It is with a heavy heart that we now have to announce that Black & White Gets Read is going on an indefinite hiatus.  We sadly, have failed to maintain enough reviewers to keep the site going.  If our status changes in the future, we will re-open the site at that time.

Consequences Of A Moonless Night by Loueva Smith

Published by Texas Review Press

Reviewed by G. B. Welch, Ph.D.

In her first chapbook, Consequences of a Moonless Night, Winner of the prestigious Robert Phillips Chapbook Prize, poet Loueva Smith takes us from the East Texas piney woods where she was born to a park bench that fronts the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas.  With stunning imagery she tells us that her darkness is always with her, it rearranges the furniture. The family is steeped in Pentecostal beliefs that the world will end in her lifetime.  My father’s mother walks/ with the beast of the Apocalypse/ on a leash down to the livestock/ pond…  for exercise.  Her father tries to build a fire on a cold night with wet wood.  It smolders, but no heat.  He plays Love Me Tender with five rubber bands on a cigar box.  They are so poor the static electricity in their hair has to serve as Christmas lights.  The only thing her father will give Ms. Smith are the names of the constellations in the night sky while her mother remains secluded behind stacks of romance paperbacks breathing through rose petals the scent of a love she longs for.     

Growing up, Ms. Smith is closest to her older brother and, as readers, we stand with the family as he dies, too young, too soon.  He has given her books telling her what to expect from this world: Kafka and Anne Frank’s Diary.  And she asks of her kitchen chairs, when they were felled in the forest did they long to be made into flutes, to have holes drilled for song?  She rescues a crippled bird and tells it, You and I are rooted things.  But then, if Jesus can work on the Sabbath, making clay birds fly, can Ms. Smith become the poet she’s dreamed of being since she was a girl carrying Emily Dickenson’s poems in her pockets? 

Dearest Marie is the first in a series of love letters.  Taken as a group they form a transition between the loss of a loved one, and the beginning of a new love.  In these poems Ms. Smith explores unfamiliar territory.  I can’t learn to pronounce even the simple words…..My voice hides in a cut-lass sugar bowl.  The poems are exploratory, sometimes cautious, certainly gentle.  I touch her ridged childhood scar/……the letter M/ the same as the burn on the inside/ of my lip where I seldom say her name.  Tarot Pair and Recipe introduce the pitfalls of loving.  Marie’s recipe for a meal includes the knee joints of St. Joan of Arc.  Let her pray all night …../ ….It makes the flesh tender.  And finally the last poem, Dearest Marie, (the second poem with this title) unveils the poet with truth, candor, and strength.  Consequences of a Moonless Night leaves our minds wobbly with its expansive journey through lyrical imagery.    

Acts of Balance by Nancy Means Wright

Published by Finishing Line Press

Reviewed by Carol Smallwood

Vermont writer Nancy Means Wright is the author of seventeen books and has had dozens of poems published in magazines and anthologies such as Bellingham Review and St. Martin’s Press. The 18th-century feminist Mary Wollstoncraft is no stranger to her as she has published a mystery series based on her life. Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men.

In her third chapbook,  Acts of Balance, the poet alternates chronologically the voices of the historical Mary Wollstonecraft and a fictional contemporary farmwoman, Fay. For each poem, she’s included a short preface with their name (Mary or Fay), date, and their current concern.

Most of the poems have a work by the fictional contemporary Fay opposite one by Mary Wollstonecraft such as:

Fay Drops in on an Apple Doctor

   Something is growing inside Fay’s breast. Vermont, 1994

Fresh cheeked and white-haired,

he leans over my bare breast

and we talk poems.

Admittedly, he writes a little,

A Carlos Williams. Last week

the poem described an aunt who

died—it was pancreatic cancer.

Breasting the Flood

   Mary gives birth to Fanny. Le Harve, 1794.

When my cat purrs

the fresh stream rushes

under the frail bridge,

the earth rumbles

in the rub of wind;

green twigs snap.

The attractive chapbook’s design is a study balance it self with red endpapers, red ribbon tie, red cardinal bird on the cover. The first poem is by Fay in 1957; the last poem is by Fay, 2012.

The dialogue between the women divided by time and place shows a unity between the two lives, a sharing that women too often do not see among themselves whether they are contemporaries or not. We are in the Third Wave of the Women’s Movement but many women do not realize it which I suspect Mary Woolstonecraft would have understand very well; Wollstonecraft died when she was thirty-eight, shortly after giving birth to her second daughter. I would have enjoyed an introduction by the poet on how she came to write this memorable work.

Answer to My Ellipsis by Donella M. Dornwell

Published by Transcendent Zero Press

Reviewed by henry 7. reneau, jr.

When is a door not a door?

When it is ajar, and any perception “masked in paranoia” may enter, uninvited.  

Every one of our personal perceptions of the world, all our private feelings, are solely dependent upon the chemical balance, or imbalance, of our brains. Answer to My Ellipsis, the first poetry collection by Donella M. Dornwell, shines a discerning light into the impaired reality of mental illness. Her fearless use of introspection and unadorned wording reveals the skewed landscape of her altered reality, like a mirror brought unnervingly close, exposing “. . . the door-matted closet/of dreads I’ve been,” proving both demoralizing and revelatory.

As such, the thoughts and feelings, uncertainties and fears of the sometimes direct, sometimes elusive voices in her poems, once filtered through Dornwell’s poetic second sight, boldly verbalize from the secluded room of loneliness, of pharmaceutical depression, the incorrigible anxiety of desperation, unexpected hallucination, and the almost feral guardedness in her interactions with those labeled rational, stable, sane . . . human:

“You’re a pushover.”

but really I’m evaporated,

saying “yes” to them

but “no” to me.

Shoving me out of happy . . . 

The spotlight she directs inwards, using a sparse poetic methodology similar to Emily Dickinson, probes deep into the prism of “dim thoughts/of menial me,” to then unavoidably refract outwards, illuminating the lurking psychosis, and lack of empathy, sometimes lurking otherwise latent in status quo-deemed “Normals.”

Readers of this collection of poetry will no doubt be inspired by her artistry, courage, and “tight rope walk of stable me” perseverance. 

Mutant Neuron Codex Swarm by Juliet Cook and Robert Cole

Published by Hyacinth Girl Press

Reviewed By:  A.J. Huffman

Mutant Neuron Codex Swarm, a 27-page chapbook by Juliet Cook and Robert Cole, is a self-portrait of a relationship as a bad acid trip through hell.  It is brutal and honest in a way that can only come from an almost after-life-like separation from the self.  As readers, we are hovering above the carnage with the speaker, looking down on a train-wreck of a situation with a disdain that is anything but disconnected.

Cook and Cole, two obvious masters of macabre surrealism take us on an imagistic roller-coaster journey through the blood-soaked progression of a transgressive nightmare, drowning in an over-abundant amount of love, lust, hate, sweat and tears.  They open doors -- revealing wounds, skins and private atrocities – that should probably have been nailed shut and abandoned in the deepest bowels of memory, but by doing this they force the reader to not only journey with them through these horror-soaked pages, but also to journey inside themselves as the cataclysmic scenerios begin to seem all-too-familiar.  This bawdy collection of expositions erupting with expletives of lust and frustration born of a stereotypically mundane obsessively co-dependent, self-destructive relationship is as intoxicating as opium, and just as addictive.

