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.