National Poetry Month

[REVIEW] at first & then by Danielle Rose

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(Black Lawrence Press, 2021)

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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Danielle Rose’s at first & then opens with a few lines from LIFE published in 1947. A couple of lines into the poem that stars under those lines, Rose pulls that suicide and her own life together, weaving a narrative across time in the way only poetry can:

“like me she wanted to disappear?

i have too many of my mother’s tendencies?

perhaps she nervously tapped her foot?

was no fun at parties and did not understand?

that she was not actually broken”

The dark, enigmatic aura of that opening poem is perfectly matched by the following one, which is titled “aleister crowley summoned demons & all i get is this tarot telling me i am always in the wrong.” Despite the humorous title, the poem isn’t funny and once again mentions Rose’s mother. Just like in these two poems, darkness, death, and the self quickly emerge as strong cohesive elements in the collection, and the resulting poetry is often sharp and memorable because it reveals the poet as the shifting, complex center of everything.

at first & then, which won the Fall 2019 Black River Chapbook Competition, deals with trauma, grief, and gender, but always through Rose’s lens, which makes everything feel like a study in identity and a personal confession. The body is present here, a flawed, wonderful thing full of bones, secrets, and desires:

“tell me i am like the sky / & lie to me / tell me i am expansive & clear / i need to hear that joyful clouds reach their hands into my chest / because i can feel them inside of me / storming / telling me i am pretty when i smile / i want to be a set of cascading conditions / like a logical proof or the way i am always sneaking away from my fear / tell me i am prettier when i smile / tell me / become a cloud & tell me that when i am pretty / it is impossible to be so empty”

This chapbook is a tiny gem in which the heavy themes of some of the poems balance perfectly with the wit and humor of some of the titles. For example, “on walking outside with my morning coffee at 9:00 am to find my new neighbors fucking like cottontails in their backyard” is a title that’s hard to forget. The same goes for the poem itself, in which Rose dreams of catching said neighbors in a jar and keeping the there so they can do their thing “against a snapped twig.”

In many ways, at first & then is a journey of transformation, but one that follows no map. Here, grief, trauma, and keen observations reveal the change, but the change itself, while always at the core, never overpowers anything else. These are poems about transformation, becoming, and emergence, but they don’t tackle those subjects in any cliché ways. Instead, each line holds something new, and sometimes that new thing is a powerful revelation: “i am a queer body that was hidden inside a different queer body.” These lines, more then words on the page, feel like the extricated veins of a person who performed poetry surgery on themselves.

Rose’s knack for dictating rhythm and the depth of her writing make at first & then an impressive debut, and hopefully one that announces the arrival of a great new poetic voice with much more to say. 

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Gabino Iglesias is a writer, editor, literary critic, and professor living in Austin, TX. He is the author of ZERO SAINTS and COYOTE SONGS. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

[REVIEW] A Complex Accident of Life by Jessica McHugh

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(Sparrow Poetry, 2020)

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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Jessica McHugh’s A Complex Accident of Life is complex, but it’s no accident. Inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, McHugh created a series of Gothic blackout poems. However, the book includes a “clean” version of each poem as well as images of the original pages she used, which clearly show the markings, ink, colors, and different approaches. The juxtaposition is visually engaging and reveals the artist at work. The result is a collection of short poems about a plethora of topics that quickly reveals itself as an objet d’art.

The interesting thing about having images of the original pages next to the end result of McHugh’s work is that readers get to see the words as they originally appeared in Shelley’s work and then can read the hidden poetry McHugh revealed by slicing away the “extra” words that were hiding it. This way, a page of Shelley’s work transforms into something new that carries a its own meaning:

“I am a vessel of dauntless courage

And severe evil.?

My joy will endeavor,?

My rage possess.”

