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Lo: Poems by Melissa Crowe

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

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

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

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

RATING: Cinquain

About the Poet:

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

In Kind by Maggie Queeney

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

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

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

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

RATING: Cinquain

About the Poet:

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

Sound Fury by Mark Levine

Source: Publisher
Paperback, 80 pgs.
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Sound Fury by Mark Levine assaults the reader, bombarding them with broken words and lines at unexpected times, sounds that render readers concussed in many ways. “There go another million minutes/In the history of the misery/” (pg. 62-4, “‘strange shadows on you tend'”) His poems tackle a wide range of subjects from identity to ecological destruction, but sometimes the poems are so focused on artistry that the themes are muddled and obscured.

Despite these drawbacks, the collection does provide readers with vignettes of sorrow and insanity. Like in “Lark” where a storm causes significant damage, yet the narrator and the family slept through it.

Lark (pg. 1)

Storm of storms: We slept through it
In golden stupor. True, it
Did its damage before it withdrew. It
Emptied our orchard of unharvested fruit
Along with a fruit-picking crew it
Hurled hither and yon, bushels askew; it
Did not apologize, either, though a few it-
Ty bitty groans slipped through it-
S pores, a sorrowful fugue.

In “Thing and All,” the narrator laments the anonymity and desire for fame or being known, but by the end “It might feel like something/To feel something capturing you/In milled mirroring lenses/As you are and would be/But that self-love/Is nostalgia.”(pg. 18) Here, there is a sense that even self-love is an illusion in this chaotic world.

Levine seems to take “Delight in Disorder,” of course a poem in the collection. And his poem “‘strange shadows on you tend,'” reminds us of the fleeting nature of this chaos we try to make sense of with our assaulted senses: “It is not that he was never here/Or that we were never here./It’s just, oh just that he and we/Have lost a way/Together.” Sound Fury by Mark Levine has moments of clear lucidity and absolute chaos, what we take from the collection is all that we’ve carried with us in this wild world.

Rating: Tercet

About the Poet:

Mark Levine is author of Debt, among others. He is professor of poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is editor of the Kuhl House Poets series for the University of Iowa Press. Levine lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

Mailbox Monday #717

Mailbox Monday has become a tradition in the blogging world, and many of us thank Marcia of The Printed Page for creating it.

It now has its own blog where book bloggers can link up their own mailbox posts and share which books they bought or which they received for review from publishers, authors, and more.

Emma, Martha, and I also will share our picks from everyone’s links in the new feature Books that Caught Our Eye. We hope you’ll join us.

Here’s what I received:

Hunters Point by Peter Kageyama for review in January from literary publicist Stephanie Barko.

SAN FRANCISCO, 1958. World War 2 veteran, Katsuhiro, “Kats” Takemoto is a Nisei, second generation Japanese American and the private detective for those who don’t get noticed by the police or get the attention of traditional private eyes. The city is exploding with population growth and creative expression as the Beat poets and artists fill coffee shops and galleries. When a young Beat poet enlists Kats to keep his family from being pushed out of the Bayview Heights neighborhood by a shady developer, Kats learns that the conspiracy to take over the land around Hunters Point runs deep into Cold War fears and politics. Kats takes on the US government, the Navy, unscrupulous businessmen and the west coast mafia as he and his friends race to find the truth.

Award winning author Peter Kageyama’s debut novel brings the post-war San Francisco scene to life with historic characters including Jimmy Stewart, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Alfred Hitchcock and Shig Murao, along with the dynamics of racial identity for Japanese Americans finding their footing again in America following the war and internment.

Lo by Melissa Crowe, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize for review.

Lo maps the deprivation and richness of a rural girlhood and offers an intimate portrait of the woman—tender, hungry, hopeful—who manages to emerge. In a series of lyric odes and elegies, Lo explores the notion that we can be partially constituted by lack—poverty, neglect, isolation. The child in the book’s early sections is beloved and lonely, cherished and abused, lucky and imperiled, and by leaning into this complexity the poems render a tentative and shimmering space sometimes occluded, the space occupied by a girl coming to find herself and the world beautiful, even as that world harms her.

In Kind by Maggie Queeney for review.

