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Beyond Repair by J.C. Todd

Beyond Repair
by J.C. Todd
Review by Courtney Bambrick

Beyond Repair presents a solemn, resigned perspective of war and its inevitable, irrevocable toll on civilians, combatants, and their communities. The collection opens with “In Whom the Dying Does Not End,” in which a parent recalls the development of her child’s body inside of her. This intense awareness of the work of creating a body – the prolonged and exact process of gestation – follows through the book as a counter-perspective to the awareness of the body’s vulnerability to violence and how witnessing such violence can affect the brain. The speaker in “In Whom…” contextualizes her daughter’s gestation within her own awareness of an insurgency in Hama, Syria. Throughout this collection, that balance between human creation and destruction reinforces the shared humanity of us and them in any conflict, across any border, but maintains that geography, history, power, and imperialism have made some bodies more vulnerable than others.

As it establishes expectations about pregnancy and motherhood, “In Whom the Dying Does Not End” offers a lens to see the effects of war on parents, children, and the bond between parents and children. Other poems such as “Cover Shot” (13) and “Night Ride, ar Raqqah” (17), pick up the theme of caring for children or carrying a pregnancy through tragedy. These poems seem to attempt to balance threat and promise. By referring to the space inhabited by her daughter as the “province of my body” (4), this foundational idea of pregnancy and development becomes complicated with the idea of nations and political powers within them. The speaker of “In Whom…” is “consumed by what I feed,” reflecting the parasitic nature of imperialism. The poem’s depiction of violence in Hama is countered by the daughter’s development: “a riot of cells / firing between [hips]” (3). Different “provinces” support or suppress different revolutions. The poem “Flashback to the Morning After” makes this parasitism even more explicit in depicting the flies in the wounds of a child: “…his decay / is the incubator / and holy food for clusters / of eggs” (44). Such a “contagion” is “alien / and intimate / as a just-conceived child.”

“My Parents’ Altruism” also repeats themes of “In Whom the Dying Does Not End” such as gestation and development of life set against a backdrop of war. The poem suggests an animal urge toward growth and survival and future. The repeated emphasis on the scientific and medical language serves to de-personalize the images and allows the poems to speak to universal human experiences. Todd writes, “Eight months before birth, / all the eggs I will bear into life / appear in me as seed” (51): not only is there birth emerging out of war, “the seedbed” where the speaker has “taken root,” but the potential for the next generations.

The landscape is another vulnerable body threatened by human violence. The former fecundity and abundance of “Peshawar  Lahore  Kashmir  Shalimar” are mourned in the poem, “The Silk Road and the Scythe.” Here, an orchard, provides an image of historical opulence and plenty “epic and sugary before it fell” by the work of “that ascetic—the scythe” (9); such destruction of orchards and farmland leads to the starvation of human bodies. Similarly, in the section “Earth” from the sequence “The Damages of Morning,” the planet itself says of its unruly inhabitants, “They cavort and die. I persist, / My motion not a quest for power / Or longevity” (75). The host can withstand cycles of destruction and regeneration to a degree we squabbling leeches, fleas, and flies cannot.

The title Beyond Repair comes from the military slang term FUBAR, an acronym meaning “fucked up beyond all repair.” Here, “FUBAR’d” is a sonnet sequence near the middle of the collection about an Air Force doctor who is coping with immense and relentless loss: of patients, community, resources, and of elements of herself. The sequence brilliantly uses the sonnet form to contain ideas and emotions that are too gruesome or too dangerous to share unfettered. The connections among the linking first and last lines of the sequence stitch together like sutures, holding together this doctor’s world, but just barely: “…In dreams, their skin gapes open / to wound her pain that has no analgesic” (31) shifts into “Too wound up and there’s no analgesic / strong enough to bring her down but uproar” (32). I think of the splint, tourniquet or the hasty stitches closing a wound enough to protect the patient for just a little longer. The subject of these poems considers how changed she is, how unrecognizable to those with whom she shares a life: “Best prepare him to live with her half-gone, / fucked up by damage beyond her control” (34).

