Mailbox Monday #723

Winner of the 2022 Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from the Washington Writers’ Publishing House, You Cannot Save Here is a collection of poems about how we live when each day feels like the world is ending. The poems ask what we do with the small moments that matter when so much around us-climate disaster, gun violence, pandemics, wars-makes these days feel apocalyptic. The book is a bit speculative and a bit confessional. It’s queer, punk, and woven tightly with cultural allusion-from visual art to video games, pop culture to counterculture.

Elegies for an Empire by Le Hinton for 2023 Gaithersburg Book Festival.

Emily Dickinson is known for saying: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” Le Hinton’s poetry is that poetry—what happens when words erupt from the spirit to physically, emotionally, impact us—edify us. His work in Elegies for an Empire is concussive with craft, timeliness, reverence for Black life, family—and for every being timestamped to our fleeting days. The picture of living is never removed from dénouement, although we are often loathe to face its inevitable frame. Hinton faces it with authenticity and grace. Moreover, a depth of concern over the state of our fragile planet is clearly evident in the layers of his poems. In that light, this collection carries the solemnity of prayer. Therein lies its hymnal-like power, in any meaningful literary service. ~ Truth Thomas, Poet, Editor, Founder of Cherry Castle Publishing

Le Hinton’s Elegies for an Empire is a crisp, entrancing, enlightening foray into the specifics of the author’s path. It is also replete with the linguistic musicality found in the best poetic efforts. Your eyes and heart hang on every image—every subtle and powerful narrative turn—not unlike the recordings of pianist Bill Evans. (whose equally lyrical artistry is celebrated in this volume.) The great jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli once told an interviewer that an artist should “start well and end well.” These poems are perfect examples of Mr. Grappelli’s credo. ~ Reuben Jackson, author of Scattered Clouds: New And Selected Poems (Alan Squire Publishing)

Finding oneself in the thick of Le Hinton’s deft, alert poetry can feel like being transported—as if that were possible—into someone else’s first-rate meditation, inside of which important and worldly matters are treated with the same attention and respect as mundane ones; more ordinary family losses and joys attend also to larger issues like race, ancestry, a pandemic, among other concerns. Hinton has the ability to talk about tenderness, for instance, and fear of being traffic-stopped while being black in the same breath; his work dives deep into this particular moment in the “empire,” during which a pandemic has also brought into stark relief viral systemic racism, other social and structural inequities, loss of our elders and our inability to properly memorialize them, and all of the vagaries of love that make life worth living. In this book no kiss is just a kiss, a father’s sacrifice is measured in miles, and ancestry’s considered alongside the history of diseases. “How harsh,” this poet says, “the desire to endure.” It’s a brave mix of everything, in this moment, the “empire” has to offer or means to take away. Elegies for an Empire is a very important book of poetry by one of our most unsung poets. With this, his seventh book, it’s clear to me that Le Hinton now needs to pack the house, most certainly not for his own gratification, but for every last one of us listening carefully for whatever wisdom we can find. Here’s hoping this book finds the very large audience it deserves. ~ Rick Benjamin, author of Some Bodies in the Grief Bed​

String by Matthew Thorburn for 2023 Gaithersburg Book Festival.

A book-length sequence of poems, Matthew Thorburn’s String tells the story of a teenage boy’s experiences in a time of war and its aftermath. He loses his family and friends, his home and the life he knew, but survives to tell his story. Written in the boy’s fractured, echoing voice–in lines that are frequently enjambed and use almost no punctuation–String embodies his trauma and confusion in a poetic sequence that is part lullaby, part nightmare, but always a music that is uniquely his.

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