[REVIEW] Mother, Loose by Brandel France de Bravo

Posted on April 21, 2015 by Sheila Squillante

34 pages, $10.00

Review by Hannah Rodabaugh

Brandel France de Bravo’s poetry chapbook Mother, Loose combines childhood nursery rhymes and a sense of overwhelming grief into a fascinating, hybrid document. At times, it resembles the humor of the book Politically Correct Bedtime Stories—except this collection is more like its grown-up cousin than its twin. Other times, the collection is intense in its portrayal of the narrator’s dying mother—sometimes similar to Plath’s aesthetic-like immolation of her father. This chapbook’s lush language, its poignant grief, and its imaginative retelling of classic nursery rhymes are a delight to read.

The title appears to be a sort of intersection: a play on the words “Mother Goose” and “Mother Lose.” This double meaning is intentional as so many of the poems, even the retold nursery rhymes, are about the death of the narrator’s mother (or at least a mother figure) from some form of cancer. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Saturn, by Simon Jacobs

Posted on April 16, 2015 by Sheila Squillante

Spork Press
36 pages, $12

Review by Emily-Jo Hopson

Saturn, by Simon Jacobs (of Safety Pin Review) is a brave oddity: a collection of 16 shorts about David Bowie, both semi-biographical and hyper-fictionalized. If the thought of reading a book of fan-fiction puts you off from picking it up, reconsider: It is a powerful, intelligent work, polished to the gleam in both theme and execution, at sentence and story level. Though Jacobs is clearly a Bowie fan, and Saturn is, by definition, fan-fiction, it is not a work of fan worship – the portrayal is affectionate, but not uncritical. It’s a fascinating, weird speculation on what life might perhaps be like in David Bowie Land, in David Bowie’s “sizable Manhattan apartment,” as the artist comes to the end of his multi-decade career. There are some accompanying illustrations, and these are equally honest; Bowie’s big teeth, jowls, stubble and age lines are all there.

Plot basics are open to interpretation. My reading: Having become “the ‘elder statesman’ of rock, an old man left to passively herald in the new as his voice goes reedy,” Jacobs’ Bowie is descending Mt. Olympus, and becoming mortal. He attempts to stave off the future and his mortality by revisiting and, increasingly, dwelling within his own iconography; purchased works of art begin to take on his features, flashes of Ziggy Stardust and The Thin White Duke appear in stormy windowpanes, movie and video game cameos are re-watched, obscure bit-parts re-inhabited. Continue reading →

MÉNAGE À TRIOLETS, by Heidi Czerwiec

Posted on April 15, 2015 by Sheila Squillante

A [PANK] Blog guest series for National Poetry Month

ONLY CONNECT

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/hook-up-apps/

With the newest, latest App
there’s many ways to make a connection:
with Tinder, Grinder, and 3nder, you’ll tap
(with the newest, latest App)
every horny lovelorn on the digital map,
and with Hulu, proof you’re free of infection.
Without the newest, latest App,
how’d we ever make a Basic connection?

***

Heidi Czerwiec is a poet, essayist, translator, and critic who teaches at the University of North Dakota and is poetry editor at North Dakota Quarterly. She is the author of three chapbooks, including Self-Portrait as Bettie Page, and the forthcoming A Is For A-ké, The Chinese Monster. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, Waxwing, and Able Muse, and you can visit her at heidiczerwiec.com

[REVIEW] The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards, by Rachel Mennies

Posted on April 14, 2015 by Sheila Squillante

Texas Tech University Press
79 pages, $17.56

Review by Ryan Rydzewski

“What good is storytelling,” someone asks the speaker in Rachel Mennies’s first poetry collection, The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards, “if I can’t tell you stories the way I want to?”

The question implies an elusive truth in the stories we tell each other—stories altered, perhaps, by embellishment, by the unreliability of memory, or by lies of omission; stories modified to spare their receivers pain. But what happens when we stake our identities on such stories? What if those stories define not only ourselves, but also our culture and where we come from? Does the avoidance of pain really outweigh the importance of truth? What good are stories about our past, after all, if we can’t lean on them with confidence in our present?

The winner of Texas Tech University Press’ Walt McDonald First Book Prize, The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards tackles these questions by peeling back thick layers of memory and family history. The speaker, a Jewish woman in modern America, attempts to reconcile her grandmother’s stories with the historical facts available to her, and ends up relearning her own identity in the process. Mennies’s poems—steeped in religion, Jewish history, and carefully chosen imagery—are both straightforward enough for clarity and sparse enough to leave room for implication. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room: Blog People

Posted on April 13, 2015 by Sheila Squillante

When Temim Fruchter began writing her monthly column Between the Bones for the [PANK] blog, she described “[m]y blunt grown-up pancake feet, with their no arches, my feet with their chipped red polish, my feet like a golem’s – ungraceful stones, impostors in shoes.” This former drummer for the Jewish feminist punk band The Shondes maintains historical immediacy and bodily consciousness in this edition of our series of interviews with the blog people, who keep the [PANK] internet chugging and full of poetry.