Fearless of judgment, Cook and Cole actually welcome the readers’ theoretical commentary.  In Bang It Until It Explodes, they blatantly pose the question:  “Are they human?  You decide.”  This strange awareness of and interaction with the readers subconscious forms an immediate connection, forces more squeamish eyes that might prefer flower-covered denial, to not only engage, but to focus on base-level debauchery splayed in the following pages. 

In a mere 23 poems, Cook and Cole manage to weave a portrait of gravitating build, an eruptive explosion, and a settling into almost sadistic complacency that is beyond impressive in both its uniqueness and its universality.  In Stop the Madness!, we see the point of initiation:  “You know how pussies purr/and then turn into explosive devices.”  At this moment, even though feminine pronouns abound, gender disappears, and male or female, a uniquely human understanding of what is about to happen emerges.  That moment when amazing sex clicks something in the brain screams this is worth any price overrides common sense.  “The telegraph reads DON’T/stop     DON’T stop     DON’T stop” is a testimony to the over-riding confusion that occurs when the body and the mind get lost in intense physical sensation.  “The aftermath/is never good enough.” drives the duplicitous point home – the absence of such amazing sex is a level of down that causes a craving need for duplication, repetition, and the realization that this consuming coupling can only end in something less than the euphoric Xanadu it is held as.

In Induction Obscura, we begin to see the beginning of the ups and downs that can be the only reason even Shakespeare referred to love as “merely a madness”:  “They dig themselves out of the loam. . . down the toilet again.”  As the intensity of the relationship grows, so does the imagery of these emotional potholes: “where the light at the end of the tunnel/is another tunnel smoldering beyond control.” (Churning Codex Portal)

Coagulation Served Cold With Lemon Zest reminds us again of the consciousness of our speaker, the awareness of the torturous destruction that is both being inflicted by her and is being inflicted upon her:  “Allow me to place the napkin just so/upon your lap, around your neck,/the blade tip trained to your ear.”  Even worse, we begin to see the speaker’s awareness of her own helplessness:  “Tied down, hacked off, so much less to potentially love.”  While grisly and grotesque, this awful moment is still completely relatable.  Have we not all tried to metaphorically cut off pieces of a significant other in search of a reason to extract ourselves from a bed relationship, often to no avail? 

And when extraction fails, what is the next human reaction?  Blue Flames in the Nest tells us:  sex becomes a weapon.  “A robe falls to stand up straight/brimming with teeth.”  This idea of the body as weapon is taken one step further in Contamination Ward:  “too drugged to mutter an evocation . . . The doctor waters his perennial scourge . . . Continue the retinal collapse in sub-level three.”  This image of a sexual zombie with intentionally induced blindness flashes like lightning in a starless sky – illuminating to an almost painful extent.  “Is his pen(is) a medicine bag or a blow torch?”  The ugly face of addiction is beginning to emerge.

By the time we reach Swarm One, addiction has consumed both speaker and reader:  “Lucid unrelenting pain proponent, we were somehow winged/with gigantic stingers all over our skin.  Nobody can touch us anymore.”  The emotions of the speaker echo what the reader is feeling.  The scene is too painful to endure, and yet to alive to pull away from.  We are completely consumed.

From that peak moment of unity, immediately we are plummeted into dregs if emotional despair.  Swarm Two blast us with a scathing dose of realization:  “Nobody can save us . . . Ashes ashes we/used to think we were interesting.  Now we are nothing/but rotten fritters that would eat until nothing remains.”  With that slap to our consciousness we are faced with a mirror of entrails that are both otherworldy and our own, and we think this must be the end, this must be where reality strikes and someone is saved.  But no, Copy and Pasty My Eyes shows us that there is no happy ending to be found in this tale.  Clarity is not to be found.  “Here, at the entrance/exist, blinding dust is everywhere.”  And in Final Swarm we are faced with the unwished for reality—sometimes there is no way out, and we see the speaker and her counterpart 10, 20, 50 years in the future still stuck inside this hellish hamster wheel, going nowhere:  “we sit and buzz by an empty fireplace,/wishing the forest would be set ablaze.” 

Finally, Cook and Cole remind us that they have been bleeding intentionally before us by posing just a final question to the reader:  “when we lick the dirty mirror, does it make us more attractive?”  This visceral duo, in all the depravity of the previous pages, shows that there is always a level lower.  The need is still prevalent, but has now changed.  The search for sexual gratification, for emotional sanity and a calmer co-existence, is now manifested in the need for any validation.  Is this literary penance enough to equal a moment of beauty.  Yes.  Yes it is.

How I Lost My Virginity to Michael Cohen and Other Heart Stab Poems

 by Alexis Rhone Fancher

Published by Sybaritic Press

Review by April Salzano

Reading Rhone Fancher’s newest collection is like one of those times you start out fucking and end up crying. Even when sex seems to be for a good fuck’s sake, the layers of meaning remain infinite. There is always more to it than that. Sex is a rite of passage, an exploration of selfhood and femininity, a power trip, a road trip, a mind trip. How you screw is who you are and everyone you refuse to be. Fancher tells us in the poem “Let’s Be Happy Now!” that she not someone’s old lady, but someone’s wet dream, “not the marrying kind,” but “the fucking kind./The lewd lingerie kind.”

While this is certainly one kind of woman within these pages, Fancher also portrays women as much more complex creatures. Her women are stilettos and flats, Mary Jane’s and “two-toned, two-faced saddle Oxfords that guard the door” (“Walk All Over You). They are wives and they are mistresses. They are also bitches, whores and narcissists. They are rape victims and beaten wives with “Dark Options” whose shopping list includes “star fruit, endive, hollow points/and a pair of balls.” They are as much heartbreakers as they are heartbroken. When a woman in this collection is hurt, it is often at the hands of another woman. Perhaps consequently, the female speaker is often as cruel to men as other women have been to her. Women are feared and fearful. One even finds a way to strip a rapist of his power in the poem, “College Roommates,” where she says: “I didn’t mine the rape./It was the softness I minded./He couldn’t get it up/when it mattered.” One trait consistent to women throughout this body of work is their power. They fuck, but they also love, and more importantly, everything they do is with passion. Indifference is not an emotion in Fancher’s repertoire.

Every corner of every poem is alive and vibrant. Although they are fewer than the moments of lust, there are many tender moments within, such as in the ekphrastic pieces closer to the end of the collection. In “White Flag,” for example, we catch a glimpse of another side to the dark, sexually liberated thrill-seeker (or perhaps a different speaker and woman entirely). Who has the power to make her “desperate for a second chance” like one of Hopper’s subjects? The sentiment echoes, haunting in it seclusion, lonely in its juxtaposition within such a body of work so otherwise explicit and sexually charged. This is not to say Fancher resists making even sadness sexy with her subject’s “parted knees, open thighs, that famous shaft of Hopper light a white flag.” As real as this woman is, the woman in the next poem, is nearly a mannequin, an objectified body, painted so that she will “Stay Put,” while her mind wanders the landscape of a framed painting on the wall. The shock here is this boredom not often found when the speaker is naked. Her stillness is heavy with implication.

