poetry

[REVIEW] Arsenal/Sin Documentos by Francesco Levato

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(CLASH Books, 2019)

REVIEW GABINO IGLESIAS

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NOTE: The following is a tweaked version of my introduction to Levato’s book.

Writing poetry entails pulling feelings, dreams, and memories from nothingness and bringing them to the page with words. That’s why it’s so easy. That’s why it’s almost impossible. On the other hand, blackout poetry is the art of pushing unnecessary/extra/dishonest words into oblivion so that the true message, the meaning behind the jumble of words, can be revealed. Since the words are there, given, one could argue that it’s an easier task. However, that is not the case. Every discourse is constructed with an intention, and this type of poetry demands a ruthless, fearless deconstruction of that discourse in order to reveal the truth. If poetry can speak truth to power, then what I’m choosing to call here revelation poetry speaks truth to power using power’s original discourse.

Francesco Levato’s Arsenal/Sin Documentos is a courageous book. More importantly, it is a necessary book. We are witnessing abuse and bigotry daily. We are living a ridiculously anti-immigrant rhetoric created to cause fear of the Other. This book slashes into the center of that issue and exposes its inherently racist core. Remember watching science fiction movies as a kid and being scared of aliens? Well, alien is, once again, a word used to instill fear, and to deliver a clear message:

“The removal of these aliens, must be prioritized.”

But these are not aliens Levato is talking about. These aren’t grey monsters with huge black eyes or evil green humanoid beings with disintegrating ray guns; he is discussing immigrants. People. Brothers and sisters in the struggle that is staying alive and caring for those we love. He is talking about children. Yes, the same children that got tear-gassed at la frontera.

Now imagine your life is so shitty you decided to leave everything you know behind to move to a different country. You have no money and fear abandoning your home, your language, your friends, your job, everything. Then you get here and the folks holding the American Dream receive you with “Choke holds/neck restraints/baton to the head/electronic pulses to cause/Incapacitation/or pain.” Welcome to the United States, cabrones.

Now stop imagining things. What you are about to read is not about imaginary things, it’s about everyday things that happen at the border. It’s about rules and regulations that were created to control and dehumanize. It’s about exposing the reality of a system that seems to be designed for a war and not for receiving individuals seeking asylum.

Like I said, stop imagining things. There are real words will real world implications ahead. Words like lethal and enforce. Words like authority and body and discretion. Words like taser and trauma and control. These words matter because they point to a flawed system. These words matter because Levato pulled them from a plethora of official documents he felt have “the capacity to affect an embodied subject both discursively and physically.” They matter because they tell stories about the way other humans are seen, treated, processed. They matter because they are the law of the land, sanctioned by those in power and applauded by many.

There is a point in the career of every writer where he or she will have to decided if politics are going to be part of their oeuvre. Even deciding that they won’t is a political move. I respect that. However, fully engaging is something I respect much more, and that exactly what Levato has done here. There is no pandering. There is no sugarcoating. And there is Spanish. This level of engagement is the literary equivalent of standing in the middle of the road a few seconds after the cops drove by, one hand squeezing your crotch and the other held up high, middle finger flying. That deserves respect.

Perhaps the beauty of Arsenal/Sin Documentos is that it exposes truth while also leaving the door open for the reader to discover more. For example, it includes the instructions for immigrants who want to become citizens. Among those requirements is knowledge of English. Yeah, and then you remember there is no federal law establishing English as the official language of the United States…

Frontera narratives matter now more than ever, and you’re this book is a crucial addition to the list of books tackling the issue.

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Gabino Iglesias is a writer, book critic, and professor living in Austin, TX. He is the author of ZERO SAINTS and COYOTE SONGS. His work has been translated into four languages, optioned for film, and nominated to the Wonderland Book Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the Locus Award. His literary criticism appears regularly in venues like NPR, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Criminal Element, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. His nonfiction has been published in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and other print and online venues. He was a juror for the 2018 Shirley Jackson Awards and the 2019 Splatterpunk Awards. He is the book reviews editor for PANK Magazine and a literary columnist for LitReactor. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

[REVIEW] The Geese Who Might Be Gods by Benjamin Cutler

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(Main Street Rag, 2019)

REVIEW BY ESTEBAN RODRIGUEZ

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For many poetry collections, the theme of place is central to the images, ideas, and emotions they seek to instill in their readers. In the book Romey’s Order, Atsuro Riley couples a unique regional dialect with the memories of growing up in the backwoods of South Carolina to create a rich and highly percussive collection. In the work of B.H. Fairchild, the Midwest – both its people and the landscape – shapes the speaker’s understanding of not only the region, but the world at large. For Benjamin Cutler, southern Appalachia courses through the veins of his debut collection, The Geese Who Might Be Gods, and with a voice that is clear, lyrical, and maturely measured, we are gifted with poems that are both beautiful and hauntingly memorable.

The beauty of Cutler’s collection lies in its ability to weave the historical with the personal, and to create a narrative where the understanding for a greater truth is found in the relationship between the two. In the opening poem “Peeling Bark for Bread,” the speaker ponders a documentary that details the Sami people (from Scandinavia) and the manner in which they’d peel bark and grind it into flour. This rather random fact inspires the speaker to do the same to their mother’s dogwood, albeit unsuccessfully. The mother, “in grief and rage,” laments the speaker’s actions, but when the splintered edges grow back within the year, the “leavened loaves under the sun” remind both speaker and mother (and reader as well) how wounds can heal and eventually flourish.Many poems center on familial relationships, either through the frame of the speaker’s childhood or through the eyes of the speaker as a father. In one poem, the speaker remembers turning to his brother and his brother’s friend to help fix a lawnmower, and when these two “shamans garbed in grease / and denim” have resurrected this “child” (the lawnmower), the idea that family serves as a foundation and backbone to one’s own needs is illuminated in a subtle yet thoughtful tone. In “Butterfly Funeral,” the speaker, now a father, shows his son how certain moments require our attention and care rather than the more common act of capturing a scene through a photograph:

See their color:

a spill of ink on yellow paper.

See their movement:

wings like hands opening

and closing in uncertain prayer.

 

Remember so you can tell her:

they’ll be gone when we pass again.

 

Looks like a butterfly funeral,

 

he said and—

with such reverence—

 

brushed one finger

over on attendant’s wings.

 

It shuddered but did not fly.

 

These poems are heartfelt, but without falling into the trap of being overly sentimental. Page after page, Cutler seeks to create images filled with emotional and intellectual nuance, delving into subjects such as A.L.S. (“How to Speak With the Dying When the Dying Cannot Speak”), grief in the wake of a school shooting (“A Refusal”), and the anxiety surrounding survival should the world enter its last stages (“A Tomato Sandwich for the End-Times”).

One of the most intriguing aspects of These Geese Who Might Be Gods is how Cutler can take a seemingly grotesque image and find meaning that isn’t apparent on the surface. In “Bear Paw,” the speaker finds a “fraction of a crucifixion – / a single [bear] paw nailed to a telephone pole.” After bathing in a shallow pool, he returns to the paw and ponders the last moments before its death:

How heavy he must have fallen,

how silent and still

 

as blade cut through radius,

tendon, and ulna—as spike

pierced the palm’s pad, paw

 

lifted high for a sign:

flesh as dark and bloodless as guilt,

bone as pale and dry as forgiveness.

