A Real Time of It by Sally Delehant

      Feeling nothing

is the opposite of love.

The Cultural Society, 2012. This book. Oh, this book. It is a sunburn in the shape of a fingerprint.  An owl pellet filled with candy hearts and rabbit bones. It is a box of petit fours left over from a birthday party where somebody has died.

To say A Real Time of It is a treat is to be horribly cliché.

Ms. Delehant has a pitch-perfect ear for rhythm and sound. Combined with an eye that scans the fields, seashore, city, and home for only the details that delight and surprise, her lines such as: “hearts/ adorned with habit’s form,” “snow geese scramble tic-tock,” “eggs/ coddled and under chandelier light,” and “fortune cookies tah-dah a hated taste” read like grown-up nursery rhymes. Just like in those childhood stories, there is something inherently charming about “a puddle of pantyhose,”  “lamps warm piglets” and “Love the sea’s small papers/ we crumple and throw.”

But don’t you dare read these poems in a baby voice, though. Despite its consistent beauty of image and sound, this book snuggles up with sadness. It is a meditation on deep, human grief: the anguish of losing a parent, the heartache of a failed relationship. Here, Ms. Delehant performs the very brave work of expressing real sentimentality in a world that Ping-Pongs between Hallmark cards and post-modern cynicism. She does that nowhere better than in her prose poem, “Easter Sunday”:

On the first anniversary of my mother’s death, I bake a birthday

cake for an attorney I work for. It’s good for me. It reminds me

that every day is someone’s birthday, until I fuck up the cake. I

don’t wait long enough for it to cool, the top layer peels off into

the frosting, and it looks like shit. I drive to the store to buy a re-

placement cake. I think about how my mom lived—smiled, said

“no problem,” bought cakes, took shit from attorneys. I don’t

know what the end of post-modernism means or what a poem

should do. I only know to sit outside my apartment in my dark

car and hold the new cake, with its crown of cookies propped on

whipped cream, and weep.

The voice in “Easter Sunday” is uncharacteristically blunt compared to the rest of her poems, but, perhaps because of that—that break and that surrender—it is this poem that strikes me the hardest.

A Real Time of It is Ms. Delehant’s first book and a resplendent promise for more to come from this remarkably talented young writer. You can find the book here: http://www.culturalsociety.org/publications/a-real-time-of-it-poems-by-sally-delehant/

Buy it. Read it. Love it, I promise you.

Between the Crackups by Rebecca Lehmann

Salt Publishing, 2011. Winner of the Crashaw Prize. Snaggle-toothed, impish, and daring, Rebecca Lehmann’s debut collection Between the Crackups reads like the love child of Robert Frost with an attitude and Pop Culture with an ear to the ground. Bristling with re-imagined elegies, sonnets, “Letters to a Shithead Friend,” and “A Hundred Words for Loser,” this book completely took me under. At times it was the school bully, passing mean notes in class, spreading vicious rumors. “Bucolic Calling” ends with this unrepentant image: “Mom was in the gravel road crying and we/ laughed at her. We laughed and we laughed at her silly poor-person/ jacket and we laughed at her face, and at her silly tears.” Just as brutal, “For Posterity” snarls the line: “Go publish a bird’s nest.” At other times, though, this book is the victim, exposed, tender and afraid. To contrast, “The Devil is in Detroit” ends with “I never told anyone about the bruise you made,/ but wished I had a bone to break against the world.” In “Particulate Matter,” this stanza nearly broke me:

To the right of the man,
a mother holds a fistful of gnats,
tells me she is saving them for me.
Each gnat is a heartache I
can’t remember.

