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"Walter's Books" Reviews By Walter Holland of Poetry Books I've Found of Interest: Relatively Recent, Relatively Past

Updated: Feb 20





 

 

When I go to my local branch of the New York Public Library, I always make sure I check the “New Arrivals” shelf for the most recent titles in Fiction and Non-Fiction. Unfortunately Poetry is mixed-in with Non-Fiction and seems the lonely, forgotten stepchild. You need to look for 811, which is the Dewey Decimal classification number for poetry.

 

Anyway, I try to browse all the most recent titles for all kinds of books from the current year and take home one or more that particularly interest me. Sometimes I’m intrigued by the first line of a poem or the particular topic of a non-fiction work, or I spot a book for which I’ve already read an interesting review.

 

I thought that I might write some “flash reviews” on my Blog site in the hopes I can draw attention to some books which I have found of interest. Mind you, this is a random process and is often the result of my own haphazard reading habits and of course is often biased by a particular love of poetry.  

 

The great advantage of living in New York is its fantastic library system as well as its many bookstores. I encourage everyone to give whatever monetary donation you can to  the NYPL which of late has seen severe budget cuts. It needs our help, as do independent bookstores.

 

While it’s true that I often receive advance reader copies of new titles and for that I’m very thankful, there’s something about browsing the library shelf just as there is in browsing the bookstore stacks in a small shop, that still thrills me. It adds to a sense of discovery. With so many titles coming out each month, especially in the case of poetry, and so many talented poets, I sometimes like to rely on this random browsing as a way to decide my next read.

 

Non-fiction, fiction, and poetry are all my interests. Additionally, I have friends who are poets and writers of all kinds. Their books are very much on my radar. I like to review books and share my thoughts. I’m by no means however a great reader, a solid critic, and certainly not extensively well-read. I just like responding to what’s there on the page in the moment, putting into words my first initial feelings, and then going back to understand better what has excited or moved me. I suppose I’d like to think that this puts me in quiet dialog with the poet or writer. Writing is such a difficult process and so I like to recognize, in any small way that I can, the great effort that has gone into a book.

 

To publish a review in a journal is a difficult process and there are often strictures on the reviewer: have you maintained absolute neutrality? is your judgement impartial?, can you assure you’ve had no contact with an author or a press? As in any writing venture, as there should be, there is much competition and a high bar as to the quality of the writing and the critic’s insight. And as we all well know “everybody’s a critic.” Everybody has an opinion and most wish it to be heard or valued in print.

 

Add this to the fact that many books go by without an eager audience. Most poets I would guess are surprised when they hear directly from a reader and sometimes have no idea that a review has been published about their book, as there can be silence out there even for the most celebrated or accepted writer.

 

The length requirements for a review can further be an issue. Often, a small word-count due to space constraints can sacrifice nuance, but it also can be a blessing at sharpening the critic and focusing their observations.

 

So, I’d thought I’d jot down my occasional impressions on my blog site. It will help me keep track of book titles and the writer’s names that I’ve especially enjoyed. I suspect this will be a rather sporadic process with entries far and few between. And please note, that a great number of these “reviews” are taken from ones I posted on Amazon.com for the books in question.

 

Walter H.   



Thoughts on Poetry

 

In poetry, at least in the contemporary personal lyric, the movement has been toward prose poetry and the distinctive declarative “I.” Just as Ginsberg in “Howl” returned us to the highly Whitmanesque “I” of early American poetry, the 1990s built upon this rhetorical emphasis with multicultural, gay and lesbian, and feminist poetry. True, an uneasy dynamic has always existed between the “declarative I” and the more indeterminate experiential focus on “language” alone, i.e. the poem as “object” or “theoretical construct” or “meta-text” at odds with any “essential speaker.” While these poetic skirmishes enrich and shall continue to enrich the pleasures of reading poetry, I’ve always been pretty eclectic in my reading.

 

It is because of this that sometimes I am drawn more to the originality of the “voice” or the “I” in the poem. The poet’s diction and rhetorical surprises and unique rhythms all wrapped up in the “I’s” sense of agency and individual authenticity become then the focus. Other times it is the style or form on the page and the length of the lines and the line breaks as well as the grammatical finesse of the poet to draw attention to the pure materiality of language. In that case it becomes a fascinating theoretical display of concept over content—however that’s not to downplay or dismiss altogether the content! And then there is the political or historical tenor of the poet, their forcefulness and argument and depth of fury, insight, or revelation, be it moral, ethical or some novel challenge to an old way of thinking. Epiphany and poetry with a more spiritual emphasis along with sensitive lyricism I have always liked due to its unknowns. In these meditative poems the poetry becomes more experiential if you will, disarmingly quiet.

 

But the fact of the matter is from the start you can’t separate the poetic experience or poetic practice or poetic enjoyment into discrete parts and elements. Form and content, language and form, subject and object, style and diction, grammar and metaphor and image or symbol are all joined in a quantum dance of indeterminate wonder and all subject to strange unfathomable forces.  


Walter H.


(Admittedly for the most part these reviews are primarily from 2017 and 2013 as mostly all were unpublished at the time for one reason or another. On my website if you check out the Book Reviews menu link you will find links to many of my reviews that have been published over the years in lit journals, etc. These listings have a button beside them to read the online versions as they appeared. Of course some of the reviews are not available online but are in hard copy print format.)





Short Reviews

 

 David Groff’s “Live in Suspense,” Trio House Press, Inc.  July 1, 2023. Poetry.

 

Groff is a poet of deep self-examination and scrutiny of the personal world. He never flinches in looking at the tragedies around us, the complexities of a minister father, a caring but distant mother, a passage as a gay man from joy to plague to miraculous survival. He knows the mortal cruelties of an ever absent and silent world. He is haunted by the biblical narratives he heard in his youth which no longer supply enduring hope or absolute salvation. There is no other poet I know today who is as daringly brave to look into the heart, to speak to grief, loss, and reexamine the past with such acuity. He speaks of those loved and no longer with us. Groff finds in the sudden shock of a bird colliding in full force against a window, or a deer hit by his car at high speed, the odd nature of life and fate. We are indeed always living in suspense, but most of us choose to ignore it, to look away, to distract ourselves. These beautifully crafted soliloquies are never maudlin however, or bleak, for Groff tempers his work with a magnificent honesty, a clear heartfelt sense of inquiry and biting irony. He is a remarkable apostle of our modern moment and witness to the mysteries of the human heart. (Walter Holland)

 

 

“Assotto Saint, Sacred Spells, Collected Works.” Nightboat Books, August 29, 2023. Poetry, Plays, Essays.

 

The collected works of Assotto Saint, the Haitian-American-Gay Writer (1957-1994) are as powerful today as they were in the 1980's and early 1990's. These poems, plays, essays, and short fictional pieces, burn with fierce compassion and political acuity. Saint's imagination dazzles as it weaves the written word into lyric incantations and spells that mesmerize, cajole, and persuade us to be forces for change and forces for love. To read Assotto Saint is to return to the generation of Essex Hemphill, Marlon Riggs, Melvin Dixon, and so many others who sought cultural liberation and showed bold courage as pioneers in the LGBTQ activist movement. This is an authentic life to be treasured. (Walter Holland)

 

 

“Invisible History: The Collected Poems of Walta Borawski.” Edited by Philip Clark and Michael Bronski. The Library of Homosexual Congress, Rebel Satori Press, December 1, 2022.

 

As Chris Bram, the novelist, says so smartly, Walter Borawski "could be as witty and sly as Frank O'Hara, but he was wiser, more passionate, naked and liberated." Even Ginsberg praised Borawski and his "sparky mind" with his ability to be sassy and romantic and display "Lots of intelligence in the line, mindful measure of spoken speech music." Borawski gives us a glimpse of a sexually liberated poet in Boston who lived in both the intellectual bohemia of the city and its post-Stonewall era gay underworld. Borawski gives us a "Tea Party" in verse, full of eclectic influences and dazzling allusions, a brew of humor, elegance, pain, and camp, his is a mind that throws overboard the taxing constraints of conventional life. A diva of the night, a reclusive intellect, lover, social loner yet witty conversationalist, Borawski joins the roster of other gay revolutionaries who led the charge, young men from the provinces who enlisted in the cause of raucous liberty. (Walter Holland)


Allen Barnett’s “The Body and its Dangers & Other Stories,” Dec 1, 2023, Library of Homosexual Congress, Rebel Satori Press, Ed. Tom Cardamone.

