have you seen this man?

Years ago, I discovered Karl Tierney's work reading a few of his poems in Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS, edited by Philip Clark & David Groff. One of his poems in the book, "Funereal," shifted the earth under my feet. I admired its careful craft, but I also felt suddenly emotionally connected with a voice that was so distinct and unusual from a name I hadn't heard of before. The poem moves from the historical and grand--"One whole ship set with an entire fire, / wasted on a dead Viking" to the painfully "real": "Satin in a coffin ... Who knows which is more apropos for laying grave side / flowers of plastic or flowers of silk / when there's not only a new decade and another country / but a fresh millennium just around the corner." The death here is personal, so it feels enormous, enveloping, and Tierney paints it with a historic sweep; but there's also a knowing in the ultimate insignificance, especially when it comes to the triteness of funeral aesthetics. This voice of urgency, of erudite, of wit and slight indignation, culminates in the crafting of a dynamic piece that runs the gamut of observation and feeling. When I was co-editing the now-defunct online journal Clementine, I reached out to the executor of Tierney's poems, Jim Cory and asked him if I could publish some of his work. He graciously sent me a slew of poems and I chose three from various points in Tierney's life. At that point I didn't expect to see a collection years later emerge from Sibling Rivalry Press, and I am so happy one did.

"Funereal" appears in the 1991 portion of  Karl Tierney's collection of Castro poems, Have You Seen This Man? and it's just one of the jewels in a both modest and extraordinarily rich collection. This book has been sitting on my bedside table for months. Is there some sort of trepidation that writers sometimes face when they read the poems of another writer whose work they connect with so deeply? Perhaps because you want to engage with it so wholly, or perhaps because it's too much to bear. Karl Tierney's life was cut short at 39 years of age when he jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge in 1995. He had been sick with AIDS. He made sure to contact Cory in the event of his death to take care of his work. Jim Cory's introduction to Have You Seen This Man? is especially poignant--lovingly detailed with moments of acerbic reflection of the life and times of Tierney. In linking Tierney's work to O'Hara, Cory sums up much of Karl's poems vividly--"... the voice is both casual and intense. The poems sometimes sound like someone sharing a confidence with intimates, at other times, they could be rants delivered across a cafe table. Much of their subject matter--cruising, dating, soggy overnight assignations, fumbling attempts at relationships and the recriminations that often follow--concerns the search for erotic satisfaction, if not connection..."

This searching moves through the years, from 1983 to 1995, Tierney's coming-of-age as a poet in the midst of such devastation. I admire his ability to capture expansive subjects succinctly. On "Beauty": "It comes from nowhere  /and has the disturbing quality / of knowing your desire." On "Turning 30": "... one discovers there's no age / when one doesn't feel awkward..." On "Vanity": "... for two hundred dollars / I buy a vanity mirror and have it inscribed / Resentment is the Potting Soil of Scars." If Gary Snyder's The Back Country feels like artfully-constructed diary entries from the natural world at the mercy of the material world, Tierney's poems feel like artfully-constructed entries from the material world (the female impersonator "MacDonna" figures, a poem which doesn't seem so keen on Madonna) at the mercy of the natural and also the historical. Through the years, Tierney's voice understandably grows more complicated and complex, with lines running back and forth with various switching of tone, attitude and stance ("I saw your eyes in the brothels of Tangier. / Oops! Wrong century. All right, then..."). The earlier poems sometimes have a winsome quality, like observing the "Arkansas Landscape: Wish You Were Here" poem where "red-nosed boys from the hills / walk free from sin-shod shoes / through the collegetown mall. / Everywhere there's hair blowing / (brown mostly) / and the bushes huddle together / animated in conversations about the sea..." The consistency is within the craft. Most poems have killer openers ("He sits stiff as Lincoln / on my Salvation Army chair...) and killer conclusions ("The good ones have died / or can't afford a face-lift / and wont answer the phone"), fitting since Cory notes Tierney was meticulous about both filing his poems and writing and editing them. Though none of the pieces have a sterile quality--they are very much alive and reeling. And many intricate portraits emerge--the ghosts of Tierney's times--from the bar rag publisher (his "obituaries ... another / name to scratch and claw from his great black book") to the "Adonis at the Swimming Pool," elegantly drawn until the stinging closer "Who would have me discussed in seedy cafes / and ruin me since I'm deaf to the hiss / behind the teeth in that inspid smile." And the poems are deeply rooted in the changing Castro neighborhood, on the brink of and in the midst of 90s gentrification: at a film retrospective "that closes with this Salò, this controversial / gem, the poet-filmmaker's final reel before murder, shown in / a neighborhood whose men are mostly dead or about to be." These are thorny, unpredictable poems of people in the midst of death and great social upheaval--clubgoers (painted fantastically in "Club Uranus" after Auden--"hounds tie bandanas round sagging necks / coyotes buckle silver above crooked tails / old wolves smolder in leather / and sly young foxes preview naiveté in shorts / when not the season / this is called going out"), yuppies, punks, pretty boys, "twinkies" like "Skippy" from "what everybody's calling Generation X / which is something like a brand-name credence / suffering from what Bush called "the vision thing." / Issues around lack, very American"--all of these people are sketched out in multitudes. The country at large is changing as well as the collection hints at the fading of the old American political gatekeepers (like Nixon and Jackie O) for the incoming powerful like Bush and Elizabeth Dole ("... this cold-tit whore you present in ridiculous pumps / as some sort of liberal is far away your worst assault on truth") of the new conservative movement of their time. "Brutally Honest" and labyrinthine is how I would describe Tierney's portraits and [poems and they always link back to the speaker's psyche, pain and predicament. One the eve of turning 40, alive writer / reader to long-gone writer, I feel fortunate to have your collection that I felt I could finally bear to read--one that has specificity, joy, savagery, and now permanence in this world.

-Jeffery Berg


Further reading:

"Language Could Kill Us" by Patrick Nathan

space struck

Sometimes a sparkly poetry collection comes along where nearly every line is perfect and extremely clever. For me, that is Paige Lewis's Space Struck. It's fitting that the book begins with the setting up of a zoo of "Normal Everyday Creatures" since there are plenty of animals that roam throughout the collection from a "goose-drawn chariot" to foxes to pelicans to "oysters gasping in unison." It's the most distinct and apt opener in a collection I've read recently. Like a zoo or a diorama (there are a few of those here), the collection acts as a viewing and a cockeyed, sometimes raw and absurd, engagement with the natural world (the speaker asks "for more tactile participation" with the "Terre Haute Planetarium"; the title poem is from the point of view of a meteorite-struck victim; in another, a purple finch is struck by something in space too--"burned / to the grill of my car"). "Space" is a word used a lot in poems and in describing poems to almost banal levels. Those stacked gray rectangles (like "sticks of Juicy Fruit"; like the shadows we're stuck with) on the cover end up being slyly deceiving, as Lewis's spaces ultimately emerge as far more complicated and artful than the ones typically wrought in poetry. Throughout I felt the speaker's unease--"the vice president of panic"--a constant shifting, moving "through life like I'm trying to / avoid a stranger's vacation photo" in a landscape where stirrings of joy and confidence is easily stifled: "I'm ready to shout, / Look at my healthy new life! But my friend / thinks it's a bad idea to frighten people / in a place with so many hard throwables." Among this backdrop are figures of power, saints and such and God ("God's Secretary, Overworked") who are evoked brilliantly and perversely. There comes a point in reviewing a book where I feel like, as I also did in writing about Luljeta Lleshanaku's Negative Space, as someone in Space Struck is noted as one destined for "a prison sentence for anyone caught / explaining magic." I really admire this book and how it's so skillfully-written, arranged, realized and arch, and seemingly effortless in both humor and heart.

