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Poems From the Asylum by Martha H. Nasch, edited by Janelle Molony and introduced by Jodi Nasch Decker

March 16, 2022 by

Source: Publicity
Paperback, 336 pgs.
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Poems From the Asylum by Martha H. Nasch, edited by Janelle Molony, with an introduction from Jodi Nasch Decker, is part poetry collection, part family history and mystery, and part examination of psychiatric practices at the time of Nasch’s confinement at St. Peter State Hospital in St. Peter, Minnesota.

I don’t plan to explore much of the history of her family or how she and her husband got together, had a child, were separated by her confinement, and eventually split up. The history is informative regarding her life, though there are some mysteries regarding her treatment at the hospital and her procedure that seemed to make her more ill after birthing her son. I’d rather focus on the poems, but the whole book is an interesting exploration of this family, its dynamics, psychiatric care at the time, and so much more. About 80 pages are dedicated to the family history, family tree, maps of the neighborhoods, and more. About two-thirds of the book is Martha’s poetry, written while she was in the asylum.

**Of note is that there are asides detailing the meaning of metaphors used by Martha, as well as other techniques, which too me seemed overdone and extraneous, but to others could be helpful.**

From the early poems, it is clear that Martha feels betrayed, whether her poems are about a specific or imagined infidelity by her husband, it is unclear. Martha does not specify with whom or when the affair occurs, but it is clear that she is devastated. “When the dearest one she had on earth was unfaithful to his wife./” (from “Forbidden Lust,” pg. 94) Many of these poems read like short diary entries, seeming to be the way in which Martha tries to make sense of the heartache she feels as she has nothing else to do in the asylum but feel and wallow. She even wishes that he could feel the bitterness she does, but by the time he begs her for forgiveness, it will be too late, she says in “Failure.”

In many ways her poems fit nicely in the modernist movement of poetry, mirroring a stream of consciousness style but with rhyme.

One of my favorite poems in the collection is “A Cottonwood Tree.” Martha remembers her love of nature and the changes of seasons, but soon comes to a realization that she has become like the tree, losing its leaves and entering its fall season. “To have no world, nor loved ones near,/All nature’s beauty marred./To be cast into hell, alive,/And in an asylum, barred.//” (pg. 121)

Not all of these poems are merely dedicated to her role as wife and mother. There are some about other patients, etc. These are equally as interesting. Poems From the Asylum by Martha H. Nasch, edited by Janelle Molony, with an introduction from Jodi Nasch Decker, gives readers a glimpse into world of asylums at the time, and into the mind of a woman isolated from her family.

RATING: Quatrain

Check out this interview with Janelle Molony and Jodi Nasch Decker:

Filed Under: challenges, New Authors Challenge, poetry, Poetry Reading Challenge, Read in 2022, review copy, reviews Tagged With: , , ,

The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country by Amanda Gorman

March 15, 2022 by

Source: Gift
Hardcover, 30 pgs.
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The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country by Amanda Gorman is a beautiful book that tries to hold the hope of this poem inside its covers, but fails. The hope of Gorman’s poem oozes out of the stanzas, breaks free from the line breaks, and sizzles off the page. It’s hard to believe that she’s only our 6th poet to read at an inauguration. Where have these presidents been that they didn’t seek the powerful words of poets in their own times?

I digress. The foreword in this book is by Oprah Winfrey, and it’s about what you would expect it to be. She pulls quotes from the poem like many reviewers do and she talks about Gorman’s words, the themes, and more. But I wasn’t overly impressed with it and felt that the poem can stand on its own, just as it did at the inauguration.

It’s funny because I started this blog so many years ago, looking at individual poems in magazines, rather than full collections. And here I am again, looking at a single poem that is as powerful and beautiful as the world around us. We just need our eyes to be opened.

Is our world broken? In some ways, it is. And we do carry our losses, like we wade in the sea and the “norms” are not “justice” or “just is,” they are ripe for change and we can make them… for the better. “Victory,” Gorman says, “won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges/we’ve made.” We mustn’t forget, “History has its eyes on us.”