 The glow worm energy and dark beauty of this book lie in this double-play of aggression and vulnerability. Lehmann shows us an America we all know but don’t want to see: “A kid sells cotton candy in bags at a busy stoplight in summer”; “In the back alley: half/ a bologna sandwich, a flattened refrigerator box”; “The sky like a bathtub/ emptying, the sun a glob/ of blond hair clogging its drain.” In dreams, too, we are not safe from “a snarling monster/ nesting in my oven, its matted fur/ spotted with light and ice, its snaggle-/ tooth a mess of old skulls, forced together.” My favorite poem in the collection, “My Father’s Fourth Tooth,” paints this unforgettable picture of bully and victim and love:
                           
                             A fox hunches

on a bridge, cracking open a clam.
How pink its shell’s ridges; how mealy

 its muscle, its one lonesome tongue.
And the fox—his teeth gleaming,

his fur soaked with brackish water,
gray as my father’s hair.

Part pastoral elegy, part working-man’s ode, and part old-fashioned coming-of-age storytelling, Between the Crackups is an impressive first collection from a bold new poetic voice. Check it out here: http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smp/9781844718580.htm and Read this Awesome Book!

SCARED TEXT by Eric Baus

 

Center for Literary Publishing, 2011. Central question: Is the dictionary a bible that is an animal or a story that is a name? This is the question, or a variant of, that Eric Baus’ Scared Text poses, or disposes of, calling upon language as a semantic menagerie in which meaning and sound, mythology and etymology, definition and transformation swarm, dissolve, and amalgamate, revealing the ontological tension within the acts of speaking and writing. The poem “A Delphi” introduces Minus and Iris, figures/apparitions/word-animals who are as much their own definitions as ghosts of Baus’ pluralized “I,” and the characters from which these poems hang their dream-like narrative, literalizing the poet’s interest in absence as presence and the fallibility of our primary sense. 

Minus tried to write his own bible. It began, So what, saliva. So what, 

     milk. 

Iris told us her dad died in space. The whited-out vowels rang in my     

     ears. Stupid moon. Stupid burned-up blind spot. 

The doctors said his name had burned up. We never knew how it 

     sounded.

Baus’ direct statements hypnotize without confounding, building a world of spiritual breakage in which “Minus’s bible was reading itself,” and “I woke up behind the sky.” Governed by paradox and repetitions that accumulate but don’t cohere, “A Delphi” does best what all of these poems do by walking the line between narrative and non sequitur, quelling the difference by making it extraordinary, a bit blooming, a bit explosion, the same. Injecting each syntactically simple phrase with its own lyric dissidence, Baus allows each (prose) ((yes and no)) poem to move both inward to the music of each sentence and outward to the illusory movements of the whole collection. Indeed, the book's obsession with the distinction, or lack of distinction, between name and namelessness, animate and inanimate, turns every word into an amplification of its own semantic struggle between meaning and noise. “Inscribed, blighted, tongue filled with snow. A throat so other I entered my name,” Baus writes, paralleling language and the act of speaking with the need for identity and articulation that is so often stunted or stunned by the inability of language to let us out of its own Bosch-like incongruity. And like taking in a Bosch painting, reading Baus can leave you a little scared, or sacred, depending on how your eyes feel it.

 

The Cost of Walking by Shannon Tharp

Skyskill Press, 2011. I had the pleasure of hearing Shannon Tharp read poems from The Cost of Walking in New York in October. The room fell completely silent as she read. A sudden attentiveness was palpable as the audience awakened to the gravity of her words and to the voice of these poems— one that is careful but insistent and vital. It’s clear that Tharp listens to the sounds of the world, the sounds of her words, and to “the weather within,” as John Taggart writes.

The poems in Tharp’s first full-length collection confront various physical landscapes and climates. The images are often Midwestern— fields, stretches of highway, vacant barns, or they are Pacific Northwestern— rain, fog, harbors, the sea. The poems’ speaker pulls at these environments and turns them inward. Of course this comes at a cost— the longing that is established in thinking through the particulars of existence, an awareness that we walk through the world alone, and what we do have is received in moments and pieces. This is what poetry gives us. This is what it can do: “What of birds and the peculiarity of / flight— a pattern by which to scratch // existence. What of me and the inexpense of / sitting in a field with your face / to any nameable thing.” (“Steady, Less and Less”)

The poems are often short and sometimes written in one and two word lines. This form gives each word weight and value. It’s as if a wind has blown through the poem leaving just its spine or perhaps the edge of a wound: “The / ocean // reasserts / itself. // Each / wave // makes / a crater.” (“Travelogue”) These poems are real and truly beautiful. We get to dwell solely in the sublime, and that’s refreshing. From “After Astronomy”:

“Books, porcelain, windows are open,

and heaven could be said

to be a wreck.