-Jeffery Berg

the back country

I've long admired Gary Snyder's dexterity of language but there was a different feel in approaching one of his single collections than encountering anthologized pieces or his selected. His 1968 book, The Back Country, runs deep with riveting observations, unusual, tactile use of words, and the complex portrayals of the frissons between the natural world and the material world (a "Van Gogh print on the wall: vase of flowers all yellow / & tawny"). It also houses his translations of the Japanese poet Miyazawa Kenji. Fittingly, having the translations at the end of The Back Country, it is immediately clear that their work shares similarities, and that Snyder's work is indebted to him (" flash of a crow flapping / up from a treetop / --spiritless woods-- / --the atmosphere clearer and clearer / cypress trees standing to heaven / in a dead hush--"). Snyder's poems are rich in sound and textures and telling details about the human condition: "The Chainsaw falls for boards of pine, / Suburban bedrooms, block on block / Will waver with this grain and knot, / The maddening shapes will start and fade / Each morning when commuters wake-- / Joined boards hung on frames..." His ability to capture tone, malaise, and those gnarly natural descriptions--more tough and dirty than lush and serene, is stunning. The pieces read a bit like journal sketches along his different journeys in the wild and yet they maintain engrossing perspectives: "... high in a pine-- / from behind the cypress windrow / the mare moves up, grazing. / a soft continuous roar / comes out of the far valley / of the six-lane highway--thousands / and thousands of cars / driving men to work." And later, "... all these crazed, hooked nations need: / steel plates and / long injections of pure oil." Snyder obviously prizes nature versus the human-made, but perhaps because he is so physically immersed in the natural world and his crisp, terse syntax is so involving,  his poems never feel obvious or pedantic. I appreciate the leanness of his compact, noun-heavy lines--intriguing compound words like "nuthatch," "bullhump," and "buckbrush." Among his travels and his forest-living, there are moments of disdain for humans: "... sightseeing buses crammed. / to view bare rock, brown grass, / space..."; and also moments of longing for connection: "I don't mind living this way / Green hills the long blue beach / But sometimes sleeping in the open / I think back when I had you."

-Jeffery Berg

driving without a license

Janine Joseph's debut collection, Driving Without a License, is on a coming-of-age Filipino experience in America--a speaker without the documents, without the license to "prove" citizenry--and it is a frank, lively and illuminating read. What immediately struck me was its kinetics. So much energy, so many verbs tumbling across the page ("we hipped our boxes," "sideswiping"). The visuals of the poems themselves look restless as well, with their twisty indentations. The poems almost spin in space--in junkyards, in childhood rooms, up in the air, and in cars; the poems spin like the speaker, who jumps through memories, investigating belonging. "Assimilation... was only a matter of time... / I had down the Valley girl like, / hugged my binder and books / close to my chest, like in Clueless, / all of my weight on one leg / so the other could be all / like this." Joseph's poems are distinctively Californian, with underlying conflicts of identity. The speaker bravely admits, in "Playing 'Indentured Servants,'" the sometimes mystifying actions of childhood--speaking "the way we in the schoolyard believed Chinese people spoke"--and performative playground power structures of race. Also within the book is an emphasis on naming. Some of the names have been blotted out, just a simple letter (invoking both intimacy and the sense of "Always Hiding") . In "The Name," ("My father's choice was Jennifer..."), a litany of names spill forth along with the speaker's spry associations. "You Lie" drudges up an American moment that still makes me queasy from 2009. Funnily enough, the "You lie" has stuck, but the "reasoning" of it hasn't. And Joseph reminds us in the CNN blurb note that the two words were blurted out by a representative during the State of the Union after "the president denied that health care legislation would provide free coverage for illegal immigrants." In the poem, Joseph writes, "my medical history / was an unidentified coastline." Overall, I found the poems in this book haunting, with sly lines and excellently-wrought pieces in both form and free verse. There are many lovely moments too, such as in "Break" where "I was a ghost away / from wild magnesium / and our braincases were split- / seconds from barreling the mine shafts / with calcium pearls-- / and no search party for me." There are maps--even an era-stamped mentioning of MapQuest--borders, and archipelagos--all indicative of a speaker's on-going searching and defining.

 -Jeffery Berg

the tradition

"The blk mind is a continuous / Mind. There is a we. I am among them. / I am one of the ones. I belong." Jericho Brown's The Tradition is an extremely exact and beautiful book of poems. It truly feels like an absolute collection--one that builds slowly and elegantly--with a gratifying circular effect. I am thinking in particular of its "Duplex" poems which echo imagery and music through form and repetition-play. In the first one, "A poem is a gesture toward home," and it immediately establishes story, the remixing of memory and one vivid concrete detail (that "burgundy car") that end up being carried throughout until its ultimate, gut-punch conclusion--one that so few poetry collections can deliver, and perhaps the most striking I can think I've read in years. The poems feel of-the-moment, but also timeless, and there's a lovely leanness to them, despite their wide emotional, political scale. The book is flooded with the beauty of flowers, their fragility, intertwined with pain. The title poem is a fulcrum, with the scientific names of flora intermingled with black victims of violence. "Summer seemed to bloom against the will / Of the sun, which news reports claimed flamed hotter / On this planet than when our dead fathers / Wiped sweat from their necks." Such a sweeping way Brown is able to capture the oppression, anxieties and deep history in just one sentence. As in the "Duplex" pieces, Brown's poems are often rooted in a concrete image that grows more in its complexity until a final knock-out line, like the ones in "The Trees," where describing the crepe myrtles in the front yard: "It's not that I love them / Every day. It's that I love them anyway." Sonically, thematically, everything clicks. And complexity lies in simple words too, like "big" and "fine," which are evoked as "legend," used "long ago" of men describing women and cars. There is a nick of humor, but Brown, per usual, treads deeper, in describing the eventual "wear and tear" of people and things, once prized. If Brown's art in The Tradition delivers painful subject matter through pleasurable aesthetics (those sturdy capitalized lines; the straightforward diction and internal rhymes), it's akin to a statement the speaker delivers boldly in "Night Shift": "... I am touched, brushed, and measured, I think of myself / As a painting." Abuse and torment and personal and societal perils are lensed through art and succinctness, such as the blues refrains in "Entertainment Industry" ("I don't have kids / Cuz I'd have to send them to school / Ain't that safe as any / Plan for parenthood / Mass shooting blues"). One could slip into simplification, but Brown's poems are extraordinarily-wrought ("Layover" is a skinny poem of haunting power). In "Dark," I am reminded of what Major Jackson does in "Double Major," where the poet has a conversation with himself. Like Jackson, Brown also opens up the poem into something larger about identity and place in the world. In The Tradition, I witnessed the craft on display, but I also was so emotionally connected throughout, that I wasn't just admiring the skill, but deeply affected as well. I recently purchased this book on CD, and am looking forward to its arrival, to hear Brown's work back in all its (morning) glory.

