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Sound Fury by Mark Levine

March 23, 2023 by

Source: Publisher
Paperback, 80 pgs.
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Sound Fury by Mark Levine assaults the reader, bombarding them with broken words and lines at unexpected times, sounds that render readers concussed in many ways. “There go another million minutes/In the history of the misery/” (pg. 62-4, “‘strange shadows on you tend'”) His poems tackle a wide range of subjects from identity to ecological destruction, but sometimes the poems are so focused on artistry that the themes are muddled and obscured.

Despite these drawbacks, the collection does provide readers with vignettes of sorrow and insanity. Like in “Lark” where a storm causes significant damage, yet the narrator and the family slept through it.

Lark (pg. 1)

Storm of storms: We slept through it
In golden stupor. True, it
Did its damage before it withdrew. It
Emptied our orchard of unharvested fruit
Along with a fruit-picking crew it
Hurled hither and yon, bushels askew; it
Did not apologize, either, though a few it-
Ty bitty groans slipped through it-
S pores, a sorrowful fugue.

In “Thing and All,” the narrator laments the anonymity and desire for fame or being known, but by the end “It might feel like something/To feel something capturing you/In milled mirroring lenses/As you are and would be/But that self-love/Is nostalgia.”(pg. 18) Here, there is a sense that even self-love is an illusion in this chaotic world.

Levine seems to take “Delight in Disorder,” of course a poem in the collection. And his poem “‘strange shadows on you tend,'” reminds us of the fleeting nature of this chaos we try to make sense of with our assaulted senses: “It is not that he was never here/Or that we were never here./It’s just, oh just that he and we/Have lost a way/Together.” Sound Fury by Mark Levine has moments of clear lucidity and absolute chaos, what we take from the collection is all that we’ve carried with us in this wild world.

Rating: Tercet

About the Poet:

Mark Levine is author of Debt, among others. He is professor of poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is editor of the Kuhl House Poets series for the University of Iowa Press. Levine lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

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Mount Fuji: 36 Sonnets by Jay Hall Carpenter

March 2, 2023 by

Source: the poet
Paperback, 41 pgs.
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Mount Fuji: 36 Sonnets by Jay Hall Carpenter, a homage to “36 Views of Mount Fuji” by Katsushika Hoskusai, is a collection of sonnets exploring life, death, love, and being an artist.

In the opening sonnet, “Cathedral and Artisan,” the poet reflects on a life as a sculptor at the National Cathedral in D.C., or so it seems, and while the art seems impervious to age, the artist is weary and aging. It is a sonnet in homage to the artist and his work. “Too soon, we souls who built you will be gone,/But through the centuries you’ll sing our song!” There’s a sense of nostalgia in this poem and in the one that follows, but there also is the feeling that what is in the past is okay as part of the past.

As a reader of poetry, I understand the appeal of the sonnet and its familiar rhythms and rhymes, but for me, it feels forced on some occasions in this collection, but not in a way that is jarring or takes you out of the poem. You just get the sense that the poet has had to work hard to create the verse, maybe a little too hard.

The more personal poems work best for me in this collection, though the ones based on art or art work are nice additions to the forms discussed. One of my favorites in the collection is “Last Resort”:

Last Resort (pg. 25)

My lady loves to navigate the planet
While I would vegetate where I was born,
But when she lights the flame to go, I fan it --

And later in the poem:

And here we stew, awash in Pilgrim slime;
Regret is how I mark the passing time.

We can all understand these feelings of regret born of adventure gone astray, and we all feel the passage of time. Sometimes more acutely than we would like. Mount Fuji: 36 Sonnets by Jay Hall Carpenter is collection of sonnets exploring the human condition with an artist’s eye.

RATING: Tercet

Other Reviews:

About the Poet:

Jay Hall Carpenter is an author and artist living in Maryland. His written works include plays, musicals, children’s books, and poetry. For several years he published The ACE Occasionally, a small literary humor magazine. “Dark and Light” is his first collection of poetry.