Partway through the book, Todd’s geography becomes more familiar to American readers: in “Imagining Peace, August: 1945,” we see the speaker’s father and uncles “laze in Adirondack chairs” while drinking beer and singing “Mairzy Doats.” The poem presents a family’s exhalation after the end of war, and the ways that confrontations persist in peace: “We’re picking fights. Clam up / or else, the first idle threat of peacetime” (54). Poems in this section relate to the poet’s childhood and growing up and how life is shaped by WWII, Korea, Vietnam. Even in American backyards, insulated against so much of the terror experienced elsewhere, we feel reverberations. For many U.S. citizens living today, there are few periods of time untouched by American militarism; very few of us know no veterans or refugees of these and other wars. In “Reading the Dark in the Dark” (58) and “Reading with Students about Death Camps” (69), Todd illustrates the ways these stories of war are shared through writing and reading as well as through more personal and immediate connections.

War, militarism, and imperialism affect all of us – the relative immediacy of that danger may vary whether we are living in a region under siege, working in such a region, or growing up with someone who has witnessed such horror. Todd’s emphasis on the body allows us to consider all bodies regardless of political or ethnic identity. Removed from borders and beliefs, the physical body that demanded the sacrifice of parents’ strength, time, and safety is a body familiar to most of us. The human connection shared among parents and children across languages, regions, and cultures is matched by our shared vulnerability to violence. Todd knows that it is often easy to look away, but Beyond Repair presents layers upon layers of damage – a reader will almost certainly recognize a familiar reflection in at least one of these stories. Maybe the title is more a question than a declaration. How much suffering and how much cruelty will push us “beyond all repair/recognition/reason/redemption” (Notes 91).

J.C. Todd is the author of Beyond Repair, a special selection for the 2019 Able Muse Press Book Award. Other books of poetry are The Damages of Morning (Moonstone Press 2018), a 2019 Eric Hoffer Award finalist, What Space This Body (Wind 2008), the chapbooks Nightshade and Entering Pisces (Pine Press 1995, 1985), and collaborative artist books from Lucia Press, On Foot/By Hand and FUBAR, both in the collection of the Library and Research Center of the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Honors include the 2016 Rita Dove Poetry Prize and finalist designations for the Robert H. Winner (2015) and the Lucille Medwick (2006) awards of the Poetry Society of America. She has received fellowships from The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and awards from the Leeway Foundation and the Latvian Cultural Capital Fund, and has been a fellow of the Bemis Center, Hambidge Center, Ragdale, Ucross, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts international artist exchange program, as well as a scholar at the Baltic Center for Writers and Translators and a resident poet at the Experimental Printmaking Institute, Lafayette College. Her poems have appeared in Baltimore Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Mezzo Cammin, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Virginia Quarterly Review and other journals, and have been anthologized nationally and internationally, most recently in Welcome to the Resistance (Stockton University Press), Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California (Scarlet Tanager Press), and A Constellation of Kisses (Terrapin Books).Her poetry has been translated into Lithuanian, Italian, and Albanian. She has edited two online anthologies for the former journal, The Drunken Boat: Contemporary Lithuanian Poetry in Translation (Winter 2002)and, with coeditor Margita Galaitis, “To Be The Roots:” Contemporary Latvian Poetry in Translation (Winter 2005). She has lectured on lineages in American women’s poetry at Vilnius University in Lithuania, the University of Latvia in Riga, and, through the American Consulate in Berlin, at the American Studies Departments of Goethe University in Frankfurt and the Universities of Bayreuth, Stuttgart, and Würzberg. Currently she is writing a group of poems responding to the work and life of the German Expressionist artist Käthe Kollwitz, which has been supported in part by a residency with the Department of English Language and Literatures at Humboldt University, Berlin. For her work in Artists in the Schools programs, Todd has received a Governor’s Award for Arts Education and a Distinguished Teaching Artist Award from the state of New Jersey and a fellowship from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Council. She is affiliated with the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Program and Festival, where she has been a featured reader and workshop facilitator. She has taught on the faculties of the Creative Writing Program at Bryn Mawr College and the Rosemont MFA Program and holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Courtney Bambrick is poetry editor at Philadelphia Stories. Her poems are in or forthcoming in Inkwell, Invisible City, New York Quarterly, Beyond Words, The Fanzine, Philadelphia Poets, Apiary, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Mad Poets Review, Certain Circuits. She teaches writing at Thomas Jefferson University’s East Falls campus in Philadelphia.