Fancher leaves it all on the page just like her speakers leave it all on the bed (or the floor or the mustang or the…) Sex is self. Her sexual evolution runs parallel to the notion of self-development and recognition. “It was the most powerful I’d ever be,” she says in “The first time I gave cousin Lisa an Orgasm.” Making someone cum equals a kind of control; cuming means surrender of control. But it’s not quite that simple, as nothing in this poet’s work is. In many pieces, such as “Handy,” surrender is something to fear, akin to being “glued to the sheets or tethered to the box spring,” not objectified, but owned nonetheless. In other pieces, such as one aptly titled “Property,” the speaker, says of a lover’s thumb hooked in her belt loop, “like you have me on/a leash. Like you own me. I’m not sure I don’t like it.” Like all women, the degree to which one is willing to go against her nature is directly proportional to how enamored she is with the one making such a request, whether that means to be owned or to take a picture of her pussy with a Polaroid. The organization of the poems is such that we alternate frequently between two extremes: wanting to be possessed and wanting to defy the very notion. We need only trace the duplicitous use of the word “surrender” in this text to note how frequently the speaker considers allowing herself to be kept, but resists. Vulnerability itself is a “perversion,” as in the poem, “Flashbacks.” Sometimes the notion of desiring a lover too much means “swallowed up/Disappeared.” In other moments, she mocks her own obsessive need for freedom and danger: “When I desire you,/I think: no stringers./Like that’s a good thing,” as in the poem, “Love Bites” where she confesses, “I get all mixed up,” both as to why pain is sexy and why desire might mean ownership.

Though you may start out reading these poems for the sex, you will end up reading them for the raw beauty. The pain of loneliness and heartbreak runs a close second thematically to the many meanings the act of sex can hold. This collection is not for everyone. Just as one with a weak stomach would not read the gory details of an autopsy, a prude should not bother cracking Fancher’s spine. 

Femme Eterna by Lyn Lifshin

Published by Glass Lyre Press

Review by April Salzano

Born of a collaboration that unfortunately never came to fruition between Lifshin and Russian painter Luba Serlikova, Femme Eterna examines historical women, Enheduanna, Scheherazade, and Nefertiti, to provide what becomes an ambitious speculation on the women’s innermost thoughts, as well as a comment on their collective and individual impact on feminism and writing.   From an intrigued, and at times obsessive, perspective, Lifshin contemplates each of her subjects with a voice as bold and feminist as the voice she projects onto each woman. Reader-accessibility and understanding is of utmost importance to the poet in this work, as in all of her work, and each woman is examined fully and with Lifshin’s usual unapologetic questioning and fearless explanation in place of esoteric allusion. Also typical of the poet’s previous collections, each poem could easily stand alone, displaying no dependence on the others in the collection. Many are even titled the same, simply with each woman’s name, and include all information necessary for any reader to fully appreciate the subject. It is this very accessibility that allows the reader to become part of this world, to “smell the saffron, feel the hot dust near the pyramids,” just as Lifshin promises in the introduction. As much as she allows us to become immersed in this ancient world, Lifshin still keeps us tethered to the here and now with her signature vernacular, which forms a stark contrast to the world it describes: “Birds no/one now living can/see dart thru brambles,” she writes in “In a Breeze of Dates And Olives, 4000 Years BC”. Just as we forget we were reading ink on paper rather than cuneiform on lapis lazuli tablet, we are reminded by the poet with such an abbreviation or a reference to the difference between that time and our own, which one of the work’s key themes.

At times, the writer adopts the persona of her gorgeous, powerful subject, while in other poems she remains an external voice and outside observer, allowing herself to become a character in this history. Only once the image is fully created does Lifshin interject, always returning us to the vision of a young passionate woman on the banks of the Tigris, weaving words and history into a beautiful braid, giving “birth to what/explodes from/her heart,” as in the poem, “Between the Euphrates and the Tigris.”

The first section is as much a tribute to Enheduanna as Enheduanna’s to the goddess Inanna, a contribution to the very immortalization of which she stands in awe.  Here is a woman, 6000 years before us, that we as readers can associate with, that through “rage and pain” is asking: “Can you still be/a poet-priestess/when your skin/wants a flesh man?” (“Some Days Her Heart Feels No Relief”). Is art alone enough to sustain us? This is one of the many questions of poet, reader, as much as it is of Enheduanna herself.  The relationship between art and life is an essential one to explore as is the nature of language, simultaneously fragile and permanent: “She can’t let/the day go, she/is obsessed,//she is carrying/the embryo of a/poem in her fingers.” Enheduanna shows us the restlessness Lifshin colors her with, a young writing because she has to, often showing little control over the act of creating art. With or without her consent, Enheduanna creates, each poem becomes a divine act, “each shape/glowing with the/ambiguity poetry/demands,” as in the poem “When She Pressed Her Web-Shaped Reed into Soft Clay.”

Much like Enheduanna, Scheherazade is alive and well in this collection, despite the nightly danger she faced at the hands of the Sultan if she was unable to entertain him with her stories. Lifshin tells us in her introduction that this is a woman “easy to identify with,” which one finds to be, however unfortunately, a profoundly true statement. At the beginning of this section, Lifshin sets up the notion of sexuality coming second in importance to artistic importance, the latter a more difficult test to cheat on, and a task that cannot be faked. In the third poem in this section, “Scheherazade,” our subject is clad in blue, “not the wild bullfight flame/color that drives men wild/as the story goes,/but calm.” Importance and focus is placed on her word, not her physical form.  The hypnotized husband becomes the “you” in most of this section, forcing the reader to identify with him, to become as taken with the speaker as we are the author, both performing the same task, luring us with their imaginations, one through the other. “Each tale,” she tells us “like the third person/in this ménage à /trois where words tempt/more than bodies,” as she shows in “How Could Her Palms Not Be Wet?” She offers the scenario of man, woman, and story locked in an intimate triste. The reader becomes the fourth member, breath held, a fearful voyeur who cannot turn away. The speaker’s ongoing plots become a “strip tease,” each night only a shred of clothing removed as a new plot unravels in the ongoing effort to stay alive. We get the sense that the imminent danger adds adrenaline we presume is needed to do what she has to do to stay alive. Lifshin interestingly equates Scheherazade to Rapunzel in “ Each Night She is Like A Drowning Nymph,” with her words as her rope, both women sacrificing themselves to escape their fate.

Lifshin saves the best for last, paying tribute to the mystery and beauty of Nefertiti through poems as sensual and strong as the woman herself. Speculating on the many theories about the woman’s life and death, Lifshin paints the third portrait in her collection, this one maintaining the state of the “perpetual arousal” Lifshin warns us of in the section’s introduction. We are also shown a deep admiration, as the author conjures ideas of what Nefertiti may have thought and felt during all phases of her life, as woman, mother, as goddess and king, multifaceted “like a flower/that keeps unfolding,” but, as time has shown, nowhere near as fragile or ephemeral, as she shows us in “Hours Posing for the Sculpture.” Nefertiti’s beauty and power has lasted beyond what she could have imagined, though Lifshin certainly instills in her version of this mythical creature a kind of prescience rivaled only by her sex appeal. “[H]er skin can barely/keep her inside,” we see as the young woman poses for the sculptor who will immortalize her, a knowledge of her own beauty, which seems to feed itself infinitely.