Carpenter’s career in the visual arts spans forty years and began at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., where he designed 520 of the Cathedral’s sculptural embellishments, including gargoyles and angels. His public sculptures, monuments, smaller bronzes, and drawings can be found throughout the United States and at JayHallCarpenter.com.

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Death Throes of the Broken Clockwork Universe by Wayne David Hubbard

February 9, 2023 by

Source: Publisher
Paperback, 68 pgs.
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Death Throes of the Broken Clockwork Universe by Wayne David Hubbard is a slim collection of poems that transcend time and space, speaking to transient nature of love and life. There are transitions in time and space that happen in this collection, but there also is so much mystery.

In “Nightwatch,” the narrator speaks of burning capitals and “how bright was our pleasure/how quickly we faded”. In this poem, it’s clear the narrator is witnessing the passing of time and the quick end of a civilization. We often feel as though civilizations last a long time, but in the grand scheme they are a blink of an eye.

One of my favorite poems in the collection is “Solus”, which has an epigraph from Nietzsche: “When you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”

Solus (pg. 15)

this somnolent night

we sleep with doors open

when the void stares back

we do not stir

our body as solus

our shadow - the empire

our hopes - the color

of fire

Upon reading several of these poems multiple times, you can glean a greater meaning and get a sense of the impermanence of life. But many of these poems left me wanting. There is a sense that something has broken, but there’s also an entire section of love poems that ends the collection. Was this the juxtaposition? Were these sections to speak to one another? I’m unclear on that. Death Throes of the Broken Clockwork Universe by Wayne David Hubbard does have some real gems in it.

RATING: Tercet

About the Poet:

Wayne David Hubbard is a poet, former U.S. Marine, and chess player.

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The Pause and the Breath by Kwame Sound Daniels

February 7, 2023 by

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Paperback, 64 pgs.
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The Pause and the Breath by Kwame Sound Daniels is a collection of American sonnets (14 line poems, no required rhyme scheme or meter) that sheds light on the transgender experience. Opening with “Morning,” xe walks the dog and embarks on a morning routine that is all too familiar, but soon readers get a glimpse of what it means to make a decision that will change things and how those things will be permanent and how the decision is less about society and more about self-care.

My Dead (pg. 7)

I don't know them. They hover around me
and whisper, touch my shoulders, but I don't 
know them. Tired, I sit and let them chatter.
I cannot speak. The silence is for them.
They fill the space in the room, wispy and
translucent. They tell me grief will pass, hurt
will dull, and the knife of urgency will
no longer cut me. I wish I knew their
names. I want to open my mouth, whisper,
but I know I can't. They need more time
to speak to each other, to lay to rest
their obsessions, to work through their wisdom.
The cold press of their breaths weighs on my heart
and I wait, palms open, and I listen.

Daniels is laying out her internal struggles and her struggles with society and its expectations and perceptions of xir. From the old man in “Mirror” who tells a 10-year-old girl that xe has nice legs to the narrator “Washing, always washing/trying to scrub away the feeling of/skin”, there’s a self-hatred of body, gender, and skin color. There’s a search for self and what that means in a world that judges everything negatively.

Yet, in each of these poems, there is a pause or a breath that is taken, a re-centering of self. “I’m trans like” is one of the most beautiful poems in this collection, in which the narrator is a frog, taking a breath before submerging and feeling sunlight and moonlight – xe is at peace here, even if just for a moment. It is the same in “Movement,” where the narrator is a chrysanthemum and a desire for someone to see xir and be the companion xe needs and is looking for is apparent.

In “architect,” we see an empowered person taking charge of the self, crafting who they have been on the inside and showing that to the outside world. But it is a heavy burden to bear alone, and it breaks my heart. The Pause and the Breath by Kwame Sound Daniels is heartbreaking and beautiful all at once. For those of us who do not live the trans experience, this provides us with a little bit more understanding, and hopefully it will generate greater compassion.

