[REVIEW] Songs of the Sun Amor by Wade Stevenson

(BlazeVOX Books, 2019)

REVIEW BY NETTIE FARRIS 

As indicated by its title, Songs of the Sun Amor, by Wade Stevenson, is a full-length collection of poetry about love. Stevenson is the author of the memoir One Time in Paris, and two collections of poetry subtitled “A Memoir with Poems.” Understandably, this collection appears to be autobiographical, yet not, necessarily, confessional.

Mother and father appear frequently in this collection, which opens with the poem “About My Mother.” This poem is followed by “The Map of Elsewhere,” which begins: “My mother sat on a wheelchair.” Later in this poem, we hear: “No mother to me, a mother in name, never caught in the act.” We hear also: “Then my father got mad, venting his fury.” The poem ends: “I discovered love in strange places / Real Amor was on the map of elsewhere.”

The love sought in this collection seems to be a supreme love. Something beyond the realm of inadequate parents.

My favorite poem is, perhaps,  “My Teddy Bear.” This poem is about forgetting the past. Living in the present:

A long time ago I lost my teddy bear

Today my white dog barks

To tell me that he’s hungry

Why is the past so difficult to bear?

Why can’t I just exist

Feed the dog, breathe with my breath,

Disinvite the starving guests of ghosts

Exhale, say with simple thanks

Life is good and that’s enough?

Similarly, “Sun, No Son” imagines a new beginning:

If by chance or luck I could be born again,

Emerge another, to learn to love again

I’d seek to become one with God’s eye, the Sun

However, we see glimpses of the beyond, which is the amalgam of opposites:

God, when you find Him,

You’re stunned

To find out

He’s smaller

Than you ever imagined

Bigger

Than you ever thought possible.

When we add opposites, the sum is infinity, as exhibited by “When You Die”:

When you die

You’ll never be lonely

Because you’ll die with the best

Friends and lovers you had

And all those you did not

Meantime, “There is no ordinary, every Amor is extraordinary.”

These are poems about forgetting our past injustices, living in the present, and looking forward to the infinite love beyond this life; for, as we learn from the conclusion to “Promise of the After”: “God’s blow will finish my body hard as a hammer.”

In Songs of the Sun Amor, Stevenson demonstrates an affinity with verbs and occasional rhyme. But most important, he demonstrates an affinity for coherence. This collection is truly a series of lyrical poems that tell a significant story.

Nettie Farris is the author of three chapbooks of poetry: Communion, Fat Crayons, and The Wendy Bird Poems. She is the former reviewer for Blue Lyra Review‘s Spotlight on a Press feature, and has published numerous reference articles for Salem Press, including micro biographies of 100 world poets. Her essay on Lydia Davis appeared in the Journal of Kentucky Studies and her peer-reviewed article on William Faulkner’s Sanctuary appeared in the Kentucky Philological Review.

 

[REVIEW] Fake News Poems by Martin Ott

(BlazeVox Books, 2018)

REVIEW BY LEONARD A. TEMME

Simply put, Martin Ott’s new collection, Fake News Poems, is terrific and here’s why; the book is structured around a single idea so simple it’s genius. The idea allows immense flexibility and has roots that go back centuries, yet Fake News Poems is entirely contemporary and as fresh as tomorrow. I suspect the idea for the book came in a flash, a moment of inspiration in response to the Greatest, Most Magnificent (GMM) President of the United States (POTUS) Of All Time (OAT). So what is the book? What will you find when you read it, which I recommend you do?

It’s a kind of almanac, a collection of 52 poems, one a week for the year 2017. The title of each poem is a news headline complete with date and source. For example, the first poem in the collection is Automated Book-Culling Software Drives Librarians to Create Fake Patrons to ‘Check Out’ Endangered Titles. This headline appeared 2 January in the online zine Boing Boing. All 52 poems follow the same pattern: date, publication source, headline, and then the poem.

The poem does not present the news; the title tells us all the background we need for that. Books are in trouble again, and librarians are coming to their rescue. Beginning with a report that Fahrenheit 451 is in danger, the poem presents a dystopian vision of AI deciding which books to keep and which to cull. As the poem progresses, references grow increasingly personal until we realize that we are in love with books, each one intimate, like a friend, teacher, and lover, and we are on the verge of losing them.

Fake News Poems continues this way. For the most part, each poem fits on its own page and each has that poem-ish appearance that contrasts with the facticity of the date, source, headline / title.  The contrast is certainly intentional as telegraphed by the book’s inscription from William Carlos Williams’ Asphodel, That Greeny Flower: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die every day / for lack / of what is found there.” This reference is what Fake News Poems is really about.

