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Summonings by Raena Shirali

October 12, 2022 by

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Paperback, 122 pgs.
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Summonings by Raena Shirali is an urgent calling of female personas in an effort to highlight the continued practice of daayan (witch) hunting in India. But even as Shirali conjures the spirits of these women, she is also summoning her own power as a westernized Indian woman to empathize and call attention to this practice and the unfair targeting of women.

As she points out in the foreword, “India is the world’s most dangerous country for women … The only Western nation in the top 10 was the United States…”

Shirali is fully aware that as a westernized Indian woman there is “distance/between self & subject.” (“on projection,” pg. 12) Her poems aim to bring these women into full-bodied poems based on what she knows about these “witches,” but it is hard to be a spirit without the lens of one’s own culture and upbringing. This mirrors her poem “ojha : rituals” where she questions what “truth” is, especially when it becomes subjective.

These poems are multi-layered and the longer you sit with these lines and images, the more you realize these stories are a conjuring of female power from ancestors and modern women who face oppression. Even as there is a reach for feminine power, there’s also a self-hatred Shirali struggles with: “i was shit & wanted/to be shit. & then i swallowed pretense. swallowed/countries” (“at first, trying to reach those accused” pg. 27) and in “summoning : retreat” (pg. 31) “digging in/the old-world soil/for common root.”

Shirali offers a “different way to look at the same/old face.” (“daayan gets her name” pg. 35) In summoning the spirits of these women, these so-called witches, she’s rewriting the narrative to include their truth, not just the stories that have been told about them. Her poems are when “the earth began to shift”(“daayan & the mountains : ii pg. 58-9). Summonings by Raena Shirali is asking us to reexamine who gets to ask, who answers, and who tells the story.

RATING: Quatrain

About the Poet:

Raena Shirali is the author of two collections of poetry. Her first book, GILT (YesYes Books, 2017), won the 2018 Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award, and her second, summonings (Black Lawrence Press, 2022), won the 2021 Hudson Prize. Winner of a Pushcart Prize & a former Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell University, Shirali is also the recipient of prizes and honors from VIDA, Gulf Coast, Boston Review, & Cosmonauts Avenue. Formerly a Co-Editor-in-Chief of Muzzle Magazine, Shirali now serves as Faculty Advisor for Folio—a literary magazine dedicated to publishing works by undergraduate students at the national level. She holds an MFA in Poetry from The Ohio State University and is an Assistant Professor of English at Holy Family University. The Indian American poet was raised in Charleston, South Carolina, and now lives in Philadelphia.

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Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me by Ada Calhoun

September 28, 2022 by

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Hardcover, 272 pgs.
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Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me by Ada Calhoun is a memoir that seems to have started out as a biography of Frank O’Hara, but really was an attempt by a daughter to capture her father’s attention through the poet that tethered, at least in part, their lives together. Peter Schjeldahl is an art critic who also wrote poetry, essays, and other works, and was immersed in the New York School of poetry in which O’Hara was considered a major poet. Calhoun has felt unseen by her father, according to the memoir, even as she, too, pursued a career in writing, though mostly as a ghostwriter.

Calhoun’s O’Hara journey begins long before she finds the tapes in her father’s drawer and starts to listen to the interviews he conducted when trying to write a biography of the poet. The ghost of the poet has haunted her father and their lives since the start – a father dejected by the cancellation of his biography on a man he admired and a man who threw himself into writing as a critic and more to the detriment of all else, even his own poetry (which some in the book praised to Ada).

For Ada, O’Hara’s poetry was a gift from her father, and through those poems, she experienced New York City in the way that she believed her father must have. She also used this connection to draw her own conclusions about her father and his obsessions, which may or may not have reflected reality for her father. In many ways, she equates O’Hara’s poet-ness with her father’s writer-ness and the obsessiveness it requires to shut everything else out, but what she fails to see early on is how both simply wanted to make connections and to reach out from their own emptiness and fill it up.

Calhoun is on a journey taken by her father years ago, and like many things when we seek something we don’t think we already have, it becomes a competition to do better and be better as a way to prove our worth to someone we desperately want approval from. Maureen Granville-Smith, O’Hara’s sister and executor of his estate, plays a pivotal role in both the journey of Calhoun and her father. What’s more is that Calhoun unravels this late in the memoir – almost too late.

