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The Poet Who Loves Pythagoras by Fran Abrams

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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

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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.

Iron into Flower by Yvette Neisser

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Paperback, 72 pgs.
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Iron Into Flower by Yvette Neisser is a journey into memory and identity shifts, following the passing of loved ones and divorce and even the journey of motherhood. In her opening poem, “The Arc of the Sun,” a mother takes a trip to Mexico and comes back changed, full of stories she didn’t want to share, and a new perspective, living life moment to moment. Travel can do that to us, inform our perspectives, shift our beings, and move us into a place where we are changed.

Travel weaves in and out of these poems like a teacher providing new perspectives and changing people profoundly. In “Compass Points,” the narrator stumbles “into adulthood,/veering from crevice to crevice,/scraping for my own space,/” reminding us that to traverse the world is to find oneself, carve out our own spaces, while being rooted in family and home like the rings of a tree — “the years … etched rings around my life/first with you, then without you.”

In “Nonfiction,” readers will learn how memory can be parsed out to new generations, even if the entire past is held back. A grandmother shares Holocaust through songs sung in barracks, but she also instills a mantra of “Never again” to the generations that follow. The narrator asks, “Have I borne it well?/Should I wield it/or hide behind it?” only to remind us “It’s not easy, you know,/clamping the lid/on the revolution.//”

By the final section of the collection, Iron Into Flower by Yvette Neisser, the poet has traversed through memory, history, culture, and so much more, to emerge into the flower she is today.

RATING: Quatrain

About the Poet:

Yvette Neisser is the author of Grip, winner of the 2011 Gival Poetry Prize. Founder of the DC-Area Literary Translators Network (DC-ALT), her translations from Spanish include South Pole/Polo Sur by María Teresa Ogliastri and Difficult Beauty: Selected Poems by Luis Alberto Ambroggio. She also contributed to the anthology Knocking on the Door of the White House: Latino and Latina Poets of Washington, D.C.

Yvette has taught creative writing, poetry translation, and literature at numerous institutions, including the George Washington University, Catholic University, and The Writer’s Center (Bethesda, MD). She has lectured on translation at venues such as the Library of Congress, the Embassy of Argentina, and Georgetown University. For several years, she was a roving “poet in the schools” in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, DC.

Her passion for international affairs and cultures has been a driving force in both her writing and her professional career. After studying in Egypt and Israel, her work in international development and research has taken her to Africa, the Middle East, South America, and Europe.

Rooted and Winged by Luanne Castle

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Paperback, 68 pgs.
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Rooted and Winged by Luanne Castle, on tour with Poetic Book Tours, speaks to the human condition, a need for feeling rooted to a home and the need to expand our wings and fly beyond what we’ve known and experienced. The tension of this is felt throughout the collection, but as the poems evolve there’s a sense that both things are possible even if we stay rooted in our families and communities.

One of my favorites in this collection is “How to Create a Family Myth” in which a grandfather seems like he’s larger than life building cities, but in truth, the narrator who looks like her great-grandmother is fascinated by a story in which she takes a whip from a man who is beating a horse and whips him. I love that there’s this magical quality of traveling through time to see this young, brave woman empathizing with the pain of the horse and teaching a man what it is like to be beaten. So many wider implications of this bravery, and how we all wish to be that brave in our convictions.

Birds are prominent as are the poet’s family members. The narrator is building her nest with these twigs of stories and she’s holding those ancestors close, even though many have flown away in death. Like these birds the saguaro is mentioned multiple times, and in reading these poems the candelabra shaped, tree-like cactus (mostly found in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert) is symbolic. It can be prickly, but it bears a sweet fruit, and isn’t that what family and family stories and memories are — bittersweet.

In “Why We Wait for Rain,” the poet says, “We wait to run through wet branches and shake/drops from our shoulders, caught/in the sharp unmistakable fragrance//wanting it to pool inside us in reservoir.” When looking back on the past, we can feel the joy of those moments running through rain with siblings or friends, but as life has moved forward, those memories also can be sad because they are in the past and perhaps we have lost touch with those we loved or they have passed away, or their loss is from some argument.