 

There’s a certain sense of guilt that the speaker feels for the bear, wondering if it experienced defiance or fear before it was killed. Nevertheless, the speaker ultimately feels cleansed (or forgiven) of having to witness the aftermath of such a strange, brutal act. Even when the images are not based in reality, they remain stark and offer a chance at greater reflection. In “Waking From Tooth-Loss,” the speaker navigates a dream where his teeth fall out and expose “nerve / and purple-blooded absence.” He doesn’t know exactly what it means that he’s losing teeth so rapidly in a dream (some interpretations of this would indicate that it symbolizes anxiety and the way we think we are perceived by others), but he knows that once he has awakened, he cannot regain the feeling – however ominous it is – he had when he was asleep:

But now that I’m awake,

I have forgotten the secret.

Now that I’m awake,

my teeth are here, rooted to bone,

and you are not.

I cannot ask. You cannot answer.

Hurry your return,

if you can, because soon I will swallow

something that tastes

too much like loss.

These teeth are tired of chewing.

The “you” comes in unexpectedly, but it can be in reference to the “I” that the speaker left behind in the dream (a separation, if you will, that he experienced when he woke up), and this loss, this constant “chewing” of everyday life, reveals that there are always moments out of our grasp, those we can only hope to retell.

There are debuts that are good and there are debuts that are great precisely because they remind you of the power of poetry and how important it is in capturing the environment, the people, and the moments that shape our most basic understanding of this world. The Geese Who Might Be Gods is an incredible book that examines our relationship with nature, loss, family, and with ourselves, and with that “endless hungry search” for meaning, we find light in these pages where we least expect it.

—

Esteban Rodríguez is the author of Dusk & Dust, forthcoming from Hub City Press (September 2019). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, The Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Puerto del Sol, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He lives with his family and teaches in Austin, Texas.

“There is loft; there is flight; there is the strange lightness of being”: an interview with Linda Watanabe McFerrin

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(Santa Fe Writer’s Project, 2019)

INTERVIEW BY LELAND CHEUK

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Since the 1990s, Linda Watanabe McFerrin has been a voice for those caught between cultures and genres. Her best-known works are the novel Namako: Sea Cucumber (1998) and the story collection The Hand of Buddha (2000), both published by Coffee House Press, but McFerrin is also an award-winning poet and travel writer. Her body of work is collected in Navigating the Divide, as part of Alan Squire Publishing’s Legacy Series, which is devoted to publishing career-spanning collections from independent press authors. I had the privilege of interviewing McFerrin over email, after reading this category-defying collection.

Leland Cheuk: I was so impressed with not just the array of poetry and prose in Navigating the Divide, but also the arrangement of the pieces. Though we were just getting snippets of your longer works of prose, broken up by poetry and travel writing, there’s a narrative build for the reader from beginning to end. What was your thinking as you chose the order of the pieces?

Linda Watanabe McFerrin: Although it is not arranged by genre or chronology, Navigating the Divide does cohere in a narrative way. True, it is built from pieces pulled from work written at different times and in various genres. In that way it is an abstract construction, but the bits are all from one source, a single worldview. So it’s my world—the traveler’s world, the outsider’s world—arranged with a narrative arc or a “story.” The through line is an emotional one, and it escalates. For me, it has to begin with the story goal, with “Love.”  In subsequent sections, the terrain becomes trickier, the footing less sound. In the final section, the reader is on the edge, and all I need to do is to give a little push into the surreal, which is actually a relief, I think, after “Death and Shadow.” There is loft; there is flight; there is the strange lightness of being that comes with acceptance and escape.

LC: Your pieces seem concerned with bridging the proverbial gap between Japanese and American cultures, but also with bridging the gaps between reality and surreality, life and death, and genres: fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. What’s driving your desire to write about the in-between spaces and categories?

LWMC: The world I grew up in was quite multicultural and far-flung. I was raised in the U.S., in England, and in Japan. Family and friends came from many cultures, and we had quite a few writers and storytellers among them. Our house was sometimes a caravansary and our bookshelves—full of diversity, full of photo albums, magazines like National Geographic and books by writers like Paul Theroux, William Burroughs, and Walt Whitman—just another prompt toward exploration. I was constantly trying to find a way to integrate all of this. I’ve always used my work to create a personal path into and through it all.

LC: There’s a lot of attention to diversity in publishing today and many, many more authors of color are being introduced to American readers. Many are writing about some of the identity issues you’ve written about over the course of your writing life. What do you think of today’s writing about identity in America? Are we just covering the same ground or are we making actual progress?

LWMC: I love the fluidity; that this cultural business is not settled; that we seem to recognize what’s “in the circle” and what’s “out” and that it is necessary for this to constantly change; that we are not forced to identify in a predetermined and constrained fashion; that we can create our own identities and stretch the “definitions” that limit our understanding. I think we are beginning to realize that by embracing the outsiders, we grow the collective. That it is a topic of discussion and a point of contention is progress.

LC: I loved the poem “Legacy” in which you write: “I’ve thrown out the kimonos, the costumes and robes / I’ve made a new self out of flowers and surgical steel / a shiny new self that blooms every spring / And I’ve cast all the ancestors / back over the sea”. Have you felt constrained by your heritage in your writing (or in the publishing of or reception to your work)?

LWMC: I’ve never felt constrained by my heritage in my work. Maybe I have been constrained by my heritage in life, where I’ve danced the outsider’s dance, but not in my work, which is a record and release of that dance. In my work, I’ve always felt inspired by my heritage, challenged by it, sometimes confounded by it. It’s the same relationship I’ve had with my family: It’s part of me, not all of me, and I want to simultaneously accept and refuse it. I think it’s that tension that fuels what I lay down on the page. I can use that. I wish I had that kind of control over my life. I don’t. Others exert a certain power over outcomes in this world, and where that is the case—in publishing, for example—my heritage has worked to my disadvantage.

LC: You write beautifully about kamis (ghosts) in your novel Namako: Sea Cucumber and elsewhere in the book. Who are some of your literary kamis? 

LWMC: I explain the concept of kami in a childish way as Ellen in Namako. The kami are Shinto gods or spirits that take the form of things important to our lives. There are supposedly millions of kami. Ellen tells her friend Anne, “Almost everything is a kami.” So a kami is more a spirit than a ghost and that spirit can be found in the strangest places. Sometimes it finds its home in a being, but often it occupies some other aspect of the natural world. It’s the vulnerability of a baby bird, the power of the wind, the ferocity of a tiger and so on. A tree, a shadow, a musical note, the paper that sits on my desktop—I guess I find my literary “kami” in everything—dark or light—that moves me. 

LC: What I love about your travel writing in Navigating the Divide is that it’s very experiential and doesn’t read like glossy travel magazine writing. You’re not the tour guide; you’re open to wandering, meeting new people, experiencing the absurd. Where are you off to next and who are some of the travel writers that inspired you?

LWMC: I spent the first part of the year traveling in Hawaii, in France, in Greece. I’m off to Washington, D.C. next for the book launch. That’s where my publisher is located. Then there is the tour. I’m not sure where that will lead me. It’s an open road, isn’t it? I hope I will do some more exploring of my own backyard, but overall, I think it will be a surprise. I wish I could say I’m off to another swamp, another rainforest, another desert area, but I think I’ll be hanging out in bookstores and libraries for a while … which is fine with me; I love them. As for the writers who inspire me, they are, fortunately, all over the country and all over the world, and maybe on this tour I’ll get to visit some of them. Let’s see: Maureen and Tony Wheeler in Australia; David Downie in France; photographer and writer Alison Wright—along with so many other creative folk—in New York; Tim Cahill in Montana; Jan Morris in England; Paul Theroux in Hawaii; Haruki Murakami in Japan … and so many great ones right here in my neighborhood.