Maybe due to the accessibility of the work, to the balance of speculation and fact, or perhaps because of the ease with which the poet navigates her subject, this collection comes to a close before we are ready to let go, leaving us sitting in the sun on the banks of the Nile, thinking of these three beauties, each a petal of that forever-unfolding flower, wondering why we haven’t read more poetry about them. Ultimately, the collection as whole educates as much as it admires, and the subject matter is presented with equal parts knowledge and grace. 

Poet & Vampire by Chuck Taylor

Published by MadCityPublications

Reviewed by:  henry 7. reneau, jr.

Like Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, Chuck Taylor's poetry is prose-edified to parables erecting an artifical electric fence between two camps that may disagree, but are no longer that dissimilar from one another.  The result is not just a bastardization of poetry to prose, or vice versa, but a rethinking of the parameters of voice--becoming a "vehicular" language casually slipping in and out of identities, pushing against the public/private language binary:

"The poem must rhyme at the end of the line and beat in

                                         a standard rhythm . . . "

at the heart of the formalist, pseudo-avant-garde, academic canon.  Taylor writes poetry that disrupts literary business as usual, poetry that articulates the unheard, unthinkable, and unknown in tongue-in-cheek increments of satire, irony, and deprecating hindsight.  Think, Groucho Marx, Stephen Hawking, and Jesus walk into a bar . . . 

His collection channels dueling alter-egos of the body electric--Poet as everyman, Vampire as eternal observer of human nature--who project an optimistic expansiveness, while simultaneously evoking the visceral misapprehensions of life:

". . . is not Poet a kind of vampire?  Is not Poet sneakier in the way he moves around and

               listens, hiding in plain sight as an ordinary person, sucking out the blood of lives and 

               spitting it off the tongue and onto the page?"

At the heart of this collection resonates a spiritual but revolutionary zeal mischievously opposed to the cloying shibboleths of 2014 America:  a neo-Beat that seeks to upend Western literary tradition, and develop languages and forms that reject western-influenced craftsmanship.

The alternating points of view (Poet/Vampire) create a speculative second-person poetics of observational introspection, a narrative attuned to an

". . . ancient wisdom that says at times you don't want to travel a bee line, you want to

                  twist this way and that, and then head back a ways, before channeling forward."

Virtues and failings, love and loss, success and comeuppance, are sifted and analyzed to finally ". . . know what we're thinking years before we're thinking it."  Taylor's poetry/prose/pensees are addictive sojourns into unpredictable landscapes teeming with a confluence of the mundane and with the extraordinary, capricious realities startled by the eccentricities of the supernatural, or the human conscience juggling apples of moral virtue before an audience of absolute evil.  The reader rides shotgun through the West Texas desert and encounters a naked hitchhiker, who becomes "a moving open window into another world," a view soon terra-formed to a field of sunflowers that reveal themselves as "green stalky animals with giant yellow eyes," dizzy in their adoration of the sun.  The binding element in each abbreviated tale of this collection is the healthy dose of humour, ranging from vaudevillian slapstick to an almost morbid sense of eventuality that laughs at itself, punctuating each parable with buoyant closure, unexpected cliff-hanger, or a sudden curtain fall of teaser that simply turns the punch line in the direction the Poet/Vampire speaker wants it to go.

Poet & Vampire is prophet, wise man, holy man, the semi-divine trying to make a dollar outta' fifteen senses--the absurd with the willfulness of prescience, that delivers the reader from the deceptions, if not the often bizarre and unaccommodating vagaries, of life.

Red Demolition by Juliet Cook

Published by Shirt Pocket Press

Reviewed By:  A.J. Huffman

Red Demolition, a 16-poem chapbook by Juliet Cook, is an almost-primevally surreal portrait of a woman swimming in the murky aftermath of a broken relationship.  The guttural grief and visceral imagery explode across the pages to create a jaggedly accurate vision of the nightmare life becomes when there is nothing solid left to hold onto.  Cook’s poems create a bloody, but beautiful, storyscape of those transformative moments in a woman’s (or really anyone’s) life when every breath is agony, when every mundane action is a bad-acid-trip flashback that cuts like a surgeon’s scalpel.

In the opening poem, “Head Twists” we find the speaker faced with the fracturing removal from a perceived happily ever after.  The rug has been pulled out from under her feet, and she acknowledges a lack of control that has descended with this new reality:  “I thought I was real until I became nothing but swerving.”  This line resonates as both a universal accepted emotional response to a romantic breakup and as an initiating stone for the tone that ripples across these pages.  Cook has created a manic blur of a speaker, a ghost of a woman who sees herself in the assumed reflections of some common and somewhat catastrophic objects.  In “Head Twists” we see the first of these reflections as being a “headless manikin.”  The speaker is looking at herself in such an image, pondering if such a headless “manikin might be more level headed than the current twisting me.” 

In “Why I Dye My Hair Red” we see the speaker assume the reflection of “a Bloody Mary,” a spilled drink.  The metaphor is subtle as a sledgehammer:  “don’t drop me, don’t drop me,/but they always do,” and we, as readers, are falling and breaking right along with her.  We continue to sink and break and drown with Cook as the path gets darker.  In “Vintage Pom Pom Underwater” the speaker sees herself as “A mummified octopus . . . like a broken balloon who suddenly turned old.”  The murky waters of this image is somewhere most women drown.  Aging is something we, as a gender, have been trained to fear.  This image of a deflated, wrinkling form, is a suffocating force that almost forces readers to pause, and consciously take a steadying breath.

The idea of fear takes a different turn in the later poems.  The speaker, while still disjointed and thrashing about in a bloody miasma of poisonous memories, seems to take on a more clinical calm, begins to dissect the mess she has become.  “It starts with a multi-colored glitter dress lifted up high/to show thighs wrapped with garter belts made out of garter/snakes.”  This opening image from “Love Can Be a Chokecherry” sets the perfect, if overtly biblical, stage for the subtle undercurrent of fear that echoes through the remainder of this collection:  that she let this happen.  The fear of responsibility is palpable:  “She knows another nightmare is coming.”  The fear of knowledge and deliberate ignorance of the same is also addressed in “Insecticide Dye Job”:  “They poison you and then pull themselves out.”   This particular poem also holds the fear of the future in its opening lines:  “Nobody else can keep you inside them long enough to glue you/back together.  Nobody wants to anyway.” 

Finally, while the final poem, “Not another Replication,” hints at survival, potential desire to move forward—  “I need to keep drinking red glass/after glass so my love doesn’t turn into mildew”—as readers we are left with the image of the speaker being as broken as the reflections she donned earlier.  Cook drives this home in “Vintage Pom Pom Underwater” and “Blue Marriage” respectively:  “I’m sinking down inside my own tiny body bag again.  Alone alone alone.” “Love is the color of dead blue skin silently screaming.”  As readers we heard her blue skin screaming; we felt the body bag slowly zipping closed.