 

 

Allen Barnett is a writer who captured 1980s life with smart and wry observation. His characters and their conversations emerge in ironic tones both urban and suburban in scope. His stories are told with tenderness and savvy, but also with great honesty and heart. They both entertain and engage us by Barnett's keen introspective narrative style and his sense of what it was to be a gay man in the topsy turvy world of those times. It was a time when death, life, sophistication and youth kept close social ties and hope was the flighty friend next door. Barnett travels with bemusement, but also with honesty and care, giving us these skillfully self-aware studies of human weakness and his own mortal intimations. The fact that he would die of AIDS in 1991 only makes the frame of these small ardent masterpieces glow ever more golden and tragic. (Walter Holland)

 

  

“Bedroom Vowel” by Zoe Tuck, BUNNY, an imprint of Fonograf Editions, 2023.

 

 Zoe Tuck is definitely a poet to keep an ear out for. Her wonderful voice is quirky as it is spontaneous, full of brilliance and smarts that demolish any reader’s preconceptions. Tuck mixes the day-to-day about relationships and shared social domesticity with an amazing erudition and quicksilver intellect. Her trans, lesbian, working-class narrative voice and her Amherst, Massachusetts proximity offer up a subtle refute against sister-school-lesbian stereotypes or really any gender or class stereotypes a reader might bring with them. This freedom to just be herself in all her complexity is truly wonderful. Tuck’s rebellious zeal and distinct originality zig zag down the page, and at any moment can pause for a kitchen break, counsel a love-lorn friend in need at the door, or contemplate the Russian-born psychoanalyst and renegade Lou Andreas Salomé. What is it about Texas-born poets transplanted to northern climes (via California) that they can so perfectly maintain their wily independence? Tuck is the real-deal rebel poet, one who easily matches the bad-boy cliques of before. One easily hears in Tuck a radical trans feminist and brilliant poet. I delighted in her effortless meandering from the “pink cloud in Watteau’s ‘Embarkation for Cythera’” to “Missy Elliot’s ‘Get Your Freak On.’” While joining her girlfriend partner to see a fertility doctor about IVF, she can label the French poet François Villon as “a thief” and the philosopher Georges Bataille as “a pervert” as she compares them to the “red raw excellence of Kathy Acker.” Reading Tuck is a true joy. One might drink a beer and wish to take to her worn couch to listen as she discusses Nietzsche, Dawson’s Creek, and her efforts at “quitting Spotify.”  (Walter Holland)



“Poems: Imperative to Spare.” by Scott Hightower. Rebel Satori Press, November 7, 2023.

 

Scott Hightower, born on a Texas ranch and long a literary maverick in the poetry world of New York has over the years managed to exquisitely blend the grit and pluck of his rural upbringing with his wide breadth of knowledge. In this, his fifth book of poetry in the US,  Hightower presents a series of elegiac poems which address the sudden death of his long-time partner. These personal lyrics are meditations charting his journey of grief as he goes about his days now cut loose and on his own. Hightower captures the strange dislocations and tender ironies of loss with the odd contradictions of mourning. His intelligence and long-life-in-letters are now confronted with sobering realities, the slow pace of estate lawyers, the awkward pursuit of dating, and the constant need to reenvision both future and past. Hightower’s writing resonates with other works of loss such as Isherwood’s “A Single Man,” Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking,” and Paul Monette’s “Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog.” With heartrending honesty he speaks of the eternal questions of aging and absence. And as he so eloquently suggests, the only true memento mori “we’ve really got” is language. Hightower’s words in this beautiful collection shall long remain an enduring testament to his abiding love. (Walter Holland)






Long Reviews



“still falling”

by Jennifer Grotz

Graywolf Press, 2023

Pub Date: May 2, 2023

softcover, pp. 58

 

Poetry Review by Walter Holland


 

                        The Unfinished Conversion of Jennifer Grotz                      

 

 

            “still falling” is a rare treasure. Its title is tied to Caravaggio’s “The Conversion on the Way to Damascus,” a painting which looms large in this sensitive collection of poems. The painting depicts Saul on the ground, having fallen off his horse after hearing Jesus and seeing a bright light, a light which temporarily blinds him. The Bible does not recount Saul falling from a horse, but alludes instead to Saul’s blindness and later cure, causing Saul’s conversion to Paul, the avowed Christian. Jesus, according to theologians, blinded Saul in order that he might be humbled in his prideful and self-righteous ways; further that his blindness would make him accept his helplessness and the need to surrender to God; and third that he would lose his old way of looking at things and clearly see his Maker. This theme of blindness followed by eventual revelation and humbling surrender, is a recurring motif for Grotz and reflects her own inner helplessness toward mortality. 

Grotz is not a poet who steps loudly into the tumultuous political and cultural upheavals of today, or focuses solely on the many contemporary ills that plague our present world and environment, rather she’s drawn inward to her own reassessment. Indeed, she’s a detective of feeling, trying to solve the misunderstood decisions that have brought her to later life, seeking deeper revelations that never fully arrive. Hers is nuanced verse, a quiet poetry of failed emotional intentions, illusory passions, and troubling loss. In her search for clues, she recollects turning points both large and small, reconstructs old scenes to analyze what has shaped her womanhood and brought her to her art. Of course, remorse attends it all.

The men in her life and their deaths leave her with feelings of incompletion and palpable absence. Mentors, friends, lovers are reconsidered, their initial motives suddenly seen as honest self-sacrifice, unappreciated empathy, while she was unaware. Moments of self-critique and regret shadow Grotz’s work, but also brings brighter wisdom. The poet can turn a simple “nature poem” into an interesting reboot on mortality. In “November” she begins: “Even when the grapes were still green and firm,/ the vines had grown heavy, charged with fruit./ Then sun-kindled, they made the subtle switch/ to tawny purple and started to soften.” (p. 10) A squirrel filches a grape in its paws, hurriedly feasting on its ripeness. The “pendulous cluster” has an underlying female suggestiveness as does the male quality of the marauding squirrel. The squirrels a thief, hurriedly and aggressively eating at the ripened harvest. Grotz gazes calmly on. The poem ends:

 

                        Why are you [the squirrel] in such a hurry? I want to say,

                        it’s November, penultimate month,

                        when fingers are coldest, ungloved

 

                        and we from the rain slicking off

                        the grapevines still waiting to be gleaned.

                        It’s time to savor. We’re penultimate, too.  (p. 11)

 

Vis-a-vis this epiphany, Grotz does savor life in her poetry, as much as she ponders it and revels a bit in her maturity. For all its muted self-scrutiny, the writing is fresh, honest and skilled.     

In the first poem “Staring into the Sun” she describes a relationship at its end “I was leaving—the thing we both knew/ and didn’t speak of all summer” (p. 3) and continues “We were cheerful at dinner and unusually kind./ At night we slept under a single sheet,/ our bodies a furnace if curled together.” (p. 3). Her simple off-hand descriptors surprise us by their matter-of-factness.

            We’re told her partner has decided not to come with her as she leaves on some unexplained journey or newer start. Grotz writes: “Now I consider/ what it took for you to help me go./ On that last day. When I stood/ in a wrinkled dress with aching arms.” (p. 3) She climbs into a truck and calmly starts the engine: “Only then did we know. How it felt/ to have loved to the end, and then past the very end.” (p. 3) Notice how oddly she extends this last line. What could have been a cliched expression, “loving to the end,” is strangely pushed logically to excess. Grotz does this syntactically a lot in her work, this exaggeration or overstatement that gives pause to the reader as it brings more attention to the concept or idea being expressed, rather than the simple facile rhetorical sentiment.

            Grotz’s poetry reminds me of Bergman and French films of the “Nouvelle Vague.” These films focused on human intimacy and inner complexities unlike Hollywood’s grand spectacles. Instead, the films engaged everyday people and centered perhaps solely on some couple in a café, an unspoken dialogue and subplot passes between them, conveyed by just a gesture or passing smile.

