Adolf Hitler, obsessed with apparitions in Fatima, and utterly alone in his bureaucracy. He had ordered his churches to save individual Jews by hiding them and issuing phony baptismal records. He broadcasted veiled condemnations of the Nazis. He seemed to mean well, but yet…. The poet, speaking of the audience Lemaitre had with the Pope, concludes the piece this way,

… his silence at the roundups

near Vatican walls: culpability caught by hindsight,

the encyclical denouncing hate shelved for diplomacy.

In the photograph you look up at him, your pontiff,

as he welcomes you. Obedient, open, to his throne.

And had he donned the yellow star? History’s “What if.”

Using the famous double-slit thought experiment as a metaphor in his poem (Aperture), Tobin plots out the possibilities and paths of science, as well as Lemaitre’s mystical hope for religious salvation. In the experiment that charts “wave theory,” particle photons, when shot through a slit screen, seem to know where to go; they have a kind of consciousness. Does probability theory indubitably lead to an invisible world? The poet explains,

--“ Infinity is such an artistic creation, all symmetry

And elegance, but your method smacks of metaphysics,

Lifeless life, and the Bible is not a textbook of science.

If relativity theory had been necessary to salvation

it would have been revealed to St. Paul or Moses.

Still, the deeper we penetrate the universal mystery

The more we will find one law and one goodness.”

Lemaitre envisions cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) in Tobin’s poem entitled Canto. His predictions were validated shortly before he died by Arno Penzias and James Wilson. The poet begins his piece by quoting St Augustine,

Is it motion itself that makes the day? Or is it the time

taken in the motion? Or is it both? The saint asked,

searchingly— Deus creator omnium: the measure

of mind made by the Maker of minds, and time

come to existence only observable as time, phase

transition to the radio spectrum, pre-recombinant,

the primordial light unchanged from the initial

sea of light, a television hiss homing everywhere,

mysterious, incessant…

Tobin has dared mightily with this multi-faceted book of cosmological wonders and soaring divination.  The degree of his rarefied achievement startles beyond mere artistic credence. Bravo.