poems

[REVIEW] The Disinformation Phase, by Chris Toll

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disinformation

Publishing Genius Press
68 pp/$12.00

Review by Kate Schapira

The first time Emily Dickinson appears in Chris Toll’s collection of poems, she’s writing an angry letter to Arthur Rimbaud about the FitzGerald translation of the Rubaiyat. The second time, she pays a fangirl visit to Edgar Allan Poe, hitches a ride to 2002 in his time machine, and leaves a poem in a Baltimore bookstore. Its first stanza reads

I’ve lost Everything – I’ve lost Everything Twice.
I bought a Sniper Rifle from a man named Don.
I’ve got a Holy Bible gnawed by mice –
I want to dance like they did in Babylon –

I was just talking with someone about how dashes aren’t what makes an Emily Dickinson poem; they dress a poem up as an Emily Dickinson poem. That made me wonder what I’d put on a poem to make it look like it came from Disinformation Phase. Continue reading →

Marvelous Medicine: Books for Precocious Kids and Kid-Hearted Grownups

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~by Dan Pinkerton

of lamb

Of Lamb, by Matthea Harvey, paintings by Amy Jean Porter
McSweeney’s Books

Many of the classics have an air of weirdness about them, novelty coupled with discomfiture. The art startles, making you more alert, opening you to a new kind of beauty. Think Dalí or Buñuel, Wallace Stevens or William Faulkner, Bladerunner or Charlie Kaufman. Of course there’s bad weird, weirdness for its own sake, genuine insanity. Such weirdness quickly fades. But there’s also good weird, the weird that endures. Of Lamb, a book of poems by Matthea Harvey with paintings by Amy Jean Porter, is assuredly good weird.

The weirdness is there in neon from the start. Porter’s paintings are a hodgepodge of color and line, stencil-style patterns, leaves and limbs and vines spiraling across the page. We get glimpses of everything from Manny Ramirez to Seventies-era split-levels to Washington crossing the Delaware. In one illustration, the book’s protagonist, Lamb, stands on a table gnawing at his back leg, surrounded by cacti, while a large wasp settles on his haunch. In another, Lamb is tightrope walking above an old cabinet-style TV set on which an image of Peter Jennings plays. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Tanya Olson

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Welcome to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work.

December interviews come courtesy of the mind of DeWitt Brinson.

***

Tanya Olson’s Ain’t I Pretty Fought to get into our March Issue. Now read as Tanya beats the shit out of anyone who’d try to put Ali in a Greek box, people who can’t not buy tigers, and those who choose not to see. All this before being eaten alive by a snake-shark.

1. Your bio says you have a book coming out, but that was months ago and YesYes Books’ website says Boyishly is out. Wanna plug it?

Heck yeah! Boyishly is beautiful to look at, unsettling to read. It is an American book that asks why we see what we see, as well as what is the cost of not seeing, not being seen. I also like that it is a book that is stern but forgiving to its readers.

2. Muhammad Ali is like Plato in that he’s known as a philosopher, writer, and fighter. Do you think he should be studied in school the same way the dialogues are?

It would seem a shame to lock Ali up in academia, behind school walls. Ali needs to be free to move between worlds- schools are not good about granting the folks they focus on other understandings, so poor Ali would end up like Plato, a one trick pony (Greek, philosopher, allegory of the cave guy) instead of the beautiful complex dude he is. We need to keep the loud Ali who talked and talked alive beside the liquid Ali who hit and danced beside the Ali who is locked inside his own body, who serves as some sort of cultural touchstone. I love that all those Alis live simultaneously in the poem. Once Ali dies, I’m afraid he’ll become only the guy who used to lip with Cosell or some other similar reduction. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Sara Backer

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Welcome to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work.

December interviews come courtesy of the mind of DeWitt Brinson.

***

I direct you to Three Poems by Sara Backer in our March issue. Now join us, won’t you? As we discuss the new toll system for traveling to poets, Buddha bunnies, and the dark stairwell we drink from.

1. These poems made me hungry. How do you see the intersection of poetry and food?

Obviously, both are basic necessities. Beyond that, food is the vehicle of the most tangible imagery there is. Is that cheating? (p.s. I do make a fabulous devil’s food cake from scratch.)