Whatever the loss may stem from, it doesn’t matter because our memories of them always speak to us from the deep well of our emotion. “if I haul memory from this grave/the transmigration into pulp continues” (“Into Pulp”, pg. 27)

Rooted and Winged by Luanne Castle is a gorgeous collection rooted in the Arizona desert and the past, but it also takes flight on the wings of memory and hope. Don’t miss this collection.

RATING: Cinquain

OTHER Reviews:

About the Poet:

Luanne Castle’s new poetry collection is Rooted and Winged (Finishing Line Press). Kin Types (Finishing Line Press), a chapbook of poetry and flash nonfiction, was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. Her first collection of poetry, Doll God (Aldrich), won the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for Poetry. Luanne’s Pushcart and Best of the Net-nominated poetry and prose have appeared in Copper Nickel, American Journal of Poetry, Pleiades, Tipton Poetry Review, River Teeth, TAB, Verse Daily, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Saranac Review, Grist, and other journals.

Water Shedding by Beth Konkoski

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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.

Inheritance of Aging Self by Lucinda Marshall

Source: Purchased/GBF
Paperback, 66 pgs.
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*** full disclosure: Lucinda, who is a member of my poetry workshop group, is a great mentor and a golden angel to poets in the poetry community***

Inheritance of Aging Self by Lucinda Marshall explores what it means to age, to see our ancestors in the mirror, and to make peace with the life we’ve led, left behind for others to make sense of, and the life we have in the present. Life is just one patchwork quilt, isn’t it? Yes, Lucinda is a quilter, a natural puzzle maker.

From "My Grandmother's Tea Cups" (pg. 1)

...
I see the you in me
as I become the wearer
of your papery skin,
an inheritance 
with its own design,

Patterns and textures take center stage in Marshall’s poems, weaving together a quilt her family will cherish always. But there are the emotional ties woven in each square, from the anger at aging and loss of youth to the acceptance of the multi-faceted you, a beauty beneath the perception of who you were then, like in “Mirror Image.”

Marshall says in “Contemplation of Succulence in Sonora”: “I do know that erosion changes us–// a whittling away, until only bones and distillation/ remain to provide the grounding” Some of us take longer to find our grounding, drifting from place to place, family to family, friend to friend, but these experiences eventually ground us in who we are and who we are not.

In this effort, we also need to learn how to create our own boundaries to preserve our mental well-being, like Marshall’s “I Do Not Ask” and “Serenity Prayer For Singular Existence” remind us. Boundaries are necessary to ensure burnout is kept at bay, that we can be our best selves when others need us, and that we can fulfill our own desires and dreams, even if others don’t quite understand.

Marshall’s collection hinges on the title poem, which comes midway through the book. Where the narrator comes to terms with aging and the potential for lost memory, lost sense of self, fewer days ahead. It is an unsettling moment when age becomes a reality you can no longer ignore. “she wonders what it feels like to be ashes,// what part of who she is will be left/,” says the narrator of “What Remains.”

Inheritance of Aging Self by Lucinda Marshall is about the universal, solitary journey we all travel on. Don’t be mistaken, we are journeying with our past, present, and future side-by-side and no one can reconcile those facets of our selves but us. We must come to terms with all that we are and what remains, what we leave behind, how others will know us and remember us, and what pursuits will be of greatest importance in our waning years. That “Unicorn” is in the surf, it’s just out of reach unless we’re willing to believe and lunge forth toward it.