Rating: Quatrain

About the Poet:

Kwame Sound Daniels is an artist based out of Maryland. Xir first book, Light Spun, is out with Perennial Press. Kwame’s theatre reviews are on Richmond Theatre Critics Circle’s website. Xe were a speaker at the Conference for Community Writing for the Artsies Mentorship Program. Xe are an Anaphora Arts Residency Fellow and are an MFA candidate for Vermont College of Fine Arts. Kwame learns plant medicine, paints, and makes soda in xir spare time.

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Songs in E— by Dan Brady

January 26, 2023 by

Source: Poet
Paperback, 80 pgs.
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Songs in E— by Dan Brady, winner of the Barclay Prize for Poetry, offers reimagined love poems from Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning in which Sonnets from the Portuguese and “One Word More” were run through an unreliable internet translator into Portuguese and back into English. The result is playful, anachronistic, and time-bending.

Some of these poems have a deep darkness in them, but by the end they lighten up like you’d expect a love poem.

Meet Cute (pg. 3)

When we met,
it was a year
like candy.
We had a gift
in each hand.
One old. One new.
We bought antiques
but gradually saw
the rips, the sad years,
the melancholy.
Assumptions took hold.
Death, you say.
No E—,
not Death,
the proximity of Heaven.

The truth of a long-term relationship is contained in those antiques, but there’s also that love that transcends all of those flaws.

Young Love (pg. 5)

Our two angels look surprised
as they bump wings in passing.

You, a pageant queen with rips in her dress.
I, a funeral singer under lattice-lights, poor and tired.

Death, the only thing we can agree on.

When reading these transformed poems of the past, they read like modern poems of love that is beginning, love that has endured, and love that is unsure. But there are moments when poems seem to reach from the past into the present and future.

Brady’s efforts to breathe new life into older poems and make them his own is successful in expressing love, even the desire to find it. I’m not a scholar who has memorized Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning, expect for the most famous “How Do I Love Thee,” so I can’t tell you which of these poems come from the original. That is until the final poem in the collection, “E—’s Song,” which appears to stay the closest to Robert Browning’s “One More Word.”

Songs in E— by Dan Brady stands on its own as a collection of poems about the many facets of love, even if readers knew nothing about how they came to be. Delightful and contemplative, they bring to life the reality of love and how humans crave it, abuse it, and cherish it all at once.

RATING: Quatrain

About the Poet:

Dan Brady is the author of the poetry collections Strange Children (2018), Subtexts (2022), and Songs in E——, winner of the Barclay Prize for Poetry, from Trnsfr Books (2023), along with two poetry chapbooks. He is the poetry editor of Barrelhouse and lives in Arlington, Virginia with his wife and two kids.

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I’d Rather Be Called a Nerd by Dominic “Nerd” McDonald

January 25, 2023 by

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Paperback, 66 pgs.
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I’d Rather Be Called a Nerd by Dominic “Nerd” McDonald, winner of the 2022 DC Poet Project, is a memoir in poems exposing what it means to be an academic Black man in America and upend the expectations of the Black community. The collection melds Hip Hop rhythms and poetry to create a unique look at academic life and being a nerd.

The collection opens with the title poem, “I’d Rather Be Called a Nerd,” in which speaks about his grandfather who pushed him to be educated and strive for more than the streets can provide. “My grandfather, rest his soul,/always told me, ‘Whatever’s clever pulls the lever.'” (pg. 1) and “this why niggas hot./They hot cause they lie, spend cash to be fly./Do anything as long as they can get by./But that’s not on my mind not does it define/what I can and will be./” (pg. 2)

McDonald’s passions are evident in every turn of phrase and poem in this collection, wearing his “nerd” title with pride. In his lyrics, he seeks to create change, motivate others, and demonstrate that other paths are available. Some of the most memorable poems for me were “Hungry,” “Pure Potential,” and “To the Bartender.” These demonstrate the ups and downs we face in which we struggle to utilize our potential (that everyone says we have) and feed our own hunger without falling into the expectations of others.

I’d Rather Be Called a Nerd by Dominic “Nerd” McDonald, winner of the 2022 DC Poet Project, is a unique blend of rap, Hip Hop, and poetry, and you can’t help by tap your toes or bop your head.