The clouds are here,

they aren’t up in the sky— that’s

your handwriting, that’s the way you write.

I told you I need something

to hold— here I am cold

with you, without.”

I could not give a book a higher recommendation. This one’s important. Read it. Get it right here:

http://skysillpress.blogspot.com/2012/01/cost-of-walking.html

OF LAMB by Matthea Harvey & Amy Jean Porter

McSweeney's Books, 2011. Packed with wit, dark humor, and twisted pathos, Of Lamb is a collaboration between Matthea Harvey and Amy Jean Porter combining Harvey's erasure of A Portrait of Charles Lamb by David Cecil with Porter's stunning, often slightly disturbing illustrations that creates a contemporary re-telling of the relationship between Mary and her Lamb. With the outward appearance of a children's book and a story within that follows Mary and Lamb's relationship from naive sexual encounter to Lamb's uncomfortable realization of self to the emotional and psychological disintegration of both lovers, Of Lamb beautifully juxtaposes Porter's bright, inviting, thoroughly weird illustrations (like, are those Lamb's genitals?) with Harvey's lines, a mixture of child-like declarative sentences ("Lamb lived in the background") and the slightly antiquated diction of Cecil's original text ("He moved among the rouged illusions of dawn"). As the story progresses and Harvey's lines lead Lamb and Mary together and apart and together again with Porter's illustrations continually complicating and exacerbating the emotional and psychological drama of Mary and Lamb's taboo relationship, Of Lamb develops both a growing magic and a sense of ontological frustration: how, really, can the girl and the animal love one another? However, Of Lamb's success and delight lies in the fact that it never poses such questions directly but lets the narrative built of Harvey's careful word choices interact with and rattle off and oddly illuminate Porter's illustrations, creating a seamless dialogue between the two artists that endlessly charms, humors, and, thankfully, weirds-out.

Not Merely Because of the Unknown That was Stalking Toward Them by Jenny Boully

I have a big crush on Jenny Boully. This is very awkward for everyone involved. But I can't help it. Her first book, The Body, made me go "Whoah" in a Keanu Reeves manner when I was in graduate school, and her next book [one love affair] prompted an "Oh my God, this is so true" reaction that had me pushing the book onto any person who would listen. 

This latest book uses J.M. Barrie's Peter and Wendy (think Peter Pan) as a jumping off point for Boully's intriguing mix of poetry/prose. The darker adult themes that always existed in Barrie's work are pulled forth, and the anxieties and pressures of reaching or avoiding physical and emotional maturity are highlighted. That sounds serious, and it is, but this book is also fun -- from Neverland logistics (does Tinkerbell need tiny tampons?) to Neverland pinups (Tiger Lily in a seashell bikini, the seductive stylings of Hook). Boully's latest will keep you turning the page to see what familiar scene or character she'll reinvent next -- though I confess that as I neared the end I turned the pages more and more slowly, hoping to make it last.