According to the author’s note that kicks off the collection, McHugh originally made a few blackout poems to give away or sell. This means that, more than blackout, the pages she worked on were carefully colored and drawn on to reveal the poem within. In A Complex Accident of Life, there is plenty or color, patterns, curlicues, and drawings that go from smooth and organic (like the one for A Blessed House, which resembled a close-up of a cluster of colorful cells) to blocky blackout (although the color used to cover text is never black) with words trapped in tiny rectangles. From time to time, the blackout process is so clearly a work or art that it presents readers with a recognizable image. For example, “A Kind of Pleasure” shows a raging storm at sea, complete with dark clouds, roiling waves, and lightning bolts in the sky.

Perhaps the best thing about blackout poetry is the way it reveals not only a secret that was always on that page but also the personality and taste of the poet plucking out those special words. Reading the poems in A Complex Accident of Life isn’t reading chunks of Shelley’s work; it’s reading McHugh’s voice. “It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishments of my toils,” writes Shelley. Here, dreary, night, and toils could offer an easy start, but McHugh picked November, and the result is a poem that shares the collection’s title and perfectly exemplifies how the poet’s voice is at the center here, even if the source material is Shelley’s work:

“November was half-extinguished,

A dull yellow eye?

Within I endeavoured to form,

Beautiful and horrid,

A complex accident of life.”

Themes abound in this collection, but they all carry the dark, gloomy atmosphere of Gothic literature. Darkness, wounds, monsters, and “quiet misery” can be found in this pages, but the poems are so short that recurring themes never get boring. McHugh received a Bram Stoker Award nomination for this collection, and it’s easy to see why: A Complex Accident of Life is a monster born of the pieces of another monster, all carefully rearranged and brought to life by McHugh. I hope she tackles another classic soon.

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Gabino Iglesias is a writer, editor, literary critic, and professor living in Austin, TX. He is the author of ZERO SAINTS and COYOTE SONGS. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

[REVIEW] Baptism by Fire by Amy-Jean Muller

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(First Cute, 2021)

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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“An angry woman remains a political act, and is sometimes a creative one as well. Rage, here, is transcended into art. It becomes constructive—clearing the way for growth. Fury is wielded as a transformative force. It burns away impediments to change. What blooms after?”

That’s the last paragraph of the introduction actress, writer, and pornographer Stoya wrote for Amy-Jean Muller’s Baptism by Fire, a superb poetry collection that serves as the perfect introduction to Muller’s work.

Short collections almost demand a concise synopsis, and Muller’s work screams courage. Her poems use vivid imagery to bring thoughts to life or to reshape the past to give it new meaning in order to be share with readers. Her life is here, and so are religion and motherhood, to name two strong cohesive elements that give the collection a sense of unity. Take, for example, the opening lines of “Choked at birth,” a poem that serves to set the atmosphere for what’s to come: 

“My birth was like a hanging;

breathless and suspended from her tree

I was thrust from her branches

with the chord wrapped twice

around my neck”

Muller constantly uses beautiful language to present ugly things, but her technique doesn’t lessen the impact of what hides behind her words. Take “Roses,” which is devastating and, while short, opens up a chasm in the reader’s heart that soon fills up with pain and anger, none of which are in the poem itself in any obvious ways:

“I met a a father once

and he was different from mine

when he laughed at my jokes

looking at the buds that grew on my chest

pushing swollen behind the flesh

of a pink nipple

And when he handled them like roses

His fingers grasped my blossoms

To hear my wince

having taken a bouquet

of petals

from flowers

that were

yet to grow”

The strength it took to write that comes from a place constantly on display in Baptism by Fire. It’s a strength that shines from Muller’s core, showing how she’s seen life for what it is, survived a lot, and is ready to survive whatever else comes, with or without help. The short lines of “Listen” are a perfect example of that strength, even if they show vulnerability:

“Listen, I don’t pray to God often

but when I do

the ghosts dragged behind me

stir up to face

my reticence,

 knowing nobody heard.”