Despite the close association of the GMM POTUS OAT with the phrase ‘fake news,’ to its great credit the collection explicitly references the GMM POTUS OAT in only a few poems. For example, the second poem, in response to a January 13 Mondoweiss News headline Origins of a Golden Shower, considers the rise of the GMM POTUS OAT through a series of six tercets (note the poem-ish form) to conclude with ‘musing on how the waterfall of humanity / gushed in his presence, history in the taking.’

The third poem, from 15 January, The Inquisitr (sic), riffs on the closing of the Ringling Bros Circus, quickly shifting from news to family drama. This is the poet as reader responding to the headline in nine couplets. The structure could not be more clear; the flat facts of the headline at the top of the page inspires, or provokes, the poet’s response, captured in the poem that declares itself to be a poem by its shape. This pattern delivers fifty-two doses of the good Dr. Williams’ prescribed antidote to the poison in the fifty-two headlines, which are a sampling of what we experience daily. Note, I spot checked about a dozen of the headlines via Google and they are all the real news.

The table of contents alone, the list of poems titles, is provocative reading as the news of our society, reflecting who we are and what we read; but where is the GMM POTUS OAT in this? He appears in about a dozen or so poems but almost never by name, yet his shadow lurks in much of the book. While most of the poems do not explicitly tackle politics or social issues head-on, his shadow is easy to see as consistent with the tenor of society and consequently, the tenor of the poems. The GMM POTUS OAT doesn’t have to suck all the oxygen out of the news cycle, he is part of it, fitting in perfectly, fouling the atmosphere.

There are many great poems in the collection as there are many great headlines. The cover picture is of a man in a red tee-shirt and blue shorts pushing a lawn mower through his backyard, enclosed by a tall, wooden privacy fence, the very picture of self-contained stability. But we see over the fence to the tornado filling the sky, coming his way. Meet Everycitizen. The picture refers to the 5 June, Huffington Post headline and poem title: Determined Dad Won’t Let a Tornado Stop Him from Mowing the Lawn. The poem, with as many end and inner rhymes as any rap lyric, appears on the page in eight, nice-and-tidy couplets that remind me of the steward dutifully aligning the deckchairs on the sinking Titanic. Ott doesn’t ridicule the situation, he understands it, and relates it to his father and to us. Given the current chaos, we do what we can to establish and maintain what order is possible.

The two midyear poems are worth noting because they are consistent with most of the book, not polemical or political, they capture the surprise of real life, struggling humanity trying to normalize the absurd. The L. A News of 26 June is the source for a seven couplet poem reacting to the headline: Suspect Hands Monopoly ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ Card to Deputy. The final couplet: “Love is a game with rules inked each day / The joke was that he still held out hope.” So do we. The second midyear poem, from July 5, CMBC, is a single sentence spread over a dozen lines organized into four neatly arranged tercets reacting to the headline, Sex Robots Could Make Us Lonely and Unable / to Form Relationships with Other Humans. The poem begins “When the dollhouses become our houses” and concludes with ‘when love may tear you limb from limb / there is no hope without beginning or end.” With these poems we are visiting true but tragicomic reflections of ourselves. The headlines are absurdist reality; the poems strive after order.

Like bookends, the last two poems of the book balance the first two. Recall the second poem turns the golden showers on the GMM POTUS OAT while the penultimate poem, dated 19 December from CNN, has the headline / title “Disney Adds Trump Robot to Its Hall of Presidents, which congers an image sufficient to give every reader pause: the GMM POTUS OAT surrounded by all his inferiors, from Washington through Obama. Extraordinary. Reading through the Fake News Poems we realize we finally elected the president we deserve.

The last poem, completing the year’s cycle, dated 26 December, reacts to the headline, “Man Beats up an ATM for Giving Him too Much Cash,” which appeared in USA Today. The poem feels like a coda, rounding out the year with an absurdist Chaplainesque image updated from Modern Times, futile but heroic in the way librarians protecting books heroically resist the inevitable. I can almost hear Ott reading this last poem with its many internal rhymes as rap. And so it goes.

Leonard Temme is a research neuropsychologist in a government research laboratory. He studied writing most extensively with Marie Ponsot, Sue Walker, Josh Davis, and Kristina Darling. In addition to his professional publications, his writing has appeared in numerous literary and small presses. He serve as Poet Laureate of Northwest Florida between 1989 and 1992.

 

[REVIEW] Petrarchan, by Kristina Marie Darling

~by C.L. Bledsoe

 

Petrarchan

 

BlazeVOX [books]

72 pgs./$16

 

Darling has produced a collection of footnotes, commentaries, and poem fragments inspired by the work of Francesco Petrarcha, a poet who was known for writing emotional but spare poems. Darling has deconstructed his work to the barest slivers of emotional resonance and then shared her reactions. This is a book about a book, a direct response. But in producing these reactions, Darling is also showing us something of herself. Her reactions don’t exist in a vacuum; they’re influenced by elements of her life, so we also see a bit of Darling behind the curtains.