June Moon

Don’t rhyme “June” with “spoon,”

unless maybe it’s one

that’s bent back & tarred black,

nor “moon” with “June”

unless you mean the bug big

as a car now battering my screen.

“Soon” also is suspect.

Expect it to be the same

as when pairing “breath”

with “death” in a previous line–

the poem had better

have depth in infinite fathom

& the rhyme, at least

one reason for being

besides the chime. Time is not

on your side, friend.

The end is too near to waste

even one unstressed beat

on a repeat of anything.

 

Yes, it will take some work.

Wait, do I hear you complain?

So you impressed yourself

slant-rhyming “duende”

with “pudendum,” but look—

already been done

& more than one time. Ditto

for subbing in “dog”

for its reverse rhyme, “God.”

It’s true both are dead

so far as I know, but—never mind.

The point not to repeat

a tired trope. The point is to hope

things will be better or different

—at least try to make language new—

I triple-God dare you.

Rebecca Foust’s seventh book, ONLY (Four Way Books 2022) earned a starred review in Publishers Weekly and was featured on the Academy of American Poets 2022 Fall Books List. Her poems, published widely in journals including The Common, Narrative, POETRY, Ploughshares, and Southern Review, won the 2023 New Ohio Review prize and were runner-up for the 2022 Missouri Review Editors Prize.

Coronation

Crows & their eyes’ starry glint,

brassy anklets of sparrows, ruby-crowned kinglets:

among these trees all limb & lung, each is a jewel

 

churning hours, draping Earth in necklaces of song

that rain onto my bed of ringlets

black as crows & their starry glint.

 

My dark volunteers decide where they belong.

Abiding by the current of these glossy rivulets,

I shrug at the slim rings crowning my head, fussy jewels

 

I swear stand on end when the crows arrive each dawn.

Breezing from the trees (those gem cabinets)

the crows nearly appear to wink—that starry, starry glint.

 

I toss them some peanuts on the roof and lawn,

willing our adjacent lives to better bisect,

hoping they’ve glimpsed in this gesture a jewel

 

of goodness. The human shock of my face gone

softer, daily, till in beaks of black intellect

the crows carry a kinship with my own starry glint.

All limb & lung, wing & song, each of us: jewels.

Basia Wilson is a poet with a BA in English from Temple University. A finalist for the 2022 Banyan Poetry Prize, Basia’s work has most recently been published in Voicemail Poems and bedfellows magazine. Selected for Moving Words 2023, her work will soon be adapted for animation in an international collaboration between writers, animators and filmmakers with ARTS By The People.

5 x 8

Take the afternoon train toward

forgetting.

Fill the saddlebags of your Harley.

Go in peace.

 

I will wait under the birch

for the owls to cry.

 

Hitchhike to Columbus.

Carry a calico bandana full of lightning.

 

I will remember the hedgerow,

the small silver trout,

the history of icicles,

the taste of juniper berries on your tongue.

 

Pack your trunk, take your pistol,

Measure the wingspan of a barnwood flag.

 

I carry a snail in my backpack.

He chases a grasshopper

under stones.

 

Heartsick, your highway

whispers ‘tomorrow, heart,

ache’. This is a film,

twice forgotten:

a spaghetti western,

this balloon lifting

you from sleep.

Pediatrician Kelley White has worked in inner-city Philadelphia and rural New Hampshire. Her poems have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Rattle and JAMA. Her most recent chapbook is A Field Guide to Northern Tattoos (Main Street Rag Press.) She received a 2008 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant and is currently Poet in Residence at Drexel University College of Medicine. Her newest collection, NO.HOPE STREET has just been published by Kelsay Books.

Filling Up

On a winding road this side of South Mountain

which looms beside the less and less quiet valley,

we park the Jeep just past a roadside spring

that streams from a pipe fastened to a rock.

Such an insufficient description, I know,

but you don’t need to see it, just trust

that today as we lift empty plastic jugs from the back

and pop the caps to fill up on the free spring,

I’m stuck in time, or maybe just seemingly so

because nothing passes—not a car, a bike, or a breeze,

not a sound from the songbird likely stuck somewhere

deep in the somewhere trees erectly still on the mountain.

