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Virtual Poetry Circle: Haki R. Madhubuti

April 29, 2023 by

Because all of us enjoy reading and love books of all kinds, I thought this poem was highly appropriate: From Haki R. Madhubuti:

So Many Books, So Little Time

For independent booksellers & librarians, especially Nichelle Hayes

Frequently during my mornings of pain & reflection
when I can’t write
or articulate my thoughts
or locate the mindmusic needed
to complete the poems & essays
that are weeks plus days overdue
forcing me to stop, I cease
answering my phone, eating right, running my miles,
reading my mail, and making love.
(Also, this is when my children do not seek me out
because I do not seek them out.)
I escape north, to the nearest library or used bookstore.
They are my retreats, my quiet energy-givers, my intellectual refuge.

For me it is not bluewater beaches, theme parks,
or silent chapels hidden among forest greens.
Not multi-stored American malls, corporate book
supermarkets, mountain trails, or Caribbean hideaways.

My sanctuaries are liberated lighthouses of shelved books,
featuring forgotten poets, unread anthropologists of tenure-
seeking assistant professors, self-published geniuses, remaindered
first novelists, highlighting speed-written bestsellers,
wise historians & theologians, nobel, pulitzer prize, and american book
award winners, poets & fiction writers, overcertain political commentators,
small press wunderkinds & learned academics.
All are vitamins for my slow brain & sidetracked spirit in this
winter of creating.

I do not believe in smiling politicians, AMA doctors,
zebra-faced bankers, red-jacketed real estate or automobile
salespeople, or singing preachers.

I believe in books.
It can be conveniently argued that knowledge,
not that which is condensed or computer packaged, but
pages of hard-fought words, dancing language
meticulously & contemplatively written by the likes of me & others,
shelved imperfectly at the level of open hearts & minds,
is preventive medicine strengthening me for the return to my
clear pages of incomplete ideas to be reworked, revised &
written as new worlds and words in all of their subjective
configurations to eventually be processed into books that
will hopefully be placed on the shelves of libraries, bookstores, homes,
& other sanctuaries of learning to be found & browsed over by receptive
booklovers, readers & writers looking for a retreat,
looking for departure & yes spaces,
looking for open heart surgery without the knife.

Listen to the poem.

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National Poetry Month 2023 Comes to an End

April 28, 2023 by

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Bargaining with the Fall by Alison Palmer

April 27, 2023 by

Source: Purchased
Paperback, 80 pgs.
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Bargaining with the Fall by Alison Palmer is a deeply personal collection about loss, grief, and the impact it has on those left behind. The opening poem, “The Sky Only Teaches Me Uncertainty,” sets the tone for the collection, a struggle with debilitating grief and uncertainty, a deep enveloping emptiness left by a departed father. The poet says, “I’m a done-in-soul without you.” Grief is like that. All consuming and seems never-ending, which it is, though the grief does change over time.

Imagine grief before a loss, watching a loved one struggle to survive. “I start to breathe like you; water moves/over your gills in my mind. I implore myself, stop//pacing, but I already saw you die/once.” (“Your Memory Moves in Me Like a Shark Must”, pg.8) Grief in memory, grief in the moment, grief as it happens. Emotions are unexpected and invasive.

Salvation (pg. 31)

What more could you have done to obey; the sum
of your parts down to zero: I'm reduced to photographs—

              from the corner of your eye, reverence,
      for what? Rusted nails, your weight, wooden staircase—

I don't bend my knees in prayer, next to you, I don't
believe you'll be protected: such guttural sounds—Oh,

             Lord or Anyone listening? Deliverance gets lost
      along the way, the ambulance arrives an hour later—

Faith in the body owes us nothing; we can't all be
spared: the night you fall, the night falls with you—

             your blue eyes, the only beacons that speak
      to me. I'm startled by how little they say—

As the poet moves through the collection, we’re taken on a journey to make sense of tragic, unexpected loss. It’s a hard road of what-ifs and surprise, even as the poet seeks to use an equation to understand it in “Behind the Conglomerate, a Backbone?” There is no understanding this kind of tragedy; it is unknowable, like grief, until you live it. Bargaining with the Fall by Alison Palmer is as heart-wrenching as it is beautiful in its questioning of loss and grief and what hollows it leaves behind. This collection has come at a very appropriate time in my life. Do not miss this collection.

