PoetryMagazine.com

 

Poetry  & Prose Reviews

By Grace Cavalieri

MAY EXEMPLARS 2016

SPRING’S GNP (GREAT NATIONAL PRODUCTS)

Round up of Best Poetry (26 new books) in no particular order


Prose

Letters from Langston: from the Harlem Renaissance to the Red Scare: edited by
Evelyn Louise Crawford and Mary Louise Patterson. Foreword by Robin D. G. Kelley.
University of California Press. 343 pages.

Poetry

Sample poems from the following books are found below:

Chaos Theories by Elizabeth Hazen.
Alan Squire Publishing. 71 pages.

The Book of Landings by Mark McMorris.
Wesleyan University Press.194 pages.

At The End of the Self-Help Rope by Ed Zahniser.
New Academia/Scarith.65 pages.

The Collected Poems: E. Ethelbert Miller edited by Kirsten Porter.
Willow Books. 462 pages.

The Thinking Eye by Jennifer Atkinson.
Parlor Press.64 pages.

Spool by Matthew Cooperman.
Parlor Press.101 pages

Azure:Poems and Selections from The ‘Livre” by Ste’phane Mallarme’.
Translated by Blake Bronson-Bartlett & Robert Fernandez. 203 Pages.

100 Chinese Silences by Timothy Yu.
Les Figues Press. 135 pages.

Bright Stranger by Katherine Soniat.
LSU Press. 78 pages.

Rock Taught by David McAleavey.
Broadkill River Press.81 pages.

Why Is It So Hard To Kill You by Barrett Warner.
Somondoco Press. 61 pages.

Matchstick & Bramble by Lucy Simpson.
Broadkill Press. 58 pages.

Don’t Be Interesting by Jacob McArthur Mooney.
McClelland & Stewart. 81 pages.

The Names by Tim Lilburn.
McClelland & Stewart. 65 pages.

Settler Education by Laurie Graham.
McClelland & Stewart.105 pages.

Blood Hyphen by Kenny Williams.
Oberlin College Press.79 pages.

Desecrations by Matt Rader.
McClelland & Stewart. 79 pages.

English Kills by Monica Wendel.
Coal Hill Review. 17 pages.

Scarecrow by Robert Fernandez.
Wesleyan University Press. 66 pages.

Beyond Elsewhere by Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac. Translated by Helene Cardona.
White Pine Press. 59 pages.

Five Sextillion Atoms by Jayne Benjulian.
Saddle Road Press. 71 pages.

The Absence of Knowing by Matthew Heniksen.
Black Ocean.77 pages.

I Am The Season That Does Not Exist in The World by Kim Kyung Ju.
Black Ocean. 122 pages.

Porridge by Richard Garcia.
Press 53. 66 pages.

Constellarium by Jordan Rice.
Orison Books. 87 pages

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

POEMS

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Chaos Theories by Elizabeth Hazen.
Alan Squire Publishing. 71 pages.



FINAL THEORY

Our expectation is a sphere, the perfect

alignment of mouth and eyes, a Rorschach blot,

a butterfly, but symmetry is not

merely reflection. Throughout nature objects

skew, land erodes, our memories are a jumble,

yet there is symmetry in repetition:

stars, pixels, sleeplessness, the apparition

of his face like headlights in a tunnel.

Scientists claim universal symmetry,

say a “theory of everything” exists,

order, in spite of evidence, persists:

to know the mind of God, patterns are the key.

Prayer has symmetry, and funeral processions,

blood spatter, scattered ashes, a child’s weeping,

cardboard boxes hidden for safekeeping,

his infinite silence, my unanswered questions.

+++++++++++++

The Book of Landing by Mark McMorris.
Wesleyan University Press.194 pages.

This is the tree of rootlessness

I carry the pot and the earth

and store the tree in side my bag

One night the sky will open

Stars bloom on the limbs of caryatids

The Guinea tree and guinep tree

united in a barren adventure

DECORATED HUSTLE

nostalgic Gold Coast ( ) diaphragm

auction

Absence of Earth

++++++++++++++++++

At The End of the Self-Help Rope by Ed Zahniser.
New Academia/Scarith.65 pages.