I’m bound by the thought of us here, somewhere

in the muck of life and all that’s falling

each day—each leaf, each dripping drop, each glimpse

of sunlight reflecting from the cascade of uncertain endings.

Someday I’ll ask where this went, where it fell or what it

fell into. But if I stay here, stuck, just one moment more,

I know I’ll find a way to slip this into my pocket,

zip us up, cap these jugs, preserve the roadside spring

that begs us to drink—drink from this leaky mountain,

as if we seek the answers or even know how to ask.

Wes Ward was born in Dover, Delaware, though roots tie him back to Chester County, Pennsylvania, where his dad was raised. Now a familiar stranger to Philadelphia, Wes lives a couple hours due West of Independence Hall and teaches high school English and college writing. He earned his Master’s of Arts in Writing from Johns Hopkins University.

Queen Anne’s Lace

To my mother, Elizabeth Worthington Shelly

 

A coarse scatter of gravelly buds

with a bare wire undercarriage,

a stem like baling twine,

and the aroma of last night’s dowsed fire.

 

No silky petals here:

you look like the doilies old ladies lay

on the heads and arms of chairs

to soak up sweat and body oil.

 

How cruel, they named you for a queen

when you were always a working class flower,

a Depression bloom.

There was never any luxury for you:

nobody took you into their garden

to cultivate or to coax.

You grew up in worn out fields,

in ditches along the sides of roads,

nurtured on rocks and exhaust fumes.

 

And that one purple dot in your center?

The one legend says is lacemaker’s blood?

That’s yours: shed along with your last tear

before you learned never to cry again

no matter how much it hurt.

Steve Shelly lives in Devon, Pa. and has worked for many years as a psychotherapist. His poetry has appeared in a variety of publications including The Atlanta Review and Philadelphia Stories. He works as a Volunteer Guide at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Bic Breath

To view “Bic Breath,” by Jake Price, click HERE.

Jake Price is a sophomore student at Susquehanna University pursuing a degree in creative writing. He spends most of his time reading his work to his cat, Raven, who has yet to give him any feedback. Jake has an Instagram account where he posts his poetry, @‌nolenprice, that has amassed over 3100 followers as of writing this. His poetry has been published in Rivercraft Magazine, Poet Lore Magazine, and Sanctuary Magazine. His short fiction has also been published in Cream Scene Carnival and Querencia Press.

The Moon as an Engine of Burning

I don’t want to start with the moon

but it was gloomy outside

and there was a pale quivering light

that reflected from water

and silvered the tips of branches

leaving me little choice

even as I contemplated again

the traumatizing prospect of aging

even as I stood there on the renovated deck

considering whether to walk the avenues

in order to clear my head

or to return to my laptop

with all of the tasks that I was avoiding

and as I continued to kill time

and waste psychic energy

you appeared     backlit in the doorway

and as I watched you

the flames licked up from the bottom

of your dress and burned it away

your arms raising     and fire leaping the gap to me

and I was lost inside moonlight

inside unbreathable heat

I still remember that night after all this time

I still bear the scars

of that unexpected conflagration.

Paul Ilechko is British American poet and occasional songwriter who lives with his partner in Lambertville, NJ. His work has appeared in many journals, including The Night Heron Barks, Tampa Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Sleet Magazine, and The Inflectionist Review. He has also published several chapbooks. 

In the Golden Hour, Cormorants

We first noticed the cormorant late afternoon,

the golden hour just before dusk,

black feathers and kinked neck,

a thin hooked bill, perched

on a piling facing the house as though

watching the oxygen tanks unloaded

from the back of a truck, the wheelchair

we carried up the front stairs.

 

The next day there were more,

diving deep beneath the docks, feeding

for hours before coming to rest

one after another on pilings

until every one was taken.

A silent chorus, in their black robes,

and as the time we’d been given

shortened to a few days they offered comfort,

 

a belief that as long as they stayed

she wouldn’t die, even as she refused

pudding, sweet tea, turned her face to the wall

as we moistened her lips with a wet cloth.

The last day was quiet, the water still

until her final breath when wind

suddenly kicked up. I watched

as they rose in unison, heading south

as though ushering her away.