The book opens with a quote from Petrarcha, “And tears are heard within the harp I touch.” Harps are considered one of the more emotive instruments, and Patrarcha’s personification of the instrument implies that he shares his own sadness or loss through the harp he touches, or possibly plays; his emotion is shared through his art. “Harp” also sounds a lot like “heart” which implies that Petrarcha produces sadness in his audience, that their loss echoes his own, which connects him and his audience. This is apropos since Darling is, herself, mirroring Petrarcha’s tears, at times, through her own “harp.” Continue reading

[REVIEW] Romance With Small-Time Crooks by Alexis Ivy

~by Anne Champion

 Ivy-Cover-Really-Real-sm

 

BlazeVOX Books

90 pages/$16.00

The cover of Alexis Ivy’s debut collection depicts a scattered stack of cards and a hand overturning the Queen of Diamonds and the Eight of Clubs.  The Queen of Diamonds, of course, denotes power, royalty, and adornment, while the eight is a common symbol of infinity: all of this is embedded within the gamble, a game of chance, risk, and luck.  Similarly, these themes seem to trail the speaker of this collection in poems that take risks resulting in big payoffs.  These poems travel through the seedy underbelly of American life, exploring characters bound by their own self destruction embedded in a world of sex, drugs, liquor, and crime and a speaker that’s attracted to the scarred, the imperfect, and the dangerous.   While redemption and happy endings seem impossible in this collection, the poems refuse pity, instead transforming gutters into places of magic, insight, and growth.

Many poems in the collection recall still life paintings in their vivid imagery and details.  However, these still lifes illustrate ruin and utter desolation.  “So I Got Stoned,” depicts the actions and backgrounds of a speaker who has plummeted into silence.  The poem begins “I sorta wasn’t talking,/I sorta didn’t talk./I didn’t talk.”  These lines reveal the speaker’s reluctance to speak even now, as it takes several tries before anything can be said with any certainty.  Then, the still life gets painted through several sharp, compelling details, and the poem ends with the speaker’s reflection:

Wasted under
the willows at the Charles River,
chain smoking so I wouldn’t be
just sitting there.

It seems clear that the frozen muteness is all pervasive, as the speaker asserts that she had to smoke just to not merely exist; in this portrayal, readers understand the anxiety behind a life that grows too still. Continue reading

Domestic Uncertainties by Leah Umansky (A Review by Anne Champion)

 

BlazeVOX Books

74 pages/$16.00

 

On the back cover of Leah Umansky’s first book, Domestic Uncertainties, Cornelius Eady refers to her as the literary daughter of Emily Dickinson. In fact, the title of this collection is taken from The Letters of Virginia Woolf.  Even while many women writers have paved the way for Umansky’s collection about a broken marriage, Umansky manages to blaze her own trail, with a voice that harkens back to feminist literary icons of the past while simultaneously creating something new. The voice crying out from this wrecked romantic union seethes with bitterness, wit, defiance, and courage; the female speaker also remains dominant throughout the text, uncovering truths and barking orders at her lost lover:

It was all appositives.

You never loved.

Say it for me.

Say it.

The book’s most lucid moments seem like a deep, philosophical quest.

The poems fluctuate back and forth in form, from prose poems to fragmented associative poems, to poems that have experimental layouts on the page.  But in all forms Umansky seems concerned with discovery, and many of them feel like epiphanies. Consider these lines from “The Marital Space:

 Remember, memory is flexible.

How we make ourselves isn’t coincidental; it’s consequential.

 

And also these from “How We Make Ourselves:”

History always repeats itself, but the heart,

The heart uplifts and uproots. The heart

replants.

 

In these lines, the speaker triumphs in discovering what it means to rebuild the self after a shattered relationship, and the end result seems to be a sense of deep self reflection and endurance. These moments delight, because they take risks and carry such heavy truths. Continue reading

COMPOS[T]MENTIS, by Aaron Aaps (A Review by j/j hastain)

BlazeVOX [books]

$16/100 pgs

What of ourselves can we see in what we have been given? We stare into the scraps that overflow from our open palms. We stare into the puddles of seepage which are the results of our interactions with one another.

Aaps’ new book is a bawdy proposition (“on silence- fuck silence” / “where there is talking the world is like a garden to me”)–is the possibility of interacting with a thrashing, decaying host and something positive or self-affirming coming from that interaction. What if it were possible to ascend or become enlightened, by way of decay (“the bloody, peeling body archive made lucid”)? What if upwards and downwards were not at all at odds?

COMPOS[T]MENTIS is a carnal celebration, a cantata with smegma being marked into it by invested hand. Aaps’ book is an animal preoccupied with its own genitals; do you see it smile as it gingerly fingers itself (“the ape submerged the pages in hot glue made of bone”/ “it then proceeded to consume the round, extruded, phallic fruit- a sea of infected cocks. A sea of itchy clits”)

Continue reading