Making Amends

We read our book around the circle,

a chapter a week, then talk

not by turns but by compulsion

whose needs we know too well. Its miracle

moves most of us to speech despite how chalk

mounds in our mouths just then.

This week we list exactly everyone we’ve hurt

and, what is worse, must make there-from amends

for our lifetimes of dirty needs.

Are you kidding? My accumulated dirt

mounds deep. To probe it hazards the bends

or pushing up noxious weeds.

What veils our spirits slowly rends,

slowly, soothed by tears, gratis,

as is our protocol.

From here on out, make your own amends.

This former fixer’s new-won status

is deserter. He’s no more AWOL.

++++++++++++++

The Collected Poems: E. Ethelbert Miller edited by Kirsten Porter.
Willow Books.

462 pages.

BUDDHA WEEPING IN WINTER

snow falling on prayers

covering the path

made by your

footprints

i wait for spring

and the return of love

how endless

is this whiteness

like letters without

envelopes

#67

You place yellow

flowers on the table.

I stand looking

at your neck, back

and every petal

that is you. Why

are desires cut

like stems?

++++++++++++

The Thinking Eye by Jennifer Atkinson.
Parlor Press. 64 pages.

The Laws of Succession

Asters to ashes, dogwood to liriodendron: wild has its way.

The afterlife is the understory—maple samaras in a red whirl,

a downdraft over a deadfall; out of cold dormancy too early,

it seems to me, but what do I know?

Turkeys, a nodding flock of twelve at least,

a quorum, a jury, trample the duff of twenty years

ago when highbush blue- and lowbush huckleberry

held this ridge with birch and bobwhite quail,

and one little pin oak with its shadow of ground pine.

Now a copse of young silver beeches, their last year’s

leaves chattered cold in the wind, has shaded out the bushes,

overbrowsed anyhow by too many white-tailed deer,

barely skittish, willing just yards from the house

to graze the back lawn, itself returned, reversing

the laws of succession to bitten down grasses, to pasture.

+++++++++++++++++++++++

Spool by Matthew Cooperman.
Parlor Press.101 pages.

Spool 11

a surrogate body

speaks in flame

moving suites of

O! to air

a waterdrop darkly

leaf or tongue

brachial bird throat

resides in each

gasp of seizure

wings toward a

harmony flox field

so it goes

you go and

make a flame

a match of

T hees to flesh

declaration So much

lifts the leaves

their undersides ghost

music or plangency

++++++++++++++++++

Azure:Poems and Selections from The ‘Livre” by Ste’phane Mallarme’.
Translated by Blake Bronson-Bartlett & Robert Fernandez. 203 Pages.

Saint

So window’s eye’s hidden

And frayed sandalwood adorns

Nauseated viola

Tingling with flute or mandolin

Is the saint, spreading

The ancient book, unfolding

A Magnificat of diving silks

Long ago at vespers and compline:

At this window-eye’s sagging glass

That brushes a harp by the Angel

Formed with its flight of evening

For a delicate phalange

Of the finger, that, without the old sandlewood

Nor book, the harp balances

In its fletchings, musician, harvest

Of silence, o black apples of silence

++++++++++

100 Chinese Silences by Timothy Yu.
Les Figues Press. 135 pages.

Chinese Silence No. 4

After Billy Collins, “China”

I am a cicada floating in a coffee cup

on the desk of the Poet Laureate.

Grant proposals are being written.

Many bottles of Napa wine are emptied.

But even when his nodding head

strikes the desk like a bobbing Buddha’s

I lurk silently inside

my mug, chipped by the teeth of Ezra Pound.

++++++++++++++

Bright Stranger by Katherine Soniat.
LSU Press. 78 pages.