-Jeffery Berg


Further reading:

Invention by Jericho Brown (an essay on the "Duplex" poems--which I'm obsessed with)

is, is not

"Instead of 'Come in' she says 'Not now.'" Like Stephen Dunn's Pagan Virtues, Tess Gallagher's Is, Is Not is a rigorous read. The poems could be described as opaque, but there's a challenge more in the use of language and the physics of situation. Association and sentences sometimes move past what I felt would normally be a comfortable, familiar stopping point. The book itself is quite a lengthy tome too. I literally felt the language trying to push itself, twist itself. Perhaps the whole "is, is not," the "two doors," is the paradox that lies within many of the poems: "sad-happy"; "live step, dead step" (with each step forward, we get a little closer to death; "steps" also lead to "mystery ... How else let difference tell you / what you are?"). The poems are often having direct conversations with others, friends, or even illustrating a conversation with something itself, like "Breath": "... breathe it / open to the glass world. It / breathes back / to prove neither it / nor you can end / this exchange of breath / for worlds." There are moments in the poems of the unending--of an almost obsessive circularity: "I come. I go. You stay. You keep on / staying. I come again. You are here." Or in the description of "March Moon": "How unsatisfying half is / even when heading / full..." Admittedly, I was doubting myself if this was at least somewhat the intended effect until I reached Gallagher's "Afterword" which, like Kimiko Hahn's essay in Foreign Bodies, gives a fascinating look into craft: "The kind of poetry that seeks a language beyond the very one in which it arrives may travel from edge to edge... I find myself trying to out-leap what I can almost say... I seem to be writing in some sense beyond language." And later "[my poems] challenge dualities which tend to blot out a range of possibilities." So yes, there is something more than just simple paradox, the simple two doors, and the simple "is, is not." Gallagher's lyricism attempts to stretch beyond.

-Jeffery Berg

pagan virtues

With Pagan Virtues, that Stephen Dunn is up to his 19th poetry collection among an oeuvre of dense and intelligent work, is certainly admirable. There's a slyness to the language here and a resistance to the melodious and the pretty. This can make Pagan Virtues a challenging read musically and aesthetically. But there's no doubt that Dunn has accumulated noteworthy skill. The collection becomes an invite to an inner voice of trickery, contradictions and paradox. Optimism becomes a "vulgar passion." In "Misfortune," the smell of it is "clean they way rain that has yet to arrive smells clean." The title poem hints at the moment we're in where "the inner weather of our nation" is "dimming" (and perhaps the moment we are always in): "everything that smells of dogma / or the forbidden... investigate what's good, / attempt to live in a world a person from / another world might want to much around in..." I love that use of "muck" which is vaulted as both a terrible and casually pleasing connotation. Doubling and alter-identities is explored in "As If Chekhov Had Written It," which references The Americans, an ultimate television show of doubling identities physically, psychically, and culturally. Dunn's poems grapple with death here too, such as in "The Ghost Song of the Retiree" or "The Year Before the Election" when "all the poets / seemed to be dying..." and not of "suicide, or" drinking "themselves into oblivion," as associated with poets, but of "natural causes." Or works directed to "my eulogist," such as "A Postmortem Guide": "I stumble and fall, / shake and drool, but history's daily horror / trumps any condition of mine. What is it / compared to genocides and demagoguery?" There's also a series of "Mrs. Cavendish" poems which routes through an intimate relationship. While Pagan Virtues might not be as shiny and enveloping as other contemporary works I've read this month, its adroitness is undeniable.

-Jeffery Berg 

the carrying

Ada Limón's The Carrying is an astonishing volume of poetry--the kind of book that seems destined to be discussed and studied for years to come. I appreciated its eloquence and its rigor. It seems like nary a word is wasted. There are many poets who discuss the body, in all its flaws and all, but Limón's descriptions are unnerving in their acuteness. In describing Alzheimer's, recalling Stevens: "There are too many things to hold in the palm of the brain." And in describing the sound of grief in "Prey": "The muffled, ruptured voice of a friend / turns into an electrical signal and breaks open / to tell me her sister has died. A muted pause, / then a heaving. Sounds sucked from lungs." The poem is about the changing of the soul when processing close death and Limón's words help take us there to that seismic moment. In the elegy to Philip Levine, "How We Are Made," she sketches him and his work: "You, with your wiry limbs / of hard verse, inky gap-toothed grin / of gristle and work, you who grimly / told us to stop messing around, / to make this survival matter / like a factory line..." Survival and strength are everywhere in the book, even in the pop sense of "Wonder Woman."  The relations of humans to nature, too, and their own tough, weedy survival--from goldfinches to caverns to trees to suddenly beetles pinned to a board, are also invoked. One poem I read a few times was "Dandelion Insomnia," which houses so many crystalline moments: "A neighbor mows the lawn / and bam, the next morning, there's a hundred / dandelion seed heads straight as arrows / and proud as cats high above any green blade / of manicured grass. It must bug some folks, / a flower so tricky it can reproduce asexually, / making perfect identitcal selves, bam, another me, / bam, another me. I can't help it--I root / for that persecuted rosette so hyper in its / own making it seems to devour the land." There's kind of a cross-section of sophistication and words like "bam" that just ignite throughout. That wordplay. Those linebreaks. That insight. I really admire every poem in this book deeply.

