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76 pgs, $14.95
H_NGM_N Books
[REVIEW] We Lack in Equipment and Control, by Jennifer H. Fortin
H_ANGM_N Books
104 pages, $14.95
Review by Carley Moore
In the introduction to Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements, and Communiqués of the Weather Underground, 1970-1974, Bill Ayers re-examines the complex global social, political, and economic climate that led to the formation of one of the most infamous revolutionary groups in American history. Known for their brash communiqués and the bombing of several government buildings in response to the war in Vietnam, the Weather Underground created their own vocabulary, a series of riffs on the Bob Dylan lyric from the song “Bad Moon”—“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Ayers remembers:
We talked of Weathermen and Weatherwomen, Weatherkids and Weatherstories, Weather documents and Weathersymps. The leadership was, of course, the Weather Bureau, a leaflet was a Weather Balloon, and the anti-imperialist struggle was the Weather Tide. Recruits went through what amounted to an informal Weatherman Berlitz in order to become functionally bilingual.
Weather, then, became not only a patois, but also a means to communicate on two levels—the politics in the air and the air itself. Continue reading
[REVIEW] How We Light, by Nick Sturm
105 pages, $14.95
Review by Hannah Rodabaugh
Nick Sturm’s full-length poetry collection How We Light is an interesting foray into the mechanics of grief. At its heart, the majority of the poems concern a failed love affair. They ask questions of how and why we communicate even when that communication fails. While there are other minor themes replete throughout the volume, none of them surmount the near constant repetition of mouths, lips, faces, throats, and voices united in their inability to do what they were designed for. Referenced in almost every poem, they point to what becomes fetishism over loss, a sort of leitmotif for giving grief language.
For example, in “A WHORL THAT ASCENDS,” Sturm writes, “At the exhibit I touch / everything with my mouth My mouth / does not attract much attention.” While not directly about loss, we get the sense that this mouth has still failed to communicate what it needs to. It speaks through tactile sensation, and no one pays attention to what it is speaking. Similarly, in one of the many poems that share the title “WHAT A TREMENDOUS TIME WE’RE HAVING!” Sturm writes, “[T]ell me you love me / is what I want to say but my tongue is not so evolved / My tongue rides a hobbyhorse in a big wet parlor / It acts like a baby.” Other iterations under that same title continually push the theme: “I am a mammal lucky to have a mouth,” one states. “I wake up and muzzle my soul . . . / My mouth automatically dismantles,” states another. This use of mouths united in their inability to do what they are designed for creates a level of hopelessness around the potential for genuine communication. This repetition also seems to say that those who can communicate the least effectively may obsess about it the most. (Though there is no loss of effective communication to the reader even when communicating about how one is unable to.) Continue reading
[REVIEW] Right Now More Than Ever, by Nate Pritts
~ by C.L. Bledsoe
100 pgs/$24.95
There’s an immediacy to Pritts’ title but also a bit of gibberish in it. It smacks of a slogan, well-meaning but also empty. And couldn’t so many of our most meaningful and important life moments be reduced to slogans, sadly? Throughout this collection, Pritts expounds on the idea of presence, of being part of his own life, of not just observing but really experiencing and interacting with those he cares about, but at the same time he mocks his own efforts, refusing to take himself too seriously or allow himself to venture into the realm of “preciousness.” He is (trying to be) “here” right now more than ever, as in present in THE present, but the spotlight he’s shining on these efforts is also a little silly, as he tells us by mocking at the same time he recognizes its importance. Basically, it’s nothing special to be present in one’s own life (everyone does it, theoretically), but that doesn’t make it any more important. This mocking also smacks a bit of self-defense: if it isn’t special, then it also shouldn’t be that scary, perhaps.
In “Talking About Autumn Rain” Pritts begins:
I hereby submit this yellow leaf as my charter,
wet & preserved under snowpack – Syracuse
blunt, a backyard bluster of stark white –though it’s early December which means it’s
autumn & the rains that rain & melt the snow
are still autumn rains. Sirs: This application containssix parts – a missing casement, two atria, two
vehicles & respected sobbings. Also,
more than a gallon of blood. Please wear gloveswhen handling to ensure proper emotional distance
from the exploding world I can’t make sense
of…
Pritts’ exploding world is the world outside the mind which he may have “railed against/ in the bright sunshine of [his] morning li[fe]” (as he states later in the poem) but now, as he’s apparently gotten older and gained some life experience, he’s begun to make peace with it. I’m reminded of Robin Williams’ character The King of the Moon, in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, who has split his head from his body in order to pursue the life of the mind separate from the body, which runs around humping things. But as with the King, one must eventually rejoin the mind to the body or else miss out on much of what life has to offer. Continue reading
Mantle by C.S. Carrier (A Review by Brian Fanelli)
$12/ 82 pgs
As a poet who started out as a prose writer first, I’ve always been drawn to narrative poetry, work that is character driven and uses some of the tropes of fiction, while still elevating language as only poetry can. C.S. Carrier’s second full-length collection of poems, Mantle, is not work I am typically drawn to. However, as early as the first page and first poem, Carrier’s book grabbed my attention and didn’t let go until the final page. His lines are gorgeous and wild, his images surreal and sometimes deadpan, and his language a reminder of the energy a single poem can contain.
The book opens with the haunting poem “Back in the Day.” Here Carrier blends surrealism, history, and child memories all in a few short stanzas. In one stanza, the poem contains an image of a praying mantis with a Bible wedged in its mouth, and in another God, labeled as an absentee ballot, floats away “on a bowl of magma.” These lines are balanced with references to politics, including Tehran and Ronald Reagan. Other imagery is apocalyptic, even in the first stanza: “I climbed the oak in the yard/The oak began dying/Blood was fermenting in Iran.” Though the poem’s bizarre images and references to childhood and politics make little sense at first, there is much to enjoy, especially the strange, juxtaposed images. Continue reading
Flood Bloom, by Caroline Cabrera (A Review by Tony Mancus)
$14.95/102 pgs.
The first thing that I encountered when starting to read Caroline Cabrera’s new book of poetry, Flood Bloom, out from H_NGM_N Books, was the honeycombing that acts as endpaper and splits the book in half. The walls of a honeycomb seem like they could be a productive organic and partially decomposing frame for what’s happening through the book. The stuff of memory is being collected chewed up, and regurgitated into form. What’s left is a fortifying byproduct and a well-crafted casing. A hive itself and bees actually arrive early on and with them come the speaker’s worry that the collective is mucked with an “f”:
The people in town are afraid of bees we are in a hive my
big concern is colony collapse disorder everything leaves
(“Movement” – 4)
We are left, but thankfully not alone and the longing that’s semi-present throughout the book is productive precisely because all is not terribly lost. Things are just a bit foggy, and this is OK.
Cabrera deftly plays around with perceptive angles and the occasional use of “we” helps define the speaker more sharply. The author relies on declarative statements, often repeating sentence beginnings, but the effect of this repetition and construction is insistence that we as readers follow her very stable eye, and what that eye sees even though it changes as it’s seen.
I see boats, the wakes they make.
I see ghosts of clouds moving beneath me,
(“Flight Language” – 20)
The lessons presented to and through this speaker are mutable, imbued with the press and pressure: of family, of varied relationships, and the distortion that memory renders. But they’re lessons that we all have our own windows into, which makes these poems easy to enter, but not simple. Continue reading