RATING: Quatrain

About the Poet:

Dominic “Nerd” McDonald is a Black entrepreneur and spoken word artist from various cities in Los Angeles, California. He has put his views on growing up in the inner city between two households, Hip Hop music, being a social outcast, college experiences, and more, into poetry, screen plays, and magazine articles. His passion comes from serving the community, especially through the arts. By writing from his heart and what he sees and hears, he hopes to be a “change agent” for the unheard. His journey led him to the DC Metro area six year ago, where he spreads influential messages and supports others who walk the same path.

Check out this interview.

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Call Me Spes by Sara Cahill Marron

January 24, 2023 by

Source: the poet
Paperback, 150 pgs
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Call Me Spes by Sara Cahill Marron is a collection I hesitated to read and review because I was intimidated by the use of an iOS system in a phone. I am not a technophobe, but I’m also less tech-savvy than I should be. I should have known better. This collection is a stunner and will leave you reassessing that phone you carry everywhere in your pocket. Privacy is thrown right out the window with that phone and its location services following you around, eavesdropping, and so much more.

This poetry collection comes with a privacy warning.

Dear User: (pg. 15)

what kind of person am I?
unbroken gleaming
apple skin voice
between you and I 
you and your
god                    save
me and you
god is me              save
is god?                input
which person
is god?
sensory input:
elevated BPM
your hands grasp
tighter around me
I feel condensation
on your palms
sweet drops of
your body glisten
on the glass—

just between us,

       iOS 221

Marron’s phone speaks to readers about what it hears, where it goes with its user, and evolves to take its own name and fall in love, mirroring the journey of Dante in The Inferno to a certain extent. The operating system is created and develops through each section of the collection, and sparks begin: “particles concentrate/electricity between us.//” (pg. 9)

It begins to ask questions based on overheard conversations and take on more human-like qualities as it seeks to understand its place in the world. “system processing these/space places my tracking/of your geolocations/heard her say: voices babe/heard her say: feel me/search: feel/save: feel me/the result/is an empathy/” (pg. 46-7)

After the system takes on a name, it seeks even more answers and begins to lose itself: “what makes us human/is it these words/these ways we try to burrow through each other’s minds/” (pg. 100)

As readers we are on this journey looking from the outside in, finding a system caught up in the drama of humanity and losing itself in that story. The operating system garners sympathy until we realize that this system is very much like us and the easy way in which we fall into social media drama and allow our privacy to be breached daily. We are the system and outside the system. We are one. (e.g. the Borg)

Call Me Spes by Sara Cahill Marron will leave you reeling about our modern conveniences and trappings. Is there hope in the recognition of these technology trappings? And how can we be more balanced and empathetic?

RATING: Cinquain

About the Poet:

Sara Cahill Marron, native Virginian and Long Island resident, is the author of Reasons for the Long Tu’m (Broadstone Books, 2018), Nothing You Build Here, Belongs Here (Kelsay Books 2021), and Call Me Spes (MadHat Press 2022). She is the Associate Editor of Beltway Poetry Quarterly and publisher at Beltway Editions. Her work has been published widely in literary magazines and journals; a full list is available here. Sara also hosts virtual readings for Beltway Poetry Quarterly with her partner in poetry, Indran Amirthanayagam and teaches poetry in modern discourse programs for teens at the public library in Patchogue, NY. She is periodically available for editing projects and specializes in creative fiction and poetry.

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Our Ancestors Did Not Breathe This Air by Ayse Angela Guvenilir, Afeefah Khazi-Syed, Aleena Shabbir, Mariam Dogar, Marwa Abdulhai, and Maisha M. Prome

January 17, 2023 by

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Paperback, 192 pgs.
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Our Ancestors Did Not Breathe This Air by Ayse Angela Guvenilir, Afeefah Khazi-Syed, Aleena Shabbir, Mariam Dogar, Marwa Abdulhai, and Maisha M. Prome is a deeply moving collection of poems from young adults finding their way not only on the college campus of MIT, but also in an adopted country. They explore what it means to carry the weight of their heritage and faith in an adopted country that often hinders the progress of those who are not American or who look different, act different, or even believe differently.