RATING: Cinquain

Other Reviews:

 

About the Poet:

Alison Palmer is the author of the forthcoming full-length poetry collection, Bargaining with the Fall (Broadstone Books, March 2023), the recently published poetry chapbook, Everything Is Normal Here (Broadstone Books, 2022), and the poetry chapbook, The Need for Hiding (Dancing Girl Press, 2018). To read an interview with Alison visit: www.thepoetsbillow.org. She was named a semi-finalist for 92Y’s Discovery Poetry Contest 2021 and was chosen for a 2022 Independent Artist Award (IAA) grant by the Maryland State Arts Council (MSAC).

Alison received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, and she was awarded the Emma Howell Memorial Poetry Prize from Oberlin College where she graduated with a BA in Creative Writing. Currently, Alison writes outside Washington, DC.

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Her Whole Bright Life by Courtney LeBlanc

April 25, 2023 by

Source: the Poet
Paperback, 100 pgs.
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Her Whole Bright Life by Courtney LeBlanc is a collection of rolling grief and healing. In the opening poem, “Self-Portrait,” the narrator speaks to the collections of past memories that are part of her being and how they make her feel about herself, but by the end, the living in the moment and in the past, have left her without a sense of who she wishes to be in the future. There’s an unsettled-ness in this poem that sets the tone for the rest of the collection and the roiling emotions that come through each subsequent poem.

In “I Don’t Understand Black Holes No Matter How Many Times Cody Explains Them to Me,” the poet speaks to the immense and unexplainable black hole, noting “For now, I’ll just accept/that black holes exist, that they are closer/than we previously thought, and that they/are a force so powerful, every mistake I ever/made would be swallowed by them.//” Her regrets seem large and able to swallow her hole, which explains why she sees black holes as a potential force that can make those regrets disappear.

Grief takes many forms in this collection. It is not just the slow loss of a vibrant father who dedicated himself to farming and gardening and his daughter, but it’s also the slow losses we don’t see until we lose a parent. We are no longer those children we were, life has shaped us. We’ve become someone else and yet still carry that younger self with us and long for what we see as a simpler existence without regret and loss.

From "Snails and Stars" (pg. 41)

...
Last year, a friend took a bottle of pills and went
to sleep. At his memorial we watched
the slideshow, his smiling face in every frame,
the galaxy of his friends spilling onto the lawn.
We are a constellation of caring, but we were not
enough to save him.
...

Her Whole Bright Life by Courtney LeBlanc is somber and full of life — its funny moments, its sad emotions and grief, and its unexpected gifts. LeBlanc is fast becoming one of my favorite poets. Her turn of phrase, her bravery in the face of deep emotional turmoil, and her ability to connect seemingly unconnected events into a poem that you can find your own story inside. Don’t miss this collection.

Other Reviews:

About the Poet:

Courtney LeBlanc is the author of the full-length collections, “Her Whole Bright Life” (winner of the Jack McCarthy Book Prize, Write Bloody, 2023), “Exquisite Bloody, Beating Heart” (Riot in Your Throat, 2021) and “Beautiful & Full of Monsters” (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2020). She is a Virginia Center for Creative Arts fellow (2022) and the founder and editor-in-chief of Riot in Your Throat, an independent poetry press. She loves nail polish, tattoos and a soy latte each morning.

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Virtual Poetry Circle: Claudia Emerson

April 22, 2023 by

While our family attend a local Climate Summit for youth, I want to leave you with this poem in honor of Earth Day.

Environmental Awareness: The Right Whale

The whale was known as right because it was
magnificent with oil, slow and easy
 
to find and slaughter, floating even when dead.
But after it was no longer needed for fat,
 
men still hunted the whale for its rich mouth
of baleen, harvested for hairbrushes,
 
buggy whips, umbrella ribs, the stays
of corsets – vain things designed to mold the female
 
body, sculpt a waist so small a man's
hands could meet with ease around it. Crazy,
 
the girls agree, the way those women bought it.

Share your favorite Earth Day poem below.

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Poetry Activity: Pop Song Turned Shakespearean Sonnet

April 21, 2023 by

When the pandemic started and many of us were in lockdown, I had more time to read articles online and try out new poetry forms. Some of which worked for me, and some that didn’t. But what I loved was seeing the vast amount of creativity out there.