Wicker Girl by Janna Vought

from Virgo eBooks Publishing

Review by April Salzano

Janna Vought’s chapbook explores the female existence through one woman’s personal evolution, which is fraught with failure, self-loathing, and disgust of her surroundings. The speaker within these tortured pages seeks to unravel the enslaved notion of femininity. The progression from Girl to Woman, as the first two sections are appropriately titled, is unfortunately lateral. The final section and stage of life is “Soul,” an independent, severed portion of the female self that gains brief reprieve through acts of art and imagination, but ultimately, remains destined to repeat the timeless misfortune of her sisters cursed to the confines of womanhood with its “muted tongue” and “hands bound.”

            Girlhood, both concept and section, is a two-act play that ends in tragedy. “Family mythology” is the story of the speaker’s mother and first vision of woman, a “Bella Donna trapped/inside a chain-smoking/housewife sentenced” to the speaker’s father “by fate.” This, we realized early, is a place where “Adults in aluminum chairs, weave misinterpreted history.” We also learn in this section just how important perception is to truth. In one prose poem we are taken on a punctuated, truncated ride through history, courtesy of a collection of images recalled from birth to adulthood, those “years tied to a gasoline stake.” The speaker, her own version of a witch, commands her body to separate from her soul and mind while flesh loses life and she burns the house down.

            “Fragments of My Rape,” assaults us with splintered imagery, a whole that when pieced together is as gruesome as its component parts. In the room where the young girl is violated, faith dies along with her innocence. “Black eyes/God’s eyes” fill the face of the perpetrator while the speaker blames only herself for being ignorant. The rape and it’s “aftershocks” transform the her before our eyes from one who is able to love, to one who “lay[s] siege” to herself through reliving memory and self-mutilation, though one is indiscernible from the other. Her “toxic memories” are as harmful as any “razor-slice,” as are the eating disorders and the alcohol to drown or purge the unanswered prayers. “Fuck you, God,” a broken girl finally says. “One day, that room from long ago bursts/into pure light,” and forgetting is no longer an option. Gone is every “trace of the shadow/that kept me company,” she tells us. In the light of truth and surfaced memory, the speaker drowns. “Let me sleep./Bring the rain,” she begs. “Ignorance is woman’s virtue;/intelligence sleeps with demons.”

            In the next section, the author confirms that this is indeed a woman forever haunted, one who hates herself perhaps more now as “wife-mother” than she did as a child. She is ghosted and confined to a silence that “clangs within.” In “A Haunting,” she reveals what she wants from life: to not “end/up forgotten, burnt wood/turned to ash, dissipating/into empty air.” In “Heretic’s Hymn,” the speaker shows us that not much has changed from girl to woman. She still refuses faith: “God doesn’t believe/in me—I don’t believe/in Him.” The feminist reader hears the echoes of Plath and Sexton in Vought’s contemplation of the end and the very purpose of female existence and self-identity. In “Stepford Wives Revisited, she fears “life will never end.” With a literary nod to Sexton she allows us to glimpse into her madness: “Most days I don’t remember. I haunt/the clothes I wear,” followed by a tribute to Plath with the line “I’m perfected for nothing.” As Vought situates herself next to these two Queens of Darkness, she shows that death, for all three women is “the only way” to rid themselves “of the stranger inside,” to become both Self and Other, sharing “stories/of the end, where “they’ll wash away/all fingerprints and tears.” The breakdown of Vought’s speaker is as indicative of her time as Plath’s or Sexton’s, but sadly just as futile in the midst of the mundane, the milk and butter and eggs, as she shows in the poem “Madness,” where she loses it in Safeway. “Clean up Aisle 7!” is one of the few lines of humor in this work, however bleak. Equally dark and disturbing are the portraits of despair and loneliness painted in “Snapshots of Suburbia,” where women are their pathetic stories of “the depths of their desire,” from “Bed, Bath,/and Beyond,” clutching iPhones and lamenting loss alone. Each character that the speaker voyeuristically observes has a name and an action that defines her. “Tween Queen” regurgitates her “Hostess cupcakes/and Dulcolax. Her friends/don’t have to do a thing/to wear skinny jeans.” It becomes unclear which is worse, the “good girls whittled to bone, blue veins pulsing,” or the “tangle of sorrow” that spider webs from their lives, consumed with jobs they hate, children they fear, and husbands they can’t find, all of which become the “corpses piled high,” the charade the speaker leaves behind as she moves from Woman to Soul. “A beautiful exit” is the death of a witch. “The Living Word” provides some solace, perhaps the only in this tortured story where just like the apathetic world in which we live, we see “no wrists heavy/with broken chain,” where our very apathy provides kindling for a centuries-long fire.

A Likely Story, by Robbi Nester 

Published by Moon Tide Press

Reviewed by: April Salzano

Though closely sewn around the theme of the power of narrative, Robbi Nester’s collection, A Likely Story, presents poems that are eclectic in style, form, and tone, utilizing everything from ekphrastia to myth, parable, and parody. In a nine-part organization, Nester examines the natural world, and the observer’s place therein. The pieces are rich with imagery and demonstrate our interconnectedness with the world, with our histories, and with each other.

            “I can’t be sure my source was factual,” the speaker tells us in “Chronicle,” the second poem in the opening section, Tall Ones. The narrator makes this disclaimer only after repeating tales of goat-sized rats and a woman eaten by her anaconda. “So tell/your stories and avert your eyes,” the poem concludes, as if to say that seeing is her duty, adding detail to narrative to examine personal myth. She expresses a distinct refusal to “return to pitiless time” from the position above the earth she has held since she was five. From here, her world will be examined, at times against her own will.

            This notion of bearing witness and functioning as storyteller is expanded on to indeed include “a cast of thousands,” the subtitle of the second section. “Anyone can be a messenger./Survival may rely on an extended hand,” 9/11 survivor Usman Farman tells us in the poem inspired by the PBS Documentary.  Nester still gives the sense that perspective is everything. “And what I saw—or think I did,” as she says in the poem aptly title “Witness” expresses her own doubt in determining what is real from what is projection. In “Night Patrol,” her shadow-self sits in a room that exists only at night, “and then only/halfway between/inside and out.” In a kind of Jamesian “Jolly Corner” fashion, she creates a place where identity is born only through encounter with the self, that “alien other” we observe but never engage in dialogue.

            Nester also demonstrates that the notion of where the story takes place is as crucial to perspective as who is relaying the message and who is involved. Memory deserves a palace, however, metaphorical, as she says of a childhood home repeatedly renovated and “multiplied in memory.” Section IV, In the Canyon, a short series of poems that functions almost as an extension of the previous section Location, Location, examines woman’s place in the natural world. Here we find ourselves “where daylight shadow shrinks and hides/and every rock proclaims ‘I am.’”

            The relationship with nature continues as the poet reflects on the juxtaposition of self and other in the section Natural Bonds. This is most profoundly expressed in “Newcomers,” where the “tree of heaven [is] growing spindly/through the sewer grate.”  Internal thoughts and the external world are examined as they relate to one another, the biology of a world going on under watchful eye, unaware of the trespass, or sometimes, like the million beings of “The Pond,” at once “aware,” and “oblivious” of each other.