What Else There Is To Do

Because the earth spins round and our lives are wired,

we don’t hear the slow drip of rain

from the eaves.

Bell in the breeze, missed.

So we say we’re busy thinking

thoughts that multiply and reinvent themselves. Lips stretch

to a smile, or turn down with menace on bad days.

Maintain a glimmer of yourself running through the hourglass.

In the middle of a starry galaxy, you might look down

through miles of wonder.

Try rubbing your cheek on a bark of a tree, then waiting

like the jaguar whose nose is said to be uncanny.

One summer morning, the man who had a profound stutter

was heard speaking fluently to the lion in the zoo, while a deaf

girl at school wanted most to live in a sea-cave with her drum.

++++++++++++++



Rock Taught by David McAleavey.
Broadkill River Press.81 pages.

Observing dusk at the Warren family camp on the shore of

Lake Bonaparte, western edge of the Adirondacks

The lone skunk

nosing her prow

from cabin to

shed, boathouse,

lodge, peaceably cleaved

a slow arcing curve

around the aspen or birch

I leaned against.

Despite the streak

between her eyes

and the impressive wake

striping her body black,

white, black, white, black,

she was hugely calm.

Not happy: aware

of her competence.

She did not spray.

I may have flinched.

Any noise I made wasn’t much,

the ripple of her passing.

+++++++++++++

Why Is It So Hard To Kill You by Barrett Warner.
Somondoco Press. 61 pages.

Immortal One

Good Morning, angel fish.

Why is it so hard to kill you?

The others were easy:

The green bird flew away

and returned to the nest

in my Lab’s soft jaw.

What of my Tabby mixes?

Crushed by tires,

decapitated by foxes.

Even the last of five dogs

stopped bringing back the ball.

And less than a mile from the door,

a hayfield where I bury horses.

But you? You refuse, in spite

of my forgetting your food

or new carbon for your bubbler.

Once I left you on the porch.

You lived for two months

eating uncautious flies

that sipped your tank water.

Come on little triangle,

is your song here not complete?

Why won’t you die?

+++++++++++++++

Matchstick & Bramble by Lucy Simpson.
Broadkill Press. 58 pages.

The He-She God

God wanted a womb,

so he made one out of electricity and dark matter.

He could wear it when he wished,

change his gender like changing the weather.

He bought silk kimonos, made to order,

owing to his grand physique and painted

his toe nails blood-on- a-wolf’s- maw red.

When the mood passed, he’d don

his white beard and grow ponderous again.

++++++++++++++

Don’t Be Interesting by Jacob McArthur Mooney.
McClelland & Stewart. 81 pages.

Don’t Be Interesting
for Oliver

(i)

My friends are sculpting down

the major works of tiny canons.

My friends are working on translations.

Like your twelve-page board book adaptation of Moby-Dick.

The book and I are saying:

Don’t be interesting. Be bifurcated, um-tied.

Go fog your rover self into looped repudiations.

Non-belief, anonymity, and art. That’s your people.

The book says that people are art.

+++++++++++++++++

The Names by Tim Lilburn.
McClelland & Stewart. 65 pages.

Ricardo

He’s made a bed for himself

in the room of a long kitchen knife

or he sinks into a stream,

understream slide, where as he sharpens, clarity

pinholes him between the eyes. He hears applause

of a paid-for

smacking, arriving in his breast, he deliverer

of the goods, his name on the cheque,

he’s genuine smoke, the uranium gun.

He places his throat in material fervour.

He bobs in the flow of Rilke’s queer Christology,

chaotic bumping of carnivorous perfections.

He pours all muscle into a spire

resting on a single, simple x.

Movement in his chest and arms,

horses quickly circling.

+++++++++++++++++++

Settler Education by Laurie Graham.
McClelland & Stewart.105 pages.

Frog Lake

Ditchweed, fuchsia. The first thing grows after fire.

Chased here by weather, rain then clearing sky,

Wandering Spirit, Iron Body, Miserable Man,

Round the Sky, Little Bear, Bad Arrow.