RATING: Cinquain

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So Much of Everything by Jenn Koiter

March 9, 2022 by

Source: GBF
Paperback, 80 pgs.
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So Much of Everything by Jenn Koiter, which won the DC Poet Project award in 2021, explores the broken pieces we become to find the whole. Through persona poems, particularly those with the “messy girl” and “candy girl,” Koiter explores what it means to be broken and keep going. The title itself speaks to the overwhelm that many of us have felt at one time or another in our lives, with many of us having that sense during the pandemic. Dealing with grief and sudden loss, Koiter takes us on a roller coaster of emotions, but her words resonate no matter the readers’ experiences.

Her opening poem, “Easter Night,” establishes the atmosphere of hope even in the darkness where there is the chill of services and the heels sinking into grass: “Since yesterday, the earth has tilted./The day’s last light curves/differently over my arm/on its habitual armrest, then dims/and dims to night.//What will I do with darkness in this new life?//” (pg. 1)

Koiter’s poems are otherworldly, like we’re swimming in her thoughts and trying to make sense of things like she is.

In “The Messy Girl Drives Eastward, with Impending Migraine,” her lines call to the beautiful topsy-turvy nature she’s experiencing: “Lines of birds shift in the air like words that cannot stay still/on the page, latecomers looking for a place/in an already crowded field.” Or the young girl pushing her way onto the swing set “as if/I had never left, as if I could insist/there be no world without me” in “Samsara.” (pg. 42)

As readers move through the collection, grief surfaces and falls beneath the surface. In “After Thanksgiving,” the narrator is eating brandied cranberries in yogurt, but not because she loves these leftovers particularly. It is because they make her feel closer to her mother.

The mind is always churning, it is worrying like the narrator who “worries scab after scab” in “The Messy Girl Carries a Torch for the Boy Who Could Not Stop Washing.” And in “Live Portrait” where the painter is getting the model’s image on the canvas and only “The portrait can bear/the weight of all that/looking”.

So Much of Everything by Jenn Koiter a ball of our anxieties unraveled until we can do little more than see them for what they are — weights we place squarely on our own shoulders and those that we don’t. The trick is to discern which anxieties we can handle because they are our own perceptions (which we can change) and those that are heavy with loss and grief and must be accepted. “meaning today I am at my most/human, meaning I am not okay and/I’m okay” (pg.76) And it is okay to be on that precipice of everything.

RATING: Cinquain

About the Poet:

Jenn Koiter is a writer, marketer, entrepreneur and breathworker. The winner of the 2021 DC Poet Project, Jenn’s debut poetry collection, “So Much of Everything,” was published in 2021 by Day Eight. Her poems and essays have appeared in Barrelhouse, Smartish Pace, Bateau, Ruminate, Copper Nickel and other journals. She lives in Washington, D.C., with three gerbils named Sputnik, Cosmo and Unit. Visit her on Twitter.

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The Damage Done by Susana H. Case

March 3, 2022 by

Source: GBF
Paperback, 100 pgs.
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The Damage Done by Susana H. Case (on sale as of March 1 at Broadstone – click the image to save) is a poetic narrative that explores the covert, illegal projects of the FBI, including its counter intelligence program, COINTELPRO, which was used to infiltrate domestic political organizations like the Black Panthers, feminist groups, communist organizations, and others. Janey, a fashion model in the 1960s, and her fictional murder serve as a vehicle through which Case weaves her poetic narrative.

"Woman Identified" (pg. 12)

...Janey looks untroubled
and is running in a bold-patterned

dress past a bridge, debris in soft
focus piled off by the side.
The detective laughs about it later
with his buddies, a strange photo
to sell clothes you can't even

clearly see. Surrounded by rubble.
Painted-on eyelashes - as if
she's a child's doll - 
she looks as if she could blow
away. Part of her did.

Case’s voice reads like crime thriller and a noir detective tale in which a young lady is tired of her modeling life, falls into gun running and pill popping, even as her husband strives to place his heavy boot on her and rein her in. The collection opens with a dead girl in a car – Janey – and the detective on the case continues to face roadblocks to solving her murder. Is it easier to go along with the FBI’s theories or investigate a murder of a young woman. And how the decision weighs on the detective and pushes him further to drink and unravel himself.

The paranoid atmosphere infuses her lines in “The Psychiatric Institute”: “Janey thought the Feds were after her,/She was right. The cops/all agree she was a wacko.” Case has a cast of believable characters in her collection, and while it is poetry; it’s hard not to turn the pages to see what happens next, much like reading a thriller. It’s an examination of psychological motivations, an illegal FBI program that may still be operating, and the lives that it destroyed in the name of justice.