One that I found really interesting, because I love music, is turning your favorite pop song into a Shakespearean sonnet on LitHub. The author of the article points to this book as inspiration:

The Bard meets the Backstreet Boys in Pop Sonnets, a collection of 100 classic pop songs reimagined as Shakespearean sonnets. All of your favorite artists are represented in these pages–from Bon Jovi and Green Day to Miley Cyrus, Beyoncé, and beyond. Already a smash sensation on the Internet–the Tumblr page has 50,000+ followers–Pop Sonnets has been featured by the A.V. Club, BuzzFeed, and Vanity Fair, among many others. More than half of these pop sonnets are exclusive to this collection and have never been published in any form.

Inside these pages, there are songs by Taylor Swift, 50 Cent, Snoop Dogg, and others.

What pop songs would you like to see turned into sonnets? By the same token, what sonnets would you like to see turned into pop songs?

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Lo: Poems by Melissa Crowe

April 20, 2023 by

Source: Publisher
Paperback, 88 pgs.
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Lo: Poems by Melissa Crowe, 2022 Iowa Poetry Prize winner to be published in May 2023, is an expression of grief, longing, and joy all at once as the young girl growing up within these poems and pages finds that the world is all at once beautiful and ugly. This song echoes throughout the collection from the opening poem, “The Self Says, I Am,” readers will see the whimsical imagination of a young girl surrounded by a rural landscape, but within that landscape blisters and sunburn can form, causing a young girl to learn to be “nimble” and “learned.”

The narrator of “Thrownness” says, “Maybe home is what gets on you and can’t//be shaken loose.” Taking the lighters side of that observation it is clear Crowe’s roots in Maine are still with her in the imagery she chooses, but on the flip side of that, the darkest parts of our childhood lives leave indelible scars. “Remember how every branch/on that same street seemed blessed with fat red berries/your mother said would make you sick and how — always/hungry, cupboards bare — you would not stop tasting them/anyway.” (pg. 5-6)

In many of these early poems, a young girl is yearning and she cannot get enough, even when what she receives is not necessarily the best thing for her. She is loved, but there are parts of her story that include attention, not necessarily love. Part 3 of this collection houses a variety of poem structures that tell a traumatic tale, and each mirrors the emotional state of the narrator. (be advised these can be triggering) “Thank god I thought, burning,/somebody will ask me. Nobody asked me.//Thank god I thought, burning, knowing/for the first time maybe what he’d//done to me, that what he’d done to me was/wrong enough to go to jail for, if you told.//” (“When She Speaks of the Fire,” pg. 30) This is where the reader weeps for this girl. You cannot help but weep. It is because the narrator is speaking directly to the reader, even if it’s framed as spoken to someone else. You are drawn in, you are “watching through a crack as thick as a man’s/fingers what unfolds beyond your power/to undo.”

Lo: Poems by Melissa Crowe is not focused just on the trauma and telling of it; it is the emotional journey of telling it and learning how to navigate the debris and the disappointment with loved ones who were supposed to protect you and didn’t/couldn’t and didn’t want to speak aloud about it even when it is clearly needed for healing. Another not-to-be-missed collection; pre-order it now.

RATING: Cinquain

About the Poet:

Melissa Crowe is a poet, editor, and teacher. She was born in Presque Isle, Maine, but she currently lives with her family by the sea in Wilmington, North Carolina. Crowe is an assistant professor of Creative Writing and Coordinator of the MFA program at UNCW. Her first full-length collection, Dear Terror, Dear Splendor was published by University of Wisconsin Press in 2019, and her second book, Lo, won the Iowa Poetry Prize and is due out from the University of Iowa Press in May 2023.

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In Kind by Maggie Queeney

April 19, 2023 by

Source: Publisher
Paperback, 98 pgs.
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In Kind by Maggie Queeney, 2022 Iowa Poetry Prize winner to be published in May 2023, calls on the goddesses of old to illuminate the struggles of today. She deftly deals with trauma in a way that captures the darkness, the struggle, and the strength to move forward honoring that wound that makes up part of the whole person. In “My Given Name,” “Grit both the middle and the start of it://A bit of sand or shell shard, the hard/Speck of stone or flint or bone or beak—/What cannot be broken back//Into nothing, but offers an ever/Smaller division: this is what made me/What I am: Mar—as in mark, as in wound,//” (pg. 4)

Throughout her poems, transformation is taking place. Everything is unsettled in these poems, and it can be hard to get your bearings, but that’s to be expected given the subject matter (which those who have experienced trauma may want to consider before reading these poems). “We sang ourselves new bodies/the volume of our old hearts/” says the narrator in “Metamorphosis: The Daughters of Minyas Deny Ecstasy, Transform into Bats.”And in “A Charm, A Series of Survivals,” the narrator says, “He wrote his yes into my silence.” (pg. 21) Queeney demonstrates that old myths have something to teach us about punishments meted out to those who fail to conform to society’s expectations. They are unjust and harsh, but they also can become empowering enabling survivors to leverage those punishments as fuel in their own transformations and blossoming.