RATING: Quatrain

Photo Credit: Jaree Donnelly

About the Poet:

Lucinda Marshall is the author of the full-length poetry collection, Inheritance Of Aging Self (Finishing Line Press,2021) and is available for purchase from Finishing Line Press, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon. Marshall is an award-winning artist and writer whose poetry has appeared in Global Poemics, Broadkill Review, Foliate Oak, The Rising Phoenix Review, and Poetica, among others, as well as in the anthologies “Poems in the Aftermath” (Indolent Books), “You Can Hear The Ocean” (Brighten Press), “Is It Hot In Here Or Is It Just Me?” (Beautiful Cadaver Project), and “We Will Not Be Silenced” (Indie Blu(e) Publishing). Her poetry has won awards from Waterline Writers, Third Wednesday, and Montgomery Magazine.

She lives in Maryland and is the Founder of both the DiVerse Gaithersburg (MD) Poetry Reading, the Gaithersburg (MD) Poetry Workshop, and has served as a volunteer mentor for the Gaithersburg Teen Writing Workshop, part of a program run by the Maryland Writers’ Association.

A story of THE WORLD before the FENCE by Leeya Mehta

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Paperback, 46 pgs.
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A story of THE WORLD before the FENCE by Leeya Mehta is the migration of the Parsi, the immigration of a young woman from India to America and the feeling of exile and belonging. Several centuries pass in this slim collection of poems, but like the book cover, each person in these poems is on a journey, one that seems to take them away from where they were to a new destination. However, these journeys end up being very circular, bringing them back to the culture and the past they have tried to leave behind. The past is integral to who they are, as is the migratory journey they embark upon.

In the opening poem, “Refugees,” readers are taken to the migration of Parsis in 917 AD in which “the boat is too small” but the past recedes until “the joy and blood that had come before/already turning to myth./” But even in this flight from one place to another, there is a deep-seated worry that things will not change for the better, but Mehta leaves us on the shore of the white beach with their hope. In “Sleep,” we spend time with this family in its new land, leaning into the hope that they can belong on this land, even with the traditions they carry. But their “Welcome” is not as comforting. While they can retain their traditions and the myths of the past, as well as their religion, they are unable to share that with those outside their group.

Mehta is taking us on a journey from her ancestors to the present day, and woven throughout these poems is the angst created by holding onto tradition and letting go to belong somewhere. In “The Towers of Silence,” the narrator says, “But there are places/that I long to describe/in a language I do not know./And the Towers, by our not being in them,/that is our sacrifice.//” These poems speak to the deep sacrifices of migrants as they move from the home they know to a new home that pushes back against their history and traditions.

from "Decorum" (pg. 12-14)

...
I do not know what I should do in a desert;
You cannot assume anything of yourself
Until you have experienced fire.

A story of THE WORLD before the FENCE by Leeya Mehta is just one look at migration and the sacrifices that entails, as well as the need to belong in a new home. There is a fencing off of the past and culture that occurs internally in some migrants, while there is also the fencing off of cultures and groups of people in their new home — separating them from others and preventing them from sharing their own stories and cultures. Mehta is a master storyteller who takes her poetry into the past to demonstrate the richness of a future in a new country.

RATING: Cinquain

Everyone Disappears by W. Luther Jett

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Paperback, 32 pgs.
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Everyone Disappears by W. Luther Jett (full disclosure I am in a poetry work shopping group with Luther), published by Finishing Line Press, is a follow-up to Jett’s previous chapbook, Not Quite: Poems Written in Search of My Father.

The opening poem, “Nepenthe,” refers to the drug that banishes grief or trouble from one’s mind as mentioned in the Odyssey (yes, I looked this up). Our narrator runs through the poem, looking for those memories in every room, rifles through drawers, unseals books — trying to uncover who did die of starvation, but he has forgotten. This opening poem sets the tone for the collection. It is the search for memory, even the most painful and a wish to hold those tight to almost make the lost corporeal again.

In "Why the Ocean Tastes of Tears"

....
    The snow melts slowly.
Everyone disappears.
    when you want them to stay
everyone goes somewhere
    else and that is why
      the ocean tastes of tears.
It's the one thing you can count on
    when you close your eyes --
      you dream and if
anyone is still there when you wake
  you've witnessed a revolution.