I could not put down The Damage Done by Susana H. Case once I picked it up. This is one poetry collection that will have you on the edge of your seat.

RATING: Cinquain

About the Poet:

Susana H. Case, Ph. D., is the author of eight books of poetry. The Damage Done, from Broadstone Books (2022) is her newest. Dead Shark on the N Train, from Broadstone Books (2020), won a Pinnacle Book Award for Best Poetry Book, a NYC Big Book Awards Distinguished Favorite, and was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Drugstore Blue, from Five Oaks Press, won an Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY). She is also the author of five chapbooks, two of which won poetry prizes. Her poems appear widely in magazines and anthologies. Recent poems can be found in: Calyx, The Cortland Review, Fourteen Hills, Portland Review, Potomac Review, Rattle, and RHINO, among others. She has been published via translation into Polish, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. Case is co-editor, with Margo Taft Stever, of I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe, Milk and Cake Press (2022).

Case is a co-editor of Slapering Hol Press and co-curates, with Lynn McGee (series founder), Sandy Yannone, and Carolyne Wright, the W-E (West-East) Bicoastal Poets of the Pandemic and Beyond series which features writers from both coasts and many other regions. She recently retired as Professor from the New York Institute of Technology in New York City, where she taught for thirty-eight years.

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Ashes to Justice by R.E.I.L.

March 1, 2022 by

Source: GBF
Paperback, 46 pgs.
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(**note that this collection could be triggering for child abuse survivors)

Ashes to Justice by R.E.I.L. is a deeply personal collection of poetic resilience and strength. The opening poem, “Piece for PEACE” is a tribute to her grandmother and the strength she showed the young girl every day and the devastation of loss the young woman feels due to her grandmother’s passing. It’s a poem of learning to live without a loved one, but also an homage to the strength a grandmother instilled in a granddaughter: “my mind was dedicated/To being the strongest woman I could ever be/You are my hero, and I miss you/” (pg. 1)

It is clear that this poet has suffered, but she has chosen to strive for strength and resilience. Her poetry explores her efforts and her setbacks, but it is clear she will not let the abuse rule her life and take her down. From “Her Testimony,” “A little girl sad/Her life had no glory//And she wanted me to tell her story/She wants you to know that it feels good to be alive//This young girl died four times/Then was brought back to life!//” (pg. 3) It is through this spoken-word style that the narrator of the poem unpacks the sexual abuse story and brings forth the concept of “Reborn Early In Life” (R.E.I.L.). It becomes a moniker that sets the redemptive tone for the entire collection.

She strives to explore what “sexy” means and how it should be defined by not only society but ourselves. These poems are a sussing out of the past and the narrative present to determine how she should be viewed by herself, her lovers, and ultimately, what love and affection should be and how it should feel. The poet also tackles familial love and how it should be. In “A Real Man,” she implores a father to console her and the understand that not everything is about him.

Ashes to Justice by R.E.I.L. is a cathartic journey for a survivor of abuse, but it also is a lesson in how to learn what love is and not just what you’ve been given. It’s a soul-searching collection in which “where I come from” shouldn’t and doesn’t dictate who you are and what you deserve out of life. “Realizing that no one person is the problem/But we’re all part of the solution/And somewhere between here now and then/We need a resolution//” (pg. 29-31; “Fighting Temptations”)

RATING: Quatrain

About the Poet:

R.E.I.L. started her poetry career at open mics in the D.C. area and at 16 competed in the Brave New Voices slam in New York City. A poetic performer, visual artist, and arts educator teaching in D.C. schools, R.E.I.L. seeks inspiration from past and present life experiences to help the lives of other unsung souls.

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Where We Stand: Poems of Black Resilience edited by Melanie Henderson, Enzo Silon Surin, and Truth Thomas

February 24, 2022 by

Source: Purchased
Paperback, 140 pgs.
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Where We Stand: Poems of Black Resilience edited by Melanie Henderson, Enzo Silon Surin, and Truth Thomas is a gorgeous magazine quality anthology of poignant poems about Black Americans’ experiences, joys, passions, and frustrations. But it is more than that. It is a look at where we are as a culture and nation today. The opening poem, “Fear of Dogs and Other Animals” by Shauna Morgan, explores the fear Black Americans carry every day as they go to work, to school, for a walk. White America is the dog snarling. In the poem, the brother warns his sister that she should not run from the dog, but stand her ground and bear her own teeth and growl. It also is a tragic story of what a brother knew and tried to explain to his sister. But not all of these poems are dark. There is joy and passion.