            Grotz dwells in this grainy view ever aware of the conscious and the subconscious  gesture or play of our thoughts. She moves from visual long-shot to close detailed narration. In “Come, No Longer Unthinkable” she states:

 

                                    Like someone who puts out the light

                                    the better to see into the dark, look,

                                    I put it out.

 

                                    Then the dark changes, it becomes

                                    various things instead of one. That’s

                                    what lures me out

 

                                    among the slick, black trunk of pines,

                                    soft from drinking up the melted snow. (p. 12)

 

            She continues: “Uniform and tall as bars,/ the forest is the only cage I’ve entered/ to be free. Under moonlight, ice light,/ the deer nose in gold spokes of grass, . . .” (p.12) This moonlit setting, brooding and semi-visible, evokes a state of mind, a peripheral life too frequently obscured, hard to understand and negotiate. I was reminded of Plath and Sexton and their imagery weighted by depression, angst, and romantic loneliness.

            Grotz sees life and her past memories with incessant inquiry. In this wooded scene, where deer appear in a partial clearing and milkweed orbits: “like/ all the different phases of the moon,” (p. 12) and where her “mind won’t stop minding./ Or the eye stop eying.” She clarifies:

 

                                                                        That’s why, closer up,

                                    the milkweed’s eyeing, too: a cottony globe

 

                                    in its socket looks out from the hood

                                    of a wood-gray eyelid. I stare—the dark

                                    requires staring to be sure—at what

 

                                    it’s staring down at, too: a stone, and beneath it,

                                    a patch of wet earth. Where one can’t see

                                    any further, only imagine. Where

 

                                    darkness is just

                                    a purgatory of things unseen.

                                    I stand right there, in that particular dark. (p. 13)

 

            This vision, akin to German Romantic or Expressionistic painting—Casper David Friederich and his moody scenes of moonlit nature veiled with obscured sublimity—plunges us into the half-intuitable world we live in, helpless, alone.

            Deft in description, Grotz captures love and love’s estrangement. In “The Crows” two lovers meet and part, clandestine or established we’re not sure. The poet says: “but now she only remembers/ the goodbyes, the countless times/ they stood together speechless/ under a starry meal of snow,/ crows congregating above them/ in bare winter branches, all through/ the desperate sadness at the end,” (p. 14). This affair is “never at home,” but unsatisfyingly “He was her/ never husband and she his never wife.” (p. 14).

            The poem closes:

 

                                     . . . the crows were growing busy, numerous,

 

                                    there was one coming to land

                                    on every branch of every tree, once

 

                                    the thumbless black hands of their wings

                                    had finished stroking the malleable sky,

                       

                                    all along, though they couldn’t hear it,

                                    the birds had been winging

 

                                    their silent applause

                                    for the love that was going to be, then was.  (p. 15).

 

            The final line is odd. The expectation of the affair seemed inevitable, and then the poet tells us it “then was.” This short, flat statement is anti-cathartic, almost indifferent.

            “Heading There” is both elegy and love poem. Grotz has an innate skill at the lyric:

 

                                                                                    I am

                                    destroying your face, your hands,

                                    the smell of your sweat. I am your

                                    enemy, and I will behave like an enemy,

 

                                    I will love you so much I erase you,

                                    I will call desert the kingdom that you were. (p. 17)

 

            Such language is ardent and bold. Grotz is not afraid of using emotional language. Her title poem “The Conversion of Paul—for Paul Otremba,” which I mentioned in the beginning, captures the theme of her book. Grotz links the depiction of Saul or Paul in the Caravaggio to her recollections of her friend Otremba: “Something in the painting is insistently/ itself, intractable, and yet inexhaustible meaning/ keeps also being revealed. Paul, thinking of you/ when I look at the painting changes it. I see you/ vulnerable, surrendered, beautiful and young, . . .” (pp. 41-42). This lovely description matches Caravaggio’s depiction of the saint to be. But Grotz makes clear that her friend Otremba’s illness has changed his former beauty profoundly. Grotz’s sees how her later observations of the art work, after gaining the experiences of life’s losses and sufferings, are likewise profoundly changed. The poem arrives:

 

                                                            Conversion is a form of being saved,

                                    like chemo is a form of cure, but it looks to me

                                    like punishment, a singling out, ominous,

                                    and experienced in the dark. When

                                    I used to see the painting, I was an anonymous

                        `           bystander. Now I am helpless. It is

                                    and you are, in the original sense, awful.

                                    I can’t get inside the painting

                                    like I suddenly and desperately want to,

                                    to hold him, to help you get back up.

                                    And now, for Paul, everything has changed. (p. 42).

 

            And everything too has changed now for Grotz as she finds herself still somewhat blind to her own mortal life, helpless, still falling, waiting for art’s salvation.


 

 

“Like A Solid to a Shadow”

by Janice Lobo Sapigao

Nightboat Books, 2022; originally published by Timeless, Infinite Light, 2017

Book Review by Walter Holland

 

 

 

            “Like A Solid to a Shadow” by Janice Lobo Sapigao, first published in 2017, is now reissued in a second edition by Nightboat Books. In a new afterword, Sapigao has this to say about the first addition:

                        It was more widely available in independent bookstores, but it was sometimes classified as non-fiction and not poetry in those book lists that circulate  the internet. What I do know and love is that this book is an example of documentary poetics and fragmented writing to tell a story—or several stories—in a way that maintains all of its holes, holds all of its space.

 

            Sapigao’s book indeed fulfills the newer concept of “documentary poetics” as defined by Philip Metres on the Poetry Foundation website: Metres posits that

 

                        Such poetry arises from the idea that poetry is not a museum-object to be   observed from afar, but a dynamic medium that informs and is informed by the history of the moment. In contrast, George Szirtes, writing in the October 2007 issue of Poetry magazine, argues that “poetry is useless as evidence. As far as I know, no poem has been adduced as evidence in court. The truths the poem deals with are not evidentiary truths. . . The documentary poem opposes Szirtes’ idea of a closed system, inviting “the real life outside the poem” into it while also offering readers a journey into the poem. The successful documentary poem withstands the pressure of reality to remain a poem in its own right: its language and form cannot be reduced to an ephemeral poster, ready made for its moment but headed for the recycling bin. While it may be that such poems will not “stand up” in a court of law, they testify to the often unheard voices of people struggling to survive in the       face of unspeakable violence. . . Their power resides in their negotiation between language of evidence and language of transcendence.

             

            Sapigao reflects this poetic through her assemblage of mixed media materials, textual entries, historical and genealogical documents, photographs and a glossary of Ilokano, a Filipino dialect. Born in San Jose, California, and English-speaking, the poet did not understand Ilokano. She learned it however to translate her father’s spoken love letters to her mother on audio tape. The tapes were sent while her father was serving in Saudi Arabia with the US military. Sapigao writes:

 

                                    pangit

                                    ugly

                                    like calling out to father

                                    where the ‘n’ and ‘g’ collide

                                    finding that he is not there

 

 

            And then vertically and to the upper right on the same page Sapigao has the following text:

 

                                                i wonder if he calls lola, lola, and marlene to watch

                                                earthen events

                                                like graduations, weddings

                                                and when I write

 

           

            Sapigao includes her handwritten notes from her studies of Ilokano and its cultural history. All of these materials give a culturally complex Asian-Austropolynesian-American context to her project.

            The sensitive nature of Sapigao’s poetic project is one of nuance. She alludes to various theoretical concepts to explain her methodology. Here she draws from Lacan:

                        I told a room full of Filipina/o/x and Filipina/o/x American listeners that                            my manuscript was about ‘other’ families . . .

                        “The Other” is a reference to Jacques Lacan’s terminology, which describes                      the mirror stage of development. This is the stage in growth during which                               children supposedly learn their own identity by successfully separating their                      own being from a mirror image of themselves. In this context, someone                         only finds an idea of them-selves through a contrast with an “Other.”

                        I think I am a part of the Other family.