We all cry oceans of tears for lost parents, siblings, friends, children, and that salt is bitter and if often taints our ability to see the joy in what we’ve had. But what a revelation it would be to bring them back to life, even for a moment. “There is no returning,/yet we are always looking back/” says the narrator in “Days Like This.”

There are so many somber poems in this collection — ghost towns of bones, a brother gone too soon, a mother crying, and others — but “Remembrance” is the saddest poem, yet with a sense of humor. It begins, “This is the suit/I only wear once a year.” But you know by the end, a memory will surface where this truth is no longer true and it will break your heart.

Everyone Disappears by W. Luther Jett explores the saddest of truths with a sensitive hand and deep emotional root. His lines will lull you into a trance and gut you when you don’t expect it. But there is a hope, a “star’s kiss” that pierces through that dark shroud, and we shall not forget it.

RATING: Cinquain

An Everyday Thing by Nancy Richardson

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Paperback, 57 pgs.
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An Everyday Thing by Nancy Richardson explores what happens in the every day when there is an intersection of politics and society. Many of these based in Ohio or Kent State examine the unimaginable — what happens when guns go off and students are shot or what happens when feelings unexpectedly change and so much more. Richardson’s collection juxtaposes the unthinkable with the idea that it is just an every day thing. It can happen at any time.

The collection’s cover offers the chaotic mess of these events coupled with the symmetry of a square (the intersection) with a focal point in red (is this the blood spilled? or the harm left behind?). Richardson’s verse is peppered with lyrics and notes from trials, and so much more. Providing readers with a lot of food for thought. She explores the nature of Ohio and politics, socioeconomic issues that still create tense relationships, exposing emotional vulnerability. So many links in the chains of these poems. “The words were linked//like small blue train cars, silent, unmoving on their tracks./That’s the trouble with scripts, words chained to one another.//” (from “Transaction” p. 25)

An Everyday Thing by Nancy Richardson is a collection chock full of connections that are begging to be explored. By turns a dark look at the underbelly of America’s history and looks at hopeful moments, Richardson explores blue collar worlds, deep relationships, sadness, and hope that things can change for the better.

RATING: Cinquain

For more opinions, check out the Poetic Book Tours blog tour for the book.

Musings of a Netflix Binge Viewer by Kateema Lee

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Paperback, 25 pgs.
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Musings of a Netflix Binge Viewer by Kateema Lee speaks to the mind of a grieving daughter easing her sadness with popcorn thrillers, classics, and so much more. Characters pulled from Hitchcock to Kung Fu movies fill these poems with whimsy and darkness, but it is the gray areas that shine brightest. Lee has a knack for blending these iconic characters with real life memories and emotions. Imagine sitting alone in the dark watching late night movies, delving deep into the past and its tumultuous emotions to try to make sense of those disappointments to find peace.

From “Hiatus: Why I Bought a Mustang” (pg. 21)

like Steve McQueen in Bullitt, down sunny,
California streets; then busy streets changed to long,
tree-lined highways, windows down, air
blinding me in short bursts and celebrating
me at the same time. In the dream, my father
was the man he wanted to be, a military hero,

That’s the thing about dreams, we can be anyone we want to be. Much like when we watch movies, we can place ourselves in those alternate lives leaving our cares behind. Our fantasies can find us driving fast in a sports car or visiting different countries with people who have passed on. But there is that “buffering” that happens when our lives seem to be paused or stuck between what came before and what is to come.

Lee’s Musings of a Netflix Binge Viewer is a meditative examination of one’s life and memories through the lens of the movie camera and the lens of our desires for different outcomes. But it is also a review of a life lived and coming to peace with what has passed in order to move forward.

RATING: Quatrain

Other Reviews:

About the Poet:

Kateema Lee is a Washington D.C. native. She earned her M.F.A in Creative Writing at the University of Maryland at College Park. She’s a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, and she’s a Callaloo Workshop participant. Her work has appeared in anthologies, print, and online literary journals, including African American Review, Gargoyle, Word Riot, and Cave Canem Anthology XIII. When she’s not writing, she teaches English and Women’s Studies courses at Montgomery College.