—

Linda Watanabe McFerrin is a poet, travel writer, and novelist. She is the author of two poetry collections, two novels, a collection of award-winning short stories, and a travel guidebook. Her literary honors include the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction and various travel writing, poetry, and fiction awards. Her latest novel, Dead Love (Stone Bridge Press, 2009), was a Bram Stoker Award Finalist for Superior Achievement in a Novel. As the founder of Left Coast Writers, Watanabe McFerrin has taught and mentored a long list of writers and is a beloved figure in California’s rich, historic literary culture. She has led workshops around the world,  and with ASP author Joanna Biggar, she co-founded the Wanderland Writers series of workshops and anthologies, which they co-edit.

 

 

Interview with Little Book Contest Judge — Logan February

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Editorial Assistant and in-house interviewer Erinn Batykefer sat down with Mannequin in the Nude Author and Little Book Contest Judge Logan February to discuss what makes a stand-out contest submission!

Erinn Batykefer: Logan, it’s a pleasure to be back here in the interview chair with you again! The last time we chatted, you were considering baby blue hair for summer. Did that experiment come to fruition?

Logan February: It’s wonderful to be talking with you again! The last time was, what, four months ago? Amazing. So much has happened since then. But the blue hair, not yet. I’ve been very busy this summer (with a lot of internal work) so I haven’t felt much need to modify my appearance. But it will probably happen at some point, still.

EB: You’re Associate Director of Dovesong Labs, which mashes up the literary and the digital in creative video experiments, lessons, a salon, etc. Does the work to curate that space come to bear on your approach to judging PANK’s Little Book Contest?

LF: You know, there’s always so much to learn from being a reader and an editor, but I didn’t realize how much of a learning experience it would be to work as an educator, as well. Curating syllabi, creating study guides; it has evolved my relationship with poetics, and literary craft in general, in a big way. Language lets us into newer, fuller understandings (and misunderstandings) of self and society. I am interested in that—in the intention and execution of language.

EB: How do you see the little book / chapbook form working differently from a full length collection?

LF: I love chapbooks because you can read them in one go, you know, there’s limited space for the work to establish its thesis and formulate its own universe. I like the idea of that concision, I think a lot of amazing things can be born within that threshold. Where I see the full-length as a musical album—where you have to spend a whole cycle creating a complete body of work—my idea of the little book or chapbook is like an EP or a mixtape. I think of them as an opportunity to try out new poetics, to experiment, to tease new work, and just generally have a little more fun.

EB: What do you hope to see in the submissions for PANK’s Little Book Contest?

LF: Well, my love for literature transcends genre, so I am hoping to see a wide range of styles and inventions. I particularly like prose poetry and fragmented essays of creative nonfiction, so I hope I get stuff like that. Or like, a chapbook-length single poem! That would be very cool, I think. Everything, really, as long as it’s excellent. One of my current favorite pamphlet-type bodies of work is Anne Carson’s The Albertine Workout—in which she examines Albertine, the principal love interest of Marcel in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu—so I would be thrilled to read something like that, something critical and literary. Above all, I want to be amazed.

EB: You’re a student of forms, so you know the challenge and the skill it takes to write something that feels relevant in a form that is, in some cases, hundreds of years old—is that something that catches your eye when you’re reading new work?

LF: Ah, yes, definitely. Being written in a specific form makes a poem demand, I think, to be read a little closer, with a little more attention. It becomes important, then, to reward that attention with a well crafted poem, whose formal intentions are well realized. That’s what makes such poems worth all the effort they require.

EB: Your title from PANK this year, Mannequin in the Nude, draws on your global life as a queer African poet in its interrogations of religion, death, desire, grief, identity—one that is often dangerous to live. What, if anything, would you say to a writer who is facing similar risk in their work and life?

LF: I know firsthand how tough and terrifying it can be in that place, facing risk and threat externally, and many demons internally. All I can say is: have courage. Everything that must change requires your courage. Never forget to take care of yourself, and to stay as safe as possible. Do whatever you need to feel free. And you are allowed to get tired, to lose faith, to be afraid—fear is natural but it must not paralyze us. The important thing is to keep going.

EB: We can’t wait to see what you find among the finalists! Any last advice to the writers who are submitting work to PANK now or in the future?

LF: I can’t wait to get into it! All I can say is probably: have some trust in the writing, put in the work that it demands. And try to make wise decisions!

 

BUY LOGAN’S BOOK HERE

[REVIEW] The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams by Mary Mackey

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(Marsh Hawk Press, 2018)

REVIEW BY JOAN GELFAND

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Having just won the Eric Hoffer Award for the Best Book Published by a Small Press in 2019 and a Women’s Spirituality Book Award, The Jaguars that Prowl our Dreams: Collected Poems 1974-2018 is a stellar work. In the span of forty years, Mary Mackey has published 14 novels, most with big five publishers (two under the pseudonym “Kate Clemens”) and eight collections of poetry, one of which, Sugar Zone, published by Marsh Hawk Press, won her the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence.

Added to these accolades, two of Mackey’s quirky and sensual poems from the series “Kama Sutra of Kindness” (Travelers With no Ticket Home) were featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. All this was accomplished while teaching Film and Creative Writing at California State University Sacramento for over thirty years.

Mackey is a magnificent thinker with broad passions: pagan cultures, literature, anthropology, ecology and history are subject explored in “Jaguars.” After graduating with her PhD from The University of Michigan in 1970, she arrived in Berkeley, California, and began publishing in earnest.  Her first novel, Immersion, was recently re-released. An ecofeminist novel, which takes place in the jungles of Costa Rica, it is a portent of climate change.

Serious topics such as ecofeminism, history, and ecology might sound dry, but like many magnificent thinkers before her, Mackey is in full possession of a wild and wacky sense of humor that always puts her readers at ease. I’ll also say here that while her mind is magnificent and her interests broad, her work, while stunningly layered, is always accessible.

I first fell in love with Mary Mackey’s poetry when she arrived at the open mic at the Gallery Café (San Francisco), a series that had a reputation for attracting exceptional poets. Mackey’s vibrant jungle imagery mixed with her confident and mellifluent Portuguese enchanted and enticed me to learn more about her work.

 

From Sugar Zone:

“Eles estão comendo   they’re eating

purple snails   powdered viper venom

lagartas esmagadas   flowers that dye their lips

the color of blood   singing of cities of blue glass

and the jaguars that prowl our dreams”

 

We are not in Kansas anymore, I whispered to myself. Or even San Francisco.  It was thrilling.

As I became increasingly familiar with Mackey’s new collection, I was beguiled, awestruck and amazed at her ability to embrace the beauty of the world while being able to hold the frighteningly challenging, particularly in Brazil where real and present dangers were omnipresent. Rather than recoil, Mackey remained alert to the terrors and danger, external and internal threats:

 

“Sempre me amendrontou    I have always

been afraid  tankers strung out along the horizon

like a necklace of black

seeds   a idéia de ter um filho   of the idea

of having a child   let’s get drunk

on cachaça forget her outstretched

hands her face   the delicate angle of her nose

 

Mackey allows anxiety its full due, asking questions with no answers, setting down posits that lead nowhere except to more difficult questions.

 

tell me why they are burning

palm trees on the road to the airport

why the water tastes like ashes

why the windows of the cars are blind?

(Sugar Zone)

 

As a poet and reviewer, I had spent time researching Elizabeth Bishop’s source documents at Vassar College. In my essay, “Elizabeth bishop’s Alternate Worlds,” I explore Bishop’s development as a poet and novelist and the work she did before and after her experience in the Brazilian jungle.