A grave, one unmarked, months from here.

Brome grass in all the places the earth’s been turned.

+++++++++++++++

Blood Hyphen by Kenny Williams.
Oberlin College Press.79 pages.

Concrete Poem
For Peter Kreeft

I was a writer in another life. Now I am God.

At night I light the lawns for miles around

with my door whose door has become a writing table

with four stout legs screwed on.

The concrete populations of lawn and garden

gather toward me, doorstops for my door of light.

And even in that crowd, where any concrete persons

could disappear, the saint and the gnome stand out

together, as obvious as a couple of secret lovers,

each guarding the other from the only

Virgin in the neighborhood

endowed at birth with concrete clothes.

+++++++++++++++

Desecrations by Matt Rader.
McClelland & Stewart. 79 pages.

Talking Trojan War Blues

“All the new thinking is about death,”

Robert Hass said, longingly, in a scribble

Of blackberries. I was dreaming Seamus Heany

On the porch while the children pedalled

Their bicycles down the street,

Dragging their long, late-summer shadows

To death behind them. Such tender

Desecration. Even Achilles’ horses wept

In the field of battle the days before

They were made to drag through dust

Hector’s body. “Longing, we say,

Because desire is full of endless distances.”

Robert Hass said that. You can be in my dream

If I could just remember it. I said that.

+++++++++++++++++++

English Kills by Monica Wendel.
Coal Hill Review. 17 pages.

Wheeling, West Virginia

I cried so much last night

that I was super skinny this morning

and I dreamt that we drove to West Virginia

to climb inside a mountain.

The stairs were steep and I was afraid of falling.

We’re in the lentil capital of the nation,

you said. But no lentils grow

that deep underground. In the darkness

of the mountain’s hollow inside

I ordered shrimp. Each pink body

curled on the plate like a tendoned larva.

Maybe it wasn’t really a shrimp between us.

Maybe it was something we had made.

Now I’m waiting for the subway.

All morning I heard its roar from inside the earth.

It said, the next train is now arriving

on the Far Rockaway track, please stand away

from the platform edge.

It said, there is train traffic ahead of us,

please be patient. A person can travel

for hours underground

and never leave this city.

Sometimes it feels like the future

will never arrive

and I can hear the chambers of your heart

echoing with laughter.

++++++++++++++

Scarecrow by Robert Fernandez.
Wesleyan University Press. 66 pages.

we adorn

I ask for the broken ladder to fill my head

for sunstroke, red horns of wheat

For dailiness, let me know particulars

O red horn brightened in my chest,

the hairs are countless, I ask

for lozenges like islands, and the color—

red yellow blue—staining the dark

I ask for daylight, forms noticed, held, cut

down from shadow and trembling, held

for the moon’s horn filled with red honey

and for the chance of day, a gamble with red chips

The time is taken, culled, like

fruit the time has darkened, blue,

seven panes of glass crushed into the roots

the time is deadly, a coral snake

and we adorn, we adorn

+++++++++++++++++

Beyond Elsewhere by Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac. Translated by Helene Cardona.
White Pine Press. 59 pages.

The pact with the heavens is broken. Paradise escapes

beneath our feet: a cursed wind insists on making us fall

from above ourselves, with implacable patience. Month

after month, every stone of our imaginary temple collapses

in a slow attack on reality.

With the last breath of passion, all that remains of our

faces are fallen icons: two angelic visages torn by the blade

of a love profaned to vestiges. Only our soulless faces and

eyes remain, unable to withstand the vision of the fall.

Only she and I remain: nothing. Nothing but the nausea

whose sensation precedes the proclamation: the disen-

chantment.

+++++++++++++++++

Five Sextillion Atoms by Jayne Benjulian.
Saddle Road Press. 71 pages.

CLEAN

What was the word I can’t remember,

what words did I know at nine?