Past the mid-way mark, Calhoun says something about confidence being “the age requirement for everything,” (pg. 134), and there is something to that. We all reach an age where we finally have that confidence we need to overcome certain obstacles or deal with certain moments in our lives, and it is through that we become capable and achieve the seemingly unachievable. This is where were are with the memoir, as well. She has reached that age of confidence where she can finally speak to her father as a writer to a writer and explore how each has lived that life very differently — he shutting everything else out and she carving out time from her other responsibilities to concentrate on writing alone in a chunk of time. And in many ways, she answers her own questions about “How ruthless do you need to be?” to be a writer.

Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me by Ada Calhoun is so much more than a memoir; it’s a peek inside the world and work of enigmatic artists and poets and how their lives unravel while they’re working at their craft and they are completely unaware. Calhoun is equally unaware, but soon she begins to realize that she’s seen the signs all along and that no writer/parent will ever be perfect because we are all flawed, we are all editing as we go along.

RATING: Cinquain

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The New Gods by William O’Daly

September 27, 2022 by

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Paperback, 92 pgs.
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The New Gods by William O’Daly is as unpredictable as the ocean’s waves, as the poet pushes us to action and halts our momentum for moments of reflection. Opening the collection with “The Fire” readers are dropped into a glade of sorts where water is tumbling to a hot canyon, and it is clear that despite the destruction of the fires in the forest and the danger to the birds and horses, there is still beauty here. Does that beauty survive? It’s hard to say, but O’Daly makes sure we pause to see it.

Moving further into that opening poem, O’Daly shifts the focus to the tension and angst we create with our fire of invention and the risks it carries. The hail of spitballs in a classroom reminding the narrator of the nuclear fission that could rip them to shreds and render the world of friends and brothers, etc., into vapor. It’s again another familiar scene that many of us recognize that is destroyed by an outside force that could be of our own making. In the final lines, it is clear that we are all just on the cusp of a precipice.

O’Daly has a keen eye for detail in these poems, creating a world you fall into and instantly recognize. But he also asks readers why “we live far from ourselves and/each other…” (pg. 35, “The Unwritten Letter”) It’s like a bird’s call for us to slow down, pay closer attention, and learn from what’s around us, what has come before, and even the destruction we cause. There are lessons to be gleaned and beauty even in that darkness.

The Flag Is Burning (pg. 37-8)

We, friend, are the body of the country
burning in the street,
eyes open against the sky,
the child running,
the mother on her knees
reaching for the soldier aiming,
the village on fire -- the shrapnel littered ruins
...

It is in this poem where we are reminded of our place in society and a country and that we are responsible equally for its actions if we remain inert. O’Daly revisits this concept again in “Handout,” where a huddled figure in the fog is feared by the narrator rather than shown compassion until his daughter takes action with her hand out to him, an offering of food. The New Gods by William O’Daly spans a great many subjects, historic moments, but it is in its quiet moments where he’s at work, teaching us that we are the “new gods,” the ones with the power to effect change.

RATING: Cinquain

Photo courtesy of Kristine Iwersen O’Daly

About the Poet:

William O’Daly’s most recent book of poems, The New Gods, which includes these poems, will be published by Beltway Editions on September 15, 2022. O’Daly has translated eight books of Pablo Neruda’s late and posthumous poetry and Book of Twilight, the Chilean Nobel Laureate’s first book.

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Falling Leaves: An Interfaith Anthology on the Topic of Consolation and Loss edited by Susan Meehan and Robert Bettmann

September 22, 2022 by

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Paperback, 96 pgs.
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Falling Leaves: An Interfaith Anthology on the Topic of Consolation and Loss edited by Susan Meehan and Robert Bettmann is a prayer for the anguish felt around the globe by each of us whether that be during the pandemic or at another point in our lives. Each poem is founded on a tradition in faith, but the poets reinterpret some of these traditions in their lines.

Offering prayers, acceptance, and healing, these poets are reaching out to readers to demonstrate that we are not alone in dealing with loss. No loss is greater than another; all are equally harrowing. Even in this loss there is connection to ourselves, our ancestors, and the future.

