Reviews

To Alexander Long, author of the award-winning collection of poems entitled Still Life, the intellectual realm is only worth visiting if he is guided by emotion and hunger. The volume was awarded the White Pine Press Poetry Prize and published in 2011. His poems seem, at first glance, aggressively disinterested. Names of historical importance emerge from the page far more often than anyone Long might have known personally. “Still Life with the Atlantic Ocean and Nina Simone as Soundtrack,” “Still Life with Lenny Bruce in Jail,” and “Still Life with Frederick Douglass Learning the Alphabet, Stopping for a Moment at O”—in these poems as paintings, Long places his contemporary persona somewhere in the scene, most often as a hidden observer. The effect of such intellectualization on, for example, someone who isn’t familiar with Adolf Eichmann or his execution, while reading “Revelation in Slow Motion,” whose first line, “Eichmann has blue eyes,” relies heavily on the name to set the scene, can be disconcerting, as if a joke has gone over the reader’s head.

Perseverance in reading, however, reveals that the historicity of these poems only serves as a kind of screen to make what might look absolutely unthinkable from one angle—devastating loss, suicide, all-consuming depression—into a studied composition. Like finding a skull in a basket of Cezanne’s apples, these poems only barely contain a surge of primal, raw emotion behind their intellectual façade. In “Still Life with a Grain of Rice,” Long demonstrates how he attempts to restrain or dampen the bluntest of confessions:

I used to like the way things went together

Chopin and Auden; apocalypse and abyss;
Given and give in; disgust

and discussed. Chopin’s

“No. 3 in B Major,” at the end,
For instance, how he reaches

As far as he can across the piano
With both arms—as if hearing himself

For the first time—

Like Icarus, maybe.

I used to think I’d love
To plunge like that

This is not the only poem that functions like this, trying to introduce readers slowly to a painful idea, like trying to tell a child that Santa Claus isn’t real. Long seems to have imbued himself with a great deal of responsibility towards the reader; so many of the poems have a “you” in them, and even though that second person is rarely explicitly defined, readers can’t help but try to immerse themselves in the scenes as fully as Long himself has done.

Long’s writing walks the fine line between obsessive temporality and timelessness. Strewn among the historical references and literary allusions are strange lapses in the narrative. Lines like, “Truth is, it happened year/Ago or it hasn’t happened yet” in “Spilt Coffee in Slow Motion” question the nature of truth and memory, history and being. This line works because it is anchored in a concrete moment—a woman spilling coffee, having forgotten herself in anger and indignation. Other lines are not so fortunate; in, for example, “Still Life with Issa at the Gates,” Long runs away with his ideas, leaving the reader vaguely dissatisfied: “Let’s say we make a new line inside/The heavens inside the veins/Inside the salts inside the oceans’/Air giving way/To a place where nothing makes us free". By and large, though, it is his bravery, his willingness to face something as large and terrifying as the heavens, and his enthusiasm to try to describe it for us, no matter the consequences, that define and elevate his work.

~Mirabella Mitchell

Angst, Anger, Love, HopeThe Pennsylvania poet Tracy R. Franklin’s volume of poetry, Angst, Anger, Love, Hope (JMS Books, 2010) makes me glad that I grew up in Norman, Oklahoma. Not too many things can make me say that. A lot about that place did have a constricting small-town feel to it. It’s an environment that I have been largely happy to escape by living on the east coast. But I say this because growing up in that vast territory between Reno and Reading has led me to appreciate a certain sort of woman. Proletarian? Perhaps. But also intelligent, sensitive, knowledgeable – almost encyclopedically so – when it comes to the stuff of relationships between women, fellow workers, and probably most of all between women and men. One may at first fail to think that there is wisdom out there in middle America–among its middle and lower-middle classes–when it comes to such complex social realities. But just listen to a Tammy Wynette or a Bobbie Gentry song and then tell me that it takes a Ph.D. to understand the kind of spark that is involved when men and women encounter each other. Out there among the pole dancers, the cashiers, the women who have achieved Associate’s or Bachelor’s degrees all the while balancing family, marriage, jobs, and night school there is indeed a vast wisdom. And Tracy R. Franklin’s poems reflect this.

Here are poems about working (“Company Coffee Mug”), women and other women (“Visit with my Girlfriend”), motherhood (“Grace” and “Prayer for my Golden Child”) but, above all, poems about the eternal variegations of sexual attraction and love. Here Franklin seems to be most at home. Take a poem such as “Down the Shore,” which uses the metaphors of the seagoing life to discuss male/female relationships where:

My thoughts have become as tousled as his hair, as fragile as the
skin at the hollow of his neck. If I am guilty, condemn me also
when my eyes tear because they have been stung by the salt air.

And later:

As for myself, I could no more understand the sweetness of his
kiss through imagination than I could comprehend the vastness
of the Atlantic by taking measurements.

Or lines from “My Baby, He Is Hurting”:

My Baby he is hurting,
and he’s hurting desperately.
My sweet baby’s hurting,
and he might be hurting me.