-Jeffery Berg

how to love a country

How do you love a country of so much strife, so much racism and violence? That is on the mind of Richard Blanco's poems here. The book seems to come from a lofty place (with lofty blurbs), perhaps because Blanco read at Obama's inauguration in 2013. That time seems so far away, especially as we have long been mired in rolling waves of information bits and also, the devastation of a new president's era. This, in no doubt, elevates Blanco a bit to a national figure--one to speak with great importance of important events. Yet, I think Blanco's poems are often strong and dexterous enough to overcome a sense of the pedantic. There's a personal connection too that adds to their complexity. The metaphor of America as a bully doesn't quite encompass the country's totality, but there is an effective moment in "El Americano in the Mirror," where the speaker confronts his victim from fifth-grade recess: "Why didn't you punch me back?... / I wanted to say: / I'm sorry, maybe I love you. Perhaps even kiss you." Blanco's empathetic portrait is surprising and raw. When responding to the horrific incident at Pulse, Blanco seems to feel an urgency, a need to write about it but also senses the futility in capturing its horror through language: "Draw a metaphor / so we can picture the choir of their invisible spirits / rising with the smoke toward disco lights, imagine / ourselves dancing with them until the very end." This is what makes Blanco's poems in this collection sneakily conflicted. In "Let's Remake America Great," there's a sardonic tone and a re-working of America, heavily through the lens of popular culture--especially television, and personal reflection: "Let's write-out women like my mother, who fled Cuba broken as / her broken English, who cooked dinner in her uniform after / twelve-hour shifts at the supermarket, set the table with plastic / cups she could rinse out and reuse." Those little details, like the plastic cups, bobbing in the sea of importance, add to moments of spark in the book, and where I find Blanco's poems most compelling.

-Jeffery Berg

spacecraft

On a whim, I picked up John McCullough's poetry collection Spacecraft last year at Gay's the World  and I am glad I did. This is a terse but expressive volume, with vocabulary, sometimes rectifying the antiquated ("Flittermouse") and lyricism that requires an intimate and involved read. McCullough's voice and poems are unique, with a deep lexicon, sometimes heightened and tempered by emotion. The use of "space" in the title ranges from physical ones: cafes, churches, museum booths, a vault. To the space one leaves behind--especially in the elegiac sense, with McCullough writing about the death of his lover. I found myself pausing on poems that fixated upon a specific object, like the goo of a lava lamp, and later, "The Fog," which I read a few times as I found it so compelling and beautiful. "It is malt perfume and frontiers crossed / over and over. It is a horror movie villain, / chopped away at its roots--dying luridly, / springing up after the credits. It is a casual / voice informing me this was never my life..." I am barely skimming the surface here of McCullough's collection of substantial intelligence and craft.

-Jeffery Berg

hybrida

Not to play favorites, especially after reading so many great books so far this month, but Tina Chang's Hybrida might be the most effective poetry collection I've read this April. Like Reginald Dwayne Betts' Felon (both featuring the compelling use of the ghazal) and Clint Smith's Counting Descent, themes of racial identity are expressed with rich syntax in unique, complex ways. Chang writes much of the book from the point-of-view of a new mother of a mixed race son. I truly felt this book, with voices so strongly realized. I read the book in e-form, but I yearn a physical copy to sense if it has a different effect, especially since Chang uses so many unusual formats including in her ekphrastic pieces. In Hybrida, there's an underlying worry and fear of bringing a child into this unsettled world and racist country, which is vividly evoked throughout, particularly mid-way through in "Astroturf" when the pregnant speaker rests in the synthetic peace of "plastic grass" and jarred into reality by listening to girls making fun of a black boy and asking him to leave. "My boy would be here soon. Six more days into the future I would meet him. I touched the area that moved. I waited." Chang has a way to envelop the reader in her patchwork of scenes and observations. There is much brilliance in "Hybrida: A Zuihitsu" which takes the associative form and plows forward: "If I grew up with dual language, dual identity, how can anything feel unified?" The piece becomes almost an essay on Chang's collection itself, its ideas of forms, identity and language, with interruptions of questionings: "By raising a black boy, do I understand what it means to live as a black boy? How do I speak of his existence without appropriating his existence? I return to the language of mothers." And later, a quite apt statement: "Media can obliterate a spirited word (world)." I am reminded there of how I felt uneasy dissecting Luljeta Lleshanaku's Negative Space which sometimes spoke of actively eschewing clarity. While there is much ambiguity and resistance in Chang's poems here, like "The field" that "becomes wider and wider," there's also a searing clearness in emotion and visual-making, ending everything with a drawing from the son himself in an almost guttural, heart-stopping way.

-Jeffery Berg


Further reading:

"Waterborne: A Review of Tina Chang's Hybrida" by Jerome Ellison Murphy from The Adroit Journal

felon

Reginald Dwayne Betts' Felon is a blistering account of the incarcerated and its permanent effects. In his notes, Betts acknowledges "I've always thought of my own writing as having something of the desire of the quilt maker." This stitching of various experiences, texts, music intertwined with the experience of his own, are well-wrought in this collection. Interspersed are effective redacted documents, the bar-like erasures and the text left, giving way to potent lines of poetry. The poems in Betts' collection move with both a steeliness and a delicacy. On re-entering: "You come home & become a parade / of confessions that leave you drowning, / lost recounting the disappeared years. / You say fuck this world where background checks, / like your fingerprints, announce the crimes. / Where so much of who you are betrays / guilt older than you..." And the poems are of complicated thought too, such as "When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving": "in the backseat my sons laugh & tussle, / far from Tamir's age, adorned with his / complexion & cadence & already warned / about toy pistols, though my rhetoric / ain't about fear, but dislike--about / how guns have haunted me..." and later, "...this is / why I hate it all, the protests & their counters, / the Civil Rights attorneys that stalk the bodies / of the murdered, this dance of ours that reduces / humanity to the dichotomy of the veil." All of this complexity and emotion expressed in clean tercets. The opening "Ghazal" reflects the striking cover art by Titus Kaphar: "... painted my portrait, then dipped it in black tar. / He knows redaction is a dialect after prison. / From inside a cell, the night sky isn't the measure-- / that's why it's prison's vastness your eyes reflect after prison." The form of the ghazal itself and its constraints, the word "prison" repeated throughout as the final word of a sentence, open up the ideas how limits and stops are overrun by the effects of imprisonment that are permanently imprinted. This is such a strong collection. Listening to Betts speak about his writings and experiences are vital as well.

-Jeffery Berg

fetch the bolt cutters

Hard to pick a fave from Fiona's fiery new record which is carrying us through the weekend (and perhaps, 2020).

But my faves are no "I Want You to Love Me."