As Luther Jett points out in “Ha’azinu,” “… Don’t pretend/that I am up there/in the sky — aloof,/unattainable//Don’t imagine/that I am only in/the gentle places–/the sweet moments/you wish to recall.//” (pg.9-10) And in “Come Sunday,” Lori Tsang says, “I give thanks/for this chance/to remember/I am part/of something/Larger” (pg. 57-8)

Falling Leaves: An Interfaith Anthology on the Topic of Consolation and Loss edited by Susan Meehan and Robert Bettmann is anthology readers can turn to again and again to find comfort. If you experienced a loss, and we all have, this collection will help you see that you are not alone in that sea of grief.

RATING: Quatrain

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The Tradition by Jericho Brown

September 21, 2022 by

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Paperback, 77 pgs.
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A little unconventionally, I found Jericho Brown on Twitter without having read his poetry, but what he says on the platform caught my attention and I’ve followed him ever since. When the pandemic hit, I was a poet without a group of poets to fuel my revision and writing and I found a number of Zoom workshops and events to fill the void.

However, when the opportunity to have a workshop with Brown came up (for free), I was, first, stunned it would be free, and, second, that I could workshop with Brown! This workshop turned my writing on its ear. I have not forgotten his methods, his exercises, or his advice during that session. In many ways, his workshop led me to break out of the box I pinned myself in. With that in mind, I just had to pick up his book when I finally had money and could enter a bookstore in person again — yes, I waited because bookstore trips are like spiritual experiences.

Without further ado, here’s my review.

The Tradition by Jericho Brown explores the violence that has become tradition in the United States and elsewhere and its effects on not only the body, but the soul. He opens this collection with “Ganymede,” that breathes the modern world into Greek mythology and the kidnapping of the young Trojan by the gods and equates it with the taking and selling of slave children across the plantations. “The people of my country believe/We can’t be hurt if we can be bought.//” he says in the ultimate lines of the poem. How true and untrue that statement is. The truth of it is that they are harmed, but that others perceive that they are not because they are property.

From this opening, we know as readers we’re taking a journey into deeply emotional territory for Brown from the choice of a mother to side with a father and forsake her son to the bright lives of Black men and women who are cut down so easily and without remorse on the streets every day.

From "Bullet Points" (pg. 16)

...
Calling worst. I promise if you hear
of me dead anywhere near
A cop, then that cop killed me. He took
Me from us and left my body, which is,
No matter what we've been taught,
Greater than the settlement

But it isn’t just the violence against Blacks that he talks about, it is the coverup of history and that we gloss over the atrocities of our history. The stealing of land from native peoples, even as those people never laid claim to the land but merely subsisted on what it gave them. The conquering of other lands merely because we wanted to or could, all in the name of democracy or some other twisted ideal — only to turn our back on it when everyone wanted freedom.

The Tradition by Jericho Brown pushes us to ask why violence has become a standard for us and to look at where it comes from. It is rooted in all that we are as a nation. In order for us to find that “something vast” and to leap toward it, we must break this tradition and create something new.

RATING: Cinquain

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Make Me Rain by Nikki Giovanni

September 8, 2022 by

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Paperback, 144 pgs.
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Make Me Rain by Nikki Giovanni is a collection of prose and poems, with some of the prose answering pieces in The New York Times. Giovanni is unapologetic as she should be and lifts up not only relatives and friends, but infuses her poetry with a hope and confidence that some poets don’t find until they’ve lived a long life. Her poems revel in the Black experience, while at the same time decrying the hatred, racism, and white supremacy that the Black community – herself included – have endured.

In “You Talk About Rape” (for Donald Trump), Giovanni pulls no punches at his rhetoric and blatant disregard of women as property and playthings for his amusement. She reminds us that Blacks endured this type of suffering from the early days of the slave trade and what is left and what you do with it is how you survive. “Give me left/overs/and I will create/a cuisine//” she says, adding that she can use scraps to create a quilt. As a woman, she’s a creator, a possibilities maker, and someone who will not stand still and wait for you to impose your will on her.