I WANT TO OPEN THE MOUTH GOD GAVE YOU BEAUTIFUL MUTANT by Bianca Stone

Factory Hollow Press, 2012. I Want to Open the Mouth God Gave You Beautiful Mutant is a poetry comic written and drawn by Bianca Stone. Imagine if Edward Gorey and Frank O'Hara had the complete DVD set of Star Trek: Voyager when they were roommates at Harvard and the haunting, delightful, generously weird tone of this book, moving line by line, frame by frame, and page by page towards inexplicable wonder, will be immediately clear. In the two pieces in the book, "Waltzing With You" and "Les Miserables," the poetry and the images are so seamlessly combined that it never feels as if one came before the other, as if they were somehow created simultaneously. Blurring distinctions between human and nonhuman, conscious and unconscious, the images have a fragile, hopeful sorrow to them, reminding you that these poetry comics are hand-drawn and that they are human-drawn, in the sense that they are emotionally and imaginatively active, never simply illustrations. That there is never a truly straight line, that nearly every figure and scene is distorted and darkly singular, that lines like "Can you see me in the dusk, asking nothing of it?" are tethered to these figures and scenes in a way that works on a reader's intuition like the waking aftermath of a dream, that as I write this I am realizing that a line is something you both draw and write and how odd it is to have never stumbled on that thought before but how obvious it is that the aesthetic of a drawn line that is never straight would perfectly translate into a written line whose logic, images, or associations are not straight or straight-forward makes so much sense: all of these things contribute to make this book, like any exciting piece of art, an experience that asks to be returned to over and over, never feeling completely tied up. It's as if every time I close and open the book the drawings have slightly shifted or a new line has been added. Did that typewriter say "Enigma Machine" last time I saw it? If only these were the questions we were always asking ourselves.

About the Dead by Travis Mossotti

Utah State University Press, 2011. If you’re looking for poetry of brawn and muscle and girth and vertebrae, look no further than Travis Mossotti. Last week I had the pleasure of meeting him over beers and oysters and hearing him read in Tallahassee at FSU’s visiting writer series. Let’s just say those undergrads there for extra credit had no idea what was coming.

This book is awesome because it is written by a real person—not some phantom or peacock feathers—about other real people. About the Dead might as well be called About What They Leave Behind, but don’t expect a lot of sitting around and wailing. People do shit in this book. They go tubing (“One generation has tended to this river the same/ as the last and we’ve come here to mock that”), get arrested, go to church, play the blues, and hoe weeds in the same way they might bury their dead. They live in real places that have gas stations and fried chicken meals and hillsides where the dead “…lean against the wood frames/ like turnips wondering why nobody/ ever comes to visit.” In “Alice,” a poem that gives me goose bumps, the speaker follows the memory of a lost love in such tender and unapologetic language:

Maybe it was the seam of your black stocking
I trailed through Appalachia, chicken dinner
cooling on a billboard, the sky opening up
its empty skull, gravel dust powdering
my unkempt hair with the same dull ivory
of the letter you sent me telling me not to come

And—thank God—the speaker of these poems feels real people feelings. Nothing is more irritating than a voice that pretends not to hold grudges, wallow in self-pity, get horny (“She walked like most people wish they could fuck.”), get pissed off, get even or at least try our hardest to like the rest of us. When the poem “Apology” ends with this stanza:

Maybe your time down here might’ve been better spent
learning to fire an M-16 instead of patchworking daisies
into your coffin lining. I apologize, that last one was out of line.

we know the speaker doesn’t really apologize, and that makes me cackle.

POST NATIVITY by Joe Hall

Publishing Genius 2012.

Here is a book of poems! It is a very very small book of poems, by Joe Hall, excerpted from his forthcoming full-length The Devotional Poems from Black Ocean. This little book came home with me from AWP, and it was very small and patient with me (some other books I brought home were loud! in a good way! but different!) but today I read it on my porch, and if I was already too excited for The Devotional Poems, then now my excitement is definitely unmanageable.

POST NATIVITY is a long poem in 3 parts--at moments it prays, other moments it's drunk and falling over, other moments it's being degraded, other moments it's looking around at the terrifying landscape of our inhabitable (UN-inhabitable?) spaces:

"On a plain of upset bricks, static television screen, a flat emergency
Tone, then the warnings of an angular language ..."

and later:

"The night sky gone berserk with light--O Beast, O Christ"

This little book takes advantage of its small spaces--long lines rollick from darkness into light and back again, into the language of ritual and passage, back down into "LOLOMG, Dear Dave, it's been a hard / couple weeks." And all the way throughout, the eerie shadow of modern global conflict. Our stupid wars. The evening news. The things we can't un-see.