 

I wished them safe harbor.

I wish them safe return.

Poet, teacher, and editor, Cheryl Baldi is the author of The Shapelessness of Water and a former Pennsylvania Poet Laureate. A finalist for the Robert Fraser Award for Poetry and the Francis Locke Memorial Award, she is widely published, most recently in ONE ART: a journal for poetry. She volunteers for the Bucks County Poet Laureate Program and the Arts and Cultural Council and lives in Doylestown, PA and along the coast in New Jersey.

An Interview with Michael Brix, Executive Director of Tree House Books

From left to right, Jonathan Kemmerer-Scovner poses with Michael Brix,
Executive Director of Tree House Books.

by Jonathan Kemmerer-Scovner

I came to the edge of Broad Street, Temple University at my back, then crossed from one world to the next. It was an unseasonably hot and sunny afternoon. Down Susquehanna Avenue, a group of people were browsing through a small cart filled with books and I knew I was headed in the right direction.

I walked through the front door and into a small space overflowing with books, tall shelves which lined the walls. Salman Rushdie and Philip Roth immediately jumped out at me and I flipped through Goodbye, Columbus while in the room next door, a teacher helped children with their reading.

I put the book back just as Michael Brix, Executive Director of Tree House Books, came down to meet me.

Do you remember the first book you read that made you love reading?

The Chronicles of Narnia. My mom read that to us before bedtime. That’s always my go-to answer for that question.

I also loved the Beverly Cleary series with Beezus and Ramona, as I was also a pest. And I read a not insignificant amount of Hardy Boys mysteries that had been my father’s.

Coming down here, I realized I still think of you primarily as the head of the Yes! And… theater camp, even though that’s been five years ago now.

Yeah, that was actually the second nonprofit I’d founded. The first was The Simple Way, a community in Kensington that deals with direct relief, taking people to the hospital, providing food and clothing… It was out of that organization that the idea for a theater camp grew, because we’d partnered with UrbanPromise in Camden and a few other organizations to run a summer theater program for kids. So Yes! And…, as we called it, spun off into its own nonprofit, and that’s what I did for the next 20 years.

The entire time, however, I knew that if Yes! And… was going to continue, it needed to have different leadership that would allow it to grow beyond its founders. That was always the hope. So we worked at raising someone up internally, while at the same time I’d begun looking for different opportunities.

That’s when I found Tree House, which fit my skillset perfectly.

In what way?

All the work I’ve done in my life has had social justice as its focus. The Simple Way did it one way, Yes! And… did it a different way, and with Tree House Books, literacy is the focus. All of those things are very much connected, and that was the core reason why I felt comfortable coming here, because it spoke to that passion. The passion for social justice, and the passion for community.

For example, when we talk about expansion opportunities, we’re not talking about taking the Tree House model and bringing it to West Philly or some other neighborhood. No, we’re talking about how to grow deeper roots right here in this community, here in North Philly. That idea resonated with the leadership here, so, like it or not, that’s what they were getting with me.

How long was Tree House Books around before you came on board?

Since 2005. It was the brainchild of folks from the Church of the Advocate, a community staple here in North Philly. At the time, the Church of the Advocate had a Community Development Corp given to it by the city of Philadelphia. They wanted to use it to invest specifically in this corridor of Susquehanna Avenue.

So at the beginning, it was just a used bookstore, but then neighborhood kids started coming in and hanging out, and they developed an after-school program. They purchased the building next door and outfitted that storefront, which is where we now do our K-8 and teen programs, and all of our summer camps.

The Church of the Advocate had quickly realized that a used bookstore just wasn’t the economic engine they thought it would be. It would have closed really quickly if they’d kept it going, so they wisely pivoted to this nonprofit model, and all the classes and other activities grew organically out of the relationships between the bookstore and the people in the neighborhood.

But it’s still such a great space for a used bookstore, I see a lot of my favorite writers. I can tell just from a glance that you manage the selection seriously.

 Absolutely. We have books for children, teens and adults, and back behind us, there’s a section focused on African-American literacy – black authors, black characters, black stories – because that’s what serves this neighborhood. We want to make sure that we’re constantly stocking and featuring those titles. That’s something that we feel sets us apart.