***(this is a graphic poem)*** Read the title poem, “In Kind,” at underbelly. It’s where I first saw Queeney’s work, and the differences between her draft poem and the final are amazing. Her poem builds from the rapping of the window washers’ ropes against the window, which take on the life of the traumatic memories, and these memories continue to haunt as the time passes and the narrator moves forward in the poem. The poem is not only about the witness and their trauma, but about the trauma of the victim who takes the actions leading to the witness’ trauma. It folds in on itself in a tragic way to remind us that “Nothing, and/no one ever enough.” Nothing could have prevented this tragedy. That’s the most hopeless moment in anyone’s life — knowing nothing you could have done would have saved a person you loved.

In Kind by Maggie Queeney is a deep exploration of trauma and transformation. It never shies away from the harsh realities and emotions of trauma, but it does seek to highlight the wounds can heal and be transformed into something that drives an individual’s healing and purpose. Do not miss this collection; pre-order it now.

RATING: Cinquain

About the Poet:

Maggie Queeney is the author of In Kind, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, forthcoming in 2023, and settler (Tupelo Press). She is recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize, the Ruth Stone Scholarship, and two IAP Grants from the City of Chicago. Her poems, stories, and hybrid works have been published widely. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University.

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Elegies for an Empire by Le Hinton

April 18, 2023 by

Source: the poet
Paperback, 65 pgs.
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***A portion of the purchase price of Hinton’s book ($15) will go to the Lancaster Cleft Palate Clinic.***

Elegies for an Empire by Le Hinton, is a gorgeous collection of poems paying homage to parents, ancestors, and others who came before, while realizing that the foundations and moments the poet leaves behind for children will be similarly in the past, even as they are present. In each step forward, there is an echo of the past, like his opening quote says from Ralph Ellison, “The end is the beginning and lies far ahead.” In the opening poem, “Asking for my Mother,” there’s the echo of a mother’s voice, urging the speaker to not only think on the past as a lesson, but to also employ it in a humble way. There’s a tension between doing something and praying about it, while at the same time, there is the urge to do something, move forward because one is praying about it.

Second Chance (pg. 18)

I carry my family's dreams
into this soil's darkness.

Inside this pod, I hold these hopes:

a fresh garden,
a tender lunar spring,
a faultless reputation.

No one here can sing my past

There is a sense of lament in each of these poems, but carried inside it is a hope that cannot be contained. Rise from the soil to build a garden anew, sit alongside the spirits of your ancestors to learn the past and how to navigate the future. These meditations signal to the reader that the hustle and bustle of our lives needn’t be the only driver of our action or inaction.

Hinton is tackling topics that we see on the news every day, and not all of us live in that reality but are mere observers. The question I come away with is: Why are you sitting idly on your hands and observing when you can take action to make change? Do all Black men have to have internal conversations about death when stopped by police? Is there a way to remedy this issue without more violence? How can we think our way out and take action?

The entire collection is not about darkness, death, and loss. There is love here. “Still Life with Desire,” shows us that even while masked and left with unspoken words, lovers can create something beautiful just as “Beethoven composing/his 9th within the enveloping silence.” (pg. 39) Elegiac song fills the air when so much is lost, but what about the things we’ve gained. “Consider your good fortune to have survived/a virus that has no conscience or taste buds/and disregards the pleasures of a lengthened life//Then peel the skin, slowly, intentionally,/noticing the tiny movement of flesh/beneath your fingers, the initial droplets//of the sweetest of juices.” (pg. 41, “How to Eat a Peach During a Pandemic”).

Elegies for an Empire by Le Hinton reminds everyone about the importance of connection to ourselves, to one another, to our ancestors, and yes, even to our enemies. In “Allies and Ancestors”, the poet says, “we’ll recycle these deaths/over again and again and over.” The energy of us never leaves. We are all still here, still connecting, still influencing.

