poetry collection

[REVIEW] Any Anxious Body by Chrissy Kolaya

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anxious

Broadstone Books

96 pages, $18.00

 

Review by Carley Moore

The cover of Chrissy Kolaya’s first collection of poetry, Any Anxious Body, is a drawing by Jess Larson of a yellow short-sleeved shirtwaist dress with a full skirt and white piping along the lapels and pockets.  The dress floats in the blue and white watermarked background, as if on a dress form, inhabited by no particular body.  Still, the dress is iconic and reminds one of the working-class American women in the 1950s who wore these dresses—mothers, aunts, grandmothers, wives, and girlfriends, all of them workers who tried to make a place for themselves as first- and second-generation Americans in small industrial towns.  The dress is a ghost of sorts and the book haunts us, reminding us of the stories of love and loss, death and sacrifice, abuse and secrets at the center of family lore and history.  Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Interrobang, by Jessica Piazza

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Interrobang

Red Hen Press

69 pages, $17.95

 

Review by Laura Kochman

 

I hadn’t heard the term “interrobang” before encountering Jessica Piazza’s first collection, Interrobang.  Without knowing, it sounds aggressive, or accusatory. It’s a typographical character combining the exclamation point and the question mark, excitement and question, or excitement and disbelief. Two not-opposites made composite, an uncommon ligature. It’s fallen out of usage in favor of a separate exclamation point and question mark, maybe because we are prone these days to the simpler characters preprogrammed in our word processors and text-messaging apps, maybe because we are less inclined to examine the site of overlap. Tying two things together is complicated. Interrobang embarks on that kind of examination, looking more closely at pairings and opposites. All but three of the poems are named after either a phobia or a philia, though there isn’t much tonal difference between the two poem types. Most are sonnets or variations on the sonnet form. Fear and love aren’t so far-flung. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Looking for Small Animals, by Caitlin Grace McDonnell

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animals

Nauset Press

$12.00, 68 pages

 

Review by Rachel Mennies 

 

Because it’s the worst place in the world to find the correct answer to anything, and because I never take my own advice, I type one of Looking for Small Animals’ lingering-after-I-finish-the-book subtexts, “Are humans animals?”, into Yahoo Answers. And chris160444, his avatar a growling, wild fox, gives me an answer that I believe McDonnell might echo: “The worst animals on the planet,” my new friend chris says, “are humans.”

The tameless, yet complicated animals inside us come alive early in Looking for Small Animals: “The animal started lashing at fifteen,” the speaker of McDonnell’s poem “The Moth” tells us. We read this collection, McDonnell’s first, to see where the animal leads us: to understand what an at-times-savage, at-times-peaceful human speaker can teach us about a world gone machine, about our distances from and connection to our nonhuman co-citizens. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Broken Cage by Joseph P. Wood

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cage

Brooklyn Arts Press

78 pages, $15.95

 

Review by Anaïs Duplan

 Now I the rower gentle on the water. Now I the water gentle / in refraction.

from  “Little Schooner”

 

I can’t help but squeal in excitement whenever I read the first two lines of Joseph P. Wood’s poem, “Little Schooner.” The poem comes late in the collection – it heads the third and final section, Part III: Old-New World – but it’s perhaps the most enthralling poem in Broken Cage, for its music and for its painful sincerity. Nevertheless, while it’s decidedly salient, “Little Schooner” is only as powerful as it is because it lives in the world that the surrounding poems bring into existence.

