Your Poetry Reviews
By Joan Gelfand
Alkali Sink
Stella Beratlis
Sixteen Rivers Press
ISBN: 978-1- 939-639- 06-6
$16
“An alkali sink also known as a salt flat or salina,
is a habitat found in …some parts of the
California Central Valley. The sink is hot and dry,
and plant species that thrive there have
adapted to grow in the salt-crusted hardpan.”
While Beratlis supplies the scientific definition, the
title of her debut collection suggests nothing
less than toxic depression. In this memoir, we meet a
poet who has adapted to the ‘salt crusted
hardpan.’
Beratlis’ place is not the California of majestic
redwoods nor the wide, thrilling Yuba, Eel, Trinity
and Sacramento Rivers. This is ‘backstage’ where the
child of immigrants must fend for herself.
In a hard pan life of a dysfunctional family, Beratlis
finds beauty.
Is that not the test of a poet? To find the gorgeous
under the gross, the sweet under the putrid,
the warm under the bitter cold?
Growing up under the care of Greek parents and
grandparents, this may well be the world of
the immigrant today; take what you can even if it’s
wild mustard by the side of the road, mind
your manners (how to drink metzcal at a funeral) and
above all: don’t forget your roots.
But how far can you go? “All roads lead back to
Forklift, California” writes Beratlis in
Has our heroine escaped, or is she repeating the
mistakes of her forebears?
The men Beratlis describes are truck driving, auto
loving, hard, boozing, abusive and criminals;
the women wear black, cook, bake and suffer their
fate.
And still, Beratlis mines the beautiful: “Altamount of
my rib/Aqueduct of your chest,” “This
bowl of farm is mermaidful,” and “expansive cabbage.”
Loss is life, freedom is a rarity and
‘Hunger was not just a distant thought but a chemical
memory in her muscles.’
Sudden Windows
Richard Loranger
Zeitgeist Press
ISBN: 978-1- 9405-72- 06-2
$15.00
Publication Date: June 17, 2016
Reinvention is overused. Delving is boring. So how does a poet sing, now, in the
21 st century, as
the earth is winning the war against humanity? Loranger writes in “The Cinnamon
of the Veins”
“Why can’t we speak of falling leaves? You can have your economics and your
ironies,
but can you live without the fall? What art belies the oak? How many acorns need
to drop
on your head before the crumbling leaves become your heart? You may speak of
preciousness, of the done and overdone, of parsing the new for a vamping vie,
but this is
the eternal fugue, my friend, an eddy, a year, and you can no more shun the
river than
you can not fear.”
Loranger is no innocent bystander. He becomes one with the earth as with a
lover’s body.
He tussles and then melts into it until we feel his bones turning to ash.
The prose form has never had a more adept practitioner. Echoes and enjambment,
like the
eddies themselves, drift and float throughout the text. Add a pinch of anger, a
tablespoon
of despair and a cup of rage and you have a book that, shot out like a rocket to
space,
shall endure through the ages. I’d like to read this book in heaven.
Joan Gelfand, author, “The Long Blue Room,” “A Dreamer’s Guide to Cities and
Streams,” and the award-winning “Here and Abroad.”