From "This Crooked Day Dance" by Alan King (pg. 114)

...The empty passenger seat aches
like a hole in my gums. My heart if a bag
of stones...

Alan King, Teri Cross Davis, Reuben Jackson, and many others in this collection have appeared on this blog before, and their poems in this anthology are exceptional as always. But I was so enamored with the voices I am unfamiliar with. So many talented poets! I absolutely loved “Practice” by Brandon Johnson. A father talking to his children about his hopes for how they will use their voice to protest bigger injustices than just being told to clean their rooms or do their homework.

From "Practice" (pg. 76-77)

...
When you're called to pick up arms against anything
Not physically endangering you, or yours
I want to hear you let loose.
In the same manner as when I tell you to pick up your room
...

Make governments, and men, answer
The same questions you ask your parents.
Why?
....

I cannot praise the quality of this collection enough. From the heavy weight paper to the gorgeous cover and photographs inside, this collection is a tribute to the Black experience in a way that will leave a lasting impression. Harsh realities are in these pages, and I hope that wider audiences (looking at all of you) pick this up. I cannot express how emotional each poem is and how much these poems spoke to American reality. We need more of these stories to be told, held close, and used to inform a better future for all of America.

Do not pass up this opportunity. Get yourself a copy of Where We Stand: Poems of Black Resilience edited by Melanie Henderson, Enzo Silon Surin, and Truth Thomas.

RATING: Cinquain

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Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant by Indran Amirthanayagam

February 23, 2022 by

Source: GBF
Paperback, 90 pgs.
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Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant by Indran Amirthanayagam opens with the “Migrant Song,” part plea, part love song to those who have fled homes to make new ones. “We write/poems for our tribes, making one tribe of/every beating heart sending blood through/the veins of one earth.” (pg. 3) This poem sets the tone for the collection. While many of these poems tackle tough issues of racism, institutional racism, a presidential election that threw a country into crisis, and so much more, Amirthanayagam bears witness to it all, but unlike the journalist observing, he’s participating in change. He’s calling voters in conservative locations, speaking to them one-on-one, writing letters, trying to express a different view but always with an open hand and heart.

One of the most beautiful lines in this collection comes in “Soul Rising”: (pg. 25)

I miss you something fierce;
I have to tell my bones to
stop shaking, to calm
down, that there is something
called work, poetry, cleaning
the room, getting food
together, attending to mother,
reading fine print in polling,
picking up the phone, cold-
calling a Texan in the name of
participatory democracy, the
nation's and the earth's soul...

In this poem, about a third of the way through, it is clear that democracy matters and it should matter to all of us. We should be taking the time to speak to one another — face-to-face, phone-to-phone, video-to-video — anything to keep the democratic dialogue going. Like I said, more than poems of witness. These are poems of action.

From "Artist's Role" (pg. 47)

...Can we continue
to make light and gladden hearts while the virus kills
and one gang leader tries to steal the democracy, unmasked?

Despite the darkness we face in America — the something “too rotten in the fridge” and the “blackening hole” and the “spilling of blood” — Amirthanayagam is still hopeful. There is light in the ship that carries democracy in the hold and the crossing of John Lewis bridge, and the dermatologist who is able to freeze the blackening hole and removing it before cancer takes over. “Writing a poem is/the easiest option, the only one I can/imagine and control. Although war is/everywhere, and it is time to raise/our hands and say no, not past this line.//” (“Not Beyond This Line, pg. 58)

It may take 10,000 steps, but freedom and peace are worth every stone stuck in your shoe, every bead of sweat that falls, and every emotional emptying it takes. Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant by Indran Amirthanayagam explores the freedom of an open heart that allows us to “embrace the darkness and accept each other’s/absolute freedom to fly to the other end of the earth.” (“The Candle (Migratory Bird), pg. 87)

RATING: Cinquain

About the Poet:

