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Poetry for Your 2012 Holiday Shopping List

Savvy Holidays!

I’m sure all of you have either completed or have nearly completed your holiday shopping, but I wanted to recommend a couple of poetry books for the readers on your lists.  These books are accessible and could widen the scope of reading of your loved ones and maybe even yourself.

Wild Place by Erica Goss is a stunning chapbook collection that visually renders the wildness within ourselves through a series of images stick with you long after you read the verse.  One look at that cover can tell you the kind of raw power Goss uses in her poetry to explore how humanity can impair nature, but she also talks a little bit about history, particularly in her poems about Berlin, and the hardships of emigrating to another country.  In my review, I said, “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.”

 

When My Brother Was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz examines the often ignored struggles of Native Americans in the modern world, particularly as they try to integrate into mainstream society.  The kids who are around white students in school are looking to be like their peers, while at home, their parents trying to hold onto their cultural traditions.  Diaz has a frankness in her verse as she not only tackles drug addiction, but also Native American myths and ancestry.  While these poems are steeped in culture, there also is a universality to the lines that make them accessible to people of all cultures.  I consider Diaz’s book “a glimmering debut collection that hums in the back of the mind and generates an emotional aftermath that will leave readers speechless.”

Of the two Natasha Trethewey books I’ve read this year (though one was a reread), this is the one that has impressed me the most and has caused me to reassess some things.  Thrall is an even more mature combination of the personal and historical than Native Guard is.  While her earlier collection examines the struggles of a mixed race child, the latest collection builds upon those insights to create a wider historical record of mixed race children and how they are viewed by their parents and history.  My review indicated, “While her reading can enthrall you and bring you near tears, her careful word selection in each poem will ensure that you reflect on the meaning of each line in each verse before you even think about the overarching themes of separation and connection as well as their juxtaposition.”

I hope that you’ll consider these collections as you do your holiday shopping and have a great holiday, everyone.

Some Winners and Graham Parke Announcement

Winner Melissa of Melissa's Eclectic Bookshelf

Winners Ti of Book Chatter and Anita Yancey

Winner Anna of Diary of an Eccentric

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And now an announcement from Graham Parke:

“I’m very polite by nature, even the voices in my head let each other finish their sentences.” Graham Parke, Unspent Time

I’d originally planned to have a monkey draw two random numbers out of a hat (then use the inverse hexadecimal value – because you cannot trust monkeys, not at the prices I’m willing to pay) but apparently there are laws against monkey labor. There are permits involved. It’s a whole thing. So instead I asked a friend to think of two random numbers while dressed in a monkey suit, without telling him what the numbers were for. This seemed sufficiently random to me, although it later occurred to me how worrying it was that my friend would actually do this without ever asking why. There might be a thinly veiled cry for help in there somewhere…

Kindle Fire Winner:Cecilia HuddlestonKindle Touch Winner:
Kathy Habel 

 

 

A big thank you to all the bloggers and readers who supported the Unspent Time launch event (especially those who bought multiple versions of the weird little novels that wrecked a thousand reasonably useful minds.)

Anyway, here’s the results, thank you all for joining in, winners will be contacted and forced to accept prizes, let me know if you ever come across bits in the novels you like, stay healthy and sane,

Graham Parke

“We played for about half an hour before I realized we were actually playing two different games. What I’d thought of as ludo was actually a game called gin rummy, and what Warren was playing seemed to be a mixture of craps and table tennis. Once we started playing by one consistent set of rules, though, the fun was really over.” Graham Parke, No Hope for Gomez!

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.

Mailbox Monday #172

Mailbox Mondays (click the icon to check out the new blog) has gone on tour since Marcia at A Girl and Her Books, formerly The Printed Page passed the torch. This month’s host is Cindy’s Love of Books.

Kristi of The Story Siren continues to sponsor her In My Mailbox meme.

Both of these memes allow bloggers to share what books they receive in the mail or through other means over the past week.

Just be warned that these posts can increase your TBR piles and wish lists.

Here’s what I received this week:

1.  Night Road by Kristin Hannah, which I won from Jo-Jo Loves to Read!!!

2. Elegy for Eddie by Jacqueline Winspear from HarperCollins.

3. Wild Place by Erica Goss from the poet for review.

What did you receive?

***Scroll down for today’s National Poetry Month Tour stop.***