The Sore Throat & Other Poems by Aaron Kunin

Fence Books 2010

She is a 

word I always,

without knowing,

had in my mind.

(The Sore Throat 42-43)

To underscore the habit and obsession of this book is to miss the point.  Drawing from a pool of about 170 words from a translation of Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" and about 200 from Maurice Maeterlinck's play Pelleas et Melisande, Kunin creates a rift of speakers fraught with disassembling a world's wanderings.  Ideas become questionings and gestures out of questionings become rat gods.  Sore throats hide words that we cannot say or don't know how to articulate.

Kunin toys with inventions out of what seems like madness, "everything, system, system/ you say is, kind of, everything/ a kind of, like a, you say is/ a god, the day is/ kind of, a god/ like, a god" but the this madness seems like a searching and wandering out of madness—Kunin shows how habits make monsters of us all.

This book is frenetically paced, but invites the reader to think along with the writer—this union between god and you and you and you is a spectacular fusion of desire; "You are/ a choice my mind seems to desire naturally/ as a word would desire a thing."  The relentless searching to find answers questions what we want and how we perceive it.  A perserverating ecclection of what we know and how we can rearrange our mouths in our throats.  Newness like wholeness, a recollection of memory and how we enact our missive eyes.

Don't miss out on this book.

Northerners by Seth Abramson

New Issues 2011. Yes, someday I will figure out how to take decent webcam photos, but for now: THIS BOOK. How did it end up on this blog? Oh, you know, because it's awesome. It has so much heart, and the language is goddamm exquisite. But most of all, I love these poems so much because they're conflicted, yet bold, yet beautiful, yet interested in everything and in knowing of everything, endlessly groping for the invisible perimeter which divides the self from others. The "Northerner" self sometimes seeks to examine this solitude, other times to shrink from it, or to escape into a more courageous, mythological-self when the knowledge becomes too heavy: "He was sorry for how he'd sat / a massacre in the guise of a man / at a party for a boy he didn't know, / oldest there / by forty years ... where the majestic tail of his life should have been, / was just a boy / asking whether he'd agree to play horse / in a game of Knights. / He would." These poems are in love with the world despite all its traumas and cruelties--they feel, comment, and even advise, and in doing so are involved in the kind of world-building I find most commendable: "At the base of the lift / a man waits / to go up. He has courage and nothing / to have courage / for"

Not all books of poetry leave you with an overwhelming confidence that your life is better for having read it. This book makes me feel like I can do better and be better. It makes me feel like everything is important, though everything might hurt a bit, and that everything is a marvel to be treated as such.

COULDN'T. POSSIBLY. RECOMMEND. MORE.

Union! by Ish Klein

Canarium Books, 2009. You know why this book is awesome? Because I don't always like it. Let me explain. I have strong reactions to the poems in this book. Sometimes that reaction is, "Ish Klein, you're adorable and smart and funny and I feel like I would like to embark on an ocean voyage with you where we eat hardtack and speak in inverted syntax to our respective parrot familiars, Mizzy and TopBottom." Sometimes that reaction is, "Stop it, stop it, stop it." The poems are individual, full of personality, sometimes winning, sometimes too precious. Sort of like my reviews. Point is, these poems are doing something, which isn't always the case in a lot of poetry that plays it safe. I mean, the woman uses exclamation points. Everywhere. Exclamation points! Yes, like that.

Pinnochio's Gnosis by Peter Gizzi

The Song Cave 2011. Ok so it's a chapbook, but rules were made to be broken my loves, and this chapbook is fracking (I've been watching Battlestar Galactica, for those of you in the know) incredible. Also, I am in Montana and have gotten very tan this past week. ANYWAY. I've always thought it was rather wonderful how The Song Cave standardizes its chapbook covers, with the exception of switching up the 2 colors sometimes, to give these beautiful little collections a sort of freedom from anything that might take away from the text itself. I certainly can't verify this intention, given that I don't work for TSC, but I think it's very nice. This chapbook is a collection of little prose chunks, situated delicately on the page, which begins "The season folds into itself, cuts a notch in me." And from there it begins its work, this folding in upon itself, which accumulates with each recurrence of word, image, and thought. "This body only lasts for so many days. It's got a / shelf-life," "It wasn't mean to be this way, the wind leaning, / the trees sway, the stars there." These tiny, precisely coiled lines meditate on the body, the earth, and inevitably what it means to be terrifyingly aware that one will eventually be put into the other. But in the middle, there is music, even if it is difficult to understand: "It / wasn't exactly pretty when the song, the green and / blue, went into our heads."