I had delved into the boxes of archives guarded by the college where the young Bishop had studied and been taken under the wing of the well-connected Marianne Moore. As I worked, I began to make connections between the two poets.

Connections yes. But I want to make something clear before we go too far down the road:  Bishop’s visions that resulted in a series of mystical and magical poems were inspired by experiences in the Brazilian jungle with ayahuasca – a half century before the hallucinogenic substance became a household word. Mackey is, and has always been, stone cold sober.

 

From the poem: “I Went to the Jungle Seeking Hallucinations”:

“I drank nothing I ate nothing

yet the fevers made me prophetic”

 

The daughter of a medical doctor, her experience with “an alternate world’ and visions began at a young age with an unfortunate predilection for running dangerously high fevers; an experience which terrified her parents but gave her the first opening to another reality.

 

From “Breaking the Fever”:

When I was young

fevers were attacked

the grown-ups would rub you

with alcohol

wrap you in wet sheets

refuse you blankets

fan you, feed you

plunge your wrists in cold water

 

In this poem, we have the entry into the world of a child disabled by illness in the form of a ravaging fever. Mackey uses a fine, but almost sickly rhythm here that telegraphs that this forced bed rest is just the beginning of the saga. Using recombinative rhyme (echoing/ wrap you, refuse you blankets, fan you feed you), we are in unflinchingly dire territory that is about to get worse:

 

“…At 105 I would start to hear voices

soft and lulling

at 106 faces would appear

swimming around me

 

stretching out their hands

they would gesture to me

to join them

I was always very happy then

floating out on the warm brink

of the world.”

 

No ayuhuasca required.

The second and third pages of the poem are absolutely magical, but it’s a spoiler if I tell you where this poem goes.

Whatever the outcome of that 106-fevered experience, one thing is certain: it opened Mackey to a world she could live with, so that years later, when she is struck in the Amazon jungle, she maintains the strength and presence of mind to pen another brilliant poem. For example, in her recent poem “105 Degrees and Rising,” Mackey writes that fever:

 

‘lifts [me] from my bed/in an ascending spiral /whispering my name over and over”

 

If what comes before prepares us for what comes next, Mackey has been prepared as a child by those fevered visions, once striking in the safely of her parents’ home, now striking in the far away, primitive jungle. In both cases, she hangs tight.

It is in the “Infinite Worlds” section of Jaguars that Mackey begins to let loose with imagery that is memorable, remarkable and absolutely frightening, but always adhering to poetry’s rules and codes and aesthetically pleasing in the darkest ways:
From “Ghost Jaguars”

by day   you told us   the dead crouch in the jungle

arms wrapped around their knees

heads down   blind

living in a great blueness

that expands to the horizon

like an infinite ocean

 

at night, they rise

and hunt ghost jaguars

drink the black drink

fuck the trees

 

If you allow yourself to see this collection as a metaphor, I would suggest it depicts a poet drawn to fire, to destruction, and to experiences so intense they force you to question your life, your priorities and your raison d’etre.

It is true that, for many writers, the edge is where they feel most vital and at one with themselves. Take the journalist Marta Gellhorn, who craved war coverage as much as Hemingway needed to fish or Neruda needed his political disruptions and protests. But unlike an Ezra Pound, or a even a Carolyn Forche, there is never  a sense of judgement or partisan politics in Mackey’s work. The poems stand on their own.

And then there is the figure of Solange, a figure Mackey first introduced her readers to in her award-winning collection Sugar Zone. Solange appears repeatedly through out Mackey’s later poems. Is she real? A lost friend? I don’t know, but I do believe that if Mackey had not been opened to an alternative reality early in life, Solange, the mythical and magical creature, could never have manifested.

Here is a recent poem in which Mackey introduces us yet again to this alter ego/goddess/mythic figure:

 

“Solange in her Youth”

sometimes you froze among the briars

deaf to our pleas to come back to the boat

froze as if you were listening

to a great slow rush of water

that would someday bear you away

 

I identified Solange as a spirit sister, and I love her, and I think in many ways, Mackey must love her too. Take for example, this excerpt:

 

“for a whole week, I missed Solange

Por uma semana eu tive saudade….

 

for twenty minutes   I

stood in the deserted street . . . looking

for something

no longer there”

 

This progression of an image from book to book is exactly the beauty of a collected work: It engenders analysis; it gives readers the chance to discover how a poet arrived at point c from point a. It is, in its best form, a roadmap of a poet’s oeuvre.

Not all authors progress as Mackey has from her initial deeply personal to increasingly spiritual work. We don’t all go from the concerns of the immediate (career, partners) to thoughts of the world or to cultivating the ability to look at the wider world with compassion, patience and empathy.  Not to mention, we do not all possess the mettle to position ourselves in the middle of a remote jungle where, given our proclivity toward fever, we would likely face another bout of illness.

Reporting that Mackey has progressed from personal to global is not meant as a blanket laudatory statement. Mackey is very much a product of her times, having started publishing in the 70’s when women writers were seeking to analyze their personal lives – the correctness of their politics, their sexual relationships and their career choices. One must remember that Mackey began writing her poetry just as an entire movement of women was breaking the chains of invisibility, just as entire classes of people today ache to break the chains of poverty, drug warlords and .

And for all of this poet’s serious looking, connection making, and reportage, Mackey is in full possession of humor; she takes life, but not herself, seriously. This humor puts us at ease. For example, I find it impossible not to laugh when reading “L Tells All,” Mackey’s rewrite of the myth of Leda and the Swan, reincarnated as a confession in a supermarket tabloid. Apparently, Leda’s relationship with Zeus did not go well:

 

“we had nothing in common

his feathers made me sneeze

I was afraid to fly

he was married

(of course

they all are)

we even had religious differences

 

This critique of a collection of Mackey’s best poems from a total of eight  of her ten collections, leaves four collections I have not given their full due. To summarize: the early collections function as the foundation of Mackey’s magnificent mansion: we have a stand-alone section entitled “A Threatening Letter to Shakespeare,” and four previous book length collections: Split Ends (a deeply personal collection –  4 poems included) One Night Stand (3 poems on the topic of sexual politics,) Skin Deep and The Dear Dance of Eros 13 poems total on the topic of a young woman choosing to move through the world, the walls she hits, and the doors she pushes open.

Like the painters Gaugin, Picasso, Manet, this poet would never have found her rhythm had the early poems not been written. They are part of the journey and the training of the muscles of listening and opening, crafting and communicating.

And, finally, in 2018, along with writing new poems about the tropics, Mackey began to explore her Kentucky roots. These Kentucky poems form the section “The Culling”  open the collection. Personally, these poems, as much as I support delving into one’s heritage and being transparent, are like an astronaut taking up gardening. It’s a fine pursuit, but we know that she must have the dream of space on her mind. These poems read like an addition to the family archives, an exposure of a painful roots, but they do not possess the same fully inhabited, magical, exotic and inspired worlds of the other collections. Perhaps because the information came down in family lore rather than immediate experience, they lack the same emotional investment, and even curiosity.

Still it takes a confident poet to lay down the tracks of a family whose matriarch was mangled by a hog, where guns prevailed, horrible catastrophes were common, and men were summarily valued over women. The hazard here, is that by opening with this series of poems, Mackey runs the risk that her readers may not not recognize the depth of her talent and the pyrotechnics she displays in her recent mystical poems and the award-winning books that have catapulted her to fame.