In both poems a kind of brilliant country song ethos bathes Franklin’s writing. An ethos which bespeaks a great sense of elaborateness but also of the deep truths and complicated symbioses found in relationships. Another example is a passage from “Orange Moon”:

I said when it was almost over,
you would not look at your life
and count your money or your status,
but, instead, you would remember
who’d been with you when you’d looked upon an orange moon.

Yes, this is togetherness and these are the incalculable things that form the nuts and bolts of life. It is love and the loss of it that constitutes Franklin’s métier.

Franklin is not a perfect poet. At times she struggles with wordiness and vagueness. At other times there appears to be an over-reliance on rhyme for such a sophisticated writer as herself. But in Angst, Anger, Love, Hope, a piece that is further separated and organized into chapters with such piquant titles as “An Ordinary Revolution,” “This is How it is,” and “Stripped Poker,” Franklin does indeed seem to speak for the emerging silent majority of women, somewhere between the coasts, between Hillary Clinton and Sara Palin, between resignation and revolution.

-Peter Baroth

Tongue PartyIt’s no surprise that Philadelphia writer Sarah Rose Etter won Caketrain Journal’s 2010 chapbook competition for her collection of short stories, Tongue Party. Though the volume feels thin in your hand, don’t let this fool you; the collection is packed full of gorgeous, jarring stories.

Many of the pieces are narrated by Cassie, the literary love child of Kelly Link and a post-modern Laura Palmer. Cassie’s fraught relationships with the men in her life – her father, her lovers, her husband – give the collection its central theme. Most of the men suffer some form of neurosis: an unspeakable fetish, a massive case of pica. In her attempts to care for them, Cassie becomes a woman who gives everything, until the madness of her emptiness becomes a mantra – "I am a wife, I chanted, I am a wife until the knife went dull, subsided." Cassie is willing to endure unto the bitter end, to find herself on the receiving end of a Tongue Party gone wrong. Cassie is both strong and weak. Other women appear infrequently; mothers figure only by their absence, either emotional or physical.

Though Cassie has little left to celebrate, readers have plenty to delight over. Etter’s writing is taut, often poetic in its examination of the depths into which devotion might plunge us. One story, "Cures," describes a nine-step process to grieve the passing of a loved one. Number six advises, "Place it in a purse or satchel. At social events, unlock the clasps. Speak only of ache. Put it on a silver platter. Pass it around on a tray of quiches. Let it enter the mouths and minds of everyone in party clothes. Ruin the best things."

Thankfully, Ms. Etter has saved the best things for us to read. Her images are gristly, half-disturbing reminders that stick with you long after the delicious meal is over. Her stories throb with an energy that might keep you up at night.

-Blythe Davenport

American in Translation: A Novel in Three NovellasAmerican in Translation: A Novel in Three Novellas follows Inmaculada through her journey as a young military wife and mother during the Vietnam War and the events that follow and mold her as a woman. Concha Alborg has divided Inmaculada’s tale into three novellas, each depicting the next step the main character takes in finding herself.

The first novella, Marine Corps Wife, begins with the newly-married Inmaculada raising her daughter on her own while her husband Paul is stationed in Vietnam during the war. Told through Inmaculada’s point of view, the novella shows the emotions and hardships she endures while stepping into her newly-assumed roles as a military wife, new mother, and immigrant from Spain during the Vietnam War. Alborg creates a connection between Inmaculada’s world and Paul’s by including letters from him in Vietnam during their time apart throughout the novella.

Spanish Daughter is the second novella, which follows Inmaculada in Spain after her mother’s passing. The point of view shifts to offer a wider spectrum on her family and the political history and cultural differences in Spain, while keeping a focus on Inmaculada. The novella also includes letters, this time from her father, marking the conflict she must face within her own family.

The final novella, American Woman, is told through an effective combination of one-sided conversations between Inmaculada and her therapist, as well as journal entries she keeps while traveling. The previous two novellas are the buildup to the ultimate decision Inmaculada must make regarding the future of both her marriage and career. It is through her therapy sessions and travels that Inmaculada’s voice becomes more confident as she learns what she must do to become the woman she has envisioned in this conclusion to her journey.

-Kristen Stenerson

Playing Poohsticks on Ha’Penny BridgeIt usually is a bad idea to assume that the speaker of a poem and the poet are the same person, but with Playing Poohsticks on Ha’Penny Bridge—the first, and hopefully not the last, book of poetry by Edward Lee—it is difficult not to, as the vast majority of the poems here share undeniable thematic similarities. The slender volume is stylistically consistent too, as each poem is written in uncomplicated free verse with simple, unpretentious language. Luckily, what Lee lacks in variety, he more than makes up for in brutally unrestrained honesty. Lee does more than wear his heart on his sleeve; he rips his still-beating heart out of his chest and holds it inches away from the reader’s face.
If sentences like that last one are too much for you to handle, Lee’s raw, often vicious approach to poetry might not appeal to you. But readers who can stomach it will be blown away. Even so, at less than 80 pages, Poohsticks may look unintimidating, but this is by no means a quick and easy read. In fact, it is emotionally draining. For every poem of guileless brutality, however, there is another one of profound sweetness. The contrast between the sweet and sour poems is often disconcerting, but never feels inappropriate due to the stylistic similarities. Most, but not all, of these poems share the same overarching theme as well—love, with both positive and negative aspects explored.