 

            The “documentary” aspects of Sapigao’s poem share a broader connection in the practice of “installation” and “immersive art.” On The Art Story website “installation art” is:

 

. . . a term generally used to describe artwork located in three-dimensional interior space as the word "install" means putting something inside of something else. It is often site-specific - designed to have a particular relationship, whether temporary or permanent, with its spatial environment on an architectural, conceptual, or social level. It also creates a high level of intimacy between itself and the viewer as it exists not as a precious object to be merely looked at but as a presence within the overall context of its container whether that is a building, museum, or designated room. Artworks are meant to evoke a mood or a feeling, and as such ask for a commitment from the viewer. . .The ideas behind a piece of Installation art, and the responses it elicits, tend to be more important than the quality of its medium or technical merit.

 

            I see Sapigao employing this “architectural” approach. “Like A Solid to a Shadow” consists of various texts “installed” on the page, which try to replicate the broad complexities of this investigation. The text is arranged like a blueprint with flow charts and schematic figures. Blocks of commentary are followed by pages with English definitions of Ilokano.

            A “high level of intimacy between” the reader and the speaker is established in this “poem.” Moods and feelings are evoked as the “poem” asks  for our full “commitment.” Indeed Sapigao includes her own surprise upon the revelation that her father had a second family.

            It might be fair to say that the “medium or technical merit” of the book is not as important as its epistemology. Sapigao’s “immersion” also reflects what Scott Fleary defines as immersive art:

 

                        Immersive art provides the opportunity for the public to experience art as                           more than simply looking. It’s an experience that is interactive and can                                     bring a whole new dimension to the way a piece or installation is                                        appreciated.

 

            The poet encourages an “active” reader participation. As Sapigao learns Ilokano to better understand and “translate” her father’s past life, we begin to understand the difficulty of fully expressing in one language the complexities and textures of another. The poet must understand an unknown language, as much as she is forced to understand an unknown father.   


“Against Heaven”

poems by Kemi Alabi

Graywolf Press, 2022

ISBN 978-1-64445-082-6

Softcover, pp. 82

Review by Walter Holland


 

  Kemi Alabi’s “Against Heaven,” the winner of the 2021 Academy of American Poets First Book Award selected by Claudia Rankine, is a full on assault to the ear and the heart in a good way. It is a young poet’s work and it is filled with anger and desire and the unrelenting intensity of youth. Reading “Against Heaven” I could not help but think about punk rap singers, slam poets, jazz, funk, soul, R&B, and hip hop’s trap and drill music. Dawn Lundy Martin’s seminal 2007 “A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering” and an entire generation of gifted writers and their works that have followed such as Donika Kelly’s “Bestiary” of 2015, Xan Phillip’s 2019 “Hull,”  Justin Phillip Reed’s “The Malevolent Volume” of 2020, Danez Smith’s 2021 “Don’t Call Us Dead,” and Douglas Kearney’s “Sho” of 2021, have brought us a newer poetic ferocity where the old formalities have been shaken. Alabi’s work displays rhythmic maneuvers of hip-hop mixed with a new technical mastery of laying down tracks of lyrics that provoke, celebrate, dance and assault the heady intellectualism of America’s language poetry or surrealist hold-outs.

            Their pace can be hard to keep up with. Their poems are high-definition, saturated with intensity. Collisions of diction are everywhere, a pitch and punch of adjectives, nouns, images. Anything that flashes violently, discriminatory, and provocatively on our screens these days can find its split-second appearance in their poems including trans violence, patriarchal pieties, feminist oppressions, wokeness jargon used by white hypocritical liberals, and the junk of marginalized culture. Alabi’s work is transgressive, passionate narratives that flare and rush forward. They display angry need, heat-seeking desires, all at aggravating volumes and velocities. They takes no prisoners. Their lines are stumbling cascades, freighted with twists and turns, lyrics that leak with rage. Their acuity matches their sharp rhythmicality, the mix and match of tones and tonalities. They speak in raw disparities. Alabi is deft and original. Here is the opening of “The Lion Tamer’s Daughter’s Learns the Rules”:

 

                                    Your body is the inside of the nearest man’s fist. Walk to the store &                                                          back without disappearing.

                                                      Pick one:

                                                      hoop leash whip

                                                      When someone bumps into you, roll the die.

Even:

                                                      apologize

                                                      Odd:

                                                      apologize

                                                      Pick one:

                                                      circus zoo parade  (p. 15)

            The provocation of the speaker, the insistence to “pick” to either apologize or apologize, shows the impossibility in this choice for a Black nonbinary individual of today. This leaves only one strategy for such a poet’s language. It must be wielded defensively as “hoop,” “leash” and “whip,” and there’s no other choice but for an equally violent defiance, otherwise they must chose submission, being tamed and forced to conform and perform. Does this speak to racial and gender identity in America being under attack? Yes, it does.

            In “A Financial Planner Asks about My Goals, or Golden Shovel with Cardi B’s ‘Money’” we read:

 

Never touch-starved again, forever a chub-bellied baby sexed bigSkin a heatmapped catalog of hands still wet still grasping still blood-fat

Behind every steam-slammed door, playplush beds as good as checks

Whole home stitched with only these rooms, only this near-rip big

Kitchen table perfect island for the stranding, meals propped heaven-large

Backyard a honey-dripped grove named Eden, ripe land of no bills

Whatever drops first, spice-adorned, sauce slicked back-to-frontSplayed open slow, tempting a spill, grateful to be devoured like I’llMake my giggling groommates, spit-tethered hips churned tender flip Down smeared-open growls or whole wedding cakes or any drown we like Just measure by the fistful how thick this slick can coat a sigh, add ten

And that’d be balm enough to dizzytrip my lonely and her cartwheels (p.18)

 

 

 

            This visceral language with its heavy, sharp, consonants and gutturally hyphenated mashups of descriptors such as “touch-starved,” “chub-bellied,” “steam-slammed,” “spit-tethered,” and “near-rip,” create a vocal frenzy. Phrasings are choppy and clipped such as “ripe land of no bills,” or “hips churned tender flip/ Down smeared-open growls” and mirror rap’s repetitive provocations.

Alabi subverts the common lyric poem as well. They use scenes taken from everyday Black female experience and questions their ritual display of “normalcy.” In their poem “Sunday Closet”:

 

                                    Sure, the exalted drag of dresses

                                    the ritual arson of hairdone                                   

                                    the exiled snake of Saturday liquor

                                    the stranger danger of that funny smoke  

 

                                    the untouched slick of just-roommates    Sure, just

 

                                    the stripped steeple of      sermons just

 

                                    the fevered climb of       organs yes

                                                                        the feral leap of    praise

 

                        Here, Alabi describes a girl getting dressed to go to church and, by speaking of the clothes she must wear, focuses on the symbolism of an enforced identity.  She subverts this scene in both queer and feminist ways. The mention of “closet” in the title is a code word well-known to the queer community for “passing.” And the first line’s mention of “the exalted drag of dresses” poses the artifice of gender and gender role play and how drag queens have long make fun of its performative nature. Not only gender is questioned as suspect but, through their use of rash and contradictory comparisons Alabi mocks the disconnect between the behavior and its symbolic evocation.

Furthermore, Alabi flattens the lyric language by a series of prosaic statements each beginning with the article “the.” This parallelism would seem to suggest a list of simple comparatives. But there is an odd reversed metonymy here at play. Instead of placing the literal followed by its figurative evocation, Alabi flips the ordering.

            The palpable anger and sarcasm in the tone of voice here cannot be mistaken. It is an anger that captures the sentiment of our contentious moment where queer and trans lives are under attack and homophobia and white supremacy is rampant. Alabi creates a contentious and hybrid diction violating much of the conventional.

“the oldest song” refits Black female blues lyrics to use a diction that is violent and aggressive:

 

marry the fool again. shut me up before we aisle-run to you and your bride, dwayne wayne pleading baby please. i blame mercury for the retrograde. blame industry for snow heaped onto still-green leaves. blame lead in the pipes and plastic-piled oceans for this mile-deep thirst. shut me up before i tell you what my body found in that cavern, hell-singed, bor-rowed and begged. shut me up before the old no withers me down to the devil’s chord again.

 

            The caustic speech of protest, of jazz, blues, rap, and other Black cultural art forms collides with the gracefully written lyrics on the page. The literarily white and well-crafted and intellectually experimental poetry which has so dominated American poetry, even with recent intrusions of  language-centered theory is challenged.

