poetry collection

[REVIEW] Cinéma Vérité, by Sam Rasnake

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Cinema Verite cover

A Minor Press
86 pages, $12.95, £ 8.45, € 9.82

Review by Michelle Elvy

1. The beginning, middle, and end

When you dive into Sam Rasnake’s poetry, you give yourself over to words and worlds you’ve not touched before. I’ve read plenty of Rasnake’s words before, from online journals to his last collection, Inside a Broken Clock. He challenges and inspires, both intellectually and emotionally. And now, with his latest offering, Cinéma Vérité, I find myself caught up in his heady love affair with poetry and film, image and truth, space and silence, fragments and wholes.

I’m not a film buff like Rasnake, I admit. But the way he combines observations from and about films with observations of life, love, art, and death has me rethinking Welles, Malick, Kubrick, Godard, and Campion (and many more, from Wim Wenders to Spike Lee). He fits language and image together in a close examination of a wide selection of modern films. Here we have film reconsidered through a poet’s eye, connecting the specific to the universal. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] The Year of No Mistakes, by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz

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year

Write Bloody
108 pgs/$15.00

Review by Jason Carney

Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz’s sixth book, The Year of No Mistakes, is a book of transitions. Movement is a strong thread throughout the most sophisticated offering this poet has made to date. Her voice is authentic and precise. The whole of the text seems as if not only the poems are in transition, but the poet as well, as if the narrator is searching for wholeness by leaving parts of herself behind.

The easiest transitional element to spot is the physical location of the poems. The reader is constantly moving page to page—Chicago, Brooklyn, Austin, Queens, and various cities in between. This movement seems natural and fluid, as if the book is piecing together the signs of her life, with the most important of these examinations being the relationships the narrator has developed and outgrown. The Year of No Mistakes is a book of remembrances and reflections, presented in a tangible and visceral manner, relevant to each of our lives. A clear example of this is the poem “The Bowery.”

We danced like ball bearings.
We laughed like ripped newspapers.
We smoked like backwards rain clouds.
We kissed like slammed doors. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Square Feet, by Lori A. May

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squarefeet_frontcover
Accents Publishing
65 pages, $12

 
Review by Brian Fanelli

After having met editor, essayist, book reviewer, lecturer and poet Lori A. May during my M.F.A. work at Wilkes University, I wondered how she managed to balance a successful writing life with her travels, which include year-round trips in various cities to guest lecture or teach workshops. So, when I learned of her new full-length book of poems, Square Feet, I was curious if her travels would be documented in the book. Instead of writing about life on the road, however, May’s latest collection is grounded in one particular place, the domestic home. Shifting from first to third person, and relying mostly on short narrative and lyric poems, May’s work hones in on a married couple and their struggles in maintaining a happy marriage.

The book opens with a few third-person poems that introduce readers to the wife and husband, specifically their desire to keep a good home and find happiness in the myths of the American Dream. In the opening poem, “Place Settings,” for instance, the reader learns how the wedding gifts gather dust, saved for “special occasions,” while the wife imagines celebrations, but “rarely cares to entertain.” Yet, she imagines meeting the right couple that will appreciate such fancy chinaware. The small details make the poem engaging, specifically the lines about the saucer cups sitting pretty, unused, which makes the reader question why the couple keeps all of the fancy silverware if it serves no purpose other than decoration. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Romance With Small-Time Crooks by Alexis Ivy

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~by Anne Champion

 Ivy-Cover-Really-Real-sm

 

BlazeVOX Books

90 pages/$16.00

The cover of Alexis Ivy’s debut collection depicts a scattered stack of cards and a hand overturning the Queen of Diamonds and the Eight of Clubs.  The Queen of Diamonds, of course, denotes power, royalty, and adornment, while the eight is a common symbol of infinity: all of this is embedded within the gamble, a game of chance, risk, and luck.  Similarly, these themes seem to trail the speaker of this collection in poems that take risks resulting in big payoffs.  These poems travel through the seedy underbelly of American life, exploring characters bound by their own self destruction embedded in a world of sex, drugs, liquor, and crime and a speaker that’s attracted to the scarred, the imperfect, and the dangerous.   While redemption and happy endings seem impossible in this collection, the poems refuse pity, instead transforming gutters into places of magic, insight, and growth.

Many poems in the collection recall still life paintings in their vivid imagery and details.  However, these still lifes illustrate ruin and utter desolation.  “So I Got Stoned,” depicts the actions and backgrounds of a speaker who has plummeted into silence.  The poem begins “I sorta wasn’t talking,/I sorta didn’t talk./I didn’t talk.”  These lines reveal the speaker’s reluctance to speak even now, as it takes several tries before anything can be said with any certainty.  Then, the still life gets painted through several sharp, compelling details, and the poem ends with the speaker’s reflection:

Wasted under
the willows at the Charles River,
chain smoking so I wouldn’t be
just sitting there.

It seems clear that the frozen muteness is all pervasive, as the speaker asserts that she had to smoke just to not merely exist; in this portrayal, readers understand the anxiety behind a life that grows too still. Continue reading →

The Four Horsepersons of a Disappointing Apocalypse, by Gabriel Welsch (A Review by Anne Champion)

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 Steel Toe Books

102 pages/$12.00

 

“We are four horsepersons/of a disappointing apocalypse, our famine/is for kindness, for a hand on the arm,/for a word whispered for the sake/of that word’s weight and its balm/on shattered eyes or its healing weight/in a gut yearning for sustenance.”