That, and also the fact that all the books are free.

And when did you… Wait, what?

All the books in here that you see, everything on our shelves, it’s all free.

People can just come in here and take whatever books they want?

Absolutely. All told, we distribute about 88,000 free books a year. But that’s not just through this space. We also have bookshelves in area rec centers, apartment complexes and other places. We then go around on a regular basis, restocking and refreshing as needed.

Then there’s our bookmobile, the Traveling Tree House, which makes over 20 stops a week at daycares and festivals, Smith playground… they just park somewhere and put up a sign that says FREE BOOKS!

We have so many different programs, like Words on Wheels, wherein we deliver new books right to kid’s homes three times throughout the summer. Then there’s our online Book of the Month Club that people can sign up and read along with Kai. Last month, she was able to do an Instagram live interview with the author of the book, so it’s really fun and engaging.

Also, once a year, we have an event that we call Philadelphia Literacy Day, which is a whole street festival. We close down the block, invite a bunch of authors to come out and sign their books, which we then give away.

So this whole neighborhood is just overflowing with books.

One of the coolest things about this organization is that it grows just by listening to the needs of the neighborhood, but our primary mission is to ensure that people have books in their homes.

I often reference this 2019 article from Social Science Research Journal entitled “Scholarly culture: How books in adolescence enhance adult literacy, numeracy and technology skills in 31 societies.” It shows that, globally, children who are around books show an increase in their overall literacy rates, which then impacts other learning metrics.

So there have to be books in the homes that kids are interacting with. In this neighborhood, that just wasn’t necessarily the case. The impetus then became to make that happen.

Where do the books come from?

All sorts of sources, book drives, individuals, organizations, local authors… People can buy new books from our wish lists at local bookstores, kids’ books at Harriett’s and adult books from Uncle Bobbie’s. Books and Stuff, which used to have a brick and mortar store in Germantown, has also been a good partner, as well as Hachette and Quirk Books, which also bears fruit in the form of book donations. We always try to stay local, though, and away from Amazon.

We’re a part of Read by 4th, which is the overarching literacy collective in Philly, but we’re most closely related to the Book Bank, and they’re awesome. They get a lot of books out to teachers and other professionals, to help build their classrooms. They operate out of Martin Luther King Jr. High School, and Anne’s been doing that work for years, it’s a passion project of hers. I love what they do and how they do it.

So once we get the books, we then weed out any badly treated ones. As I said, we’re careful about curating books that our community needs and wants. For example, when the Traveling Tree House goes to neighborhoods that are primarily Spanish-speaking, then we need to be able to feature Spanish language books.

That’s great that you’re partnering with so many local bookstores. It seems like some of them might be upset that you’re essentially giving away the merchandise.

It’s definitely something that I stress out about, but in general, I think book lovers are a special breed of people and they get what we’re doing. We’re part of the Philly Bookstore Map Project, and I told them, we’re not really like the rest of you, but almost all of them understand that we’re mostly serving just this neighborhood. We’re not out to undercut anyone, and sometimes we can even help out.

For example, if people want to buy us new books, we have a special online-store set up through Harriet’s. She holds on to those books, which we then pick up and give away. That’s a way we can divest from Amazon and support a local business at the same time.

Wow, that’s really smart.

A lot of the stuff we do is organic. It really comes from the passions of the staff. The Book Swap festivals, for example, were my Managing Director of Programming’s brainchild. We do four of those a year, people bring books to swap, and there’s a DJ, sidewalk games, vendors… It started out as just this great pilot idea, and now it’s a major part of what we do.

But ultimately, as I said, what makes us really unique is that we’re here in North Philly. We may have all these connections and support initiatives all throughout the city, but our community outreach is located right here.

Are there plans to keep expanding?

I can’t reveal too much, but we’re looking to renovate a property in this neighborhood that we’ll be able to move into, and our hope is that we’ll then be able to serve as many as three times the amount of people than we do now.

The people I’m working with in terms of fundraising are telling me that we’re in our silent phase, which is ridiculous, because I can’t stop talking about it.

Tree House Books is located at 1430 W. Susquehanna Ave. They can be reached at 215-236-1760 and info@treehousebooks.org. Click here to donate!