Not all of these pieces are about darkness. There are tender moments in which Giovanni wishes to become a sweatshirt to cuddle close to those she loves and how her aunt showed her love in the dresses she made for little Nikki. Some poems make us realize that mortality cannot be escaped even if you do win all the poetry prizes and accolades, but it is how we are loved that most endures when we’re gone.

Make Me Rain by Nikki Giovanni pays homage to not only Blackness and the struggles of men in war, women in societal war, and so much more. As she reminds us, there’s always that struggle between the light and darkness, but “I like to think if Dark/sitting on the back porch/maybe drinking a beer/rocking back and forth/waiting for Light to come/” and “The sun sees them/on the rocker/…and sends them little pieces of color/asking them to come together/for who can say No/to the sun/” (pg. 106)

RATING: Cinquain

Other Reviews:

 

Also check out my Interview with Nikki Giovanni

 

Photo © Deborah Feingold

About the Poet:

Nikki Giovanni, poet, activist, mother, and professor, is a seven-time NAACP Image Award winner and the first recipient of the Rosa Parks Woman of Courage Award, and holds the Langston Hughes Medal for Outstanding Poetry, among many other honors. The author of twenty-eight books and a Grammy nominee for The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection, she is the University Distinguished Professor of English at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.

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Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman

August 30, 2022 by

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Hardcover, 240 pgs.
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Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman, which was the August read-a-long, is the first poetry collection by the youngest poet laureate to read at a presidential inauguration. Her poems read much like a spoken word poet would recite them. She plays a lot with poetic form, crafting lines into images of whales and masks, and placing poignant lines on the stripes of the American flag. Some of these image-focused poems work well, but others just seem to fall flat.

From "Cut" (pg.26-27)

Disease is physiological death,
Loneliness is a social one,
Where the old We collapses like a lung.
From "War: What, Is It Good? (pg. 118-124)

War, like a whale, is all consuming-
Everything fits into its mesh mouth.
Like a whale, a virus can wolf
Down the globe whole.
The bullet is a beast, as are we.
Our invisible battles
Are the hardest ones to win.

***

The first step in warfare & pandemics is the same:
Isolation, to rupture the channels of communication of
virus/violence."
Later in that poem on mask vs. no mask (pg. 144)

Why it's so perturbing for privileged groups to follow
restrictions of place & personhood.
Doing so means for once wearing the chains their power
has shackled on the rest of us.

Gorman tackles a lot of issues in this collection from slavery and racism to the COVID pandemic and its parallels with the 1918 Spanish flu. Water imagery and references to the slave ships travel throughout the collection, connecting the struggles together into the anchor that many still carry.

There is a lot of struggle and darkness in these poems, but she answers the call of how to move on with love, empathy, and connection. Gorman reminds us that there is hope for change, and that we can make those choices. We are not all that we carry with us.

From "School's Out" (pg. 17-8)

Their feet stomp at our life.
There is power in being robbed
& still choosing to dance.

Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman is strongest when it is passionate and honest, when the poems don’t rely too heavily on physical images or erasure to create declarative poems. Her honesty shines brightest in her youthful passion and I am eager to see more from this poet.

RATING: Tercet

This was our August read-a-long selection for the 2022 Poetry Reading Challenge. You can find those discussions below:

About the Poet:

Amanda Gorman is the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history, as well as an award-winning writer and cum laude graduate of Harvard University, where she studied Sociology. She has written for the New York Times and has three books forthcoming with Penguin Random House.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, she began writing at only a few years of age. Now her words have won her invitations to the Obama White House and to perform for Lin-Manuel Miranda, Al Gore, Secretary Hillary Clinton, Malala Yousafzai, and others. Amanda has performed multiple commissioned poems for CBS This Morning and she has spoken at events and venues across the country, including the Library of Congress and Lincoln Center. She has received a Genius Grant from OZY Media, as well as recognition from Scholastic Inc., YoungArts, the Glamour magazine College Women of the Year Awards, and the Webby Awards. She has written for the New York Times newsletter The Edit and penned the manifesto for Nike’s 2020 Black History Month campaign. In 2017, Amanda Gorman was appointed the first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate by Urban Word – a program that supports Youth Poets Laureate in more than 60 cities, regions and states nationally. She is the recipient of the Poets & Writers Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, and is the youngest board member of 826 National, the largest youth writing network in the United States.