Indran Amirthanayagam writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole. He has published over twenty books of poetry, including Blue Window (translated by Jennifer Rathbun), The Migrant States, Coconuts on Mars, The Elephants of Reckoning (winner 1994 Paterson Poetry Prize), Uncivil War, and The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems. In music, he recorded Rankont Dout. He edits the Beltway Poetry Quarterly (www.beltwaypoetry.com); curates www.ablucionistas.com; writes https://indranamirthanayagam.blogspot.com; co-directs Poets & Writers Studio International; writes a weekly poem for Haiti en Marche and El Acento; and hosts The Poetry Channel (https://youtube.com/user/indranam). He has received fellowships from the Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, The US/Mexico Fund for Culture, and the Macdowell Colony. He is a 2021 Emergent Seed grant winner. Forthcoming new books include Powèt nan po la (Poet of the Port) and Isleño.

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Water Shedding by Beth Konkoski

February 22, 2022 by

Source: GBF
Paperback, 26 pgs.
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Water Shedding by Beth Konkoski is a chapbook of stunning images that illustrate the shedding of an old self to make way for the emergence of another. In the opening poem, “Linger,” the narrator recalls how they needed to fit into a mold of another. “Burning any fringe/or edge you don’t like,/I beg to fit in your chosen/mold, to slide like a wedge/of orange between your teeth./” But the poem unravels this past to show readers that even as it hurts to break this mold, the narrator must relearn to use muscles that haven’t done much lifting.

From "Fragile, Do Not Drop" (pg. 2)

On a good day, I sense I'm breathing through glass
not shards cutting deep, just a dome of fine glass

I can almost press my hand to the edges,
but then fall, an insect captured beneath glass.

In each of these poems there is an energy that is contained, and while the narrator laments the lack of freedom to just be who they are, they also are afraid of what’s outside the safety of their carefully crafted world. But in “When I Was Eleven,” we see a brief moment of that freedom as the children head out into the night to catch fireflies or ride off on their bikes in summer. Later in “Sleep-Away Camp,” Konkoski explores the tight grip of fear with the story of Hansel and Gretel. She illustrates how fear is limiting, leaving the children without knowledge of the truffles in the forest or the beauty of the creek because the fear of the witch is ever prominent in their lives. “…we cage them with safety/and wonder when they do not flourish.” (pg. 6)

Water Shedding by Beth Konkoski takes readers on a journey through motherhood, being a daughter and a wife. She discovers the beauty in the cages, while slowly breaking free from the fear that creates those confinements. Her poems evoke nature in a way that calls readers to take a breath in their own lives and really consider the beauty in it. We do not need to completely shed ourselves to be free, but we can bend like the river and flow like the water beneath the obstacles and around them.

RATING: Quatrain

About the Poet:

Beth Konkoski is a writer and high school English teacher who lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and two children. She has published poetry, fiction, and non-fiction in more than fifty literary journals. Her first chapbook of poems, “Noticing the Splash,” was published in 2010 by BoneWorld Press.

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Dear Diaspora by Susan Nguyen

February 17, 2022 by

Source: GBF
Paperback, 78 pgs.
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Dear Diaspora by Susan Nguyen, winner of The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, is almost a letter to those who have left their homeland in Vietnam. We begin with a flight in “The Body as a Series of Questions:” (pg. 1)

I was running fast because of what was behind me
the bridge existed a few steps before me then disappeared
through wooden slats rose the sound of rainwater
I absorbed the sound until there was nothing else

Suzi is a young teen of immigrant parents who is living an American dream, but she observes the hardships of her parents. A mother who comes home from working, “hair limp, deflated like a paper bag” in “Suzi’s Mother Does Nails” (pg. 7) Suzi sees the hardships, but she also sees the disappearances. Her father is a man who still seems to be running in the jungles to the waterways searching for fish, for something, on little to no sleep.

In “Letter to the Diaspora” (pg. 14), the poet asks, “Does memory eat the body?” Memory can be an all consuming beast sometimes, as we recall those we’ve lost, the past that is marred by danger and fleeing. Sometimes memory can consume you so much that you “exist at the edges.”