Part wunderkammer, part grimoire, Maggie Queeney’s In Kind is focused on survival. A chorus of personae, speaking into and through a variety of poetic forms, guide the reader through the aftermath of generations of domestic, gendered, and sexual violence, before designing a transformation and rebirth. These are poems of witness, self-creation, and reclamation.

Sex Work & Other Sins by Julianne King for review.

Unapologetic and honest, King once again forces forbidden topics to the forefront as she grapples with defining morality in the light of survival. Family, poverty, desperation, and humanity are laid bare in this unflinching journey. King returns with writing that is brutal and evocative in its honesty as she drives toward blistering indictments of herself, her family, and society as a whole. Sex Work and Other Sins holds up a mirror to the reader and asks: What would you have done?

Women & Other Hostages by Laura McCullough, purchased.

Poetry, “If you, like the speaker in Laura McCullough’s poem, ‘Almost Nothing Something [stars / plates / cells]’ have grown ‘tired & suspicious of poetry’ WOMEN AND OTHER HOSTAGES will absolutely revitalize you. These are riveting, wholly moving narratives of a life lived. Out of sorrow McCullough invokes a stunning grace where ‘What is stripped from you’ becomes a gift because ‘what’s left behind is all your own.’ Women of all circumstances inhabit these poems. They shed their skin like snakes, ‘memory in flesh,’ and consider the bones of what holds us together in these divisive times. This beautiful book will knock loose what is lodged in your heart.”–Suzanne Frischkorn

What Follows by H.R. Webster, purchased.

“What a lively, funny, lacerating book of poems from this “gutsy little zombie,” H.R. Webster, who knows the world through direct, often brutal, experience, and ravishingly, through the senses. Here is a poet who knows “(t)he refrigerator warm with the animal smell / of butter,” “the shy hysteria / of doves,” “(h)unters storming through the gum trees like house cats / cut from their bells,” and “the dick velvet of the apricot under a thumb,” and also the reality of factory work, “those efficient little gestures, the left hand ready for what the right hand wrought,” that “don’t belong in a poem,” but here they are. Here it all is, trauma and the genius of survival via the genius of imagination married to the genius of truth-telling. There is so much muchness in What Follows–I must follow it.”–Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets

“Whether trafficking in the dark, alluring ambages of personal and cultural sexual powerplay, confronting the brutal indifferences of the body (and of what Roethke called “great nature”) to human volition, or boldly protesting all manner of crimes against the humanimal,  the arresting poems in H.R. Webster’s debut collection dare the reader to turn away from their gorgeously rendered, fearless and feral forays into one writer’s intense, perspicacious sensibility. “All else dims before agony,” Webster writes, and What Follows is part hagiography, part reliquary of a cosmos of beauty, want, and hurt. These poems will draw you into their experiences of the world and show you “desires [you] have failed to imagine.”–Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems

“H.R. Webster writes: “It’s the end of the world and we can’t stop saying the word tender.” Every poem in What Follows is both a beautiful and brutally honest account of what follows the end of love. Tender “is the only language left for flesh, for helplessness,” she writes. But Webster’s stance is far from helpless; this book is a brilliant, inventive, and deeply felt exploration of loss. It’s an image-rich catalogue spiked with concise, often painful wisdom that makes me catch my breath. Horses, calves, dried snapdragons, milkvetch, snakes with their “delicate purses of venom,” bees pouring from a breast, wolf spiders, a bus “kneeling like a girl,” and flowers “petaling themselves monstrous” weave an escape plan in the heartscape of longing, translating precisely what it means to inhabit a female body. Densely sonic, often in sonnet form, these poems are so sharp, smart, and vulnerable that I feel forgiven for every wrong I don’t even realize I’ve done. “Beauty opened a door, what tethered me back?” the poems ask, and this book provides an answer. An incredibly redeeming, courageous debut that through its incantations pulls back the curtain on our shared human suffering and offers hope for us all.”–Sarah Messer, author of Dress Made of Mice

Department of Elegy by Mary Biddinger, purchased.

Part post-punk ghost story, part Gen-X pastoral, Mary Biddinger’s poetry collection DEPARTMENT OF ELEGY conjures dim nightclubs, churning lakes, and vacant Midwestern lots, meditating on moments of lost connection. With the afterlife looming like fringe around the edges of this book, Biddinger constructs a view of heaven as strange as the world left behind. These poems escort us from forest to dance floor, bathtub to breakwater, memory into present.