"Pulled by gangs of men in orange jumpsuits
Bags tied over their heads, keeping pace with a falcon turning regular circles
Around an evil sun -- I watched the flame clothe a tree"

Read this stunning, powerful little book & then come over to my apartment and we'll plan activities to pass the time until it's 2013 and we're reading The Devotional Poems. I'll make snacks.

Fort Gorgeous by Angela Vogel

The National Poetry Review Press, 2011. You'll find my favorite poetry books anywhere but in my hand. Why, you ask? Because my favorite poetry books make me want to write a poem, and when that desire strikes, darn it, you have no choice but to act. Every time I've picked up Fort Gorgeous by Angela Vogel--whether settling in to read it cover to cover, or taking a quick peek at a random poem when I'm supposed to be cutting cauliflower--I have been sent to that place. Yes, that place. The one where poems come from, the elusive state we try to evoke at 10:00 pm when the house is finally silent. Thank you, Fort Gorgeous, for putting a spell on me.

What I admire about Angela Vogel's poems is the way that they welcome me as a reader, with a refreshingly frank diction, and images that make me remember why I love images so much. The poems of Fort Gorgeous are replete with flora and fauna, but not in a decorative sense. Instead, the gardens and forests of this book are active champions of their own destinies, perhaps even a bit predatory. Vogel's sense of humor emboldens these poems (I mean, look at the titles! "We'll Go for the Juggler," or "GPS: A Fairytale"), but it's not a slackerish or empty kind of humor. These poems deploy the most subtle and compelling social critiques, poking fun in the process.

Fort Gorgeous should be required reading for anyone grappling with lineation, as Vogel's work exhibits such mastery of the break and turn. "Jubilee Year" begins, "The only thing left is to hang / our hat on regret's haberdasherie," but as readers we want to keep our hats on, not hang them up. This book doesn't belong on a shelf. It belongs in your hand, and then wherever you set it down when it works its bright magic on you.

Call the Catastrophists by Krystal Languell

BlazeVOX [books], 2011. Sure, we've all heard the ponderous question, "If you were stranded on an island with only five small press poetry books, which would they be, and why?" I would like to propose that you immediately strike #1 on your list, and replace it with Call the Catastrophists by Krystal Languell.

Simply put, this book is a new book every time you read it. Its three carefully rendered sections--titled CATASTROPHES, SALVAGE, and CONTINUUM--are deceptive in their uniformity, because these sections don't so much contain the poems within, but give them walls to tap upon, ledges to peer over. Languell's lineated poems whistle at their prose poem neighbors, and she seems equally adept with either form, as well as in poems where she makes use of the field, such as "Flesh: A Clarification."

What is remarkable about this book is how Languell is able to take everyday occurrences and objects and make them both frightful and enlightening, from a fortuitously aligned sunset to a bundle of twigs wrapped in a red bow. These are contemplative poems that manage to never get lost in their own thoughts, though we may find ourselves returning to them while gazing at a streetscape or washing dishes. The final poem in the book, "Suggestions for Longevity," tells us, "You'll want to think the end isn't your fault. Get organized. Go for a hike. Start a non-profit. // I don't do that kind of thing, but I'm not the one who wants to live forever."

This book might just make you want to live forever, or at least to savor its pages on a deserted island, not bothering to scan the horizon for any signs of rescue.

The Last Decent Jukebox in America by Doug Cox

LS&S Press, 2011. Sometimes poems call on their ancestors, sometimes they call them out. Doug Cox's poems do both, singing the praises of muses--family, musicians, other poets--while refraining from being too starry-eyed. Those muses, after all, are human, too, with flaws and failings that Cox's poems refuse to overlook; the narrators in these poems are like the friend you can trust to tell you (kindly) when you're being a jerk.