            In the poem “Autobiography,” the author segues into the celebration of her own history by way of contrast. She is nothing like her home’s previous inhabitant, who removed the faces of his relatives from photos with “the clear desire/to blot out everything.” In Section VI, The Circle, she shows that she is instead astute historian and scribe, paying homage to the now faceless relatives who shaped her: distant cousins, father, grandfather, and grandmother, who, “carries Russia like a loaf,/beneath her arm.”

            Like personal histories, cultural history must also be brought to us through witness. In the section Suspending Belief, Nester shows that the world, with all its unexplained power, is humbling. We are awestruck by the very questions that lack solid answers: “Does choice or chance decide/who they will be, these witnesses?” she asks. The imagery for this very suspension of belief is most acute when the author explores “a world we cannot see,” where “together and alone,” the narrator, fellow meditators, and readers “descend/backward on ladders,” our “restless senses tethered/to a task, we can begin again.” Nester adds a brief section In the Telling, that poses and extension of the discussion on witness to include the medium through which we tell our tales, asking “what does this mean?” in the poem “What Are Poems For?” 

            The last section, Train of Thought, employs the extended metaphor of a vehicle travelling into the world. One of the major themes of the section and the collection as a whole is contained in the trains windows, passengers, even the names of train stops, all serving as metaphor for what carries those of us who are alive and awake with the power of perception, the task of history. Our stories are “likely” because our myths and parables are the fabric of who we are, our images and our truths. 

House on Fire by Susan Yount

Published by Blood Pudding Press

Reviewed By:  A.J. Huffman

House on Fire, a 25-page chapbook by Susan Yount, is a verbal mixture of pastoral imagery and apocalyptic Armageddon bombs.  Yount has created a modern, almost Wizard of Oz feeling that takes us way beyond Kansas in this simplistically powerful, yet emotionally intense collection of poetry.

The visceral portrait of everyday horrors juxtaposed against the speaker’s personal horrors, the kind of horrors that prefer to remain hidden behind closed doors, hang like a tornado—ready to consume everything in their path at any moment.  Readers are immediately swept up in the storm, our hearts and minds twisted with empathy and outrage at the scenes before us. 

The first poem, “Growing Up on a Cattle Farm,” sets the stage for entire collection.  Our speaker as a young girl and her father are caught up in the tornado and its devastation playing openly right in front of them, while the mother stands, indifferently and arguably intentionally at the stove, making meatloaf—“Her hands are red with beef,” as if nothing is out of the ordinary.  This calm, almost dead detachment, is the connecting tone of these poems, which makes the debris of falling moments hit with that much more impact.

In the poem, “Sissy,” we see a portrait of futility:  a little girl holding a dead goat; a sister pretending to get help--“to call the vet”; the little girl refusing to give up as she “Breathes into him/as hard as she can.”  This poem eloquently defines the perpetual cycle of abuse that, more finitely, rears its head in later poems.  The cycle of devastation, of pretending, of wishing maybe it isn’t true, of hoping that if we believe and if we pretend and if we continue it will suddenly be something else, come back to life, when all the time we know such devastation is final, is death.

“Father Was a Hard Man” gives us the first peek at behind the hidden door of the speaker’s family life.  Subtle flashes of a growing undercurrent of constant terror are planted like seeds before our eyes.  “He always came back at dark . . . I always packed/my Barbie doll case.//Dreamed of crawling out the window.”  This image of a child, clutching her innocence in a case, dangling on the edge of indecision while praying for escape effectively haunts the rest of the pages.  This tiny ghost screams for anyone who can hear.  Much like passing a deadly accident on the freeway, we cannot help ourselves, our eyes immediately begin searching for a glimpse of the injuries, the possibility of a body.

In “Chicken” we start to see a crack in detachment’s veneer.  In this heart-breaking moment of a child being blamed for something outside of her control—a chicken’s broken legs—we hear the vicious mantra of a helpless/useless parent:  “Mother/is pissed.  Curses.  Blames me.  Rotten.”  The speaker is pulled deeper into despair—an abusive father, a helpless sister, a spiteful mother.  It is no wonder that she relates to the tragedies around her.  The dead goat, the chicken with broken legs, the exploding chickens, the broken eggs.  Poem after poem, through this symbiotic bond between the speaker and farm accidents, the land itself bleeds for the speaker. 

The title poem, “House on Fire,” is a perfect example of this connection between the speaker and the land.  “House on Fire” reads as if Norman Rockwell and Steven King decided to write a poem together.  It is the perfect visual of this family as everyday creatures dangling on the precipice of eruption.  We see the “house is kindling—/with a wood burning stove.”  The mother “is a gray bluebird/toasty in a tarnished coop.”  The father is “a devil,/his pitchfork in the hay.”  The sister “is a chicken breast/baked dry on a cracked glass tray.”  All the while, the speaker “can hear the red stream calling, a shallow ditch swelling with pain.”  Every aspect of her environment is an omen of what has come, what will continue to come.

Later poems, like “The Oracle,” show the speaker in adult life, trying to deal with her past, remembering “the house/where you practiced/your death.”   We see that the past is still effecting her, haunting her:  “You haven’t asked to see/the future--//you remember it.”  Again, the fear of never being able to escape her past are prevalent in “Father’s Hands”:  “one pink strip from throat to memory                 dreams scrape me.”  Her past is a scar, deeper than any physical injury, and in “For a Complete List Turn to Page 422” we see a unique manifestation of this scar as this poem is a guttural list of all the faces/names the speaker has donned over time.  Harsh and helpful acronyms flash by in brief summary of a lifetime of struggle to create a perfect portrait of a survivor.  And that is what we, as readers, come away with—a poignant image of a bloodied but breathing woman, who is still here even after everything.

In “Old Photograph,” we are left with the speaker pondering a moment in her past “4 years before my first death.”  In her own words, she sums up this chapbook:  “I am ruin, a drunken pantoum.  You can never forget/my secrets, my suffering.”  And she is right, we can’t, we won’t.

They Talk About Death by Alessandra Bava

Published by Blood Pudding Press

Reviewed By:  A.J. Huffman

They Talk About Death, a chapbook by Alesandra Bava, pays subtle, elegant homage to the masters of misery.  In the title poem, “They Talk About Death,” Bava eloquently states “. . . you can almost/hear//them talk of the Pale/Rider as if they were/chatting about an old/acquaintance.”  Bava is, of course, referring to the influential Death writers and artists she tributes in this chapbook such as Sexton, Plath, Rimbaud, and Modigliani.  At the same time, Bava’s words could be describing her own chapbook, as that is exactly how she is talking about these authors—as if they were her dearest friends.

This series of poems welcomes us into the author’s parlor, pours us a cup of tea, and invites us into an inner circle of ghostly gossip.  We walk “into the hazy streets of Montparnasse” with Montigliani and is wife in “Never Thirty Seven,” as they contemplate the joys of pre-death:  their blossoming pregnancy, the potential of a son.  In “Our Lady of Napalm,” we grapple next to Sexton as she attempts to transfix her demons onto the poetic page:  “Imprisoned and tortured you type/on your bed of stone, as a/St. Barbara of Poetry.” 