Plenty with a father like mine. His sister

cornered me. Was it the stone

room, it had a porch door

a stranger could come in, was mother

alive I can’t remember who slept

upstairs, I turned the knob to the attic

door, it was cold, it was hot, I looked

through the box, smelled his cashmere clothes,

bra with a plastic straw attached,

blew air in the cup, slipped into the straps—

was it a curse word or a bad thought? Don’t say.

+++++++++++++

The Absence of Knowing by Matthew Heniksen.
Black Ocean.77 pages.

Wall Chart

Leaves and wind

In their vague nightly synthesis

Unable to sustain a memory

Or conflate a distinct moment

Here in the room with the machines turned off

And the windows cracked

The tearing of the star lingers

Too long to influence

The floor unscrubbed

No sentence can turn the husband back to bed

In another house

The children have dreamed of murders

I walk past each front door and understand

The disaster simplified by economics

First cut off one finger

Then the entirety of poetry must go

++++++++++++++++++++



I Am The Season That Does Not Exist in The World by Kim Kyung Ju.
Black Ocean. 122 pages.

THE ROOM THAT FLIES TO OUTER

SPACE 2

the bird and the whistle

When night arrives, birds hanging on the laundry line begin to puke black

water.

The stuttering boy goes up to the roof and whistles. Footprints left by birds in

The air shatter quietly in the wind. The whistles evacuate. The flocks of sheep

inside my soul change the seasons. They evacuate. At night no one can hear

the whistles people blew on the roof. The birds that bit them flew away.

On the roof, cotton explodes out the hanging blanket like intestines gored

from a sheep. Hundreds of ivory colored bugs burst out the white cotton and

blacken into the after-glow of the night sky. Dad, all people have disappeared

to the extent of years they have lived. Shut up! My sheep are weeping. Dad, the

sheep that weep are never mine. They are yours.

Like how on the day spring arrives butterflies wipe away their souls stroke by

stroke, I think about how a person disappears to the extent of all their lived

years and it makes me cry.

Biting a dead butterfly, a bird flies off to a room on the mountain.

++++++++++++++



Porridge by Richard Garcia.
Press 53. 66 pages.

Blue

Peggy did not want to be born. She hid in her mother’s

ribcage. Then she fell through the slats in churning

water that carried her away. She woke in a city of the

future where no one lived. There was a clock on a

tower that ran backwards. In the distance she heard a

train. Or perhaps someone was playing a large

harmonica. Because in a former life a forest troll had

kissed her, she loved the color blue. Her mother loved

it too. they would sit on the pavement in a vacant lot.

Peggy heard voices from another country no one else

could hear. What do they say, her mother would ask.

Peggy knew, whatever the voices said, it was not true.

So she made something up. She said, the voices say

blue, blue, blue, once and forever, blue.

++++++++++++++++

Constellarium by Jordan Rice.
Orison Books. 87 pages

GRESHAM COURT

My father warns against change, though my chest’s already sore

with swelling, my biceps smooth—I trade some strengths for others.

How will you live this way? I tell him about the older man I dated

who drove a freezer truck in the suburbs, bought beer, paid for liquor;

so I brought him home, his arms sleeved with tattoos, one a burnt

skull, its sockets black hollows. And everything expected—insistence

and anger, blood welling in my mouth. I watched a traffic signal

flicker across the flat wall—the room sliding from memory, sweat

inside his shirt. Then hospital, police report, valium for sleep, the room

walled off by curtains from a hall full of ruin, one man dead by heart

attack, the stench of singed hair, lights burning all hours, fluorescence

and pain, the on-call repeating his one word consent, a nurse

changing ice packs, my broken wrist x-rayed, wrapped, a night

nurse to check swelling, taking down vitals: Honey, buy a gun.

____________

Grace Cavalieri is the founder /producer of “THE POET & THE POEM” for public radio, now celebrating
39 years on-air, recorded at the Library of Congress. Her latest book is a Memoir: LIFE UPON THE
WICKED STAGE.

 

 

All reprinted from the Washington Independent Review of Books.