“In DEPARTMENT OF ELEGY, Mary Biddinger examines the hot pink ignorance of youth and the equally vulnerable present. These thrillingly nimble, funny poems empathize with hunger and long for longing.”–Jennifer L. Knox

“Mary Biddinger’s seventh poetry collection guides readers across the dangerous terrain between memory and chaos with confidence, bravado, and–ultimately–hard-won expertise. The speakers’ words themselves sustain a series of exquisite and delicate tensions between utterance and erasure, between form and improvisation, anchored throughout by a series of “Book” poems (“Book of Hard Passes,” “Book of the Sea,” “Book of Misdeeds,” “Book of Transgressions,” “Book of Disclosures,” “Book of Mild Regrets”). The emotional undercurrent of this collection samples such a wide range of life and existence that we are left wondering where time goes and why so quickly, from the ritualistic taste of the insides of gloves, to the realization that once ‘…your friends have perished under tragic circumstances / eventually they become like beloved characters from books.'”–Erica Bernheim

Always a Relic, Never a Reliquary by Kim Sousa, purchased.

WINNER OF THE 2020 ST. LAWRENCE BOOK AWARD

In her debut full-length poetry collection, ALWAYS A RELIC NEVER A RELIQUARY, Brazilian American poet, editor and abolitionist Kim Sousa interrogates inheritance by reaching both backwards and forwards: backwards towards her father’s first border crossing and forwards past her own. Centered around a specific personal trauma, a later-term miscarriage, the poems also contain collective trauma: they ask what it means to live in the United States both as immigrant and citizen, addressing State terror and violence as if by megaphone at the protest line. In Sousa’s poems, the personal is political: they are anti-racist, ecocritical and proletariat. She sings diasporic resilience as both a horror and celebration. The poems are haunted but hopeful; here, there is always hope in rage and resistance.

What did you receive?

Disbound by Hajar Hussaini

Source: Publisher
Paperback, 72 pgs.
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Disbound by Hajar Hussaini explores the life once tethered and now adrift, mirroring its title. Imagine your life as it is now, and suddenly it is gone, ripped apart by war, and you are refugee in another nation. There is a degree of uncertainty that would make us all uncomfortable, and this collection provides us with that topsy-turvey feeling in verse. “when we are placed in a fragile expanse/do we not become broken; unhealable;//shifting positions; shake an immigrant/and scraps of paper fall out of reality//” (from “inventory,” pg. 5-6)

All at once, the tension of Kabul left behind and the Kabul that currently is are front and center garnering attention, and Hussaini is caught in the midst of it all even as his narrative voice seeks a new life in a new place.

simple café (pg. 23)

among the lost generation of Simple going    Café drinking
your former lover orders a cup of tea     whose current lover
                                   a lemonade

Kabul has only one place with close distant tables & chairs

the soundtrack a spaced repetition       between the introvert
on her smartphone                      & the extrovert thinking
                 about a thrown grenade

the unspeakable gerund of a suicide jacket

No longer part of the Kabul left behind but not quite part of the new location where the narrator lives, he says, “I’m peopleless. my/lungs are mushroom clouds. imperial boots march on my/margins. my mammals are unloved. I’m a government//of shame. my mouth is dry & my words are all &/forever out of tune.//” (from “peopleless,” pg. 42)

Disbound by Hajar Hussaini is at once a tale of escape from oppression and war and a look at the consequences of conquering peoples we do not understand, nor do we care to, effectively leaving them untethered and peopleless.

RATING: Cinquain

About the Poet:

Hajar Hussaini is a poet from occupied Kabul. She translates Afghan literature and lives in Iowa City. Her work has appeared in Poetry MagazineMargins, and Pamenar Press. Disbound, her first book of poems, is forthcoming from University of Iowa Press in Fall 2022.

What Flies Want by Emily Perez

Source: GBF
Paperback, 96 pgs.
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What Flies Want by Emily Perez, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, is a surreal painting of the rotting fruit flesh we hide behind closed doors and with tranquil, civilized facades. Perez takes a close look at mental illness, gender and racial identity, and so much more in these pages. What do the flies want? They want that exposed flesh – to feed off of it, to get fat on our misery.