Bava opens every vein she can find for us.  Nothing is off limits here, not even Plath’s suicide note.  Bava hauntingly echoes Plath’s desire to leave “. . . in the arms/of February, winds --” in the poem “Milk and Bread.”  And we as readers feel we are dangling in that cold wind, as page after page we are confronted with intimate portraits of death and despair. 

The ending of “Our Lady of Napalm” whispers Bava’s vivid mantra:  “Suicidal Light demands worship.”  This idea reverberates throughout the pages of this poetic church.  We read and worship as one, closing the pages with remorse and relief, as well as a revitalization of spirit that can only come from hanging on to the precipice of death, then crawling back onto solid ground.

Stick Up by Paul David Adkins

Published by Blood Pudding Press

Reviewed By:  A.J. Huffman

Stick Up, a chapbook by Paul David Adkins, manages to capture a lifetime of desperation—both successfully and compellingly—in a mere 21 pages of intense urban poetry. 

Adkins is a master of multiple perspectives in this tragic tale of an everyday convenience store robbery.  His use of an MTV-video-blip jump in points of view allows the reader to capture the scene as it plays out from three distinct speakers:  the robber, the hostages, and the police officers. 

This series is about loss, losing, and having nothing to lose.  The robber, a female whose long, hard life is exquisitely summed up by the current contents of her car—“a half-empty bottle/of Jack in the truck/and her wallet she stuffed/in the glove box/her creased AARP card/her license,/expired last month,/and a tucked photo/of the lover who left her,”—is someone we all know, is someone we could become.  She is closing in at the end of her life, and has come to a point where a fake gun and a chance to steal some potentially life-changing lottery tickets has become more palatable than continuing on her current path even one more day. 

A second point of view emerges from the purported heroes of this tale.  The police officers vacillate between the desire for action and the desire for safety as they “prayed/for a quiet night.  They prayed/for a night of gunfire.”  They struggle with the same indecision the average person deals with every day.  Is a long life of mundanity preferable to one lived quickly but in the extreme?  It is almost an uncomical moment of choice, the purpetual chance that lingers out there for all of us, the ghost of death whispering in our ear, Cancer or cut throat?, as if the outcome of both were not the same.

Finally, Adkins has his hostages contemplating dairy products along with their lives, as if they are the mirror images of each other.  In “He Considered the Dairy Products,” one of these hostages’ biggest concerns is “Will I die beside/the frozen yogurt light?”  Not ‘Will I die?’ but ‘Will I die here?’ as if logistics was a factor in the fight or flight decision in these potentially last moments of breath.  In “He Recalled as He Ran Back in the Store,” another hostage actually refuses an offered opportunity to escape because he is fascinated by the robber.  He sees her as the walking dead, a figure from a horror story he was told as a child:  “She emerged from the tree line,/tall beneath the floodlit/Coors display,/her shadow sharp/and stark as the chalked/outline of a corpse.”

‘Round and ‘round we go between these speakers as this literary Russian roulette of a merry-go-round ride spins us out of control and into this depraved and very human moment where there is no clear-cut victim or hero.  Every one of Adkins’ characters has flaws that are showing, and those flaws create an unbreakable bond of empathy that lures the reader to the edge of our seats, then dangles us there before an expected but powerful gunshot drop in “They Called for an Ambulance Though All Agreed”:  “there was no rush, no siren needed/for the robber, peppered,/dead amid the shards.”

Death, one of the universal inevitabilities, continues to linger on the horizon of this series just as surely as it landed on the floor in this convenience store, the blunt and bleeding culmination of humanity’s emotionally devastating choices.

The Sky Needs More Work by Corey Mesler

Published by Upper Rubber Boots

ISBN 978-1-937794-41-5

Reviewed By:  A.J. Huffman

The Sky Needs More Work, by Corey Mesler, is an articulate and poignant portrait of a man – a man degrading, a man struggling, a man re-evolving, and, most importantly, a man surviving.  Nowhere is this more eloquently summed up, than in “A Man Walking,” where the speaker clearly states, “I am a man walking/into a mirror.”  As these lines show, this collection as whole is an introspective look into one man’s life.  This idea shows up again in “Old Hob,” when the speaker sees himself as an old man he does not recognize, and again in “Bardo,” where he states:  “I am air, fire/and loss of balance.”  Furthering the nearly suffocating fog the speaker is drowning in, Mesler reveals an underlying psychosis, later revealed as agoraphobia.  The speaker seeks tangible treatment for this issue, but, in poems like “The New Medicine,” we see the real antidote is communication, writing:  “See, you’re already listening/and that’s medicine, too.”

The writer is acutely aware of his own vacillation throughout these poems, an evident connectivity that pulls reader in with speaker to a place where Mesler weaves a vision of torturous phantoms of all guises, the two most prevalent being words and women. 

Mesler peppers his shadowy cloud with disparaging pop-culture and historical references like 9/11 and John Lennon’s death.  Tangible hits to the reader’s heart, these communal references pull us deeper into the darkness by playing on universal knowledge and memories.  The ghosts of everyone’s past stand as tyrannical, juxtapositional threads, tying us to the speaker, resonating his pain.

In this emotional revolution of poems, Mesler takes us through a lifetime’s expedition of a man searching for a tangible escape through “the door,” an image that is prevalent in key poems like “Dream of the Folktale” “Agoraphobe’s Litany” and “Black Dog on the Porch.”  The speaker regards this door as an unattainable solid that he cannot find because he lives in a liquid world, a consuming fog-filled miasma of uncertainty he cannot work his way through.  It takes the speaker the entire collection, which represents a whole lifetime, to realize the door was something else, something intangible, something inside that had to be unlocked, opened.  The speaker lands that realization in “Black Dog on the Porch,” where he states: “My hand felt/like a fresh weapon.  My/hand felt like another opening.”  This enlightenment, this new “escape,” came through writing, the very task that plagues the speaker at the beginning of the collection. 

Mesler is a master of the metaphor of writing as cathartic exorcism.  In the opening poem, we see that words are his life, his struggle.  “Dear Editor” is a self-effacing, satirical dialogue with some universal editor where the speaker claims “The poem you accepted/is no longer mine.”  He continues to claim “it lost its way, wandered” and “became something other,” as if the poem was an entity completely unto itself, disassociated from its maker.  This speaker is lost, consumed by lack of control, and does not have the “heart or wherewithal/to even try to make sense” of his own words.

Words, however, are just one set of ghosts that haunt this collection.  Like words, women also claw at him from the shadows.  In “A History of Lovers,” the speaker regales a list of past lovers and their subsequent lessons.  He ends with the longing, desperate lines:  “I am standing there still/waiting for another lover,/one who will startle me,/reject me, kill in me/what wants another and another lover.”  These lines cast an uncontrollable desperation over the initial poems of this collection.  Later in the collection, despite a change in tone indicative of personal evolution, the examination of both major themes persists.  In fact, in “Cock-a-Hoop” the speaker seamlessly melds his two phantom tormentors, words and women, into one.  “Cock-a-Hoop” is a bluntly sensual metaphor of woman as poem, and the result is that these images linger, creating a transference of ghosts as the reader also becomes haunted by this recurring idea. 