Baptism by Fire shows a maturity born of experience that is rarely found in such raw form. Muller has deconstructed and understood the male gaze, and takes it to task here in a poem that at first seems to be about hair. She has seen how violence is used to cover fragile masculinity, and she attacks a “Little Man,” a “Little Boy,” or where she talks to someone who “pretended to be a man.” She has also seen through religion, and while it remains here as part of her thought—a scar of indoctrination—she’s done with it: “When I left my faith on the roadside/like those dated books from the attic…” Muller is done with religion, with the glass ceiling, with being asked to “wear some heels to raise your children.” However, there’s not just anger here; these poems are also a celebration. These poems celebrate strength, intelligence, and courage. These poems celebrate women.

In the book’s epilogue, Mueller discusses how the collection was inspired by “symbolism and heteropatriarchal norms found in the stories of Greek and Roman mythology.”  The epilogue quickly morphs into something akin to an academic paper on the role of women in male-centric myths, but the beauty of it is how it surreptitiously reveals an awesome truth: it’s easy for men to be the heroes and women to be the monsters and temptresses, but only when men write the narrative. Baptism by Fire subverts that narrative, and the result is a collection about power and womanhood that dances over the corpses of those old narratives.

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Gabino Iglesias is a writer, editor, literary critic, and professor living in Austin, TX. He is the author of ZERO SAINTS and COYOTE SONGS. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

[REVIEW] Now We’re Getting Somewhere by Kim Addonizio

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(W.W. Norton & Company, 2021)

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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Some poetry collections feel impersonal, as if the poet is on some kind of pensive examination of something and the reader is just along for the ride, a witness more than a participant in a conversation. Kim Addonizio’s Now We’re Getting Somewhere is the opposite of that. The writing in this collection is personal, but it also feels like a conversation, like Addonizio is talking to you, bringing you into her world, sharing her thoughts the way a friend would, over coffee or beer or from under their covers.

The beauty of Now We’re Getting Somewhere comes from its ugliness. I know what you’re thinking, but stay with me. Here’s the opening line of “Song for Sad Girls”: “Right now I feel like a self-cleaning microwave about to malfunction.” Bizarre. Brutal. Honest. Strangely relatable. She goes on:

“Sad girls, sad girl, you’re everywhere. Sick on the snake oil

of romance. Blundering in and out of beds

and squabbles with roommates. Scalded by raindrops.

Hating yourselves with such pure hatred.

Loving the music that makes it worse. This is that music.”

That music, the rhythms of doubt, the strident cacophony of self-hatred, permeates the collection. Addonizio creates a world where the real is always present. Drinking, rehab, heartbreak, loneliness; they’re all here, time and again, presented in a unique voice that somehow reminds us how universal that darkness is. “I never learn from my mistakes,” says Addonizio, and neither do we, but if the result of that is personal poetry like this, then I say the best thing we can do is keeping fucking up.

There are no weak poems in Now We’re Getting Somewhere, but the segment titled Confessional Poetry could easily be called its crowning jewel. In the short lines that make up that segment, Addonizio obliterates everything about confessional writing while simultaneously offering some of her own, which goes to show that some things are inescapable: Of confessional writing, she says:

“Writing it is like firing a nail gun into the center of a vanity mirror

or slowly shaking a souvenir snow-globe of asbestos & shame

to quiet an imaginary baby”

The darkness in this collection is oppressive because Addonizio knows how to remind readers about bad feelings. In “Archive of Recent Uncomfortable Emotions, we get a laundry list of them: the “however much I drink I can’t pretend it’s love feeling,” the “everything I write is shit feeling,” and the “my friends are no longer my friends feeling,” hit especially hard for me, but there is something in there for everyone.

Despite that darkness, there is plenty or light. No, wait; maybe I should say the light that can be found here is concentrated in a way that its strength is like that of a laser beam. While there is plenty of humor and brilliant lines, two of them will stick with readers like tiny, positive remoras clinging to their ribs. The first comes at the end of “To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall”: “listen I love you joys is coming.” Short, but sharp and meaningful. The second slice of light closes the collection, and it packs so much that anything I said after it would be useless, so it also closes this review. This line is for you:

“Listen: when a stranger steps into the elevator with a bouquet of white roses not meant for you,

they’re meant for you.”