Interview by Diana Clarke

1. Many of us are scattered across the country and only know one another, and our writers, from the internet. Where do you blog from?

I blog from a house on the edge of a forest in Washington, DC.

2. In what ways is a blog person like a bog person? Continue reading →

[REVIEW] My Family and Other Hazards, by June Melby

Posted on April 10, 2015 by Sheila Squillante

Henry Holt and Co.
320 pages, $25.00

Review by Denton Loving

When June Melby’s family decided to buy the Tom Thumb Miniature Golf course in Waupaca, Wisconsin, nobody understood the myriad ways such a game would affect and influence their family. Melby’s memoir, My Family and Other Hazards, details their relationship with the game of mini-golf, both as a business and as one of the constants in their lives. But Melby’s narrative isn’t merely childhood reminiscence, and although Melby reports about the interesting history of mini-golf, it’s so much more than an historical account.

Melby’s cleverness should be noted in many ways, most obviously with the book’s framework—eighteen chapters, one for every hole in the course. But the beginning of the course isn’t exactly the beginning of the story. The force behind this recounting of Tom Thumb’s history begins with a moment of crisis when Melby’s parents plan to sell the course. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Americana, by Rich Murphy

Posted on April 9, 2015 by Sheila Squillante

The Poetry Press
83 pages, $15

Review by Stanton Hancock

The literary canon is full of examples of writers who head out in search of America. In his third full-length poetry collection Americana, the aptly titled winner of Prize Americana, Rich Murphy embarks on his own journey across the American landscape. However, this is an America greatly changed from the land romanticized and idealized by writers like Kerouac. Rather, this is an America that has failed to live up to its potential. Murphy examines the shining city on the hill fallen to squalor and explores the superficiality of contemporary consumerism. This is not to suggest that Murphy’s collection is simply a cynical mockery of modern America but more so an exploration of American culture. In Americana, Murphy asks the tough questions, “Where did we go wrong?” and “What have we become?”

Whereas other explorations of what it means to be an American have often pulled back and viewed this country with a wide-angle lens, focusing on the open road and expansive metropolitan sprawl, Americana instead zooms in and examines American life from what is at times an uncomfortably close perspective. Consider the opening poem “Western State Penitentiary” which examines a life trapped in a prison. “Entering the prison yard / by way of the womb / and leaving only as the fertilizer / for another civilization . . . ” Continue reading →

MÉNAGE À TRIOLETS, by Heidi Czerwiec

Posted on April 8, 2015 by Sheila Squillante

A [PANK] Blog guest series for National Poetry Month

PATRIOT ACT

Acts of congress are necessary
to preserve the perfect union intact.
So why do some folks, so contrary,
think Acts of Congress are necessary
to mandate who may pair off, marry?
Listen: we the people fuck;
these acts of congress are necessary
to preserve the perfect union intact.

***

Books We Can’t Quit: The Member of the Wedding, by Carson McCullers

Posted on April 7, 2015 by Sheila Squillante

Houghton Mifflin Company
176 pages, $7.95

Review by Sara Watson

It is Frankie who compels me, with her particularly gloomy and yet somehow charming brand of adolescent anguish, to pull this book from my shelf again and again. And it is every exquisite sentence that keeps me reading through to the end. Check out this opening, easily one of the most beautiful in all American literature:

It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid. Continue reading →

[Review] Bone Map, by Sara Eliza Johnson

Posted on April 2, 2015 by Sheila Squillante

Milkweed Editions
80 pages, $16

Review by Nicole Capó

There is magic to be found in the mundane.

“All moments will shine/if you cut them open,/glisten like entrails in the sun,” says Sara Eliza Johnson in her poem “As the Sickle Moon Guts a Cloud.” And cut she does, stripping away at the layers of those moments to find what lives underneath in her first collection of poetry, Bone Map. Though her work consistently touches on themes of death and disease, war and pain, it’s also full of color and light — It’s easy to imagine Johnson sitting in a sun-drenched room ruminating on the brilliance of blood.

Despite the ripeness of her poetry, Johnson’s vivid imagery stands in stark contrast to her careful use of language. Her phrases are slow and thoughtful, evoking images that are as striking as they are subtle. In “Frühlingstraum,” for instance, the narrator is reflecting on her hands while gardening, when suddenly:

I scrape my palm on a rock
and it bleeds into the soil
(which will bring tomatoes, strawberries). It is good
to be alive.

Continue reading →