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Crazy Brave by Joy Harjo

July 20, 2022 by

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Paperback, 171 pgs.
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Crazy Brave by Joy Harjo, which does include some poems, is what I would imagine a dream walk to be. Harjo shifts from moment to moment in a surreal walk through her memories. She explores her Native American heritage through the eyes of a young child and a woman who is looking for her place in a family and culture where women’s decisions/desires are secondary.

“In the end, we must each tend to our own gulfs of sadness, though others can assist us with kindness, food, good words, and music.” (pg. 23)

“I imagine this place in the story as a long silence. It is an eternity of gray skies. It runs the length of late elementary school through adolescence.” (pg. 63)

Throughout the memoir, there is a cleaving. A family broken apart by a step-father who seeks control over all in his dominion, even children who are not biologically his own and forces them to make adult decisions at too young an age. But there is also the breaking apart of a woman in that she needs to separate herself from that past and her current life to find a voice buried inside and trying to break free.

“For the true warriors of the world, fighting is the last resort to solving a conflict. Every effort is made to avoid bloodshed.” (pg. 150)

Harjo teaches that through pain and suffering there is still beauty and love. Loving oneself can provide the peace we seek, and it also enables us to find our own voices and trails. While she suffered from her mother’s decisions and her father’s abandonment, there is still love there for a family who gave her life. This is not a complete life story, but it is a journey — it is Harjo’s path to poetry. Crazy Brave by Joy Harjo is a homage to those that came before, a nod to her present, and a dream for a future.

RATING: Quatrain

About the Poet:

Joy Harjo is an American poet, musician, playwright, and author. She served as the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold that honor. She was also only the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to have served three terms.

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Scale Model of a Country at Dawn by John Sibley Williams

July 7, 2022 by

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Paperback, 85 pgs.
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Scale Model of a Country at Dawn by John Sibley Williams, winner of the 2020 Cider Press Review Book Award, is a collection that defies categorization. The opening poem, “The Gift,” establishes the poet’s framework for the collection, crafting a gift for the reader that will endure despite his loss and contain the harsh and beautiful moments of life. “Just a rough little box built from my bones/to keep the bones you’ll collect in.//” (pg. XIII)

Although there are more personal stories and imaginings within these poems, Williams is taking us (the reader) on a journey into the darker underbrush, the innate desire to seek out and understand the underbelly of humanity and life. “We all need something to scream into,” he says in “Ordinary Beasts.” This poem leads us to the build up of frustration and anger that can come with being part of society, family, and life in general. He further examines this darkness in humanity with “Like a plague of locusts,” in which it is clear that our presence and our actions have led to changes in the landscape: “This is not the sky/our grandmothers taught us to pray to;//this canvas of bald trees & splintered/schools not like anything//we can shape a childhood from./” (pg. 6)

Williams is building to something in this collection; he’s not espousing a particular philosophy or way of thinking. He’s merely building the framework that is humanity in all its emotions and faults. In the title poem, “Scale Model of a Country at Dawn,” he lays down what it means to be a father and raise a “man,” but the choice always remains with the son, just as it did with him as a boy. How do we take what has been taught and modeled for us and become our own person?

As It Is on Earth (pg. 26)

It's like that sometimes. A man bends
so completely he begins believing in
his own holiness. An empty house
kids are too scared to vandalize sees itself
in time as haunted. Even the moon
our dogs wail to each night as if in prayer
fears a response is expected. The war
my brother brought home & the home he 
pined for in war converge in an unruly
absence. Is it finally fair to say like gods
we make images to pour ourselves into?
Like rivers, how they tend to move
farther from the source? What skin
remembers & the mind reimagines:

between them a truth serrated as light.