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Gabino Iglesias is a writer, editor, literary critic, and professor living in Austin, TX. He is the author of ZERO SAINTS and COYOTE SONGS. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

National Poetry Month – Poem of the Day – Anya Groner

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We’re continuing the celebration of National Poetry Month with this Anya Groner epic from issue 10.6!

Proposal

ANYA GRONER

Give me your body: your elbows, your aches,
the sweet mismatched hollows that dent
when you grin. Give me your secrets but whisper
them slow, so that some far off midnight
when my knuckles are gnarled, knotted,
and throbbing, you’ll distract me with tales

of long ago mischief and childhood shame.
I’m a vampire for you and my hunger
has teeth. Give me your keloids, haunted

and white, your abdominal zipper
from the terrible day when you had to be fetched
from a field trip school bus. The men in white coats

swapped one pain for another. Give me that pain
and give me that organ—your humming appendix
condemned to a dish. I’ll take, too, your sorrow

and even your road rage. I want you, Love,
ugly and wild and real. Give me
your hand, and I’ll reach, Babe, I’ll grip.

National Poetry Month – Poem of the Day – Bob Hicok

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We hope you had a wonderful weekend. Start your week off right with a trio of Bob Hicok poems from Issue 8.11.

Mew zee um

The way she stood looking at the picture. This stranger.
Suggested she wanted to be inside the picture.
The way I stood looking at the stranger. Suggested
I wanted to be inside her. Not the way you think
or only the way you think. But in her brain
inside the picture, a brain aware of being stared at
by herself being stared at by me. It’s so simple: entire
lives go by day after day, an inch or arm’s reach away.
One approach is to let them, another is to lash
ourselves together like boats or what else
gets lashed together? I don’t know, I should have majored
in lashing together at school. Instead I took classes
on Carl Jung and patrilineal and matrilineal societies
and ran naked in the rain around Northeast Grand Rapids
with a woman equally though differently naked.
Some people like to run around in the rain
with the same naked, I like to run around in the rain
with different naked, but I’d really like to know
if the artist felt the stranger staring at her picture.
And you? What matters to you? You who are staring at me
thinking of you. Slip me a note. Dance me a dance.
Say something in Spanish to a wind that will say something
in wind to me. Now that we’re all friends. Now that the time
has come to leave.

Why smoking should be allowed in bars

Smoke goes spelunking in lover’s lungs,
smoke has sex in the air in front of us all
in the bar, smoke settles in shot glasses
and brain crevices and some escapes
onto Woodward and floats downtown,
crosses the river and heads into Windsor
and the lives of Canadians, I’m one of those people
who got off on the wrong foot with creation,
it’s hard to imagine a Canadian saying that, or smoke
playing poker and doing anything
but bluffing, I’ve never had to go to a mechanic
and say my car or my life is breaking down
because it’s too elegant, that’s the kind of problem
smoke would have, and I wouldn’t listen,
not one bit, feeling, I hate to admit this, happy
to see smoke brought to its knees.