Kin Types by Luanne Castle

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Paperback, 30 pgs.
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Kin Types by Luanne Castle, which is touring with Poetic Book Tours, is more than poetry. It is a breathing history of ancestors and how their lives impact the present long after they have left the earth. The poet opens the collection with “Advice from My Forebears,” in which readers are greeted with much the same advice they probably heard from grandparents and others about not spending what you do not have, etc. And much of this is advice about risks we may encounter in life and it sets the tone for the collection. It demonstrates how the past can inform the present and even guide it toward better decisions, but it also calls to the rebels within us who want to go against even good advice.

Castle’s narrative poems leave the reader with a sense of the past, and through detailed accounts, she places us where she wants us to bear witness to the hard lives of these ancestors. Many of these people are immigrants leaving their homes for a better life, or at least what they believe will be a better life. But not all that befalls these men and women is good, and not all of it is bad.

From "New Life, New Music" (pg. 15)

The boy in knee pants didn't notice
the many wrinkles
or if he did they created that comfortable
space between his own raw starch
and her eyes and smile that were only his.

Like us, there are dreams held close by these ancestors. They may have a sense of loss that these dreams were not achieved or even lost, but they never let that stop them from living their lives. In “What Lies Inside,” Castle asks how well we really know our closest family members and speaks to the secrets we hold unto ourselves, as a self that we protect from the outside hardships of our lives. It is one of my favorite poems in the collection, with this haunting line: “If I don’t have this one space, where can I go to protect this self/kept inside only by my thin twitching skin?”

Kin Types by Luanne Castle is haunting and deeply emotional, allowing readers to wander off and discover their own ancestral stories. Perhaps they too will re-create the past and see how it mirrors the present or has shaped who they are.

RATING: Cinquain

About the Poet:

Winner of the 2015 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, Doll God, Luanne Castle‘s first collection of poetry, was published by Aldrich Press. Luanne’s poetry and prose have appeared in Grist, Copper Nickel, River Teeth, Glass Poetry Press, Barnstorm Journal, Six Hens, Lunch Ticket, The Review Review, and many other journals. Published by Finishing Line Press, Kin Types was a semi-finalist in the Concrete Wolf chapbook contest.

Luanne has been a Fellow at the Center for Ideas and Society at the University of California, Riverside. She studied English and creative writing at the University of California, Riverside (Ph.D.); Western Michigan University (MFA); and the Stanford University writing certificate program. Her scholarly work has been published in academic journals, and she contributed to Twice-Told Children’s Tales: The Influence of Childhood Reading on Writers for Adults, edited by Betty Greenway. For fifteen years, she taught college English. She divides her time between California and Arizona, where she shares land with a herd of javelina. Visit her website.

Guest Post: What Shows Through by Poet Erica Goss

When you fiercely believe in a poet’s talent and their collection, you want to do everything you can to promote it and him/her to a wider audience.  You stick their book into strangers’ and friends’ hands and say, “Read this.”  Sometimes, that works and sometimes it doesn’t, but if you truly believe in a collection, you press onward.

Today, I’ve got a deeply moving guest post from poet Erica Goss, who I featured during the 2012 National Poetry Month Blog Tour with a review of her book, Wild Place.  She will talk about the joy of publishing her collection, but also the deep sadness that came with it when her father’s body was discovered in the wilderness.

Following the guest post, I hope that you will enter for 1 of 2 copies I am going to giveaway to 2 lucky readers anywhere in the world.  Without further ado, please welcome Erica Goss.

On March 29, 2011, I checked my email late in the afternoon. The subject line “Chapbook Acceptance: Wild Place” caught my eye immediately. I opened the message and read, “Thank you for submitting to us. Your manuscript has been accepted for publication.” Blue capitals announced the sender as Finishing Line Press in Kentucky.