Dear Diaspora by Susan Nguyen is a stunning debut that looks trauma in the eyes and dares it to consume us. It’s a navigation of one generation through the grief of another. “Grief says little: yes, no. Does not say where her father has gone, does not say how to speak the language of her mother.” (“Sitting Down With Grief,” pg. 49)

RATING: Cinquain

About the Poet:

Susan Nguyen‘s debut poetry collection, Dear Diaspora, won the 2020 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was published by the University of Nebraska Press in Sept 2021.

Nguyen’s poetry is often interested in the body: how geography, history, and trauma leave markers, both visible and invisible. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize and have appeared or are forthcoming in The Rumpus, Tin House, Diagram, and elsewhere. She is an alum of Tin House Winter & Summer Workshops and Idyllwild Writers Week. Her hobbies, beyond reading and writing, include photography, zinemaking, hiking, and otherwise being outdoors.

Nguyen recieved her BA, English from Virginia Tech and her MFA, poetry from Arizona State University where she was the poetry editor for Hayden’s Ferry Review. She has taught creative writing at ASU and the National University of Singapore and she received a fellowship from the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing to conduct an oral history project centered on the Vietnamese diaspora. She was named one of “three women poets to watch in 2018” by PBS NewsHour.

Follow her on Instagram.

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Your Words, Your World by Louise Bélanger

February 15, 2022 by

Source: the Poet
Paperback, 99 pgs.
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Your Words, Your World by Louise Bélanger, which toured with Poetic Book Tours, is a collection of nature photography and poetry. To me, however, the poems read more like a daily devotional, something many of us may need as the pandemic continues into its 3rd year. It’s a collection that reminds us of the beauty around us and how we tend to be too busy with our lives to notice the miracles in our gardens or parks.

from "The contest" (pg.19-20)

....
"And the fragrance of each flower
When mixed together was exquisite."

Then they understood
No flower is the best
Separately they don't win the contest
The winning comes when they are together
....

Many of these poems are reliant on a faith in God and have a motherly quality to them. Some of the tone is like a mother speaking to a child, expressing ways to better navigate the world. Learning to get along with others, become part of a team, and work toward a common goal, rather than compete with one another in a contest we cannot win.

Many of the photos in the collection are flowers or nature related, but I absolutely loved the clouds paired with the poem “A handful of cloud”. A mother and child are outside together and he reaches for a blue cloud, but it is the wispy nature of the cotton candy that reminds us of pure joy. It is the sweetness of an innocent child, it is the ephemeral nature of life’s moments. Enjoy each one while you have it.

Your Words, Your World by Louise Bélanger can be turned to again and again in times of worry or stress. The photos alone will cause readers to take a breath and smile. The poems will remind them that life doesn’t have to be a frenzy.

Rating: Tercet

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When Your Wife Has Tommy John Surgery and Other Baseball Stories by E. Ethelbert Miller

February 8, 2022 by

Source: GBF
Paperback, 96 pgs.
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When Your Wife Has Tommy John Surgery and Other Baseball Stories by E. Ethelbert Miller is a collection that spans not only the love of baseball, but also wider themes of racism, gender issues, and loss. The collection opens with “Hit This” in which a ball curves after falling off a table. What a metaphor for life and baseball! Isn’t that just the way of things, we assume life is headed in one direction and then it takes a turn.

From "Roberto" (pg. 6)

We had gloves. Cheap gloves. Gloves
with no pockets no matter how much
we kept punching into the center of them.

The gloves had missing pockets
like our missing fathers who punched
our mothers and swung bats at our heads.

Our fathers were gone and we outgrew their
absence. Our hands became too large
for small gloves. Many were lost or stolen.

Miller’s plain language and emphasis on the childhood games of baseball in the streets and parks become larger metaphors for the violence and low-income struggles of these children’s lives. His lines pack a serious punch, particularly in “Roberto.” Many of the poems in this collection are like this. Remember that opening poem — the ball curves, and this is how each poem reads in Miller’s collection.

From "Kind of Blue" (pg. 15)

....A player swung
and sent a fly ball toward the outfield
fence. It went foul at the last moment
like love or a marriage striking an
empty wooden seat and bouncing
back to the field.