And "Shameika"--those tumbling piano riffs!

telephone poles

I'm currently reading Rabbit is Rich. I love the feel of time and place in the book and of course, the brusque dialogue, where scrappy characters are endlessly nitpicking at one another. It's definitely a book of another era, the end of the Carter era, gas lines and disco, and it's captured in mesmerizing detail by John Updike. Because of this, I was curious to venture into Updike's poetry this month. I had read one of his books Americana around the time of its 2001 release but I remember very little about it. He's never been as much of a prolific poet as  he remains as a novelist, though his poems have been widely shared over the decades. His 1963 poetry collection Telephone Poles is an interesting curiosity. The majority of the pieces were published in The New Yorker and many of them have a pithy, jocular sensibility that you can imagine would pair well with ads for cameras and high-end liquor. I had doubts I would be able to get through the collection once I got to the second poem, "Reel," which takes self-indulgent pleasure in the sounds of "whirl," "whorl," and "wharve." Reading it out loud sounded horrible and I cringed at its conry nature. This play is also a bit heavy-handed in "Upperville, the upper crust / Say "Bottoms up! from dawn to dusk / And "Ups-a-daisy, dear!" at will-- / I want to live in Upperville. / One-upmanship is there the rule..." It might just feel like a dated affectation. Unfortunately, it doesn't move past frivolity. Self-important yearning is played out in "Thoughts While Driving Home": "Was I charming? / Did I make at least one good pun? / Was I disconcerting? Disarming? / Was I wise? Was I wan? Was I fun?" Self-anxieties, especially male, left unanswered, is something I noticed as pervasive in the Rabbit novels and in these poems. When pondering upon existence to a little white star: "You offer cheer to tiny Man / 'Mid galaxies Gargantuan-- / A little pill in endless night, / An antidote to cosmic fright." Even if there's a triteness to Updike's poems, it's undeniable that his attention to language is hearty and singular. Luckily, the poems get resoundingly better in the book's second section--almost like two different volumes of poetry altogether. The title poem is wistful observation: "They will outlast the elms... / These giants are more constant than evergreens." Thus begins a more meditative swath of writing, less jaggedly jokey, eyeing the frisson between the technological and nature. Later the telephone poles appear in "Vibration": "... outside my windows [they] quivered in an ecstasy / stretched thin between horizons." In "Suburban Madrigal": "... looking through my windows / diagonally at my neighbor's house, / I see his sun-porch windows; / they are filled with blue-green, / the blue-green of my car, / which I parked in front of my house, / more or less, up the street, / where I can't directly see it... / my car, / .... a gorgeous green sunset streaking his panes." This reminds me more of novelist Updike and his ability to capture detail, wryness and emotion so effectively and compactly; it strays away from the more self-conscious, showy vibe of the "poet poems." Also at play are Updike's unusual perspectives of modern life. I am especially inspired to write a poem based upon "Movie House," which ruminates on the back of a movie theater where "from this angle only / the beautiful brick blankness can be grasped. / Monumentality / wears one face in all ages."

-Jeffery Berg

counting descent

Some poetry carries the trait of aloofness, others feel very "felt." Clint Smith's large-hearted poems in his collection Counting Descent are in the latter category. I was initially struck by the spareness, the straight-forwardness of the book, and then did a second read and was enlivened by all the fascinating conversations and associations the poems were having with one another. The title poem is mostly in quatrains--a rich autobiography of familial bonds through the numeric, finally landing on the experience of a young black man: "I celebrate every breath, tried to start counting / them so I wouldn't take each one for granted. / I wish I could give my breath to the boys who / had theirs taken, but I've stopped counting / because it feels like there are too many / boys & not enough breath to go around." Other counting goes on from shout outs and jump shots to the cabs that pass a black man to black victims of racial violence. Smith expresses these painful observations keenly and plainly. The interrelation of the word "boy," in the racist sense, is interlaced with the speaker's boyhood. There are poems where the inanimate, the "un-human" speak to "the black boy," like the fire hydrant ("putting a boy against the wall / so the dogs / have an easier time"), the cathedral, the window ("when someone breaks you they call it inevitable"), and most strikingly, the cicada: "why you think we roll in packs? / you think these swarms are for the fun of it? / i would tell you that you don't roll deep enough / but every time you swarm they shoot / get you some wings son." The experiences of black boyhood are expressed in distinctive scenes such as a seemingly innocuous hotel parking lot Super Soaker fight which ends with a father's warning and fears: "Told me I couldn't be out here / acting the same as these white boys-- / can't be pretending to shoot guns / can't be running in the dark / can't be hiding behind anything / other than your own teeth." Perhaps this "hiding behind teeth," is one reason why Smith writes, "I can want so desperately / to show you all of my skin, but am more afraid / of meeting you, exposed in open water." How to break beyond the "Presumed athlete. / Free & Reduced sideshow. / Exception & caricature. / Too black & too white / all at once" in "Ode to the Only Black Kid in the Class"? The poems also depict the images of the incarcerated, like the boxy piece "Beyond This Place" ("They / want people to remember that they once existed / beyond this place, that they still do."). A sweetly-painted scene of a kitchen dance between mother and father emerges in Smith's descriptions and humor: "... smoke alarms are going off... / Their hands are clasped / now, fingers interlocked, / swinging each other back & forth. / Their feet are now music / of their own." The range of subjects in this book is impressive and expansive.

-Jeffery Berg

love hangover 2020

Eric Kupper gives Diana Ross's 1976 disco hit "Love Hangover" a fresh spin in 2020.

the intangibles

I've have admired Elaine Equi's poems since reading her 2011 book Click and Clone. How do you create such witty, precise, clever and indelible poems without being precious? As one who errs on the verbose, I respect these mostly thin, lithe, spare poems that pack so much punch in their syntax. The fun continues in her new book, The Intangibles. Communication, in all sorts of fashions and forms, is a theme which runs throughout: "We have many times / met without meeting / like this, / at some dog-eared / intersection, / each in search of / the right words" or "... peckish news / gets told in tweets, / gets old so quickly. / In place of one place / a billion tiny customized versions / appear targeted specifically / to your tastes." Or the changes in just basic gestures and communicating: "I remember when people / used their hands to gesture / and would meet each other's eyes / with curiosity or annoyance," / but now everyone looks down..." When speaking of all the writing classes taught, with "blackboards I never write on," the speaker reflects, "... together we form a current--a kind of river / that has drawn me--drawn us--forward toward I'm not sure what.." Overall, the poems blend beautifully together, album-like, such as the ode to Excedrin ("Monogrammed Aspirin") into "If I Weren't a Poet, I'd Be a Pharmacist:" "Counting pills, / not syllables." One favorite poem of mine is "My Grandmother's Glass Skyline" from the "Perfume Dioramas" which lists perfumes with their sensuous names and eye-catching bottles which "gave her bungalow / in Chicago / an exotic air." Throughout, there's a mix of the intangibles at dance with the tangibles, both are unavoidable. As one drawn to concrete imagery over straight lyricism, I love these poems, like the perfume ones, for their objects ("What is the difference between objects and things? / Things, I think, have less personality"). When thinking of ghosts, they "must still consider fashion-- / must clothe its invisibility in something / if it is to "appear" in public." As one who believes and has seen ghosts, I do remember their outfits. How they obtain those outfits, who knows? It's intangible.