Alabi’s “Soft & Beautiful Just for Me Relaxer, No-Lye Conditioning Crème, Children’s Regular” makes a clean break. Alabi rejects this tired “intellectualism for intellectualism’s sake”:

 

                        DIRECTIONS

 

Snatch the could-be-girl-’cept-she-too-dark

-’cept-them-nigga-naps child by the braids.

 

Slice them open. Rake the comb through.

Cue the scalp pop, the scab-robed choir.

 

Teach the tribe dirge: staccato rip-rip

crescendo into sizzle and shred.  (p. 46)

 

           

Alabi is part of the push on the queer frontiers of feminism and trans poetics. They are a poet poised to represent a rich music of glittering revolution and a new revivified American poetic voice.




“Diaries of a Terrorist”

by Christopher Soto

Copper Canyon Press, 2022

Softcover, pp. 69, $17.00

Review by Walter Holland

May 2, 2023

ISBN:9781556596346


 

 

                        The Queer Activist Poetry of Christopher Soto

 

 

 

            In Christopher Soto’s “Diaries of a Terrorist” the double forward slash frequently appears in their poems. These slashes are traditionally editorial indicators of a caesura, a break or pause in the rhythm of a line. They also technically can be a division symbol or grammatically a substitute for the conjunction “or.” Used liberally they create in Soto’s work an aural staccato and the visual symbol of slanted prison bars, reinforced border walls or doubled wire fencing that violently block or interrupt the flow of the narrative. In a broader sense they symbolically exemplify the many obstacles encountered by migrants in America as they pursue the American Dream. These slashes also remind us of the daily division and fragmentation of thought and political allegiance and how as Americans we are constantly assaulted by divisive rhetoric, breaking news reports of violent hate crimes, sporadic and unprovoked mass shootings, and as well the glaring realities of racial, social, and judicial inequality in our society. Soto creates an impressive no holds barred poetry, painfully aggressive on the page, but succeeds where others might fail by his commitment to the language of savagery.

            In their personal statement on the National Endowment for the Arts website they explain about their poetic style:

 

 . . .these poems are void of traditional punctuation and instead prefer

to create their own punctuation from a double backslash [sic]. This new

punctuation serves as a period, comma, semicolon, and also as a way

to heighten the poetic tensions that exist inside each line.

 

          They further comment that their poetic tone:

 

                      . . . is influenced by a punk literary aesthetic, which is often anti-state,

                      sacrilegious, perverse, and flippant. In punk, the political importance

                      of the concepts being discussed are almost undermined by the outlandish

                      manner in which they are presented.

 

            Soto was born in Los Angeles to El Salvadorian parents and is non-binary. They are an activist who cofounded Writers for Migrant Justice that protests the detention and separation of migrant families in the US and worked at Equal Justice USA to end the death penalty. They also cofounded the Undocupoets Campaign that successfully lobbied US poetry publishers to remove proof-of-citizenship requirements from first-book contests.  With an MFA in poetry from NYU and numerous teaching credits, their poems, reviews, interviews and articles can be found at “The Nation,” “The Guardian,” and “Los Angeles Review of Books,” among other journals. And as they state in their “Notes” for  the book: “this book is the residue of its experiences, from the start of the Black Lives Matter protests to the end of the Trump presidency.” (p. 66) Indeed Soto’s poems track a life of tension fraught with childhood domestic abuse, non-binary transphobia, a biased justice system toward migrants and minorities, and pervasive violence and racism. 

In the personal lyric “THEN A HAMMER // REALIZED ITS LIFE PURPOSE” they narrate their younger years including a violent event they witnessed involving their sister in a schoolyard and the many beatings they received from an abusive absentee father. Eventually they turn to the sport of boxing as an outlet. Soto explains:

 

                                    This is the story of hands on us

 

                                    Domestic Violence to // Kink to // Boxing

 

                                                We were afront a firing squad // We were afire // A flame extinguished

 

                                                We were flamboyant // Our buoyancy // A boy ago

 

                                    We began boxing with other survivors

 

                                    To let go of anger (p. 54)

 

 

The use of the noun “flame” and  the adjective “flamboyant” nicely signals Soto’s queer identity, a flaming queerness that as a youth was repressed. Throughout their book this queerness angrily coexists in a world of toxic masculinity and cultural threat. Their tense self-conflict is revealed if we substitute “or” above for the forward slash in “We were afire [or] A flame extinguished.” At the same time, they are impowered, their father’s brutality has an opposite extinguishing effect. Soto conveys this sense of an early life plagued by emotional trauma. We are cued into this when later in the poem their therapist tells them “we have PTSD // & We want a bulldozer/ over us . . .” (p. 59) Soto seems to imply that their trauma has driven them to thoughts of suicide, a chilling wish to be buried and erased. The poem is broken into several sections, each section titled as a “Round,” as in boxing round. In “Round III” they admit:

 

 

                                    We used to punch our ribs before sleep

 

                                    Trying to make our skin tougher

 

                                    So we wouldn’t feel father punching us

 

                                    Jab // Lead Hook // Cross // Duck // Jab

 

                                    On that first boxing class // Our arms flurried against the bag

 

                                    The instructor said // Imagine your enemy &

 

                                    Tears were track runners down our face

 

                                    A little lake fell to the ground // We dove in

 

                                    An encyclopedia of motherfuckers // Appeared on the bag &

           

                                    We beat them all . . . (p. 54)

 

             Later, they expand their discussion to a memory of the World Trade Center as they are walking near the East River in Brooklyn leading to a sudden personal and political epiphany:

 

                                    We remembered visiting the twins before // They fell

 

                                    Or were pushed over

 

                                    Gray hotdog water in the cart // Catty corner

 

                                    We thought if America // The biggest bully // Wasn’t immune to attack

 

                                    Then how could we ever think we were safe

 

                                    Maybe in the aftermath // We have more in common with

 

                                    America // Then we want to admit

 

                                    Maybe a boundary becomes a border // When nobody’s allowed to cross

 

                                    Maybe we built walls so giant // To keep everyone out

 

                                    Maybe our mouth was a weapon // We were willing to launch too readily &

 

                                    Mostly we were afraid of . . . (pp. 56-57)

 

 

            Soto’s poems powerfully describe the violent and marginalized circumstances they have experienced: a juvenile detention center where they try to teach migrant juveniles; JFK airport where they are suspiciously detained by security and frisked; a police car where they were arrested after stealing their father’s car; and the memory of a street tough lover who dies too soon. This last memory is effectively captured in the poem “Barebacking The Barback,” which successfully attains a punk literary tone with perverse flippancy and profanity:

 

                                    We’re his // Retired slut on food stamps // Forever

 

                                    Sniffing horse tranquilizer // Seeing digital dreams

 

                                    This sweet & cherry // Boy-pussy is a great machine

 

                                    Twice // Faggots chased // Down the nude // Avenue . . .(p. 28)

 

                       

            Soto has found a visceral language that is direct and unadorned and erupts with the punch of a boxer, rhetorical jabs and lead hooks and undercuts that rapidly move across the page. My only reservation with Soto’s unique and powerful book is with its title, cover photo and one or two poems which seem to overreach toward a more topical and global footing. The use of the word “terrorist” and the provocative cover photo of a Black woman scaling a wall on a ladder in a tropical setting, seem disingenuous to me, as the bulk of the poems are personal narratives that focus on American injustice and inhumanity that Soto has personally observed.

Soto is better characterized as a queer radical of the American cultural home front, anarchical yes, sacrilegious, perverse, flippant, and fiercely critical, but decidedly a humanist more than terrorist. The terrorism they speak of seems more represented by their father’s violent brutal intimidation of a son, and the violent intimidation of the American government toward migrants, as notably during the recent years when government leaders sought an authoritarian political outcome. Soto’s deeper claim is activism and empathy and seizing agency, and not cowardly terror.


 


“Gay Poems for Red States” by Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr.