—

Author of “You Can Be a Winning Writer: The 4 C’s of Successful Authors” (Mango Press), three volumes of poetry and an award-winning chapbook of short fiction, Joan Gelfand‘s novel set in a Silicon Valley startup will be published in 2020 by Mastodon Press. Recipient of numerous awards, nominations and honors, Joan’s work appears in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Huffington Post, Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Kalliope, The Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Levure Litteraire,  Chicken Soup for the Soul and many lit mags and journals. Joan coaches writers on their publication journey.  http://joangelfand.com

[REVIEW] Scattered Clouds by Reuben Jackson

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(Alan Squire Publishing, 2019)

REVIEW BY RISA DENENBERG

—

In a poem titled “on the road,” Reuben Jackson introduces a motif that recurs throughout his new collection, Scattered Clouds: New and Selected Poems (Alan Squire Publishing, 2019). This poem—the first one in the book—tells the story of black family taking a car trip in 1959, in which the son convinces his dad to stop for the night in Columbia, South Carolina, at “the frontier motel,” but then, it takes this turn,

It worked,

         So why did he return without
room keys?

In his sixties now, Jackson possesses a formidable curriculum vitae, with overlapping careers as music scholar, jazz archivist, teacher, mentor, radio host, and poet. Scattered Clouds mingles poems from his first collection, fingering the keys (Gut Punch Press, 1990) with newer poems, creating a tome that is both retrospective and contemporary.

The title, Scattered Clouds, seems to suggest free movement, which is in synch with the many poems that feature jazz musicians—Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Gato Barbieri, Johnny Hodges, Big Mama Thornton, Ben Webster, among others. These poems are a history lesson in 20th century jazz and funk. Reading them, I felt well-schooled. In the poem, “thelonius,” about jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk, Jackson offers this reflection,

bizarre?
mysterious?

i say no.

for he swung like branches in a march wind.

reached down
into the warm pocket of tenderness.

Scattered Clouds also suggests a sheltering sky that is overcast with shrouds of racism, suicide, and brutality. This more menacing aspect is evoked in many of these poems, for example, the poem, “Key West,” where Jackson again portrays a youth traveling in the South with family, in which the young speaker notices a white woman, and is admonished by his mother,

. . . to turn my eyes
Toward Heaven

         Where it seemed
Even the sky and clouds
Sat

         Apart

The book’s first section is comprised of the poems from fingering the keys. These poems are intimate, revolving around childhood, family, neighborhood, school, and a mounting awareness of black musicians, black music, and black political struggle. The interesting, rather than affected, use of no caps throughout fingering the keys confers an ethos of authenticity to these poems (democracy with a small ‘d’), as if Jackson is saying: These are for me and you, I will sing if you care to listen. His language, always accessible, is graceful and emotionally powerful.

In the book’s second section, “2: city songs,” Jackson returns to the many of the same motifs, often captured through a wide-angle lens. In “white flight, washington dc, 1959,” he recounts,

no more playmates
staring
quizzically
at the negroes
on my father’s
album covers

sarah goldfarb
reminded me
of a girl i saw
in an old mgm movie

even though her father said that
like my crush on her
was impossible

Jackson was raised in Washington DC. His year of birth—1954—was the same year the Supreme Court ordered desegregation of public schools throughout the U.S. Of course desegregation has never achieved integration or parity in education for black children. Still, it is notable that DC schools were among the first to implement the Brown v. Board of Education decision, and so, for a while during the late fifties (prior to ‘white flight’) public schools in DC were integrated. I am a Jewish woman born in DC, who also attended DC public schools in the fifties. Jackson’s poems about his childhood make me feel we might have been classmates. You could substitute risa denenberg for sarah goldfarb. We have all suffered the effects of segregation, a point I think Jackson makes most eloquently here, just as he describes its most insidious effects on African Americans.

Consider these devastating lines from “thinking of emmett till,” where the speaker’s experience brings the lynching of Emmett Till to his mind,

stars winked
above the diner
where I asked
a blonde waitress
for sugar,

and got
threatened by
a local

with
bloodthirsty
smile.

The last section of the book, “3: sky blues,” contains a sweet surprise, a delicious and light dessert after a nourishing, but somewhat heavy, meal.  To appreciate the origin of these poems, you need to know that for several years, Jackson relayed stories about his friend from Detroit, Amir, via Facebook posts. In an introduction to this section, titled “Amir & Khadijah: A Suite,” Jackson describes how he “first met the late poet-barber-romantic curmudgeon, Amir Yasin, at a party,” and “in the spring of 2017” Amir “met Khadijah Rollins.” They fall in love, Amir writes some poems, and the couple was “not so secretly married.” We are also told that “Sadly, Brother Yasin died in his sleep in early 2018.” Jackson concedes that he shares a birthday with Yasin, and claims that it was Khadijah who “thought it would be nice” to include “a few of Yasin’s love-struck musings.” Whether Amir was a poetic persona or an alter ego, whether the romance was actual or imaginary, hardly matters. I can’t help but wish that I had followed Jackson’s social media musings.

There is a tonal shift in Amir’s poems that we don’t find in Jackson’s. They are short and lyrical— and downright romantic. From several poems titled, “Dearest Khadijah,” we find these lines,

To touch your face is to
Feel my fingers pray.

And,

         She is a buoy
in the harbor
at dusk.

In this section we also find this Jackson-penned poem, titled “For Trayvon Martin,” in which the speaker-as-angel walks 17-year old Trayvon home from the store with soulful tenderness—an act which is also a prayer. It ends with these two stanzas:

We shake hands and hug –
Ancient, stoic tenderness.
I nod to the moon.

I’m so old school –
I hang until the latch clicks like
An unloaded gun.

Abashedly, I admit that I had not read Jackson prior to reading Scattered Clouds. But that is exactly why this compilation of poems from his first book with the two sections of newer poems is such a gem. If some of the poems are familiar, you will nod as you read them. And if not, you will feel like you’ve been missing something. Scattered Clouds further establishes Jackson’s role as a steward of Americana.

—

Risa Denenberg lives on the Olympic peninsula in Washington state where she works as a nurse practitioner. She is a co-founder and editor at Headmistress Press; curator at The Poetry Café Online; and has published three full length collections of poetry, most recently, “slight faith” (MoonPath Press, 2018).  

[REVIEW] water by Reuben Woolley and Jan Stead

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(Self-published and hand-bound [limited edition, /10, 17cm x 21cm])

REVIEW BY CLARA B. JONES

—

“The chap book with Reuben is finally finished…[t]he stitching was the hardest part—getting the holes lined up and not tangling the linen thread. I have had angst over this bit since the project started but I am relieved to find it all worked….” Jan Stead blog, smallwindowstudio

“There was earth inside them, and they dug.” Paul Celan

I regularly peruse Entropy Magazine‘s feature, Where To Submit, and have noticed that a few journals are dedicated exclusively to collaborative writing; and, in the domain of experimental literature, hybrid work—often between writers and visual artists—is not uncommon. Collaboration is difficult, even between the best of friends. There are always issues of coordination and control, not to mention the inevitable conflicts of egos. I collaborated with a colleague once—on a major writing project, and it was the worst experience of my 40-year professional life. Notwithstanding others’ experiences, Reuben Woolley and Jan Stead have produced a joint effort that has yielded outstanding results. water, the pamphlet under review, is a visually stunning creative work showcasing the noteworthy talents of two artists—one a poet, one a printmaker and painter.