Just when the collection begins to weigh on the reader, threatens to consume us with its hopelessness, Mesler turns on a light in “The Remainder at Gettysburg,” the transitional poem in this collection.  Here, the speaker notes, “What saves us is always unexpected,” and he is right.  From this poem on, the same ghosts, the same memories rise like phoenixes.  Painful scars of the past now take on a scabbed-over quality that is even therapeutic as the speaker picks at them.  This undercurrent of not-quite-optimistic desire to change is immediately noticeable.  Even the speaker’s view of himself changes.  In “Megrims,” he refers to himself as “an experiment of a man.”  “A Life Colored” continues this dialogue of desire for change.  Make no mistake, the speaker is still haunted by ghosts – ghosts of memories, ghosts of people (both living and dead) – even his family takes on a ghostly quality.  His references to his wife and children are as almost ephemeral figures floating around him, attempting to cling to him.  Nothing is solid, but instead of drowning in their darkness, he looks to these ghosts, as if they can hold the answers, the key to that door.

Rehabilitating realizations begin to turn up all through the second half of this collection.  In “The Cancer of Believing You are in Control,” the light bulb goes on:  “it is a cancer to/believe you are in control.”  This new mantra brightens the speaker’s outlook.  He is coming to terms with his present.  In “The Body Opens Like a Flame,” he can now see that “There is a stillness in/vulnerability, a stillness that/is almost consoling.”  The speaker now has a new mission as described in “Way Fairer”:  “I set out with the intention/of sewing that/shadow to a soul.” 

Finally, Mesler brings the collection full-circle in “The Last Poem.”  Our speaker has written and remembered his way through the darkness and is ready to re-emerge in the light.  In “The Last Poem,” we are once again in dialogue with the same universal editor as in “Dear Editor,” and while the self-effacing tone still lingers, there is an element of hope in the newfound desire of the speaker to get his words, those turbulent ghosts, published.  “The End of the Year of Darkness” sums it up best:  “What is/lost is lost” and “What I create is good,” and what Mesler managed to create in these 88 pages is beyond good.

The Wild Part by Jerry Craven

Angelina River Press

2013

Reviewed by Carol Smallwood

            In the award winning author’s preface, Jerry Craven relates his novel came from memory “filtered through imagination.” The author manages the difficult task of capturing a boy’s point of view; some of Don’s views are from movies that his fellow companion, a native girl, isn’t familiar. The Wild Part is multi-layered fiction for youth and adults about  Don and Rosita that begins when they leave their village of El Tigrito to catch a ride to a village to see a shrunken head supposedly hung in a shop; they end up in the interior of Venezuela.

            Rosita is a strong native girl who knows how to live off the land and tells Don: “Where there are frogs, there will be snakes. We should climb a tree to keep above the snakes.” Don worries about his family who are probably looking for him but after all their adventures, wonders if instead of returning home, they should return to the jungle where Rosita wouldn’t be laughed at.

            The point of view is the coming of age boy reminiscent of Huckleberry Finn and his travels with the slave, Jim. Rosita wisely concludes near the end of the novel, ”People are the strangest animals in the jungle” and refers to Evita Peron many times as someone held in high regard by her people. The novel that shows instead of tells, can be read as an adventure story by young adults and as a novel exploring wider questions such as the role of women, faith, good and evil, society, equally resonant to adults: it whispers and avoids shouting. Like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s allegory, Young Goodman Brown which also starts at dusk in the wilderness, it’s a journey into self-scrutiny.

            Living off the land suggestions by Rosita are especially appealing such as: catching water with a large leaf: one of them drinking while the other watching for anaconda; Don can speak Spanish and they run across a wide variety of characters from miners to witches. Humor is evident as in the chapter when the main characters discuss the best way to deal with bats, vampires, and coffins: how each of them manages the unfolding of events shows their character and what they think their expected roles of a blond boy and dark haired girl.

            I would have liked to have had more about the lives of the two main characters before they began their trip—what their families, home, and village were like, and something about how their trip related to their future: more development of the other people in the novel also would give contrast to events.

            At the end of the paperback are very helpful discussion questions for teachers and book club leaders such as ways the novel evokes the Garden of Eden. There are important questions about faith, God, and a variety of native snakes that appear in different scenes; the novel brought to mind Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and its questions about civilized society, racism, and its use of snake symbolism in pilgrim passages.

            The novel won Foreword’s Book of the Year Wards Indiefab Finalist for Best Novel of the Year in two categories. Another book by the author is Saving a Songbird and Other True Stories from Texas to Venezuela: http://www.amazon.com/Saving-Songbird-Other-Stories-Venezuela/dp/0982734255/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1402773706&sr=1-6&keywords=jerry+craven

Evening Sun:  A Widow’s Journay  by Aline Soules

Andrew Benzie Books

May 2014

Reviewed by April Salzano

Released in May, 2014 by Andrew Benzie Books, Aline Soules’ chapbook, Evening Sun: A Widow’s Journey holds a lot more depth than the title implies. In the first poem, we are introduced to the speaker, the widow who suddenly finds herself alone at the kitchen table “pushing potato and gravy/around [her] plate,” a moment many of us have had the prescience to fear. The reader assumes not the position of the mysterious stranger turning around in the driveway, so easily able to correct a wrong turn, but that of a ghost observer in the now-empty chair across the table. It is here that we remain throughout Soules’ journey through grief, from the first day and its awkward “how are you?” of a stranger to the first night alone, to the moment she faces the knowledge that she is going to age alone.

            As we flash back through italicized memories, as the speaker’s husband “get[s] smaller,/further away, day by measured day,” composers keep us company, reminding us of the strength of memory and the power of associations. Anyone who has ever lost someone knows too well the pain of sorting through what is left: out of style pants, rosaries, socket sets, and knows, too, the feeling of wanting to ask the dead person what to do with these things, of wanting to hear the impossible even more, the answer to questions you never thought you would be asking. Soules captures this range of emotion with painful clarity, especially in “Things I Need to Tell You. Questions I Need to Ask.” a title complete with the finality of punctuation. “Place,” continues to ask the difficult questions that will remain forever unanswered, such as why their son wants to buy his father rather than scattering his ashes. The widow’s voice and note of desperation at the weight of such loss, asks, “Does he believe that anchoring the last trace/of your earthly life will heal the hole/in our hearts?” The haunting “our” could just as easily refer to the wife and her late husband as it does to the people left behind, as if the departed too is struggling under the weight of such heavy, heavy loss.

            “I’ve Changed My Mind,” is perhaps the saddest poem in the collection, for all its real-life imagery. The husband’s heap of dirty clothes, shaving cream spatters, cigarette butts in the toilet remind us as wives that for all their annoying habits, we would miss them if they were gone. If Soules’ intent was to make the reader stop and hold dear the time we have together, it worked. “Hurry. Take the picture,” the final line of “Notes V” tells us in Soules’ perfectly duplicitous language.

            What I liked most about this collection was that Soules does not take us through a chronology of a widow’s grief, but instead intertwines present pain with past joy, and the reverse, ultimately, focusing on the power of memory to remain, like the stubborn dandelion whose “speck of yellow endures.”