University Press of Kentucky, 2023. Review by Walter Holland


“Gay Poems for Red States” is a quiet but forceful collection of narrative poems, that  show-not-tell the trajectory of Carver, Jr.’s life in Appalachia. Carver, a gay man in Kentucky, suffered in his youth the blatant homophobia and the economic discrimination of his community. This book clearly teaches us how Carver, Jr. persevered to become an educator who has made it his mission to advocate inclusion for LGBTQ+, BIPOC, and Appalachian students. Though he and his husband fled Kentucky to Vermont after an especially threatening conversation with a school administrator, Carver, Jr. returned eventually to his roots. He did so with renewed purpose to fight discrimination and lend his support to mentor young lives very much troubled and vulnerable as his was. This collection is essentially a memoir in verse, and reminded me of the power and eloquence of such poets as Robert Hayden, Dylan Thomas, Rita Dove, Jericho Brown, and Natasha Trethewey. This book is a true labor of love, a one-time work perhaps, beautifully written and singularly devoted to empowering through sharing one’s truth. Young and old alike will find healing remedy and courage by taking a front row seat in Carver, Jr.’s awe-inspiring classroom.



Forgive The Body This Failure

Blas Falconer

Four Way Books, 2018

ISBN #: 9781945588174

Softcover, $15.95, 81p

Review by Walter Holland

 

Blas Falconer is a poet of quiet contemplation. His work comes from a place of stillness, solitude and sensitive alertness, something he’s stated recently in an interview with Rochelle Newman. His language is sparse. He prefers short delicate plainspoken simplicity. He keenly observes the domestic, the close-to-home, and personal. In 2008 he adopted a newborn boy with his husband Joseph. At the same time they were both apparently dealing with the illness of Joseph’s father. These events influenced his 2012 book The Foundling Wheel as they do here.

Falconer’s poems are touched by mystical and spiritual subtexts. Beneath each one is a complexity of thought and feeling, a complexity, with philosophical overtones. In formal couplets, precise parsings of words, and deft line-breaks, that startle us with their surprising emphasis and double meanings, each poem is carefully nuanced. In short they have a quality of transcendence. Death’s troubling absences; the emotional void of loss; the joy and mysteries of fatherhood and family; and the sometime violent and tender experiences of being gay and longing for love; are all themes in this beautiful collection. From his first boyhood stirrings of erotic desire to moments of abusive and toxic homophobia, to gay coupledom and loving family, Falconer moves us through a series of small visual moments: scenes, actions, sensations, which are cinematic in feel. Indeed, Falconer addresses this filmic quality in a 2013 interview with Sebastian H. Paramo in Letras Latinas:

 

 . . . I like to think of the poems that I’m writing as small films. I’m the director with his camera, zooming in and out, so they are often image driven. I’m hoping to render the image in such a way that it mirrors the feeling or feelings that I hope to capture. Elliot’s objective correlative and all that.

 

Four of his poems in the book are actually ekphrastic in nature, inspired by visual art works, a reflection of this “image driven” process. But those poems are ekphrastic only in the sense that they are departure points for the poet’s private emotional journey. Again, from the Paramo interview: “With the ekphrastic poem, I can focus on an image that isn’t mine, a pleasure in itself, and remain sensitive to the emotions or ideas that rise up.” After recounting two personal stories to Paramo, Falconer continues: “The ekphrastic poem allowed me to temporarily turn away from the story while exploring the themes and emotions that the story wrestled with.”

            Tangential to this visual process is a sense of separation and distance. At times the speaker describes his world in a strangely dissociative way. The poet both objectifies and subjectifieds simultaneously his images. This unique diction, I feel, calls attention to the paradoxical nature of human experience. There is an inner essence of consciousness, an enigmatic spiritual sense that is at odds with the outer physical body. Falconer in essence is a contemporary poet who’s interested in the metaphysical. It is notable that he includes the following two quotations: the first being Zadie Smith’s “Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories;” and the second from the great French philosopher and mystic, Simone Weil: “Grace can only enter where there’s a void to receive it, and it is grace which makes this void . . .”

            Absence was key to Weill’s metaphysics and the limits of God. Affliction and suffering were ways of transcending the body and mind to reach the spiritual, to reach God: Weill felt that “Evil is the form that God’s mercy takes in the world” and that ‘The extreme affliction which overtakes human beings does not create human misery, it merely reveals it.’” She also said: “buried deep under the sound of his own [the afflicted’s] lamentations is the pearl of the silence of God.”

            Knowledge of Weill is not necessary to access Falconer’s poetry but it does shed light on his point of reference. In the beautiful elegy “Vigil,” Falconer writes of the dying: “ . . .All day, the body is/ failing, the mind failing/ to forgive the body for this failure.” And later:

 

                        All day, it’s almost over.

                        All day, the body won’t,

                        the body says,

                        No,

 

                        to the water glass,

                        but air fills the body

 

                        the way light fills

                        the house at night,

                        so those outside know

                        someone is living there.

 

            And in the end:

 

                        In every room, the body is

                        what’s missing. Why

 

                        wouldn’t the world

 

                        want the body back, what lived

                        inside the body gone, too.

 

            Falconer poignantly recounts the repeated inquiries of his adopted son about his birth mother in the poem “Apology for My Son Who Stops to Ask About His Mother Once More”:

                                                             . . . What can

                                    I do but tell again, how

 

                        under the fluorescent light, she bent

                                    over your swaddled body, her face

 

                                    pale against her dark brown hair,

                        yours dark against the pale sheet.

 

                        That is your story. This

                                                is your share

 

                                    of the world’s grief, what you must carry, and

                                                            which I cannot bear

 

                                                for you.

 

In perhaps one of my favorite poems, “Gesture,” we hear the sensitive inner thoughts of a gay man having dinner with his lover in a crowded, noisy restaurant filled with “dumb chatter.” His lover stretches his hand across the table, an act so fraught with historic shame, public hatred and homophobic violence. The stakes are enormous. The speaker says:

                                                             . . .and

                       

                                    though the body, once

                                    thrown to the ground

 

                                    bruised and bleeding for

                                    what it wanted, has

 

                                    a memory of its own,

                                    how policemen laughed

 

                                    later, the body also speaks

                                    its own language: your

 

                                    hand --- open before me

                                    and the world

 

                                    as if to say,

                                    I cannot save you ---

 

                                    holds something

                                    like happiness in it.

 

Happiness indeed. In this tender collection of thoughtful poems, the human void is filled with quiet grace.  

Nature Poem

by Tommy Pico

Tin House Books, 2017

ISBN: 9781941040645

Softcover, pp. 74

Review by Walter Holland

 

 

            NDN is internet slang for “Indian” as in American Indian or Native American. Tommy Pico deftly interweaves the language of the internet, texting and twitter to build this long, restless, rhythmical poem. Like Eileen Myles’ edgy, East Village verse and the lyrics of the rock band Hole with its aggressive and violent songs about body image, abuse, and sexual exploitation, Pico’s poem achieves an indie feel and status that is angry and dynamic. Pico’s poem challenges the stereotypical association of Native Americans with the Utopian images of the New World; noble savages at one with nature. He resists this contextualization from the beginning, resisting the vacuity of easy natural metaphors and the popular sentimental assumptions about a people and a people’s genocide. Harsh reality and fact are woven into this expansive work.

Essentially Nature Poem constitutes an anti-myth or anti-epic, a deconstructed poem still in the process of being deconstructed Its structure in free verse and prose offers the quest of a young poet finding his way, in search of form and a voice with which to discuss the crisis in his NDN identity. Originally growing up on the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation near San Diego, Pico currently lives in Brooklyn. Like Sherman Alexie, Pico grapples with the contradictions of NDN authenticity. He struggles with the task of writing a “nature poem” with all its attendant clichés, hoping to escape the lyric beauty and patina of a highly elevated poetic. The opening statement in Pico’s poem is: “I can’t write a nature poem.” This is but the start of a long personal soliloquy into what constitutes a nature poem from his perspective.