Home improvement with cheerleading

There’s a door I know, cream, a pre-hung, it should be blue
like the other door a few feet away is blue
like an ocean I dated once. In simple aesthetic terms,
egress should match, egrets should fly,
they’re horrible paper weights. I have the paint, the brush,
the weather is fine, I have no superstitions
about painting in my green underwear. It seems
like a brand of force though, like someone saying,
You never use the word pussy to make you use
the word pussy in your reply, which might be
I hate the word pussy or I use the word pussy all the time.
Do you want me to paint you, I want to ask the door,
really ask the door, like I really want to ask my wife’s pussy,
Do you feel like a door, and if you do, would you feel judged
if suddenly I painted you blue? I hate the word pussy
only slightly less than cunt, it’s such an explosion
in the mouth, cunt, a sound nothing like
what it’s a sound for, I’d call my wife’s pussy
The Velveteen Rabbit if I’d read the book
people love, adore is not a strong enough word,
it’s the right word for the job. Pussy
is not, you’re fired, pussy. You should see this blue,
you should walk through this blue to whatever hides
on the other side of this blue, saying lovely lovely blue
as you do so if you want, I find it strange
how often I’m talking directly to you
by the end of poems, doors that they are, cunts
if you prefer to call them that, I’d cringe
but mostly be happy that you’re here, remember,
we were all together, we were unified in our outlook,
we were all on the way to having Velveteen Rabbits
in the womb, then something happened to half of us,
something big or not so big, but not so divisive
we can’t all say Go Team and mean it.

National Poetry Month Poem of the Day – Morgan Parker

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Poet Morgan Parker is doing great things. We’re happy to share her work from issue 7.13 as today’s poem of the day.

 

If My Housemate Fucks With Me I Would Get So Real (Audition Tape Take 1)

I didn’t come here to make friends.
Buildings spit their stomachs at me
and I spit back, down the sidewalk
into a bitch’s hair. I am a forehead
careening in clouds, a dirty tree branch
brushing against the shingles
of the production room. I am
groundbreaking: two as one.
Brooding tattooed over my art.
Otherwise, black.
Can do angry, can’t do
accents. I need little coaching,
provocation. Opinionated and
Everything a man wants.
Lips and boobs camera-ready.
If I hear you’re talking shit about me
in your confessional interview,
please know
seven birds have fallen dead at my feet
right out of the sky.
I learned this right hook here
when I was only six. Bitch, please.
I’m so real my hair is going gray,
legs bruised up like tree bark,
veins of my neck as swollen as
ripe fruit, the cheeks of what is growing.

National Poetry Month – Poem of the Day

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We’re so excited to see all of the amazing work Chen Chen has done! Check out his poem from Issue 9.8 as today’s Poem of the Day!

poem,/love,

undo me
left & sight
north & mouth
uncompass me
with your tender
your further
& sideways
impossibilities
come on
murk me blue me
knock me out out
of me my
tight &
goodly just sweetly
behead me
with your babel
& juice your fiddle
your ruse your
arson your trees your
armpits your fishes
your loco your lilts
your mango
your licks

[PANK] Poem of the Day – National Poetry Month

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We’re honored to have published works from so many amazing poets and writers over the years. In honor of National Poetry Month, we’ll be sharing a poem a day from a previous issue. Here are two wonderful pieces from Liz Dosta from Issue 8.10 for April 1 & 2!

Elizabeth Taylor, Horse Whisperer

Husbandry: if you grow it, they live by it.
Wives, beware your husbands.

There’s a ghost in the snow.
There’s a ghost and a hand that fills the hour with greatness.

Soon, all will be revealed:
here is a woman empty of her man.

We’ll have no more of Marion.
Goodbye Winterset, Iowa. Goodbye house.

Horsedreams.
I have cried many nights waiting for my man.

The radiator shakes and steams.
Nights look like dead crows in the dirt without you here.

Leave me this hour to reclaim.
Find me in the wash closet, a mirror between my legs.

 

John Wayne Builds A Fire

First, I rub two twigs together.
I smell arrogance.
The sky gets very small.
Smoke lifts from between my palms.

Call me Hightower.
Over open flames
something turns.
In my mouth with you

as with all desire which we will henceforth
describe as hunger, passion her twin.

Obsession,
the longing for object
in absentia, describes the span of time
between wanting and having,
is masculine.

Obtaining is a partial luck. No turning back
a faith. Keep turning until burning
becomes intolerable.

I rub my palms together and breathe
into the small cave my hands make.

Tell me a story
about the longhaired men
who come to the lakes to wash their bodies
like stone,
like love letters
held under water.