The Firestorm by Zach Savich

Cleveland State University Poetry Center 2011. Why am I so shiny? It was painfully difficult to figure out someone else's webcam, as you can tell from the backwards text. Memorial day weekend trips! But I wanted to make sure I got to this. This book is awesome. I finished it a while ago, but I keep coming back and rereading it. The leaps of association and imagery are far yet elegant in this book, sometimes philosophical, sometimes from literal landscape to another. At one point Zach writes "Dear. Rejected for the brain study, / I surveyed a portfolio of blossoms. / Went then near donkeys. They could / teach me little but bray.  Come closer now / (meet me on the once-crossed plain). / Here is a little bit of innocence. " The poems are cerebrial and meditative, often obsessing over a single idea for pages. But through this, we see the many angles of longing, distance, and the self. These are love poems for the almost-could-be-easily-missed-experiences. A speaker on a bus, or meeting a man at a crosswalk who drops an orange. The firestorm here is in language, and the way association and connectivity explode even the smallest moments. I love this book like crazy.

13 ways of happily by Emily Carr

PARLOR PRESS 2011.  I came across Emily Carr's work editing for a certain literary journal cough, cough and was immediately smitten with her poetry.

"13 ways of happily" is easily one of my favorite books this year.  The brevity in which she accomplishes so much is astounding.  For instance (I'm not even going to try to get the spacing correct, for which I apologise) "you are of three minds: like elegant grasshoppers/tearing each other to pieces in the unleavened/dandelions dreaming/of someone not born/yet someone who will  change/your life—"  Each stanza journeys into a world where every line ripples through the world's membrane like the horizon after an atomic blast.  And each ripple is a new simulacrum shed out an eye of what a colour throbs and could mirror.

In Carr's world, there is so much shifting and invention—this book bleeds pleasurable aurality and surprise.  I think Breton would have a hard-on of jealousy toward the intellectualisation of Carr's surrealism—the unexpected can shape such difficult moments of profound beauty.  "on a rainspun afternoon when bombs/fall a continent away the season//flimmers like a watery jewel on the dream's/cobweb & the sparrow of what you are wakes, this/slaphappy derelict—" So many times I had to pause and acknowledge how amazingly Carr has shaped her poetry.  This is truly a book to behold and praise.  Then read again to make sure your face is still intact.

To say I have poem envy is understated like an egg—Emily Carr is writing the poems I want and am trying to write.  For this, thank you Emily Carr.  

In lieu of having lent out With Deer—Remainland: Selected Poems of Aase Berg translated by Johannes Göransson

ACTION BOOKS 2005.  There is no point of dallying—Swedish poet Aase Berg's poems are the best possible weird.  Covering 4 books, Göransson provides eloquent translations that still convey the corporeality glistening like fat in every line.  I cannot reiterate enough how amazing this book is—from the opening poem "Shard" (from With Deer): 

His fingers search the bottom of the tarn for the water lily's black vein.  Still breathes the love beast.  Still he suckles the fox-sore on my weak wrist.  In the distance the wind is slowly dying: the night of nights is coming.  But still the fetus lily rests untouched.  And still his fingers search the bottom of the tarn for the water lily's black vein.

to the penultimate stanza "we want to be remains here."  This book is adrenal dripping out ears when reality is too frightening to confront.  To say these poems are visceral understates Berg's poetry—if you told me these poems were written with seal blood or the insides of dragonflies, I wouldn't be surprised.  These poems will grab you with their tentacles.  They will put deer in your eyeballs.  If you want sleep, you will sleep in whale fat.  If you allow the Swedish landscape to hum in, "A glass deer here/branches break, thigh bones".