RATING: Cinquain

About the Poet:

Poet, teacher, Le Hinton, is the author of seven collections including, most recently, Elegies for an Empire (Iris G. Press, 2023). His work has been widely published and can, or will be found in The Best American Poetry 2014, the Baltimore Review, The Skinny Poetry Journal, the Progressive Magazine, Little Patuxent Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere. His poem “Epidemic” won the Baltimore Review’s 2013 Winter Writers Contest and in 2014 it was honored by The Pennsylvania Center for the Book. His poem, “Our Ballpark,” can be found outside Clipper Magazine Stadium in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, incorporated into Derek Parker’s sculpture Common Thread.

He is the founder and co-editor of the poetry journal Fledgling Rag and the founder of Iris G. Press/I. Giraffe Press.

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Virtual Poetry Circle: Robert Herrick

April 15, 2023 by

To Daffodils

Fair Daffodils, we weep to see
You haste away so soon;
As yet the early-rising sun
Has not attain’d his noon.
Stay, stay,
Until the hasting day
Has run
But to the even-song;
And, having pray’d together, we
Will go with you along.

We have short time to stay, as you,
We have as short a spring;
As quick a growth to meet decay,
As you, or anything.
We die
As your hours do, and dry
Away,
Like to the summer’s rain;
Or as the pearls of morning’s dew,
Ne’er to be found again.

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Poetry Play: Creating a Fill-in Poem

April 14, 2023 by

When creating poems, I often view it as play. Playing with words, phrases, images, etc. Isn’t this what we do as children? We often make games out of everything, and teachers are great at making learning fun.

Today, let’s create a Fill-in poem. I’ll provide the phrase, and you provide the ending for each line.

Under the stars
under the moon
under the trees
under your arms, I am free.

Here’s a phrase for you to try:

Over ___________
Over ___________
Over ___________
Over ___________

Let’s see what you got!

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The Poet Who Loves Pythagoras by Fran Abrams

April 13, 2023 by

Source: Purchased
Paperback, 23 pgs.
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The Poet Who Loves Pythagoras by Fran Abrams is a delight. If you love math or don’t, it won’t matter as Abrams’ wry wit and precise storytelling will tickle your humor bone. She espouses her love of Pythagoras and his math in the opening poem, but she also has a few things to say about his philosophies. We all can’t be perfect, right?

What I love about Abrams’ work is that she can take the every day things we see and feel and make them new. Imagine the poem “Triangle” and see how Abrams transforms it into a poem about trysts and how people must have confused them with the word truss, one of the strongest architectural elements used. She juxtaposes the strength of the triangle with the instability of the tryst in just 7 stanzas.

Triangle (pg. 2)

the strongest shape
used in bridges and in trusses
to support floors and roofs

compression on legs
balanced by tension
across the base

difficult to break unless
one of the sides cracks—
then why is a love triangle

the same shape as a truss
how strong can it be
when it's made of two men

who love one woman or two women
who love one man or some other arrangement
of three not supposed to be in love

how long before one side
of the triangle will crack
causing the structure to fail

the answer becomes evident only
when someone realizes
they have confused tryst with truss

Her chapbook uses the base of math to explore our lives, making astute observations on love, family, and so much more. The Poet Who Loves Pythagoras by Fran Abrams is not to be missed.

RATING: Cinquain

Other Reviews:

About the Poet:

Fran Abrams lives in Rockville, MD. She holds an undergraduate degree in art and architecture and a master’s degree in urban planning. For 41 years, she worked in government and nonprofit agencies in Montgomery County, MD, where her work involved writing legislation, regulations, memos, and reports.

In 2000, before she retired, she began working as a visual artist. Then, after retiring in 2010, she devoted the majority of her time to her art. After attending a poetry reading in 2017, she realized she missed expressing herself in words and began taking creative writing classes at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD, where she concentrated on writing poetry. In September 2017, she traveled to Italy on a poetry retreat that strengthened her commitment to writing poems. She now devotes the most of her time to writing poetry.

Since 2017, her poems have been published online and in print in Cathexis-Northwest Press, The American Journal of Poetry, MacQueen’s Quinterly Literary Magazine, The Raven’s Perch, Gargoyle 74, and others. In 2019, she was a juried poet at Houston (TX) Poetry Fest and a featured reader at DiVerse Gaithersburg (MD) Poetry Reading. Her poems appear in more than a dozen anthologies, including the 2021 collection titled This is What America Looks Like from Washington Writers Publishing House (WWPH). In December 2021, she won the WWPH Winter Poetry Prize for her poem titled “Waiting for Snow.” Her first chapbook, titled “The Poet Who Loves Pythagoras,” is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Her first full-length manuscript, titled “I Rode the Second Wave: A Feminist Memoir,” is out now from Atmosphere Press.

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