Throughout Williams’ collection, there is a tension between what we desire and what is reality and between what we envision and what becomes. “Sinkholes” is a gem of a poem that illustrates this idea of ideals and memories versus reality and the uncontrollable. The “scale model” is the start of the country, but how we build it and repair it is the legacy. “Like the sky, roofs are meant to leak, bow./& replacing the buckets every night is a ritual//” (pg. 78, “Restoration”)

RATING: Cinquain

Other Reviews:

About the Poet:

John Sibley Williams is the author of seven poetry collections, including Scale Model of a Country at Dawn (Cider Press Review Poetry Award), THE DROWNING WORKS (Elixir Press Poetry Award), As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press), and Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize). A twenty-six-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Wabash Prize for Poetry, Philip Booth Award, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, and Laux/Millar Prize. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and founder of the Caesura Poetry Workshop series. Previous publishing credits include Best American Poetry, Yale Review, Verse Daily, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and TriQuarterly.
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Inventory of Doubts by Landon Godfrey

June 2, 2022 by

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Paperback, 84 pgs.
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Doubts follow us in our daily lives, much like the little devils on the shoulders of cartoon characters. Listing our doubts in a journal or simply writing a list when we tackle something new or challenge ourselves can help reduce our anxiety and fear. Landon Godfrey explores these ideas in the collection, Inventory of Doubts, but rather than rely on a human voice, Godfrey has anthropomorphized objects like a feather boa, a dishrag, a box, and many others.

In her prose-like stories, these objects come alive, they become more than the discarded thing. An antique inkwell is not as sophisticated or as academic as it is perceived, and the attic stuffed with discarded items that we no longer care for wishes to be eaten away by termites so it could see the sky and be in awe. Godfrey has collected the uncollectable — silence. We know these objects and their purposes because we have assigned them, but in the silence, is that all that they are? Only what we’ve determined them to be? “Unable to fit in anyone’s pocket, a jealous boulder considers cures for loneliness while it pauses on a cliff.” (“Boulder,” pg. 7)

These objects are stand-ins. They are placeholders for greater questions about our own purposes and our own determinations of what is good and useful and what is to be praised and what is to be frowned upon. Like the dishrag that “experiments with justice, releasing some moisture back into the freedom of air, while retaining a few drops of water indefinitely in a grease-guarded cell.” (pg. 17) Our own experiments, like that of the dishrag, often do not have the best results, but there is always time for change, for reparations. Just like the rag, we too can be reshaped and given new purpose.

Godfrey’s Inventory of Doubts are as fantastical as they are rooted in our own realities. Our conversations with ourselves and our constant “little voices” often have us running in circles or falling into circular patterns of logic, leaving us little room to expand. This collection is an exploration of the human condition: “The seep and clot of it. The furtive fingers of it. The blob and spread of it. The orgy of it. The impossible to remove of it.” (“Stain,” pg. 64) Gloriously imaginative, surprising, and haunting.

RATING: Cinquain

About the Poet:

Landon Godfrey is the recipient of a 2013 Regional Artist Project Grant and a 2011-2012 North Carolina Arts Council Artist Fellowship. In selecting her first book, “Second-Skin Rhinestone-Spangled Nude Soufflé Chiffon Gown,” for the Cider Press Review Book Award, David St. John writes, “Never has the sumptuous materiality of language felt more seductive than in Landon Godfrey’s remarkable debut collection, ‘Second-Skin Rhinestone-Spangled Nude Soufflé Chiffon Gown.’ These exquisite poems are both sensually compelling and intellectually rigorous—a rare feat indeed. The iridescence of this marvelous volume continues to glow long after one has turned out the lights.” Printed at Asheville BookWorks, a limited edition letterpress chapbook, “In the Stone: Three Prose Poems,” will be published in Spring 2013. Landon’s poems have appeared in journals and anthologies—including The Southeast Review, Lyric, Chelsea, POOL, Studium in Polish translation, and Best New Poets 2008—featured at Verse Daily and Broadsided, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her prose on poetry has been published by Q Avenue Press and Gulf Coast, and is forthcoming from Voltage Poetry. Born and raised in Washington, DC, she now lives in Black Mountain, NC, with her husband, poet Gary Hawkins.

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Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong

June 1, 2022 by

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Hardcover, 128 pgs.
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Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong is a tumultuous collection of poetry in which the poetry is narrated by someone searching for love, acceptance, and a home. The collection opens with a surreal image of “The Bull,” in which the narrator calls himself a murderer of his own childhood. There is this sense that the narrator does not wish to grow up but has no choice but to become more mature. This signals to the reader that something has shifted in his world.