Finishing Line. I loved that name and its connotations: making it to the end and winning. But on March 29, 2011, “finishing line” meant something else. Three weeks earlier, some teenagers out hiking had discovered my father’s body in a remote part of Western Washington State. That was his finishing line: death from exposure, hunger, and thirst, brought on by dementia.

Over the following months, I struggled with grief and depression. Some days were simply too hard to bear. My friends congratulated me about the book, but I felt compelled to qualify their enthusiasm with reminders that I was grieving my father. As much as I wanted to shout with joy over the book’s imminent publication, I was unable to feel much happiness at such a time.

The book did give me some welcome distraction from dealing with my father’s death and trying to put his affairs in order. Choosing cover art, formatting the book, deciding which poems to keep and which to delete, absorbed many hours. At the back of my preparations, however, my father’s death lurked, a persistent ache in the pit of my stomach.

It took me some time to realize that I was living in one of those ironic situations that make good poems. The best poetry is tinged with its opposite emotion; to quote Chase Twitchell, “remember death.” As Linda Pastan writes in her poem “The Death of a Parent,”

Move to the front
of the line
a voice says, and suddenly
there is nobody
left standing between you
and the world, to take
the first blows
on their shoulders.

How often I wanted to share the news of my book’s publication with my father. In phone conversations, I’d told him about sending the book to various contests and small presses. The dementia that had been taking his brain away would lift for a little while, and he seemed genuinely interested. Then, abruptly, he would say, “Well, thank you for calling!” and hang up. When he did that, I knew that he had probably forgotten who I was, and ended the conversation to cover his embarrassment.

My father was never more attentive than when I read poetry to him. A former professor of German, he would fix his hazel eyes on me with the look he must have given his students when they mispronounced something, and listen intently. At the end, he would usually say, “Huh! Too bad he was such an ass,” or some other insulting remark about the poet. That’s when I knew my real father was back, at least for a moment. “Even jerks can write good poetry,” I would respond, hoping for his sudden laugh or the way he would smack the table, making us all jump. But more and more often, he would just look at me, puzzled, and turn back to the television.

My father loved run-down, decaying, decrepit places. This explains why he spent the last few years of his life, before his dementia worsened and he moved to Washington to live with his sister, in a tiny village in Northern California called Locke. Locke sits in the San Joaquin-Sacramento Delta, where two of California’s largest rivers meet. Eleven hundred miles of poorly maintained levees protect Locke, the other small towns of the Delta, and its surrounding orchards and farmland.

The Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, unruly by nature, seep under the levees, giving Locke and the whole area a lumpy, moldering appearance. Artists love Locke’s tilted buildings and its atmosphere of benign neglect (Locke is the setting for “My Father at Seventy,” one of the poems in Wild Place). The first few years my father spent in Locke were happy ones; he loved the small town vibe, the artists and writers who lived in ramshackle houses where the river bubbled up through the basements, and being so close to Nature. That was before he stopped calling, stopped paying his bills, stopped cleaning his house.

Wild Place’s cover photograph, taken by San Jose artist and architect Howard Partridge, shows a view of the Sutro Baths on the coast of San Francisco. It’s clear from the photograph that the Pacific Ocean is reclaiming that piece of land, wearing down the seawall and the surrounding cliffs. Here’s another place that water will eventually take back, just like in the Delta a few miles east.

Is this a metaphor for death? Maybe. But I’d rather think of it as a demonstration of Nature’s obdurate personality. As the French poet Saint-John Perse (Alexis Leger) writes: “In vain the surrounding land traces for us its narrow confines. One same wave throughout the world, one same wave since Troy rolls its haunch toward us.”

One same wave. “The Death of a Parent” gives us this image:

The slate is wiped
not clean but like a canvas
painted over in white
so that a whole new landscape
must be started,
bits of the old
still showing through.