I had to look up Tommy John surgery, which I found out is the reconstruction of ligaments in the elbow and it’s a surgery most often done on pitchers. I like baseball and have written my own baseball poems, but mine are nothing like Miller’s poems. From a World Series played by survivors of earthquakes and climate change in “The World Series” to the hope that you’ll be remembered after the spring time of your youth in “Free Agent,” Miller’s baseball metaphors are larger than life, much like Whitey Ford and others who have played America’s favorite pastime.

RATING: Cinquain

About the Poet:

E. (Eugene) Ethelbert Miller was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1950. He attended Howard University and received a BA in African American studies in 1972. A self-described “literary activist,” Miller is on the board of the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive multi-issue think tank, and has served as director of the African American Studies Resource Center at Howard University since 1974. His collections of poetry include Andromeda (1974), The Land of Smiles and the Land of No Smiles (1974), Season of Hunger / Cry of Rain (1982), Where Are the Love Poems for Dictators? (1986), Whispers, Secrets and Promises (1998), and How We Sleep on the Nights We Don’t Make Love (2004).

Miller is the editor of the anthologies Women Surviving Massacres and Men (1977); In Search of Color Everywhere (1994), which won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was a Book of the Month Club selection; and Beyond the Frontier (2002). He is the author of the memoir Fathering Words: The Making of an African American Writer (2000).

The mayor of Baltimore made Miller an honorary citizen of the city in 1994. He received a Columbia Merit Award in 1993 and was honored by First Lady Laura Bush at the White House in 2003. Miller has held positions as scholar-in-residence at George Mason University and as the Jessie Ball DuPont Scholar at Emory & Henry College. He has conducted writing workshops for soldiers and the families of soldiers through Operation Homecoming.

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Black Under by Ashanti Anderson

February 2, 2022 by

Source: Coriolis Publicity
Paperback, 30 pgs.
I am an Amazon Affiliate

Black Under by Ashanti Anderson is a poetry collection that will knock you back. In the opening ode, Anderson illuminates what it means to be Black and how beautiful it is. She equates it with the dark comfort of the womb, she alludes to the segregation of blacks and whites by evoking images of piano keys, but ultimately, her ode praises blackness. There are no monsters under this bed.

Anderson uses several different poetic forms to celebrate blackness, including a resume format that highlights the horrifying violence perpetrated against people because of skin color and the monetizing of those deaths for the sake of art and media. It’s that double-edge sword of calling attention to the unfair and unjust violence against Blacks, while at the same time feeling exploited. American capitalism at the forefront.

 from "Slave Ship Haibun" (pg. 11)

But she thinks not of how we watched the birds circle overhead,
bomb beak-first into the ocean. Each in our own way, we 
began to imitate. A few of us induced feathers. 
I plucked a plume, made a quill.

One of the most powerful poems in this collection, “The Body Recalls,” crescendos on the 3/5ths compromise where slaves were considered 3/5ths of a person for population counts related to taxation and representation in the House. Anderson makes readers aware of how each violent death of a Black person compounds the historic wrongs of America.

"Acrostic for My Last Breaths" (pg. 15)

If I’m ever out of oxygen

Cut the comms. Switch the radio, play
A song by Whitney or Aretha, something
No sense can pause my throat from parting for.
’Gon throw my sorrows into this vast, black void
That don’t even have space to hold tune, or blues,

But I don’t sing to be heard. I do it to keep on.
Ring diaphragm and rattle lung like sickness, each
Eighth-note a reason to stay living. Can’t take
A rest, might hear the sensor’s whining,
That worried, heaving falsetto of siren.
How I hate the sound of dying. Rather riff
Even if everything in me stops screaming.

Black Under by Ashanti Anderson explores what it means to be Black in America and the world, but it also looks to acknowledge and tackle the inter-generational trauma of Blacks in a way that is a searing commentary on our society as well as a celebration of resilience.

RATING: Cinquain

About the Poet:

Ashanti Anderson (she/her) is a Black Queer Disabled poet, screenwriter, and playwright. Her debut short poetry collection, Black Under, is the winner of the Spring 2020 Black River Chapbook Competition at Black Lawrence Press. Her poems have appeared in World Literature Today, POETRY magazine, and elsewhere in print and on the web. Learn more about Ashanti’s previous & latest shenanigans at ashanticreates.com

Filed Under: challenges, New Authors Challenge, poetry, Poetry Reading Challenge, Read in 2022, review copy, reviews Tagged With: , ,