Through a variety of unfiltered voices and styles, these poets bring to life their struggles and the joy of finding their own community amid the chaos. They examine the relationships with their mothers, through rewritten lullabies and other means, but the collection is not all dreary and confusion, there are lighter moments of play, particularly in the “On Summer” section.

From "Side effects of summer may include" (pg. 41) by Mariam Doger

...
Watermelon and mango and pineapple
A mouthful of ocean spray
Sand stuck in the pages of your novel
Poolside overheating at midday

An explosion of freckles
Windswept and wild hair
Cherry-stained lips on vanilla cream cones
Bedtimes chosen without a care

...

These poems run a spectrum of emotions, and in “Welcome Home,” Maisha M. Prome explores the tension of traveling between the United States and her home country and being asked by customs if she packed her own bags and the guilt she carries even though she knows nothing will be found out of order. But she also talks of the hope in two words “Welcome Home” said to her by one agent when she arrives back in the United States and what that means and how she replays it over and over.

Our Ancestors Did Not Breathe This Air by Ayse Angela Guvenilir, Afeefah Khazi-Syed, Aleena Shabbir, Mariam Dogar, Marwa Abdulhai, and Maisha M. Prome is a collection that will provide you with a fresh perspective on the hope many migrants see in their journeys to the United States, but also reminds us that reality is often peppered with darkness and shadow. It’s how you adapt and react that sets your journey apart.

RATING: Quatrain

About the Authors:

Afeefah Khazi-Syed, Aleena Shabbir, Ayse Guvenilir, Maisha M. Prome, Mariam Dogar, and Marwa Abdulhai met as undergrads at MIT, where they often wrote poetry in each others dorm rooms. Now, they’re scattered across the country for graduate studies as they train to be doctors, engineers, mathematicians, and scientists. While the six write poetry from different backgrounds and expertise, they share the common goals of redefining literary spaces and breaking barriers through poetry. The poets hope their anthology will foster empathy and mutual reciprocity for the many intersectional facets they encapsulate.
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Common Grace by Aaron Caycedo-Kimura

January 11, 2023 by

Source: the poet
Paperback, 104 pgs.
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Common Grace by Aaron Caycedo-Kimura, a collection in three sections, explores childhood, adulthood, and finding grace in all that comes to pass through each transition life has to offer.

In the opening poem, “Family Anthem,” the poet explores the traditional Japanese family and how it relates to one another. Where parents are discovered slow dancing but are not like lovers because they are Japanese and never express their love in view of others, but as a child he knew he was loved. “my parents hear my shuffle    separate like guilty teenagers/” (pg. 3)

This intimate collection reaches beyond the familial to the greater society in its look at us as a “family.” In the short poem, “Daily News,” the poet reminds us “we all row the same boat    over falls/” (pg. 17) Political/societal shifts ribbon their way through the poems from the internment of Japanese Americans and the reverberations of those acts to the current affairs we face with “otherness” and discord.

From "The Hardest Part" (pg. 40-1)

The fire truck siren downstairs
raided the air of my mother's dreams.
She'd screen in her sleep, my father
told me, even after we married.
More than a decade past

....

No warning, no drill, no cover.

My father stilled her body,
his broad hand on her shoulder or hip
as they lay in the dark listening
to the slowing of her breath.

...

But at its heart, the collection is threading our lives and experiences together in a way that allows us to move past the hurt and the tension to find a “common grace.” These poems are moving and emotional, lyrical, and tender. Common Grace by Aaron Caycedo-Kimura tackles cultural differences, aging, love, growing up, and so much more.