-Jeffery Berg

smiling mixed up

Right before COVID-19 shutdown NYC, I was fortunate to see the Jagged Little Pill musical, which was great. Alanis Morissette's new song "Smiling" was featured. Here is the strong club remix from F9!

foreign bodies

I've always admired the way, especially in her book Toxic Flora, Kimiko Hahn is able to respond to science with poetry. Her newest book, Foreign Bodies, is a precise, intimate study of objects and wordplay. In the poem "Foreign Body," she expresses, "Now I'm sixty. Sweet as dried papaya. / My hair, a bit tarnished, / my inmost, null. / Memory is falling away / as if an image shattered to shards then / re-collected for a kaleidoscope: / I click the pieces into sharp arrangement--" This "sharp arrangement" is how I view this book, and I found myself enjoying all of the echoes and elegance. The images of ash and dust ("Before I swept every speck of you...") are motifs throughout and are given all sorts of associations--from cigarette ashes to the ashes of the departed. In "The Ashes," witness the vividness and syntax: "After the war, after she met Father, / she smoked menthols but didn't cha-cha anymore. / She'd light up and blow smoke / out the apoplectic window. / He found the ashes on the sill." I admire Hahn's work so much that I wasn't sure at first about the inclusion of her essay "Nitro: More on Japanese Poetics"--I wanted the poems to be able to breathe on their own on their pages--but ultimately I thought there were many interesting ideas within. "After all, aren't word associations the raw material of the psyche, where one rubs against one's dreams?" And later, "Perhaps I shouldn't feel the need to essay my mixed sensibility. Please dear reader, please count this not as a lecture, but as an abiding homage to a culture that is both foreign and embodied." I appreciated this final note--and the restless yearning of a powerful mind that created this book.

-Jeffery Berg

mighty mouse mixtape!

Here's a new mixtape from Mighty Mouse!

autobiography of death

It was interesting to read Anne Sexton's Live or Die and Kim Hyesoon's Autobiography of Death close to one another. Both are chronological and both are steeped in death--in many reflections and relations. Hyesoon's book is unusual and fast. It's compromised of short, punchy sentences with similar structures. But what lies between these phrases are unique perspectives, including portraying death as a physical being looking upon oneself and others. I think of Sexton in "Photograph": "Your doll walks / Your doll talks / Drops its eyes inside itself / Cries till its neck turns all the way around / It may come back to life when you die..." The doll that turns its head around can be us viewing mortality, in a physically impossible fashion which this work takes that on. Hyesoon's poems are twisty, announcing the clash of choice and the inevitable: "Do you want to be a friendly corpse? / Do you want to be a scary corpse? / Do you want to become silk that ghosts kiss? / Do you want to become a sack that ghosts kick? / Every, every day is the eve of death..." Interspersed in the collection are illustrations, zany, visceral and striking, by Hyesoon's daughter Fi Jae Le. There's an interview with Hyesoon at the end of the book of writerly intentions and historical events that inform it, guided by its translator Don Mee Choi, that opens up the poems even more expansively as they lie on the page themselves: "I wanted the poems to vaporize. In other words, I wanted a ghost of collectivity to emerge from the poems." That haunting effect of "vaporizing" certainly worked on me--something I imagine is difficult to tap into as the poems float along in their repetitive, clipped phrases.

-Jeffery Berg

not here

There is much sadness in Hieu Minh Nguyen's poetry collection, Not Here, so when it slips into a celebratory tone, as it does in a drag bar in the poem "Monica West is Moving to Omaha, Nebraska," it's particularly shiny ("I see a world where I stay, where I stand at the foot of the stage & wait for them to reach down & take, I don't know, my money? My hand? My fear of a world that refuses to know their glory"). Nguyen effectively mixes in painful observations too--"We don't come here because the white people are better here than they are in the real world, cause after all, after last call, they will all leave & walk into a world where their clean faces have been the destination in the path of our unmasking. Cause after all, no blacks, no asians, no spice, no rice, no fats, no femmes. They push my friends, & say I don't see you--didn't see you standing there--" The little sonic booms in Nguyen's work cut. Nguyen's lucid and moving poems reflect abuse, unspoken desire, racial identity and more in concise, wrenching ways. The sharp-edged "Politics of an Elegy" shows the discordant complexity of an elegy in the first place: "I can lie & say I haven't written the poem / haven't buried her over & over at my desk / haven't described the ash of her body" and later, "I fill my lungs with English. / I numb her skin with English. / I English the light she walks into." Nguyen wields much power in his use of repetition and language in his compounded, multi-faceted work of strong subject matter.

-Jeffery Berg

live or die

Anne Sexton's 1966 collection Live or Die, looks at death through a unique prism. It's a chronological collection, its dates at the end in italics, ushering in a sense of finality to each of the loose, but direct and calcified poems. Much of the book moves through abuse, death, depression with some fantastical images: "I will have to sink with hundreds of others / on a dumbwaiter into hell. / I will be a light thing. / I will enter death / like someone's lost optical lens." I may have viewed this book differently in younger years, through my own lost optical lenses, before experiencing depression. It makes a more complex read now. I do not relate to the view of Sexton's work as trite, morbid pageantry that sometimes haunts her reputation as a writer--especially in this book. In fact, I feel the book is more celebratory and cunning in the "die" than in the "live." The last lines of the book, I do not inherently trust: "I say Live, Live because of the sun, / the dream, the excitable gift." I may have read the poem "Sylvia's Death," differently before but now, I can understand the vibe of anger and envy that comes across that Plath went before she did: "Thief!-- / how did you crawl into, / crawl down alone / into the death I wanted so badly and for so long, / the death we said we both outgrew, / the one we wore on our skinny breasts, / the one we talked of so often each time / we downed three extra martinis in Boston." There are so many mixtures of emotions and tones, so much concrete countered by evocative lyricism ("I think of dolls, / ... the pink skin and the serious China-blue eyes. / They came from a mysterious country / without the pang of birth, / born quietly and well") in Sexton's work here--her never "uncomplicated hymns"--that Live or Die is inherently tricky to pin down to exactness.

-Jeffery Berg

fanny says

Nickole Brown's Fanny Says blurs lines between a poetry collection and a memoir. A loving yet complex tribute to her late grandmother, the book is a hoot, steeped in the South and seared in pain. It resists sentimentality, something that isn't easy to do when reflecting upon one's loved one, especially a grandmother. It's a folksy read, but also a bitter-tinged one. Sometimes real-life dialogue is poetic in itself and the highlights within this big-hearted tome are Fanny's razor-sharp idioms and judgmental quips. "Pepsi" is one of my favorite poems I've read in a while, a hilarious portrait of Fanny's cola addiction and all her demands and needs around it: "I want that glass to be plastic and pretty, / something with flowers, maybe in pink; now, don't give me no ugly cup. / It better be clean too; don't give me no dirty glass, / pull it hot from the washer if you have to, / but just four--count them, four--cubes of ice." Brown uses so many specific details to illustrate Fanny's wardrobe, her uses of Crisco, her relentlessly "Clorox-ed" house, and her potato salad recipe. Fanny is foul-mouthed and prickly but the obvious love she has for Nickole and Nickole's obsessively-detailed telling show a strong, haunted bond. Brown doesn't ignore Fanny's problematic racial views and faces them on in the long poem "A Genealogy of the Word," prefaced with a James Baldwin quote ("People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them"). I was very excited by this collection because it was so vivid and different from many poetry collections I've read lately--both structurally and content-wise. It feels to cliche to say that Brown makes Fanny come to life, but she really does and I love how poetry was the vehicle to make that happen.