“Now I the rower gentle on the water.” The speaker, the rower, is alone, as he almost always is. So follows an unrelenting self-scrutiny, which the reader encounters again and again in Broken Cage. For example, in “Of Anxiety,” Wood bombards himself with unanswerable questions. “Joseph, why do you shake like an egg / in quiet, why do you pontificate to the pan / like a wife, why do you hold the pen // shaking Joseph.” He is ruthless here: while one Joseph interrogates, the other Joseph quivers, unable to respond. In “Poor Ex,” the overwhelmed speaker continues to tremble:

My hands shake like boats––tossed on the sea
into which I’m falling––Captain, my pills!––lost
among the inlets––babble-brained––morosely
my hands shake. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] The Messenger by Stephanie Pippin

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messenger

University of Iowa Press
70 pgs, $18

 

Review by Molly Sutton Kiefer

 

 

Stephanie Pippin can turn a swoon-worthy phrase.  Admittedly, I could spend the whole of my word count copying down the syntactical constructions Pippin created, but I will rein myself in with a few to share:  “this sky of promiscuous wings,” “Their jeweled eyes lamp the ash,” “The red fruit, with its buds / Like a string of little time bombs,” “the green / throat of an elm,” “winter’s / blood clock counting / mice,” “The waves in their gray / Ruches remind me / Of tormented pigeons,” “stargazer / lilies wilt like angels / overthrown, a bed of throats / collapsing,” “sogged with August, / morels swelling like lungs.”  These images are the sorts I collect, as if an ornithologist in the field, tucking samples into my notebook for the specimen tray at the museum.

Poems with wings:  fifteen.  Eggs:   eight.  Feathers:  five.  The last poem contains all three.  Other words I could have counted:  blood, death, bones.

Know too, that “his feathers / are holy things” and in a poem such as “Hatch,” “It is hard to give birth / to yourself.”  Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Diorama of a People, Burning by Bradley Harrison

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Burning

Ricochet Editions

33 pages, $15.00

 

Review by Hannah Rodabaugh

 

Several years ago, when I first read Ronald Johnson’s radi os, an erasure text with Milton’s Paradise Lost as source material, I was fascinated by the construct of erasure in the meaning of language. Though the intended product was inconsistent in its desire towards an aesthetic reading experience, it asked questions about interpretation and intention which were interesting in their own right. Put in a different way, a need for structure to display a level of content seemed the point of the erasure. These types of texts often contain intentions in making meaning as one of its forms of making meaning.

In this vein, Bradley Harrison’s short collection Diorama of a People, Burning is neatly exposing these intentions. The chapbook is a wave-like series of text erasures. (This wave-like structure might be intentional, as many references to the catastrophic flooding in Iowa a few years ago occur intentionally and often.) The erasures center around six prose poems. Each prose poem has a series of three corresponding increasingly erased versions that follows it.  In all but the last series, they are in order of least to most erased, which gives us a sense of everything falling away as we read. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Mysterious Acts by My People, by Valerie Wetlaufer

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Mysterious Acts cover

Sibling Rivalry Press

87 pages, $14.95

 

Review by Molly Sutton Kiefer

 

Valerie Wetlaufer’s debut collection Mysterious Acts by My People is a flirtation, seeped in desire and violence, the two often tangled with one another in a fraught tryst.  Wetlaufer shows her poetic range within this collection, and somehow, the bulk of the poems ring as absolute truths, while donning personas and flights of fancy.  The opening poem of the collection contains a kind of thesis for the book: “I loved a girl / when I was a girl, // before I knew desire / could be used against me” (“Solitary Vice”).  Here we have situations and emotions battering against each other in four lines:  the thrilling potential of attraction opening into the range of ways this can be a punishment.

Her poems make authentic other lived lives through persona.  In the poem “Bad Wife Spankings,” she writes in declarative truths: “I am the archeologist” and “I rewrite myself.”  These imaginative acts by the poet allow the realm of experience to open up, to show the universal in human experience.  In a violent sequence in the second section, there is a poem called “Telling True,” where “I rattled on / & they put me away.”  Here it does not matter where the root of truth is, but that each poem is true—truly felt, truly mattering.  One self in “Conjugal Elegy” reflects, “My tongue traces / tattoos & scars” and “Tangled sand, uncomfortable / legs, wasted days spent memorizing the body / I’d soon share.”  This kind of single-bodied entity moving into communal selves is also explored in intense friendship, as in the prose poem “The Canyon”:  “Once my hair grew long.  You braided it together with your own.  A black & blonde plait held us together on the ground.  I put a pebble in your mouth.  You almost kissed me.”  There are no lines in the sand in this poetic world; instead, there are almosts and there are moments-after. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Amulet by Jason Bayani

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amulet

Write Bloody Publishing

90 pages, $15

 

Review by Stanton Hancock

 

In Amulet, Jason Bayani issues a loud and defiant declaration that he has come to claim his place amongst the ranks of the best modern poets.  While his credentials alone are impressive – he has an MFA in creative writing from St. Mary’s College, he’s a Kundiman Fellow, and he’s a co-founder of the Asian American spoken word collective Proletariat Bronze – it’s the startling power contained within the pages of Amulet that serve to stake his claim.