Jan Stead answered questions from me via Facebook. I, especially, wanted to know more about her life and work, her inspirations, and her role, as well as her process creating water. What follows is extracted from her responses. She is located in the UK, residing in North Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire where she has a “small window studio.” Often working outside, Nature and, in general, the world around her, are her primary influences. She “admires” David Hockney and, also, draws inspiration from words. “Reuben’s work has recently been very important to me….” A former teacher, Stead now works full-time as an artist.

Regarding the chapbook with Reuben, Stead received five poems from him with a water theme or thread, afterward, preparing the illustrations. In her words: “I made five drypoint plates on metal and decided on a colour palette so there was a coherence [see photo accompanying this review]. I used ultramarine, permanent yellow, permanent red, raw sienna hue and sepia on a textured paper. I followed a ‘traditional order’, the front cover is a Bastard Title i.e. no author name just the title, followed by an introduction as to the composition of the book. This page was signed by us both so I signed first, then it went to Spain for Reuben to sign and then back here. The poem and its illustration were stitched together first in a way that makes them lay flat when the book opens so you can see text and image together.” Further: “ The ‘illustrations’ for the poems are drypoint etchings each are an edition of 10 that is shown as /10. They are made by incising the lines into a metal plate with a variety of sharp hand tools. I retyped Reuben’s poems in an old typewriter font following his layout.” Additional details, including, technical ones, can be found on Stead’s blog and on her Facebook feed.

Reuben Woolley is an internationally recognized poet from the UK who resides in Spain. He has been featured in jacket2 and other venues, he has been interviewed by editors, publishers, academics, and other poets, and his books, chapbooks, and poems have been received enthusiastically by his readers, peers, and publishers, particularly, those who appreciate “exploratory” or political poetry. In addition to writing, Woolley publishes and edits two poetry journals, The Curly Mind, an online venue for innovative work, and, I am not a silent poet, an online journal reserved for poetry with political relevance, especially, topics concerning abuse. Reuben’s “referential” [Marjorie Perloff] poems have an instantly-recognizable style—elements of collage; juxtapositions of words, phrases, and other grammatical units—[apparently] meaningful or not; repetition [from water, the word, “tick”]; soft and hard rhyming [from water, “speak” – “speak,” “light” – “night,”, “ways” –  “waves”]; copious white spaces; innovation and play with grammar and punctuation [especially, use of periods, double-spaces, and back-slashes as partial or full stops—sometimes, along with white spaces, slowing the pace of reading]; lack of capitalization;, as well as, relative consistency of form.

All of these features not only demonstrate that Woolley has “found his niche,” but, also, that his poems have a recognizable and intentional “voice” and persona. In addition, the consistent and repetitive features of his poems unify his work within each poem, within books, and across collections, highlighting a perspective expressed in a 2018 interview: “Miles Davis, John Coltrane, who led me into Free Jazz. [sic] I’m trying to get a Free Poetry of a similar Nature. This does not mean anarchy; no good verse is free. The good poet…controls every element at his or her disposal….” Woolley’s work is in no manner “derivative;” however, he has credited numerous musicians and writers as inspirations—among these are, Paul Celan, Jerome Rothenberg, Sylvia Plath, T.S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Denise Levertov, Bob Dylan, Charles Bernstein, Alice Notley, Helen Ivory, and Fran Lock.

water is heavily influenced by literary conventions, apparently, characteristic of all of his poems, since echoes of his last book resonate throughout the brief, new, 5-poem, 5-print, collection. In January 2019, I reviewed that expertly-written and handsomely-produced volume, some time we are heroes, in the online journal, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, observing that: “The repetition of wet things—liquid things—is ubiquitous throughout the text  [ e.g., ‘water,’ ‘blood,’ ‘rain,’ ‘beer,’ ‘breast milk,’ ‘ocean,’ ‘liquor,’ ‘tears’],”, and one notices that the last word of water‘s final poem [“north  water  &  waves”] is “heroes” [“my whispering heroes”], lending water a type of closure or regularity over time. In addition, many words in the new book refer, directly or indirectly, to water, among them, “rain,” “ocean,” “fish,” “sea,” “waves,” and “boats.”

In literature, “water” symbolizes life, cleansing, and rebirth. Reuben’s poems, read, in water, from first to last, can be interpreted as a person’s quest for wholeness over the course of his/her life—over time [from water, “you hear tick tock the old / like fish / remember six seconds repeat / staring a cold night /   tick      / tock              ;”  “a same you say / a doppler / shift  ticktocticktock / we band the waves  a truly / sea”]. Though, throughout water, there seems to be no necessary correspondence between poem [left-hand page] and color print [right-hand page], each of Stead’s fluid, misty images contains a circle, and three [of five] prints contain either, what appear to be, branches or a trunk of trees. The circle symbolizes Mother Earth or sacred space and is reminiscent of the Hindu/Buddhist/Jainist, Mandala, in which a circle appears within a square with a center point—the “boundaries” inherent to circle-symbolism. Related to these associations between poems and prints, trees symbolize, like water, union or physical and spiritual nourishment. Of course, water can be soothing and nourishing, as well as, dangerous, highlighting the present pamphlet’s complex and rich themes of life, death, and time [and memory?] that are replete with what the poetry critic, Helen Vendler, has called, “interpretive power” [see, especially, the poems, “private battlefields / personal interpretations” and “not  crossing  i  say”].

I would be remiss not to mention water as an example of the monetization of poetry—a short work of art sold for 100 pounds sterling. While this initiative is not a novel one, it is not practiced on a wide scale, and it may be time for poets to discuss methods for making their work financially sustainable. By way of e-mail, I asked Woolley about plans for a marketing strategy for the expensive, new collection. He responded that, probably, the pamphlet will be sold at Stead’s art exhibitions and in galleries. The poet noted, with surprise, that one of his Facebook followers has expressed an interest in purchasing a copy of water and that, at a later date, the artists “might bring out copies at a lower price…after the ten are sold.” Another idea floated by the poet, based on Bob Dylan’s lithograph prints, “The Drawn Blank Series,” would be to produce a “series of the artwork and poem combined.” In 2018, I wrote a proposal* suggesting that poets market their work, in association with a visual artist, according to the same criteria employed by visual and other artists [e.g., “performance artists”] who contract with galleries. The intent would be, in part, to enhance poets’ income from their art, to broaden the influence and impact of poetry, as well as, to increase the range of artforms represented by a given gallery.

Clearly, no poet would be obligated to participate in such a marketing strategy. However, if the tactics were even marginally successful, advantages (e.g., stream of income, incentive for poetry journals to pay poets, increased status of Poetry among the Arts and in public) should obtain to poets and galleries alike. The Woolley-Stead model and related concepts might be discussed at literary retreats, conferences, M.F.A. departments, etc. Whatever devolves from initiatives like water, the pamphlet represents a psychological and spiritual whole that many of us hope to achieve across our lifetimes. Though not a religious text in any manner, Woolley and Stead have created a chapbook for the spirit, in addition to, a work of intellect, sensation, and emotion—Art, in the most fundamental sense, worthy of being part of a rare book collection. water will be well-received by all readers of hybrid texts and avant-garde projects.

 

*available via e-mail request: foucault03@gmail.com

—

Clara B. Jones is a Knowledge Worker practicing in Silver Spring, MD, USA. Among other works, she is author of the collection, Poems for Rachel Dolezal (GaussPDF, 2019).

Friday Feature: Author Interview with Trace DePass

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Editorial Assistant Erinn Batykefer sat down with [PANK] Author and Contest Judge Trace DePass to discuss Trace’s incredible work what he’s looking for in a winning manuscript!