2. After digesting Crocodiles in Real Life, what poem by Vallejo should be ingested?

To me, Vallejo is a city in California you drive through on I-80 and pay toll to cross the Carquinez Bridge from which you can see the lighted Domino sign fill up with neon sugar. (I’ll mail back my graduate degree tomorrow.) But since that’s your only question about Crocodiles in Real Life, I’ll ramble. The story line is totally factual; I experienced this in 1981with substantial apprehension and relief. I didn’t write about it until decades later when I perceived a political metaphor. I live in New Hampshire, a State that has been targeted by the Free Stater movement that is blatantly out to destroy our government in the vague name of “freedom” (i.e. freedom from democracy, freedom from social responsibility).  Most people regard the Free Staters as harmless whackos, but the movement is funded by billionaires. It’s naive and dangerous to think they are safely contained. Little bits of them add up to one big predator, a predator who has no qualms about eating us alive.  Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Petrarchan, by Kristina Marie Darling

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~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] Songs From Under the River: Early & New Work by Anis Mojgani

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~by Stanton Hancock

Songs from Under the River

 

$15/88 pages

Write Bloody Publishing

 

If you’re not familiar with the poetry of Anis Mojgani, you’ve most likely been making a concerted effort to not pay attention.  As a two-time National Poetry Slam champion and the winner of the International World Cup Poetry Slam, Mojgani has more than demonstrated his performing prowess.  Likewise, his previous poetry collections The Feather Room and Over the Anvil We Stretch have aptly demonstrated that his poetry sings just as beautifully on the page as it does on the stage.  With his newest collection, Songs From Under the River, Mojgani has pasted together a vivid collage comprised of new works, previously unpublished early poems, and classic staples of his live readings.

Rather than simply present this collection chronologically as would be typical in an anthology such as this, Mojgani has instead compiled a sort of poetry mix-tape.  The poems seem to have no discernable pattern to their organization yet the flow of the collection as a whole is too effective to be merely the result of happenstance.  Instead, the poems leap deftly back and forth through time and capture snapshots of one of modern poetry’s strongest voices at various points in his career.

The collection opens with the beaconing stanzas of “Closer.”  In this poem, Mojgani invites the reader to join him in a celebration of life and love.  Simultaneously welcoming and defiant, he urges the reader to join him as he extols:

So come closer, come into this. There are birds beating their wings beneath / your breastplate gentle sparrows aching to sing—come aching hearts! Come / soldiers of joy, doormen of truth! Come true-of-heart. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Kind, by Gretchen Primack

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~ by Hannah Rodabaugh

Kind

Post Traumatic Press

86 pgs/$15.00

Gretchen Primack’s most recent collection of poetry, Kind (Post Traumatic Press), is protest poetry at its best and worst. At its best, it will make you think; at its worst, it will make you uncomfortable, which will also make you think. The poems, which deal primarily with the inherent dignity of different kinds of animals, will create responses as various as the poems: humility, a sense of the dignity of animals, occasional bewilderment, excitement, and even occasional anger were a few of the many emotional responses that I often felt when reading Kind. This is a compliment. It is rare to read a book of poems, and garner such a variety of emotions and range of emotions while reading it. It certainly makes for exciting reading.

A middle poem, “The Other Half of the Simile,” reiterates what are the most salient themes of this volume. An overwhelming sense of despair fronted within factory farming becomes a short epithet-heavy discussion of human involvement. She hazards:

They beat him like a dog
They packed them in like cattle
They caged them like animals

And why do we chafe not at the beating,
but which being
is beaten?

Not the cage, but who is caged?

Why should any being be packed?

They were animals
He was a beast to her

Who are the beasts?