Bayani covers so much poetic ground in his first collection that it is startling to reach the last page and realize that it clocks in at less than 100 pages.  After my first read-through, I was sure I had read a much longer book based purely upon the multitude of stylistic choices Bayani makes throughout the book.  While the use of many disparate styles can sometimes cause a collection to lack cohesion, Amulet does not suffer from this problem.  In fact, the strength of Bayani’s voice envelops these pages and gives the reader a sense that the many various styles do not reflect a lack of direction but rather a poet sharing the many facets of his personality.   Continue reading →

[REVIEW] The Plague Doctor in His Hull-Shaped Hat, by Stephen Massimilla

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Plague doctor

Stephen F. Austin State University Press

118 pages, $16

 

Review by Eliza Rotterman

 

Stephen Massimilla’s new poetry collection The Plague Doctor in His Hull-Shaped Hat begins seaside with the desire “not quite to live forever” but “to take / my fill of you, a long, lascivious look.” It’s an apt start for a book inspired by myth, history and journey. “Teach me to keep going / nowhere,” pleads Massimilla, “nowhere” describing both place—rock and sky—and an enlightened state of mind. From terrain nearly vacant of human presence to Italian cities densely populated and teetering atop towers of myth, the cyclical, Buddhist kind of travel Massimilla speaks of is always on a spiritual plane even while his language reflects a hyper-real, playful sensibility: “Urethra of porcelain teapot hisses,” and teens in “their went-thither hips in zucchini-green denim” traipse by.

Our expectations of travel are often unrealistic. We demand transformation without accepting the terms of pilgrimage. Adrift in his “hull-shaped hat,” the speaker of Massimilla’s poems searches for authentic, unfoldable experience. And at times he seems to find it—in his continued effort to see himself as part of a collective searching for homecoming.  “I mean more than consuming,” he tells us in “Etymology”;  “I stand wanting.” Remarkably, Massimilla brings loss and disappointment into haptic resolve:

The warmth replaced
with loss becomes part of every other reality,

its appreciation, alive to the touch,
touched every which way, every way.    Continue reading →

[REVIEW] How I Went Red by Maggie Glover

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red

Carnegie Mellon Press

73 pages, $15.95

 

Review by Molly Sutton Kiefer

 

The narrator in How I Went Red by Maggie Glover is fierce and unafraid to break wide open, share her intimacies, her scuffed-up linoleum, her junk drawers, her bank bills.  This voice comes from the kind of friend you’d crack open a beer with at a late-night kitchen countertop, lean over and tell the secrets of your worst day.  This kind of honesty builds a kind of trust for the reader, a take-off-your-coat-and-stay-a-while feeling.

So much of How I Went Red is yearning towards a new start, another envisioning of the self.  The poem “In West Virginia” begins:  “Each morning was a fresh, blue breakdown.”  In “A 350-Pound Man Receives Liposuction on Channel 43,” we observe the gruesome surgical transformation of not only the observed but the observer, ending, “I / was inside / my own skin, upon another bed // of record loss, a home I / made myself of blow-back and skin, inside— / how many hands to make a bed?”  Even dreams can refresh the narrator; in “Poem for a Night Shift”:  “I fall back into the dream / where I am among the red mountains, / a purple storm flashing:  an indulgent ordeal / of color and noise.  I awake with the dull impression / that something has happened, somewhere, again—” And then Glover gives us the Amnesia sequence, poems about forgetting to remember again. Continue reading →