-Jeffery Berg

brown

I've always enjoyed Kevin Young's work whenever I've come across it, but after reading his 2018 collection Brown, I feel as if I've witnessed a monumental experience. For a poetry book, it has an epic scale, ranging across history, largely in tight, jam-packed tercets. Young writes some very lovely poems for black sports stars like Hank Aaron and Arthur Ashe ("You swing / in my head like Count Basie / only there's no / royalty, no music anymore / like yours"). Young effectively intertwines these sports poems with personal experience of Kansas boyhood ("For years I've wanted to write / how exactly I felt / with you hovering / on my wall, framed mid- / air, about to strike") including the awkwardness of P.E. The title poem is made of graceful fragments that reflect upon the speaker's mother. The most enjoyable section is "Field Recordings," which harbors tributes to James Brown and black punk like Fishbone and 80s and 90s rap, rock and dance music in the cycle "De La Soul is Dead." The lyrics and imagery and narrative fire away in compact clips ("What was sleep even for? / The year before, a freshman, I threw / a Price party, re-screwed / the lights red & blue-- / the room all purple, people / dancing everywhere--clicked / PLAY on the cassette till / we slow-sweated to Erotic / City, or Do Me Baby"). That these poems are in form is even more impressive in that they never feel artifical nor uptight. The elegy "Ode to Ol Dirty Bastard" is fantastic too, getting to the vibe and sound of his music, his look, and his singular voice. There's a slow-down in the final act, where some of the poems get more terse, like the stacatto notes in "[Death's Dictionary]" and "[A Glossary of Uppity]." The poems reference historical figures and already recent historic moments like the murder of Trayvon Martin and the white supremacy march in Charlottesville. The book ends on the beautiful "Hive," which Young has said of: "...life hums here, in this boy remembered or imagined, the poem offering a kind of winged benediction—a song that summons suffering, but does not succumb, I hope.” I am certainly just skimming the surface of this moving--both emotionally and musically (the book literally moves along with its jazz train anthems as markers)--broad, and rich collection.

-Jeffery Berg

your new feeling is the artifact of a bygone era

One call-out I thought was interesting in Chad Bennett's poetry collection, Your New Feeling is the Artifact of a Bygone Era, was the idea of the "fade out." It's mentioned in what seems like the centerpiece poem of the book: "Silver Springs," based upon the Fleetwood Mac, but inherently Stevie Nicks, song. "... lately I have been listening to songs, like 'Silver Springs,' that fade out, pretending / but refusing to go away." It's a numbered list poem, directed at someone ("Do you know who you are?"), perhaps a past relationship, and it intricately links the data and atmosphere of the song with this "you." The video clip of the live performance, a track from The Dance, is well-known for Stevie's fiery performance in front of Lindsey Buckingham, and her refrain "You'll never get away..." This collection is haunted ("Boy at the century's / jukebox, hammered, / same furious song / on repeat), and it attempts the feel of the fade out, seemingly knowing that effect is impossible sonically in poetry--an ending is an ending--and poems are naturally doomed to build to them, making them one of the trickier things to always land on. Bennett references one of the most famous trick fade outs in a pop song I can think of, Elvis Presley's recording of "Suspicious Minds." The speaker in this collection indeed feels "caught in a trap" between the past and present--the artifacts (like dying phones or a "GIF to show in time-lapse every moon- / blooming flower opening on to worlds that narrow to a / light-latched close"). Through the pop song-like use of repeated phrases and the often spare, sketch-like shapes of the poems themselves, an overriding jagged-ness and anxiety emerges ("My throat, tongue, my lip to testify / While on TV the secret century leaks"). There's much to admire from Bennett's use of language and his melding of a wide array of figures and influences.

-Jeffery Berg

hothouse

"Her syntax is a croquet mallet she swings unpredictably." What immediately struck me about Karyna McGlynn's collection Hothouse is how energetic it is! It made me question my own work: is it too slack? is there a lack of pizzazz? McGlynn's very smart poems dig into pop (which I've always been partial to) and take stances that feel singular. I love how, like a Clue board, the book is split into rooms: Bedroom, Library, Parlor, Wet Bar, Bath, Basement. And the corresponding poems for each section fit so well. McGlynn also incorporates dialogue which either sound surreal / ridiculous or something that could be clipped from everyday conversation, or both. The poems, showing different relationships, feel like dream snapshots. One standout is "The New Sincerity:" "I'm supposed to believe we live / in a world where fifteen-year-olds know the theme song to The Jeffersons?" And then the poem launches into a description of a comic, sneering scene with a preppy law student. And then we move to this lovely description of a "dream where C+C Music / Factory was an actual factory, where / "Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody / Dance Now)" was our one earnest / anthem." Just yes to all of this. I feel inspired by this book--all its descriptions and brawny verbs and wit and I'm going to read more of her work now!

-Jeffery Berg

avowed

Out of all the poetry collections I've read so far this month, Julie R. Enszer's Avowed was by far the breeziest. I have had the book on my shelf for a few years and have always absolutely loved its cover (an image by artist Anna Sudit). The two phones with lipsticked mouths and visible tongues ultimately gets at the eroticism within many of Enszer's poems and also the inherent constant human symbiosis and human separation within relationships. I enjoyed the plain-spoken style of Enszer (in "Devoted": "For years i wanted to be my aunt: / direct, plain-spoken, clear about priorities. / Beginning with family but extending to a wide array / of social and ethical responsibilities"). But there's also world play throughout as well--as described in her HuffPo piece on the book, she writes, "The word avowed plays with both the theme of being out as a lesbian and being in a committed relationship. The phrase ‘avowed homosexual’ appears in many early news stories about queer people. ‘Avowed homosexuals’ are those men and women who did not deny their sexual orientation or their erotic desires; thus, there is certainty and bravery in the phrase ‘avowed homosexuals.’ Yet, in many cases, media used this phrase to describe gay men and lesbians luridly to heterosexual people."