It’s been over a year since that bipolar month of March, 2011. I’m learning what it means to grieve. Some days I feel my father’s loss as an acute pain; other times it’s heavy and dull, like an overcast, humid day. I have gotten better at allowing myself to feel unqualified joy at the publication of Wild Place. And I look for those places where the old bits show through.

Thanks, Erica, for sharing your story with us. I know that your father would be proud of you, no matter what. Also, please check out this poem she wrote in response to a prompt about what she would tell her 16-year-old self.

For those of you interested in this stunning collection, please leave a comment here about your own father. Deadline to enter will be May 31, 2012.

Wild Place by Erica Goss

Wild Place by Erica Goss is a chapbook, published by Finishing Line Press, examining the wild places within ourselves and our interactions with nature.  Wild and untamed, the verse sings the beauty in the blame as humanity encroaches on nature, sometimes leading to its destruction and at other times unveiling the beauty beneath the scars.  Goss has a talent for using few words to create a powerful and vivid image that sends a message to the reader about the wildness of nature and ourselves.  From “This Is a Wild Place” (page 10), “The little junk birds peck at foil,//and I am called away from my body/to forage for my life/out in the open.//” and from “New Colors” (page 16), “in an anonymous/coffee shop/a child waved/to me from//his father’s arms/fingers opening/and closing like/pink fronds//of a sea anemone.//”

Some poems are haunting, like “The Redwoods,” in which she compares the trees to whales sifting krill and how they sing in the windy darkness.  She tackles the fears of aging and clinging to the the past in several poems, including “The Redwoods,” but rather focus on nostalgic rose-colored images of the past, she highlights the splinters that gnaw at our sensibilities and the scars they create and how they shape who we become.  There is a certain wisdom that we all garner as we age, and rather than celebrate it, many times we are too focused on what might have been.

Although the California landscape and other West coast settings play a significant role in her poems, Goss also takes us out of our American element with poems like “Strange Land” and “Woman in the Berlin Airport,” in which she tackles assumptions of Americans about how foreigners act and react and how they see us.  From “Strange Land” (page 24), “America takes practice/mother prepares/our daily lessons//each morning we emigrate/our fermenting lunchboxes/ripe with foreign stink//the war of two languages/leaves us mute in school/speak up, the teacher says//”  Goss tackles the hardships of fitting in when one comes to America from somewhere else and the expectations that places on them and their children, but within the same poem, there is a nod to the past — in this case, WWII — and how it is best left in the past and not brought into the new “shining” future.

Even as Goss uses nature imagery to pull out her themes of aging, fitting in, and moving onward, she also does an excellent job providing breathtaking verse about mechanical objects, such as the airplane in “Leaving Frankfurt.”  Readers will rise and fall with the aircraft as it leaves one city for another and the narrator immerses herself in the experience.  Wild Place by Erica Goss is stunning to the point where readers will not look at the world in the same way; they will be forced to look further, to think harder, to accept more — broadening their perspective and horizons so that they become more conscientious about themselves and the world around them.

Poet Erica Goss

About the Poet:

Erica Goss is the winner of the 2011 Many Mountains Moving Poetry Contest. Her chapbook, Wild Place, was published in 2012 by Finishing Line Press. Her poems, articles and reviews have appeared in many journals, most recently Connotation Press, Hotel Amerika, Pearl, Main Street Rag, Rattle, Eclectica, Blood Lotus, Café Review, Zoland Poetry, Comstock Review, Lake Effect, and Perigee.

She won the first Edwin Markham Poetry Prize in 2007, judged by California’s Poet Laureate Al Young, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2010. Erica teaches creative writing and humanities in the Bay Area and is a contributing editor for Cerise Press. She holds an MFA from San Jose State University.  If you live in California, please attend one of her local events near you.

***For today’s National Poetry Month blog tour stop, please visit Indie Reader Houston.***

 

This is the 8th book for my 2012 Fearless Poetry Exploration Reading Challenge.

 

 

This is my 26th book for the 2012 New Authors Challenge.