            Throughout this work Pico questions aloud what he should include in his poem.  Should he focus on the Nature of traditional poetry or of human nature.  At the start he states: “I can’t write a nature poem/ bc it’s fodder for the noble savage/ narrative.” And later he continues: “Let’s say I literally hate all men bc literally men are animals---/This is a kind of nature I would write a poem about.” This is not poetry as Edward Hirsch writes that is defined by its “urge to describe the natural world—its various landscapes, its changing seasons, its surrounding phenomena” and which uses “naïve symbolisms such as purity and escape.” Pico counters:

 

                        This white guy asks do I feel more connected to nature

                        bc I’m NDN

                        asks did I live like in a regular house

                        growing up on the rez

                        or something more salt

                        of the earth, something reedy

                        says it’s hot do I have any rain

                        ceremonies

 

                        When I express frustration, he says what? He says I’m just asking as if

                        being earnest somehow absolves him from being fucked up

 

            Here is an urban queer poet who invokes pop culture from Aretha Franklin and Beyoncé to Gertrude Stein, who tries to understand his contradictory nature:

 

                        My thumb isn’t terribly green but it’s terribly thumbing at me

 

                        it seems foolish to discuss nature w/o talking about endemic poverty

                        which seems foolish to discuss w/o talking about corporations given

                        human  agency which seems foolish to discuss w/o talking about

                        colonialism which seems foolish to discuss w/o talking about misogyny

 

            In an early portion of the poem, Pico describes his father taking him into the hills to cut sage. The father tells Pico to “thank the plant for its sacrifice, son.” His mother, we are told, shows respect for plants and the natural world: she “waves at oak trees” and talks to nature. Pico states: “I am nothing like that,” “I went to Sarah Lawrence College,”alluding to Pico’s later urban experiences. Despite being poor and undereducated, his parents, read poetry aloud to him daily. Pico refers to his life on the reservation. His cousins suffer from cirrhosis undoubtedly related to alcoholism.  He tells us: “I’d turn to my cousins wonder which/ of us wd make it to old age.”

            This anxiety about the future of the NDN community is evident in Pico’s verse. It is mixed with suppressed anger, which erupts in political rage:

 

                        NDN teens have the highest rate of suicide of any population group

                        in America. A white man can massacre 8 black ppl in a church and be

                        fed Burger King by the cops afterward. A presidential candidate gains a

                        platform by saying Mexican immigrants are murderers and rapists.

 

            Pico later shares that the Cuyamaca Flume transported mountain runoff and river water into San Diego. Construction was illegal. The creek dried. Plants died. And

“The very best citizens of/ San Diego called it ‘deluded sentimentality’ to give Indians any land or water. As if these are things, stuff to be owned or sold off.” He goes on to tell us he is “missing many cousins” and “The sadness is systematic. Suspicion is the lesson that sticks.”

            There is indeed an attendant sadness to this long poem as Pico alludes to the many atrocities that the US government has brought to the NDN community. As he says about his “line” or lineage, they have had to endure “waves of/ SoCal dehydration, waves of European diseases, active predation by men/ whose bullets were bought by the US government the pendulum of/ genocidal legislation intended to rob yr tribe of its sovereignty, the cultural/ bleach of NDN boarding schools that robbed yr grandmother’s generation/ of the language, meth infestation of the 80s . . .”

            The apathy and patronization of white people from their comfortable vantage toward the destruction of NDN culture is sharply captured in a short vignette where Pico observes “two white ladies in buttery shawls as they pass a display case” at the Hall of South American Peoples in the American Museum of Natural History. On view is traditional native garb. Pico writes:

 

                       

and that word Natural in Natural History hangs

 

                        also History

                        also Peoples

                        hangs as in frames

 

                        it’s horrible how their culture was destroyed

 

                        as if in some reckless storm

 

                        but thank god we were able to save some of these artifacts – history is so

                        important. Will you look at this metalwork? I could cry –

 

            Pico goes on to castigate the women further when he states that he is sure they just want to wear a pair of NDN earrings and that they “do not mean harm,” which he follows abruptly with the sobering statement that they “don’t really think abt us at all.” Then Pico references the 103 young people who tried to kill themselves on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation in a four month period.

            The difficulty for Pico appears to be the complex nature of his NDN identity and his search for the “core” of his urban being, awash in American culture. He restlessly battles with reductive terminology that seeks to box him in. He writes: “. .  .tell you why I carry/Kumeyaay basket designs on my body, or how freakishly routing it is to/ hear someone died// but I don’t want to be an identity or a belief or a feedbag. I wanna b/me.”

            The personal struggle in this work reminded me of Minnie Bruce Pratt’s fine sequence of poems Crime Against Nature. Separated from her children due to her lesbian status, Pratt engages in a lengthy exploration of her identity, her marginalized status, her anger, her desire and her political stance against the State. I was also reminded of Justin Chin and his dissident, brutal, unflinching verse that explored Asian American queer identity; and Audre Lorde with her investigation of the African-American diaspora. Finally, I can see Pico’s debt to Sherman Alexie who has written uncompromisingly about NDN culture. All of these poets have confronted assimilationist, historical, and colonial-white ideology as well as its rhetoric.

            Pico is a young queer poet. He eschews “perfect poems,” breaks with reductive formats, traditional poetics, and like other millennial poets embraces the swiftly abbreviated, blog-like flow of the new and the informational. It is exciting to hear a voice at the start of its discovery.

           

 

 

 

 



Together and by Ourselves

by Alex Dimitrov

Copper Canyon Press, 2017

ISBN: 9781556595103

Softcover, 99 pp.

Review by Walter Holland


 

            Alex Dimitrov’s heartfelt, bicoastal poems tend to be continuous forms of sizeable length that run roughly a page to a page and a quarter. They utilize serial statements of an aphoristic nature as well as frequent rhetorical questions, which can be hauntingly enigmatic. In “American Nothing” the poet asks: “What do we want when we ruin each other?” Or in “The Past Remembers You Differently”: “what wouldn’t we want death to know about us?” More akin to prose poems there is an element of syntactic and rhythmic repetition and collage in this work with its multiplicity of voices and its mosaic of narrative threads. Some of the lines make gestures toward a story, a place, a personal dialogue, and many are keenly poetic in their choice of words, images, phrases and titles.

            It is by way of the titles of the poems that we find their subtexts.

“Champagne,” “Cocaine,” “Famous and Nowhere,” “The Last Luxury, JFK Jr.,” “Lindsay Lohan,” “Los Angeles, NY,” “American Money,” “Jesus in Hollywood,” “Speeding Down the FDR,” “A Living,” “Strangers and Friends,” are just a few, which evoke contemporary American culture, sending us from East Coast to West Coast and gesturing toward the cult of celebrityhood, obsessions with money, and a wary skepticism on love, intimacy and personal fulfillment.  

            In tone, they reminded me of the Beat and Surrealist impulse to surprise the reader with their dreamy, feverish, and introspective declarations and abstract metaphors. They also bear the influence of newer experimental verse by Anne Carson in their indeterminacy, part of what has been called the postmodern elliptical movement.  In the opening poem, “Together and by Ourselves,” Dimitrov writes:

 

                        Why does the sea hold what it loves most below?

                        Fear. Hopeless money. All the news and the non-news.

                        How could anyone anywhere know us? What did we make?

                        And the leather of your chair . . . it has me marked

                        so good luck forgetting. The world was a home.

                        It was cruel. It was true. It was not realistic.

           

            Each line is primarily end-stopped and avoids enjambment and carries its own discrete weight of emphasis. Short or long, we encounter the staccato of the poet’s thinking as he accumulates or notates various ideas, thoughts and emotional responses.

            Many of the poems are addressed to an intimate “you”---a lover, a confidante be it a man or a woman. The “I” of the poems expresses fleeting moments of great tenderness and also loss. In “Always” the poet writes:

 

                        I would pause for you and be a million commas.

                        The way a flock of birds will leave a tree.

                        Not just the sound or lifting.

                        That’s where I want to put my hands inside you.

 

            And later in the same poem:

 

                        I gave my life a real nice show.

                        And then you went away so I could see you

                        as graffiti in a bar just once.

                        A man is stepping on the moon.

                        The earth or your one life is gone.

                        The phone rings in your leaving.

                        Let your black hair, let your black hair

                        get in my way always.

 

            A certain elegiac tone hangs over the collection, a sense of yearning especially in the book’s ending.  Section V. consists of the last poem, “Days and Nights,” which culminates with:

 

                        “I go on loving you like water but . . .”

                        I go on loving you and going and.