From "My Son Is" (pg. 1-2)

...
....He needs 

the shock
of a thing done.
Something stronger
      than his anger, something
      forcing fortune out of him.

            He crowds the dark he darks
            into his boyhood wears
                his hood unhinged.

Every word, every line is nuanced. Even as boys play childhood games with Nerf guns, the violence is there, under the surface, lurking. In “Battle Song” and in “My Children Use the American Flag,” Perez’s lines are commenting subtly on the roles of boys, the expectation of violence, the training it takes even when it is just pretend. She juxtaposes this with her poem “Before I Learned to Be a Girl,” in which the narrator is a “wind unwound,” and she is a fire all her own. She needs no one; she is a force that can take down the darkness, the pirates, the gunman.

Nightwatch (pg. 6)

We killed the mockingbird
and killed so many more. Foolish
to believe that we were ever growing
out of our armored selves, sealed off
like walnuts, small brained and fearful.
We did not want to be vulnerable. We did
not want to stand alone, skin exposed
to the night, trembling against
whatever wind was rising.

There is the constant push and pull between civilization and the feral wilds of ourselves. But even with civility, there needs to be limits because “The thing about privacy//is it narrowed who knew/what forces//tipped the walls./” (“Outbound Flight,” pg. 7) Even in “Accoutrements,” the bounds of marriage need to be reexamined, with everything seeming well from the outside as long as you don’t look too closely.

What Flies Want by Emily Perez, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, is stunning in its examination of the pressures we put on ourselves and the pressures society levies bluntly. We have to do more than protect ourselves from outside forces, we need to protect ourselves from our own expectations while holding onto out whole selves, not just portions of us.

RATING: Cinquain

About the Poet:

Emily Pérez is the author of What Flies Want, winner of the Iowa Prize, forthcoming in May 2022. With Nancy Reddy she edited The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, forthcoming in March 2022. Her other books and chapbooks include House of Sugar, House of Stone, Backyard Migration Route, and Made and Unmade. She graduated with honors from Stanford University and earned an MFA at the University of Houston, where she served as a poetry editor for Gulf Coast and taught with Writers in the Schools. A CantoMundo fellow and Ledbury Emerging Critic, she has received grants and scholarships from Hedgebrook, the Community of Writers, the Washington State Artist Trust, Jack Straw Writers, Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, Summer Literary Seminars, and Inprint, Houston. Her poems have appeared in journals including Copper Nickel, Fairy Tale Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry, Diode, and DIAGRAM. She teaches English and Gender Studies in Denver where she lives with her family.

Lost and by Jeff Griffin

Source: NetGalley
eBook, 170 pgs
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Lost and by Jeff Griffin, published by University of Iowa Press, feels more like a scrapbook than a poetry collection, and while there were poems included, most everything in the book are scraps he gleaned from his travels into the desert. Some of these pieces are lists, photos, and other scraps, including a letter from a woman to her alcoholic partner. While these items may reflect communities that have once thrived in the desert and are now abandoned, the collection is not what most readers would expect and there is little to link these pieces together.

From GoodReads:

Ever since he was a child sitting in the back of his parents’ car, Jeff Griffin has been taking explorative journeys into the desert. In 2007, as an art student, he started wandering the back roads of the Mojave Desert with the purpose of looking for a place to reflect in the harshly beautiful surroundings. What he found were widely scattered postmodern ruins—abandoned trailers and campers and improvised structures—whose vanished occupants had left behind, in their trash, an archaeological record.

While Griffin’s efforts to create an artistic rendering of these emptied communities, trailers, and lives, the pieces could have been better tied to one another with some text, explanation, or other commentary from Griffin. In many ways, the collection could have benefited from a demonstration of how Griffin was influenced or inspired by these pieces to create his own art — though the book itself is his modern art from those journeys into the Mojave Desert. Lost and by Jeff Griffin, published by University of Iowa Press, just didn’t work for me, but perhaps I’m not the target audience for this one.

About the Poet:

Jeff Griffin is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an associate at Griffin Moss Industries, Inc., and he operates the publishing house Slim Princess Holdings. He lives around Nevada.