When the reader gets to “Snow Theory,” we see that a mother has vanished from the narrator’s life and he pleads: “What we’ll always have is something we lost/In the snow, the dry outline of my mother/Promise me you won’t vanish again, I said/She lay there awhile, thinking it over/One by one the houses turned off their lights/I lay down over her outline, to keep her true/Together we made an angel/” This is the moment where the journey begins and the poetic narrator is no longer anchored.

Throughout the collection, Vuong explores what it means to be loved and where love cannot be found. How a sense of belonging is integral to mental health and how the journey can nearly destroy you.

The image of snow appears throughout the collection, and it gives readers a sense of stillness, perhaps paralysis. It may be that the narrator is unable to fully move forward until they deal with the deep emotional loss of their mother, but it seems like the narrator is more adrift because they are unable to navigate the hatred he faces because of whom he loves.

There are a number of intriguing images throughout the collection, including the morgue as a community center, but some of these ideas are not fully fleshed out and leave the reader wandering in a surreal world without any breadcrumbs to follow. Perhaps this was intentional because like the narrator, the reader will feel adrift. Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong is a journey into the unknown.

Enter the GoodReads giveaway by Jun. 15, 2022.

RATING: Tercet

About the Poet:

Ocean Vuong is the author of the debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, out from Penguin Press (2019). He is also the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2016, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. A Ruth Lilly fellow from the Poetry Foundation, his honors include fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, The Elizabeth George Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, and the Pushcart Prize.

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Memory and Desire by Gregory Luce

May 18, 2022 by

Source: Purchased
Paperback, 38 pgs.
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Memory and Desire by Gregory Luce is an undulating collection of poems filled with the roller coaster ride of desire and love, but also the tricky thing we call memory. The opening poem, “Desire,” speaks of an empty vessel that is filled and emptied, flowing in and out with the tidal waves of want. But like the vessel, an “indifferent” moon is pushing and pulling the waves – desire is everywhere. In the second poem, “Poem Beginning With a Found Line,” there’s the inkling of a chance meeting that doesn’t happen. But the lives of these two people run in parallel throughout. It’s one of those “what if” poems and it’s aching with longing.

Luce’s love poems in this collection will have readers sighing with longing and joy, especially with beautiful lines like “She could turn/and slide sideways/like a trick of the light./” in “Love Story.” (pg. 5) Or in “The Mechanism of Joy,” where “she floats in/all legs and tresses/clothes billowing as/light pours in/from every direction/and dust motes pulse/like electric particles/moving up the back/of my neck…/” (pg. 17-18)

But there’s also a sense of being adrift, too. In “Torn from a Notebook,” a narrator rushes through a subway station alone, “On the train you are/jostled, shaken, a dry/stick fallen away/from the bundle.//” (pg. 10) One of my favorite poems, “The wish to be an insect,” is so reminiscent of Kafka, I couldn’t help but imagine it — a man as an insect scurrying around. Something I’ve often wondered about traveling in the city full of people rushing here and there. There’s a loneliness in that scurrying, but also a sense of community and belonging – at least the desire for it.

Memory and Desire by Gregory Luce was a delightful read and full of surprising images and desires. Definitely includes some poems you’d want to read to someone you love, but it also includes some reflective pieces about belonging and community.

RATING: Cinquain

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About the Poet:

Gregory Luce is the author of the chapbooks Signs of Small Grace (Pudding House Publications) and Drinking Weather (Finishing Line Press), and the collection Memory and Desire (Sweatshoppe Publications). His poems have appeared in numerous print and online journals, including Kansas Quarterly, Cimarron Review, Innisfree Poetry Review, If, Northern Virginia Review, Foundling Review, MiPOesias, Praxilla, Little Patuxent Review, The Rusty Nail, Rising Tide Review, Cactus Heart, Faircloth Review, and in the anthologies Living in Storms (Eastern Washington University Press) and Bigger Than They Appear (Accents Publishing). He lives in Washington, D.C., where he works as Production Specialist for the National Geographic Society. When not working or writing poems, he enjoys reading, birdwatching, hiking, bicycling, and spending time with his sons, Alex and Theo.

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