Just from this segment, we get a sense of how deeply thought and deeply felt concern towards animals is for Primack. This is hardly surprising given her work as a political activist in the animal rights movement. But, she weaves animal rights towards understanding with deftness. Everything is intentional in the landscape of this well-structure volume. For Primack, the rights of animals are human rights, and vice versa. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Right Now More Than Ever, by Nate Pritts

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~ by C.L. Bledsoe

RNTME

H_NGM_N BKS

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 contains

six parts – a missing casement, two atria, two
vehicles & respected sobbings. Also,
more than a gallon of blood. Please wear gloves

when 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 →

Wrought & Found

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Original poems and found images

~by Mia Sara

Mid Life With Gorilla

At the annual Halloween parade for grades K-6, camera poised,
in the glare of what passes for Autumn in Southern California,
waiting for my daughter, in her gorilla suit, to round the corner,
when that come-hither mommy, the one with four-children-and
-counting,  sidles up behind me to whisper in my ear,

“You’ll miss this one day,” as I am squinting into the sun, neck
sweating, feet itching, thinking,

“But what if I don’t?”

What if I am stuck here at the corner of Moorpark and Elmer,
nodding my head, smiling. Trying not to worry about my girl,
in all that synthetic fur, passing out from heat stroke? Trying not
to feel annoyed with how long this is taking. Trying not to think
about what I might have been doing, had I not been here, exposed.

And If I don’t miss this, have I missed the boat?  I was living life
at sea level, but now, the water’s rising. Where’s that ivory tower,
now that I could use it? Now that youth and beauty, and other rough
devotions, are sinking, along with yesterdays missing homework
and the Kodak moment?

Is this the middle, or the end of the beginning? The beginning of
the end of the glad-handing? The diapers, and bloodstains, and crayons,
melted at the bottom of the bag? The time before the time you have
to remember the things you didn’t even know you wanted?

Have I left my gorilla too long in the sun?

I still want the shot. Proof I was here, standing on the solid earth,
dry beneath my callused feet. I want a lifeboat, a lodestar, a shiny
brass compass. Can I navigate by ape, the way back home from school?

I shift my weight, and spot her. Low to the ground, hobbling. Panting.
On knuckles and knees, pausing, she rears up, beats her chest, roaring.
I focus my lens, framing the picture, and I take it.

gorilla

 

 

 

***

Mia Sara is an actress and poet living in Los Angeles. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in poemmemoirstory, Pembroke Magazine, The Write Room, PANK, Cultural Weekly, The Kit Kat Review, Forge, The Dirty Napkin, St. Ann’s Review, among others. For more please visit: http://wheretofindmiasara.tumblr.com/

 

Chemical Tendencies by Paul Lieber (A Review by Alex M. Frankel)

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Tebot Bach

99 pp./$15

 

Paul Lieber- a student of Method acting- has spent most of his adult life playing tough-guy roles on Broadway and in Hollywood. He played Eric Dorsey in the TV series Barney Miller and has also appeared in many other shows, including Dallas, The X-Files and Law and Order. Now he has come out with a collection of poems that reveal his tender side, which is on display whether he is remembering his growing-up years on the streets of New York City, his long career as an actor, his more recent years as the father of a young son or, tragically, as the brother of a woman dying prematurely of cancer. All through this book, the tone is conversational, the style seemingly effortless, the humor smart and sly. Here, as in many poetry collections, the most memorable poems come near the beginning, so let us build up to them by making our way backwards in this volume, and considering first the sections devoted to a dying woman and a growing child, before concluding with Lieber’s most individual contributions.

In “Sister,” he describes, in frank detail, moments in the early years of his relationship with his sister: 

I’d surrender on the toilet where

the light was strongest. She above me,

searching. She pinched, tweaked.

The blackhead lifted. Precision pressed

on to neck side, ear lobe, a lung or two.

She’d wipe dead cells on my hand.

A cotton ball dipped in alcohol slammed

pores shut.

This passage is especially poignant since it is the only poem in the collection in which the sister is portrayed as the caregiver; usually it is the brother (the narrator) who must care for her, much later in life, when she is stricken with cancer. These pieces about the sister make up the book’s last section, and they are memorable for their unpretentiousness and eloquence. In “We Think” Lieber writes: 

Each day

the phone rings with all the love

she couldn’t feel.

The eulogy starts before

they lower the body.

Praise heaped

in the hope to keep

her above the boxwoods

in the nurturing cries

as years run into minutes,

as mobility stills. Continue reading →