-Greg Silber

They AbideElizabeth Dougherty Dolan’s moving collection of poems, They Abide, offers glimpses into a family album, alternating posed smiles with shocking candids. What is most consistent here is the author’s questioning of herself and of family history: “I missed my mother…. // But now I’d like to know why she, a baby nurse, / was spic and spanning phones and files. / Maybe she was sick of babies, / sick of us…” (“Split Session”). Like the images in a family album, Dolan’s poems freeze moments, revealing their subjects and their surroundings in sometimes crystal clear detail: “As a child I feared breathing lest I break / the blue glass slipper on her bureau” (“My Godmother Outlived Them All”). The subject of childhood is central to this collection: most poems discuss the childhood of the narrator, but other poems discuss her husband’s childhood in Ireland, a baby’s first awkward steps, a young student of the narrator idealizing an absent father. The collection weaves a series of references throughout, such as the execution of Ethel Rosenberg, firmly establishing the poet’s relationship to history and to culture. The poet’s concern with issues of motherhood and family responsibility carries much of the collection and in using so personal and believable a set of images and anecdotes, Dolan engages her reader. These poems are nostalgic – for Old Mother Ireland, for Old New York – but their nostalgia goes beyond simply revisiting the past. In each snapshot of a poem, she interrogates her personal history. Elizabeth Dougherty Dolan’s They Abide uses nostalgia to examine and learn from the casual, familiar suffering of childhood.
- Courtney Bambrick

Crossing WatersJourney and passage are essential themes running through Ray Garman’s collection, Crossing Waters. In accessible, everyday language, Garman harnesses the sacred, reaching ever beyond the words themselves and into the open spaces around them. The reader travels through time (the collection is organized in sections named for the seasons) and through space with Garman who seems to consider the soul to be the most powerful vehicle. The “growing up” of an American man may be a familiar (to some, perhaps too-familiar) theme for a collection, but Garman’s emphasis on the spiritual – and on the spiritual in the sensual – allows the reader something more to consider here. In the poem, “Twenty Something Coffee,” he weaves many of his central ideas: “We flush / the metaphorical phlegm / from corpus community / as we break bread….” Later in the collection, these themes reappear to an older, perhaps even wiser speaker: “I am made / moderate / with age, / unable / to wave / a wand / and feed / the world.” Garman succeeds in tempering the weight of his material with a great joy in his language: “…earth mother magic / brings sleep / with thickets / of crickets…” (“Celestial Juke Joint”) or “I tingle / the tangle of jangled / nerve endings…” (“The Boys Swim”). Garman, however, never quite overcomes the tone of self-help/spirituality: “Where would the truth live / if it were absolutely honest?” (“Truth Pick-up”) or “I’d like / to choose / the path of wisdom / and kindness” (“My Choice”). Garman’s “searching poet” schtick is doubtlessly sincere here, and his transcendent moments of linguistic glee give the reader plenty to consider and enjoy along this path.
- Courtney Bambrick

Poemas de Filadelfia: Philadelphia PoemsSandro Chiri’s poems are dreamlike despite their very clear and exact details. In a poem such as “Vislumbro la ciudad” (“I See the City”), characters emerge from a fog of memory: “…I set out to see this / City with the shape / Of a flirtatious woman, / To smell / Its bars…” The poems certainly are “de Filadelfia” and the smoky, foggy, snowy city serves as a fitting backdrop for these meditations on foreignness and belonging. The poems feel to be smudged, backward glances through dark shades, but Chiri continues to reach out to many “yous” of his poems, including his readers. The first two poems in this collection are addressed “A mi lectora” and “A mi lector,” to the poet’s female and male readers. Poe and Whitman are conjured in separate pieces, their ghosts contributing to the collection’s alternately mysterious and forthcoming mood. Occasionally, the English translation by Raymond McConnie is too on-the-nose literal, and the spirit of the original Spanish is muted as in the poem, “Yo también escribí un poema de amor en inglés.” “It happened at the corner, by the traffic light, / Where without any shame / our mouths were joined” offers only the strictest meaning of “Fue en la esquina, frente al semáforo, / y sin ninguna vergüenza / nuestras bocas se juntarón.” Thankfully, English and Spanish versions of each poem face one another, so the taste and intention of the original is available to the reader. A series of photos by Robert Dewey at the end of the collection offer a visual representation of the images conjured by Chiri throughout: snowy, shadowy, solitary Philadelphia. The final poem of the collection, “Relámpago,” or “Flash of Lightning,” casts the poet as reader, “lector” of books of physics wherein he finds a poem: “like the rivers of the night, / on the infinite sky / Books of Physics / Travel and dream.” Travel and dream are certainly elements of this collection which assembles a series of snapshot moments, flashes not of lightning, but of a camera. Sandro Chiri’s Poemas de Filadelfia: Philadelphia Poems express an engagement in and understanding of place that a native of this city might never quite achieve.

-Courtney Bambrick