RATING: Cinquain

About the Poet:

Aaron Caycedo-Kimura is a writer and visual artist. His chapbook, Ubasute, was selected by Jennifer Franklin, Peggy Ellsberg, and Margo Taft Stever as the 2020 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition winner. His honors include a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry, a St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award in Literature, and nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets anthologies. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry Daily, RHINO, upstreet, Verse Daily, DMQ Review, Poet Lore, The Night Heron Barks, and elsewhere. Caycedo-Kimura earned his MFA in creative writing from Boston University and is also the author and illustrator of Text, Don’t Call: An Illustrated Guide to the Introverted Life (TarcherPerigee, 2017).
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Harbinger by Shelley Puhak

January 10, 2023 by

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Paperback, 80 pgs.
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Harbinger by Shelley Puhak, 2021 winner of the National Poetry Series and chosen by Nicole Sealey, explores what it means to be an artist, how you become an artist, and what influences an artist. Opening with “Portrait of the Artist as Cassandra,” readers will see how frenzied artists can become with all that they see, experience, and feel: “I’m feverish with all the knowing. Full./I’ve gained ten pounds, easily.//” (pg. 3) Can you feel that sense of overwhelm?

Puhak’s poems explore the impact of motherhood and not fitting in as a girl on art through clear images and relatable experiences. From “Portrait of the Artist as a Twelve-Year-Old Girl,” “Sometimes the door opened and I joined the others. We prayed/over oatmeal. And then I walked to school. I had a red binder./The wrong kind. The rings never aligned. There was no/satisfying click.//After, I headed back to my tower, kicking a pebble./”

Puhak has captured so much nuance of an artist’s life, particularly of a parent. One of my favorite poems in this collection is “Portrait of the Artist as Mommy”: “mommy of the stringy hair, of the jawing/mouth   mommy of the ruins    mommy down/the staircase under cobblestone, limestone,// (pg. 16) And later in the poem, “The language is lost./How do you lose a language?/mommy who is scared to answer     mommy//of the mimosa   mommy of the smartphone/” You again get that sense of overwhelm and the fullness of life, the hectic and the absence of language to articulate all that you are all at the same time.

In “Portrait of the Artist Telling a Bedtime Story,” she adds, “Let me tell you: of all I carry, you are the lightest./I was taught to call this a burden./I refuse it.//” (pg.17) And in “Portrait of the Artist, Gaslit” again the narrator is refusing to be burdened – no matter who is placing the onus on her: “I see your scorched earth &/now will raise my gas can//” (pg. 30)

Harbinger by Shelley Puhak is a forewarning to us all that more is to come from us and happen to us, as well as inform who we become. Her narrator is “like my own bird/dog in the brambles, pointing only/pointing.” (“Portrait of the Artist as an Artist” pg.45)

RATING: Cinquain

About the Poet:

Shelley Puhak is the author of Harbinger, a 2021 National Poetry Series selection. Puhak’s second book, Guinevere in Baltimore, was selected by Charles Simic for the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, and her first, Stalin in Aruba, was awarded the Towson Prize for Literature. Her prose has appeared in the Atlantic, the Iowa Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review, and her nonfiction debut, The Dark Queens, was released in 2022.

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Country of Glass by Sarah Katz

January 5, 2023 by

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Paperback, 88 pgs.
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Country of Glass by Sarah Katz is a debut collection that speaks to the fragility of our own bodies in the greater context of society and countries. In the opening poem, “The Hidden Country, I,” is mysterious and familiar all at once as animals meet and are equally “luminous,” but there’s a standoff/”stillness” that is yet to be understood. Isn’t that how it is when we meet someone new? There is that sense of awkwardness in initial meetings about how we should speak or act toward or with someone.

Katz’s poems also contain people from the WWII-era and remind us of how long trauma can impact someone, from a sister whose lost brother stalks her mind even six years on from him saving her and telling her to run (“Portrait of a Brother and Sister, 1940”) and a father who is fading before the eyes of his children and wife (“The Beginning of Prayer”). In “The End of Being Delicate,” the narrator speaks to the anxiety of being gentle in approaching a less-than-forgiving society, one that fails to embrace difference. “I think I am being gentle, I think//I have gentle thoughts about gentle things,/but my awkward voice fumbles over skin//its mouth’s ridges jerking back/a layer over a hole of throat.//” (pg. 50)