                        I go on, I go on, I go up.

                        Unreachable like a live wire in the sky.

                        We are Pacific, Atlantic, this north or south feeling.

                        Take the long way forever.

                        If you’re asking, if you still need to know,

                        it’s hardly time to go home.

 

 

            There is a wonderful impressionistic style to these compositions, but  perhaps I was drawn to the more narrative poems, which were more cohesive in capturing the mood and voice of the poet. Poems such as “Famous and Nowhere,” “Los Angeles, NY,” “Jesus in Hollywood,” “Out of Some Other Paradise,” “Central Park,” “Nights with People, Days Without” are more successful in my opinion. The end of “Jesus in Hollywood,” reads:

 

                        Do you even cry, Jesus? Do you even pay rent?

                        Would you live in the world that we do?

                        Or do you just like to drive, see the sights,

                        keep your sunglasses on, keep the real you inside:

                        a white BMW on Fountain. Or wherever it is we are now,

                        I’m going to let you pass me.

                        I’m not going to follow you, Jesus.

                        I’m going back to the sun and the people,

                        back where I never belonged.

           

However, as mentioned, there are reflections of great tenderness in Dimitrov’s work. He weaves a language that is languorous, richly romantic and imagistic. In “Poem with William” he writes:

 

                        Looking for the news, I found the blue corridor

                        where nothing happens. It was blue.

                        We just kissed.

                        And because I took you there your were quiet.

                        It seems people are everywhere and so few.

                        A hand has five fingers. Five fingers and five thousand wants.

 

            There are some wonderful aphoristic lines in these poems. There is also a mood, a tone of despondency, a weariness, that magically captures the L.A. scene. This is especially evident in my favorite poem, “Famous and Nowhere.” Here Dimitrov opens with the line: “Life is like Los Angeles. Bright and disappointing.” And later states the poem’s title: “Life’s like LA./ It’s famous and nowhere.” He closes with:

 

                        Leaving town I sat next to a senseless and beautiful boy

                        who asked where I live.

                        His unwashed hair or the way his eyes were just eyes. . .

                        the soul is a tiring thing. You can have it.

                        I don’t know what you mean’s what I told him.

                        It’s more simple than that. I’m just passing through.

 

            And indeed “passing through” is the nature of Dimitrov’s poetic. There is a transitory nature to this work. The poems resist closure. They are observations, sometimes darkly nihilistic and existentialist, but always quiet and strongly felt.

At the end of “The Standard,” named for the hotel in NYC, Dimitrov writes:

 

                        One cigarette I smoked on the roof of The Standard,

                        I didn’t even finish it. Transfixed by all that water,

                        the hundreds of cars and the ways people take themselves out.

                        And however true, to whoever had gone up there with me,

                        I said lucky life. That no one gets to return to the past.

                        No matter our tedious days of ambition, no matter the nights.

                        The nights, the nights---

                        these endings we’ve learned to stay up for.

                        The flaws we recall and regret

                        when our tricks stop to work.

 

            This is an intellect at the top of its game, playful yet wounded, juggling his odd idiomatic truths, questioning in the face of hopeless love and hopeless life.

The Carnival of Affection

by Philip F. Clark

Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-943977-41-3

Softcover, 82 pp.

Review by Walter Holland

 

 

            The Carnival of Affection is a deeply personal and intimate record of male affection and desire: the affection of a son toward his mother, his father, of a man toward his lover, toward those who have died or left, and those who remain friends or figments of fantasy.  Its poems are deftly simple and intelligently crafted. The male body and the male gaze are key themes in this book; a gaze, never furtive, apologetic or anxious; rather, loving, accepting and honest. Homoeroticism and passion, lust and passing attraction pervade this study in gay masculinity.

            Clark exhibits a sensitive, literate, intelligence and artistic spirit. A poem such as “The Readers: After Robert Hayden,” amply captures the subject of Hayden’s famous poem “Those Winter Sundays.” Clark, like Hayden, explores the difficult and complex relationship between fathers and sons, and the sometime routine way a father expresses his love. As in the Hayden poem, the father in “The Readers” in addition to his own work must interrupt and put aside his reading of a book to prepare breakfast for his son and make sure he leaves ready for school. The son realizes this is the sacrifice a father makes, a sacrifice, which might appear minor, but nonetheless is significant, a sacrifice, which may remain unspoken, but is nonetheless apparent. Clark writes:

 

                        What book was he reading this time? And where was he in it, when

            I interrupted his dream? How long does it take to read a book when you

            have a son?

 

 In “Learning” Clark shirks off his father’s lessons in masculinity, which endorse competition, power and violence. His father tries to instruct his son in boxing and how to fight like a man. The poet rather affirms his choice to seek the love of men, essentially affirming his gay identity:

 

                        Be a man, he said.

                        And so I’ve tried.

                        Fight like a man, he said.

                        I’ve loved men like a man

                        instead.

             

             

            In another poem, Clark gives us the classic sculpture of Menelaus supporting Patroclus. This vision of the love, affection and respect of Menelaus, the Greek King, toward the dead Patroclus is erotically described:

 

                        He tightens his arm around

                        the flesh, feels the musculature

 

                        and smells the sweat.

                        He carries, he carries, he steps.

 

                        Foot to foot and to future

                        he pushes against air           

 

and breath.  Waist to chest

                        he holds, he holds,

 

                        he remembers, he touches,

                        he lifts and kisses the mouth.

 

            The internal rhymes or assonance in this poem: “flesh,” “sweat” “steps,” “breath” and “chest” give us a smooth, breathy, quality; one that matches the smooth and sensual surface of Patroclus’ body. But it is in Clark’s poetic profiles of various men in his life that Clark excels: “Joe,” “Mitch,” “Vincent,” “James,” “Louis Belfast,” and “Martin” are a few of these men.  From Mitch, who lives with his partner, who have both witnessed a horrendous drowning of a young boy, to Louis Belfast who is an older man met one night in an Irish gay bar, to Martin who is the object of everyone’s desire, these character studies are keenly evocative. In “Louis Belfast” Clark writes:

           

                        He leaned into me; in a clipped and

                        beautiful brogue, he said,

                        “They say we have the gift of gab

                        so be prepared, I probably won’t shut up.”

                        He’d traveled, taught, had a former wife

                        in a former life. His lover died.        

 

            And in “Martin”:

 

                        Martin was known for a magnificent chest.

                        We waited all winter for the spring, when, like some

                        first bird announcing a change in the weather,

                        he would slowly disrobe from his shirt.

 

            Clark has a fine ear for the vicissitudes and rhythms of gay culture. He masterfully plays with language in the very successful poem, “At the Bar.” Here through a series of “hand-offs” in the narrative, we get the sort of breathless, breakneck banter of bar talk and gossip; a list poem, exhaustive in its tattle. The run-on nature of the poem ingeniously captures the sort of bored nosy speaker who drones on oblivious to the very detailed secrets he is disclosing. The accumulating speed of the poem is brought to a humorous stop at the end with the single statement:

 

                                    ‘Whoa boy, let’s go. It’s late

                        and no one here is really interesting anyway . . .’

 

            This sort of punch line is fraught with irony and campiness, as it negates the long litany of gossip that precedes it.

As mentioned, Clark’s work has a deep eroticism. He highlights masculinity and gay male bonding. “Excavation” is a poem with the conceit of an archeologist recovering and contemplating the past; in this case a past filled with love affairs. Here we find the memory of a lovers’ body and the reconstructed lovemaking. Clark writes:

 

                        We contemplate bone, buttock and lip; the rise

                        of the back into the neck, the slope of the glute,

                        the dark slide of the tongue.

                        Inveterate archaeologist of the kiss,

 

            And later at the end of the poem:

 

                                                            the muscled arm potent with veins,

                        the fine chest and nipple now licked and slept upon

                        to be remembered in some distant summer:

                        Oh yes, oh yes, I had him.

 

            The Carnival of Affection is in short a very personal testament to the human heart. It looks with empathy and love at the myriad of men we call lovers, friends, fathers, sons, or fantasies. Clark gives us, in the very best sense, an intimate look at male identity and gay desire.


 

    

 
 
 

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© 2017 by Walter Holland. Website by Deb.

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