Adding to the sense of play and fun, Avowed is split into sections with famous pop-rock songs to herald them in. The book is largely about the speaker's marriage and also her relationship with her father and his sexuality. The poems about the father ultimately emerge as the most complex as if there's still an underpinning of dissatisfaction, ambiguity. There are explicit moments of the book expressing the joy she experiences with her beloved, but, as in any marriage, there are also lots of mundane moments too (lots of dish-washing is happening!). This is contextualized in the poem "After Fifteen Years," which focuses on the bond of marriage cocooned within a litany of all the to-do projects around the house. In "When the Marriage License Arrives," she observes, "After years of waiting for / formal state recognition of / our life, our love / our relationship, / when I finally receive it, I recoil. / Is paper all that makes a marriage?" Overall, I enjoyed this collection and Enszer's refreshing directness and no-frills style.

-Jeffery Berg

some say the lark

Welcoming Jennifer Chang's Some Say the Lark on this day. The lyric poems, scholarly-tinged, are dense but parsed out in spare lines. There is bluntness and philosophical questioning in much of the book, as in the widely-shared poem "Dorothy Wordsworth."

Perhaps in the immediate era of Tiger King, which showed clips of the incident of animals running free in Zanesville, Ohio, the poem "Freedom in Ohio" is on my mind. "My terror is not secret, / but necessary, / as the wild must be..." The poem eloquently aligns the speaker's aging (a poem "on my birthday"), wildness, and animals roaming in bewilderment.

In writing about collections of poetry over the past few days, I am recognizing the difficulty in crystallizing my thoughts on poems.  In "About Trees": "A poem has nothing to do with fact, / though both are made things. / I explain that trees know / certain facts, but what poems." Why is it that film criticism comes much more swimmingly easy for me? Is that films are inherently simple to pinpoint and hold-in-place, whereas poems freeze and thaw in states of clarity and opaqueness? Still, the joys and pain I find in both art forms are similar. In "The World": "Why must every winter / grow colder, and more sure?"

-Jeffery Berg

the absurd man

When opening up Major Jackson's The Absurd Man, I randomly landed on a section that ultimately felt like the heart of the book. In part 7 of "The Absurd Man Suite," the speaker gives us a litany of all the things "grandfather would be ashamed of." I love the images here and the dichotomy of two different men: "I am sure he'd smirk at the sight / of fresh cut flowers delivered at my door..." Many of the poems throughout speak of identity through the lens of others or through the eyes of oneself. I am attracted to poems which deal with self and specifically doubling, so the opening piece, "Major and I," felt particularly revelatory.  "The other Major flies in his daydreams / which means he's collecting a paradise / of mirrors where I sit studying the prose / of Toomer, Morrison, and Faulkner. Latinate / though he is, master of the outside, he digs / the gangster lean and is more thankful / than a sunroof top." There are many flowers, bouquets which bloom throughout the book--and serve as distinctive metaphors. The book is about journeys as well, not just the personal, but the physical--from Washington Square to Paris to the Adirondacks and a particularly distilled, lovely Vermont poem. Like the "person" poems ("Double Major"), the locations are fractured in a way through other lenses, perspectives. All of this and more makes this another sparkling and fascinating collection from Jackson.

-Jeffery Berg

negative space

Negative Space begins with the building of a house. Near its end, it progresses into the building of stairs, houses under dusk and finally, the intimacy of a bedroom. The first poem here, "Almost Yesterday" ("They started with the barn. / This is how a new life begins--with an axiom"), begins a journey of relationships with space, objects, people. Luljeta Lleshanaku's poems are translated from Albania into English by Ani Gjirka. The translation is rich, meaning, that there is a preservation of and engagement with eclectic diction. The book is split in two between two different collections--which meld well together. "Gloves," in what now feels a paean to cleaning workers, nurses, feels especially pertinent right now: "As you leave the plane, the yellow gloves enter from another door. / Sterilization grows even more powerful here: / seats disinfected after long intercontinental nights... / and headphones after movies watched over the ocean." And later: "Hygiene, hygiene, hygiene. / How quickly the world hurries to clean up every trace!" Lleshanaku shows how the synthetic and the natural, including time itself, washes things away.

From the Poetry Society of America site, Lleshanaku describes a memory here: "One of the most resistant images from my childhood, which comes to me from time to time, is the damp school corridor and the cleaning ladies who warn in a threatening tone: "Don't step here!" I don't know why that hallway was always recently-washed, or washed at the wrong time, but it sounded as a punishment to me, as if those two nice ladies, exhausted by their hard work and difficult life, gained a kind of satisfaction when imposing their small power over us, the little ones. And the fact is that I'm still unable to free myself completely from that black-and-white wet tile nightmare and the acid smell of chlorine."

Since the collection emerges out of Lleshanaku's experiences under dictatorship, it makes sense that there is so  much expansiveness in thought in describing the limitations of language (the hard-to-hear conversation with Charles Simic in a Las Vegas bar--a truly great poem). When looking through a used copy of Elizabeth Bishop's Geography III, marked with notes from a previous owner, the speaker says, "And now it's my turn to add my own geography. / There's hardly any space left, not even for the shadows. / The black ring of a coffee cup and the careless ash of a cigarette / are my only traces. My fear of clarity." So let me not try to make the mysterious un-mysterious and simply praise the poems for engaging similes, observations, and introspective sketches.


-Jeffery Berg

electric arches

Eve L. Ewing's Electric Arches is one of the more structurally unique books I've come across in some time. I'm late to it as it came out in 2017, but I'm glad I found it. Loose, lively and observant poems are paired with visuals of scrawled handwriting and artwork (like a dryly amusing chalkboard of a teacher's "agenda" in cursive which leads into a stunning piece: "Requiem for Fifth Period and the Things That Went On Then"). It is a beautiful, fun book, much of it rooted in Chicago childhood, with bruises of pain. "appletree" struck me in particular. It rides through the perspective of the speaker's life on the vibe of Erykah Badu's Baduizm. The apple tree is a Biblical reference too, of course, a where-it-all-began moment; later in another poem, Ewing writes "... there was Eve, my own / namesake. The first black woman who ever / lived. She was the first person on this strange sunlit planet to know anything at all, though she / paid for it with terrible cramps." This feel of knowing and being a black woman and the pain and cost that exists with it is what is most palpable in Electric Kingdom. There is comedy too that sears and cuts. In the amazing "Ode to Luster's Pink Oil," (I love, by the way, how this youtube reader describes why this poem speaks to her so much) she writes "nor are you free of anything: / paraben- sulfate- hassle- free. / no, friend. you cost." In "True Stories about Koko Taylor," a deft tribute, again Ewing invokes both the pain and the comic: "She wished to be born again, under a good sign. / She wished for a better jukebox." Ewing's poems have stirring rhythms and sounds. There's a density to this collection and so many surprising shifts, that it is hard to capture all it captures on a first read on this rainy day. Will be turning back to it. Hope you find it too if you haven't yet!

-Jeffery Berg