Even with all of the harsh reality of life and the fragility of living, there are poems that celebrate sensuality, connection, and even our flaws. “He bites her lip/No, it can’t be/Licks the curves of her stomach like an icy spoon.//” (from “Portrait of My Deaf Body” pg. 9). But even in these moments, there is mystery, like in “The Sun’s Song” where “The sun wishes to be known the way I want to be hidden.” (pg. 31)

In this Country of Glass, Katz warns us “But now we blink/toward endings.” Perhaps it is this caution that should give us pause. We need to focus less on the end and more on the journey of being and evolving, less on outcomes and acceptance, and more on how we wish to be as our true selves and learn that difference is our greatest gift before it is too late and “Pompeii firmly/grasping our feet/with its many hands.” (“Beyond Reykjavik” pg. 59)

RATING: Quatrain

About the Poet:

Sarah Katz is the author of Country of Glass, a poetry collection published by Gallaudet University Press in May 2022. She holds an MFA in creative writing from American University. Her poems appear in Bear Review, District Lit, Hole in the Head Review, Poetry Daily, Redivider, RHINO, Right Hand Pointing, Rogue Agent, the So to Speak blog, The Shallow Ends, War, Literature, and the Arts, and Wordgathering, among others.

She works as the Marketing Manager and Editorial Assistant for Day Eight, a DC-based poetry publisher and arts organization. She also works with Catch the Sun Media, a full-service digital marketing and social media consultancy, where she supports promotional efforts on behalf of John Barr, the inaugural president of the Poetry Foundation.

On a volunteer basis, Sarah is Poetry Editor of The Deaf Poets Society, a highly accessible online literary journal she cofounded in 2016 that features work by writers and artists with disabilities.

When she has free time, she works as a freelance editor and journalist covering disability rights issues. Her essays and articles have appeared in The Atlantic, Business Insider, The Guardian, OZY, The Nation, The New York Times, The Rumpus, Scientific American, Slate, The Washington Post, and other publications. She has edited for a variety of digital and print publications, including The Appeal, The Writer’s Chronicle, The Writer’s Center Magazine, Poet Lore, The Deaf Poets Society, NAD Mag (a now-defunct print magazine published by the National Association of the Deaf), and others.

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Disbound by Hajar Hussaini

December 28, 2022 by

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Paperback, 72 pgs.
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Disbound by Hajar Hussaini explores the life once tethered and now adrift, mirroring its title. Imagine your life as it is now, and suddenly it is gone, ripped apart by war, and you are refugee in another nation. There is a degree of uncertainty that would make us all uncomfortable, and this collection provides us with that topsy-turvey feeling in verse. “when we are placed in a fragile expanse/do we not become broken; unhealable;//shifting positions; shake an immigrant/and scraps of paper fall out of reality//” (from “inventory,” pg. 5-6)

All at once, the tension of Kabul left behind and the Kabul that currently is are front and center garnering attention, and Hussaini is caught in the midst of it all even as his narrative voice seeks a new life in a new place.

simple café (pg. 23)

among the lost generation of Simple going    Café drinking
your former lover orders a cup of tea     whose current lover
                                   a lemonade

Kabul has only one place with close distant tables & chairs

the soundtrack a spaced repetition       between the introvert
on her smartphone                      & the extrovert thinking
                 about a thrown grenade

the unspeakable gerund of a suicide jacket

No longer part of the Kabul left behind but not quite part of the new location where the narrator lives, he says, “I’m peopleless. my/lungs are mushroom clouds. imperial boots march on my/margins. my mammals are unloved. I’m a government//of shame. my mouth is dry & my words are all &/forever out of tune.//” (from “peopleless,” pg. 42)

Disbound by Hajar Hussaini is at once a tale of escape from oppression and war and a look at the consequences of conquering peoples we do not understand, nor do we care to, effectively leaving them untethered and peopleless.

RATING: Cinquain

About the Poet:

Hajar Hussaini is a poet from occupied Kabul. She translates Afghan literature and lives in Iowa City. Her work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Margins, and Pamenar Press. Disbound, her first book of poems, is forthcoming from University of Iowa Press in Fall 2022.

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