From the poem “The Tesseract Tethers Rooms”

i tire of death, relative to me, not passing, in 3D. i need this divorce.
you go writ(h)e,
go anthropomorphize rot incessant all thru my body. look! there’s ceiling to this
passivity: dirt. here’s this room i’ve named —
me.
outside that room lives just my other room,
another empty tomb, maybe
a separate cube,
which, after peering at it for long enough, i too
on some days become. watch: i’ve lost

track of my own tesseract face

Buy Trace’s Book Here!

 

Erinn Batykefer: You’ve edited and juried several awards and anthologies, especially for works created by younger writers. What excites you most when you’re wading through the slush pile for those contests?

Trace DePass: I get the chance to witness the heart & mind of a young person at work. Hundreds, if not thousands of them, at the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, for instance. I watch how the world turns. There are usually always gems to find. For Scholastic’s “Best Teen Writing of 2017” I was really trying to amplify works that changed me if not perhaps the institutions these kids walk into, or see, daily—there was this essay, “On Ableism” which centers the voice of disabled & differently-abled bodies in intersectional justice & climate activism, which eventually led me to the work I do know (in 2019) with the Climate Museum. It mentions the cold war term “sacrifice zones” as lands designated for oblivion in case of nuclear fallout & disabled people as the “quintessential sacrifice people.” So much work by young people gets lost, whereas it could completely change discourse if we were to give it the space to do so. It’s exciting to be able to teach or reference the published work of young people to other young people. I feel like I’m doing participatory action research by spreading THEIR participatory action research & stories, curating an ongoing literary conversation in the culture of children (even if only for as long as I can hold that attention).

EB: What excites you about judging this contest for [PANK]?

TD: I enjoy reading poems in the conversations or arcs that the author curates for them. PANK will always get works that are experimental, whimsical, or playful. I’m glad to be a part of this kind of world-building. It’s probably going to be pretty intense so that’s exciting, lol.

 

EB: Your own Big Book, Self-Portrait as the Space between Us came out in 2018 from [PANK]Books, a collection that seeks to place a reader “befuddled in what befuddles me.” The poems here resist drawing neat conclusions and instead embrace nuance and contradiction. Is that the point of poetry?

TD: Nuance is one of the drives of my poems. I can’t speak for all poet motivations. I like acknowledging we don’t only live in 3 dimensions; once you pick up an object & literally move it you’re witnessing 4 dimensions (not including the sensory or psychic), then shifting to love or death or my father, a National Guard veteran who also created presets for Korg & Yamaha pianos from scratch. I think English can be confusing & often misinterpreted or sometimes collapsed or sullied by interpretation. There are poems that are nuanced to speak aloud & bring into conversation, even if the voice in our head doesn’t hear that on the first read of the work. I’m not trying to necessarily be undeniable. I’m trying to delineate or make non-linear & up to interpretation through image & sound up until I’m not. Then, the questions: is about consent? Is this consent? How many childhoods, generations, stories, layers, and things like entry points are here? Life doesn’t resolve itself in a simple, mathematical answer & you can say that is a poem, perhaps not all poems.

 

EB: What are you hoping to see in the submissions for this contest? What, in your opinion, should a book of poems do?

TD: I don’t have an absolute—probably not even a firm—stance on what exactly books of poems “should” do as an experimental, often described as musical + narrative + lyrical, poet. I believe there’s a stance taken for an author in how they want to be read or taught. I think a book of poems considers a lot of people & gives context, subtext, meta-text to those people. It’s completely up to the discernment of the author on how to tether or go about that. The book should have wants, drives, reckoning, character, among other things maybe. The poems will do what they want or need to do if you allow them to direct you. I hope to see what that looks like.

 

EB: One of the most striking iterative images in Self-Portrait is that of the speaker as Darwin’s Finch, scrabbling and transforming and evolving in his understanding of an absent father and his own identity. You’re also creating a fellowship program with the Climate Museum for high school students. Is science a triggering town for your creative work?

TD: The bird comes as goes like my father has for his own reasons. Some years I knew neither of my parents. Other years, I’m just like them. I see a lot of my own blackness in the migration of birds, yes. Leaving & loving for me are nuanced things.

I’ve worked with a climate scientist that has told me that there’s subjectivity & intention also behind science. I believe there is a nature to the questions we pose, experiment to answer, & thus a human behind the veil of “objectivity.” My book definitely dabbles with this idea. Given there is no absolute objectivity, what isn’t a little triggering sometimes? I question the nature of my own birth so I think I’m pretty strong-willed.

The kids as well as the staff I work with at the Climate Museum open me up to the idea of care & warmth in science, as much as scientific suggestion in the poems. One of our kids, Ota, has a poem that questions if love has a place in a world where we neglected it, this environmental predicament & man-made problem. I love that poem. All the poems in our program, Climate Speaks, feel nuanced in a similar. If you’re in NYC on the evening of June 14th, come check us out at the Apollo.

 

EB: If you could encourage the writers who will be submitting their books to [PANK] for this contest to keep one thing in mind, what would it be?

TD: You’re not completely alone. Give it time. Give ALL of it time. Play with the script everyday. Keep editing. Don’t just edit for a prize. It doesn’t stop here. You will have to live with what you write & the context that brings you to the page. They are not exclusive. Don’t be afraid to play with form. You may be an entirely different person at the end of editing, likely after publishing it, & so on. Feel everything you feel. You have the initial & final say. Put the poems in conversation in real life & see how you feel. Learn from the process. Think of how you want you & this book to be taught. Get to know some of the author’s work at [PANK] & beyond! Being an author, especially of a book of poems, will not make you rich & it takes a lot of life for poems to make you any kind of wealthy.

 

EB: Anything else you’d like to share with [PANK]? [PANK] loves you.

TD: If you’re looking for a reader, teaching artist, drummer, beatboxer, playwright, or poet for the summertime, I’m available!!!

[REVIEW] Soft Science by Franny Choi

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(Alice James Books, 2019)

REVIEW BY DANA ALSAMSAM

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Franny Choi’s Soft Science begins with a quote from Donna Haraway: “We are excruciatingly conscious of what it means to have a historically constituted body.” This sounds at first like a Butlerian critique of societally constructed gender roles. But upon looking into Haraway and discovering her expertise in cyborg’s as a feminist post-humanist argument, it becomes clear how Haraway’s quote relates directly to Choi’s collection. In critique of traditional feminist theory, Haraway uses the cyborg to deconstruct boundaries, not just of gender, but also of the boundary between the human and the other (the animal or the machine). Soft Science takes on these boundaries full force. As the collection goes on, we sometimes forget if the speaker is a cyborg or a human, and this confusion is intentional. This more politically charged quote is immediately juxtaposed with a much softer, humanizing quote from writer Bhanu Kapil. This juxtaposition becomes characteristic of the collection which places heartbreaking and humanizing poetry about the intrinsically gendered, political experiences of the poems’ speaker next to cyborg poetry that feels (and sometimes is) computer generated.

A series of poems called “Turing Test” begins each section, mimicking the experiment which tests how well computers can simulate human speech. These poems shimmer at meaning but don’t arrive at it. They instead use constellations of language society associates with queer, Asian, femme people, and we leave these poems with the feeling of perceptions that are constructed: from phrases like “duck duck roll” to “sodium bicarbonate” to “undress me anywhere,” we see this piece as reflective of a cultural machine that takes the other in, labels them, and spits them back out with a prescribed vocabulary for identity.