But the reason you should read it? Because these poems will become muses, too. Cox's poems dive into raucous punk rock benders, the unwieldy weight of loss, and insufferable injustices, wrapping them in received forms (ghazals, sonnets, villanelles) that try to give shape to, make manageable life's enormities. Still, sound escapes. When read aloud, the poems hum low, almost inaudible notes. They emit the hard crack of static. They howl with feedback. They fill you with song until you've got no choice but to bust out a poem of your own.

I AIN'T ASKED ANY PARDON FOR ANYTHING I DONE by Sasha Fletcher

Greying Ghost, 2011. Sasha Fletcher's poems give us a world where everything is persistently consuming and being consumed by an extreme code of ethics, or lack thereof, defined by a brutal bandit-and-bible landscape. In other words, everyone and everything is either leaving, dying, crying, killing, or on fire. A cinematic Western-meets-Salamun-like logic puts us in deserts that eat tears, with coyotes who cut open other coyotes to hide inside them, and in trains that spontaneously burst into flames, all driven by an ontological hunger for survival that, as the title suggests, shuns forgiveness. Through it all, Fletcher transforms these formulaic characters and settings into darkly strange lyrics that meld human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate, in bizarre situations that reveal the binary of malice and hope that governs our desires. Written in long lines that waver between violent directness and biblical intensity, these poems want to break out of themselves. In it's entirety, I am Feeling Good:


There are eggs from buzzards that I caught falling from the sky.

I opened my eyes until the sun burned them out and I grew new ones.

I bent my arm in the middle of all the bones. I heard them crack. The crack
I heard was the splitting of an old dead tree set on fire and left to burn.

I let the dust wash my tongue I let the bandits wash over me and swallow me
and pass around me and I saw it all and it was good and I pronounced it.

I howl but no sound comes out.

I will try harder next time to think more softly.


I Ain't Asked Any Pardon For Anything I Done is already sold out from Greying Ghost - even more evidence that this is an awesome book. If you don't know anyone who already owns a copy of this chapbook you need to need to get to know them. And as always, the elegant presentation from GG, with vintage battle maps in the interior, makes the experience that much better.

The Naming of Strays by Erin Elizabeth Smith

There’s no forgiveness
in empty bottles, the silent
teeth of blackouts on bourbon
and cheap shiraz…

Gold Wake Press, 2011. Sound like your New Year’s Eve? 2012 has started off on a sassy note with Erin Elizabeth Smith’s The Naming of Strays—a collection that drawls and howls in a voice that’s unapologetic yet unmistakably real.

The texture of this book is cool in two ways. One, the front cover literally has kind of a velvety feel, which is always a plus. Two, throughout the four sections, which are divided into the Oxford definitions of the noun and verb “stray,” we are forced to see and feel and taste the worlds of the wanderer, deviator, roamer, animal.

To put it bluntly, these poems aren’t afraid to “go there.” Whereas another poet may bask in the cheery refuge of a home-cooked meal, Smith describes a “Still Life with Cook after One-Night Stand” as: “An uncooked bird needs/ brining, its pale rubber body/ sink-warm. There are cranberries/ to bleed. Lettuce to crack and clean.” The very next poem is titled “Driving Next to Two Men I’ve Slept With.” Yeah, we cringe, it’s awkward, we want to look away, but she refuses to with lines like: “In the bayou, the trees/ don’t speak, but deal in secrets/ and human combustion” and “We are three in this car but were once two-/ and two again. We try to believe nothing/ before this highway existed, these bodies that sheen/ like blades.” And again, the next poem, “Lovebugs” (for anyone who’s lived south of I-10, you know what these are), Smith exposes the creepiness and uncertainty of instinctual lust with: “They bang/ into banisters”… “love turned/ beast and blood in the streets.”

Building in verve and momentum, The Naming of Strays demands to be heard and remembered. You won’t regret taking it in. Happy 2012 y’all, and Read this Awesome Book!