This feeling of artificial construction continues in one of the first poems of the collection, “Making Of,” which I feel is exemplary of the collection’s themes in both the cyborg poetry and the poetry embodied by a human speaker. It begins with the lines: “When a cyborg puts on a dress, / it’s called drag. // When a cyborg gets down / on her knees, it’s called // behavior.” This immediately recalls the initial quote from Haraway and the idea of gender performativity. Because the cyborg is man-made but appears natural and human, it becomes an avatar in this collection for the cultural construction (the man-made construction) of the collection’s speaker. The speaker goes on to eat both of her hands: “Each digit, // a salty word whose meaning / furred my teeth.” Here the speaker tries to make sense of her own body, to put it into language but only given the vocabulary that society allows, meaning comes out illegible, furry.

The woman speakers in this collection are constantly attempting to uphold the pressures and expectations placed on women but are simultaneously burning with a desire to be seen—not read for meaning but understood. In “Acknowledgements,” the speaker says, “I’m / still smiling, smiling until my gums crack, until / I’m a photograph.” And then in “Shokushu Goukan for the Cyborg Soul,” a play on the Chicken Soup for the Soul collection, the speaker says, “so I am both the woman holding the camera and the woman / being opened by it—nothing special about that.” The cultural expectation of women is so deeply ingrained that they uphold and regurgitate these norms, become the image they are told to be. This collection shows women picking up behavior or appearance because, in some way, they are told to, or don’t know how else to be.

All of the subtle gender theory scaffolding the collection does wonders when we land on intimate, personal poems from a human speaker who longs for love and understanding, so much so that she finds freedom in promiscuity, and later experiences shame. This cycle of emotions is familiar and relatable for many young women. Fulfilling their desires is impossible when they are sexualized but then shamed for the actual act of sex. Even the shame is constructed. Next to the cyborg poems which evoke ideas of culturally constructed and performative ideas of gender, these poems about the inherently gendered experiences of a femme body entering the cultural machine are deeply impactful.

I’ll end with a piece that resonated like no other. Unlike the tables, slashes and prose blocks that create the marked experimental queerness of the collection, “On the Night of the Election” remains simple in short 3-5 word lines utilizing standard punctuation. Here, the speaker recalls the night He was elected, a night which, as a queer femme and child of an immigrant myself, still brings tears to my eyes. The speaker masturbates in a hotel room while watching the news and contemplating numbness—of the body, of our country—and what it means to feel hopeless under an administration that not only labels the other but despises the other. This piece requires no explanation:

 

“is there anything that works

that isn’t a machine for killing

or doomed to collapse or stolen

from the sweat of the hungry?

Maybe my body was all three,

there, in the hotel room,

liquor-shot and reaching

in every direction

for an answer,

a complete sentence, or,

if nothing else, an exit,

a view, at least, of what

waits on the other side

of despair…

 

—

Dana Alsamsam is the author of a chapbook, (in)habit (tenderness lit, 2018), and her poems are published or forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review, North American Review, The Shallow Ends, Salamander, BOOTH, The Common as well as critical work in The Rumpus. Her work has been supported by a fellowship from Lambda Literary’s Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices.

[REVIEW] Losing Miami by Gabriel Ojeda-Sague

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(The Accomplices, 2019)

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué’s Losing Miami is an outstanding exploration of exile, Otherness, and the possibility of returning to a place you’ve never been to. Unapologetically bilingual and packed with explosions of language in which coherence is ignored and the reader is invited to make connections between words, this poetry collection is at once brave, nostalgic, and passionate.

Ojeda-Sagué is fully aware of his status as a displaced person. His Otherness, like that of many others, make him a permanent nomad, someone who belongs only to movement and transitional/interstitial spaces. The same applies to his family, which came from Cuba. His work reflects that. Much like Gloria Anzaldua’s mestiza, the poet and his family live surrounded by the idea of a return to a place that never was or that could never be again:

I am asked if I would go to Cuba now that policies

have changed. When I ask my abuela the same

question, exchanging “irías” for “volverías,” she says

que “no tengo nada que hacer en Cuba.” Somehow,

I feel the same, even if I could never say “volvería”

because I have never been to Cuba. Returning would

not be the form, in my case. But to grow up in Miami,

as the child of exiles, is to always be “returning” to

Cuba. Everything has a fragrant—not aftertaste,

but third taste—of Cuba. Angel Dominguez writes

“What is the function of writing? To return (home)”

but his gambit is that the flight (home) is the writing,

the verb “to return” is the writing, not the home itself

or returning to it. What is the function of writing:

“to return.” The answer is no, I would not go to Cuba,

because the Cuba I come from only can be returned

to in the murmurs of the exile.

Ojeda-Sagué is a very talented poet, but the most beautiful element of Losing Miami is the code switching. Anyone who follows my work knows I love bilingual writing, and Losing Miami is full of it. The poet cambia de idioma de momento, sin perdir permiso a nadie y sin preocuparse por hacer que los lectores que no entienden el idioma lo puedan entender. This gives the collection an undeniable sense of authenticity and a cultural depth that few of its contemporaries share. Whole poems are written in Spanish without translation. They aren’t italicized or explained. They are what they are in a language that isn’t foreign; it is the poet’s language. Here’s “Esponja”:

el internet me hace sentir horrible, como si

todo pasara a la misma vez, y como si hubiera 30

horas en el día / casco del demonio / ciruela /

avenidas y malas noticias / dominó / dibujo el

mundo sobre un papel / duermo adentro del congelador /

encuentro parte de un radio en el patio / lo siembro /

allí crece un manicomio / azul y marrón /

en seis semanas / azul y marrón /

ciruela / una uva entre los labios de Patroclo /

en seis semanas todas estas ideas

serán ahogadas / serán fluidas /

al dibujo le añado agua de una esponja

While the poems in Spanish can be hard to decoded for those who don’t know the language, they are relatively simple and will not offer much of a challenge for those who opt to translate them. However, there are other poems in which Spanish and English share space that are not that easy to decipher. Ojeda-Sagué writes rhythmic clusters of words that act like a celebration of language, a bridge between cultures, and an invitation to fill in the blanks. These don’t appear early on. Instead, they show up once the reader has an idea of how the poet’s brain works. They are fun to read. They are intriguing. They tell tiny single-word stories and sometimes add up to bigger, multilayered narratives. Readers should slow down when they encounter them. These poems demand to be read twice, to be explored, to morph into new realities in the brains of those who read them. Here’s my favorite one:

sincrética allowance pájaro steak dar

criminal coraje water tendida field debajo

salted mar virus sigue giant carabela city

palma awful infección girls abierta bluer

grama palms sudan rafter mariquita heat

boca agape el great mosquito summons

coraje and viento acid pueblo gridlines

pobreza dreaming Haití they mandan

back queman back pobreza back abierta

back rezo that no take mi sweet vida back

If Losing Miami is any indication of what The Accomplices are going to be publishing, then do yourself a favor and put them on your radar immediately. The strength of this book sent me looking for more of Ojeda-Sagué’s work. It will do the same for you.

—

Gabino Iglesias is a writer, book critic, and professor living in Austin, TX. He is the author of ZERO SAINTS and COYOTE SONGS. His work has been translated into four languages, optioned for film, and nominated to the Wonderland Book Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the Locus Award. His literary criticism appears regularly in venues like NPR, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Criminal Element, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. His nonfiction has been published in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and other print and online venues. He was a juror for the 2018 Shirley Jackson Awards and the 2019 Splatterpunk Awards. He is the book reviews editor for PANK Magazine and a literary columnist for LitReactor and CLASH Media. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.