 

These lines embody the delicate balance of humor and seriousness found in Gabriel Welsch’s third full length collection of poetry, The Four Horsepersons of a Disappointing Apocalypse.  First, the reader is tickled by the politically correct word choice of “horsepersons,” only to have that cleverness peeled away to reveal stunning and moving insights about the chaos of a world wrought with television, pop culture, and market capitalism.  A simple glance through the table of contents leads one to believe that the collection situates itself solely in humor with slick titles such as ‘The Annoying Questions Faced at Parties by People Who Sell Office Supplies,” “The Television Makes Its Promise Between Channels,” and “Mr. Disagreeable Decides Not to Rant About How He Used to Be Somebody.”  However, this collection strays far from shallow provocation, equally balancing coy, tongue in cheek wit alongside startling epiphanies.

Readers who bask in hilarity within poetry will not walk away disappointed from this collection.  Welsch’s speakers convey an undeniable jesting tone, and I often found myself smirking with each page turn, as the titles promised a speaker with a keen sense of irony.  Consider the first lines of “The Harridan’s Song”:

“It’s like even your shrubbery
wants to flip me off, like the shaggy maple
by the drive wears a Metal Up Your Ass
t-shirt and biker boots, wallet with a chain.
Your yard wants to kick my ass.” Continue reading →

Reluctant Mistress, by Anne Champion (A Review by Hannah Rodabaugh)

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Gold Wake Press 

86 pages/ $15.95 

           

Anne Champion’s first book, Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013), is a lovely accomplishment of enveloping beauty. This poetry collection, which centers on love and relationships (and infidelity, in peculiar), displays a timelessness in image and tone. While reading this sophisticated, yet earthy collection, there were moments where I wondered if I were reading an anthology of ancient love poems by Catullus or Sappho because of her poems’ pure, undiluted images. This is not a criticism; purity and fineness and an authenticity of spirit are all too rare in a cynical, postmodern landscape. This is certainly not to say that this book is not justifiably modern. Rather, it is because Champion lets each poem so fully be itself, that they work so thoroughly across history.

The first half of Reluctant Mistress parallels the more sugarficial, glycerined aspects of romance. And while it occasionally makes gestures towards apparent sentimentality, (the repetitiveness of “Villanelle for Past Lovers” or the weddingscape of “Blessing” are almost problematic), their stunted happiness is intentional—part of the crux of this book is how artificial these feelings are and can be: in the “The Great Show,” she writes, “These awkward, fumbling puppet limbs enjoyed the lead role in that old, artificial tale of love.” It is almost impossible not to write of love this way—especially when writing about your past as a present which does not now exist in the world outside the perfect reality of the poem you have created for it. In “Dabbling in the Occult,” she writes:

” When Amanda’s crush finally pressed her
up against the window inside the school bus, 

jostling his tongue with hers the whole ride home,
we thought it must be our potions that did it, 

not realizing yet that boys take their power;
they don’t need charms to manifest it.”  Continue reading →

System of Hideouts by Heather McNaugher (A Review by Anne Champion)

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 System of Hideouts

 Main Street Rag Publishing

55 pages/$14.00

 

In Heather McNaugher’s debut collection of poems, System of Hideouts, readers are treated to intellectual gusto, personal gutsiness, and aching tenderness.  The collection covers a broad range of experience—childhood, familial, and sexual—in interrogating the construction of self identity, producing a collection of moving poems emboldened by emotional verve.

McNaugher’s most stunning poetic trait materializes through her unabashed honesty.  These poems pilfer the experiences that many people keep silent about: from first lovers to first menstrual cycles to familial homophobia, McNaugher weaves her way through the secrets hidden deep within us, plucking them from our bodies for close self exploration.  In “Max,” the speaker reflects on her first friend, who she unashamedly reveals had “the first family I’d hate.”  She recalls suffocating goldfish and placing bets about cartoons, which Max always won.  The speaker makes meaning out of this young memory:

“From this I developed my first self-defeating theory
of luck—boys have it; I don’t.  It occurs to me only now
that a glossy T.V. Guide arrived each week at your door.
At my door was a woman on drugs.”
 Continue reading →

The Opposite of Work by Hugh Behm-Steinberg (A Review by Tony Mancus)

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JackLeg Press

136 pgs./$14.00

Working in clipped phrases throughout the whole of The Opposite of Work (Jack Leg Press, 2013), Hugh Behm-Steinberg has built a dream-rattled space. It is a space of stretched ideas and ideals set in the pursuit of reconfiguration and reimagining—or at worst, the sand-refined dream-filtration—of many of the pillars of western myth: Egyptian (“Horace”), Judeo-Christian (“Eden,” “Adam,” “Lot”), American political/economic (“A Senator,” “The Truck,” “In the New Economy”), and domestic (“Radish,” “Not Sleeping”).

His poems, situated on the right facing pages, are paired with pretty mysterious and intriguing images on the left-facing pages. The images, which operate as a flipbook, were created by Mary Behm-Steinberg, and contain all manner of things, from eggs in crowns to humans transforming into crows. It’s pretty wild stuff that seems in many instances to have jumped to life directly from the opposite page. The images work to directly extend and comment upon the content, creating a larger world for the poems. Instead of building towering and narrow poems – pieces that spire ever upward – or drill through the page, as it were, Behm-Steinberg has chosen to work horizontally in effect flattening the content in a mirror of the two dimensional imagery that accompanies each piece. As in “Again”

Tap your head twice          to let the rust out.
The thought as it          stumbles in you.
It has rhythm     but you have to wait     you have to wait
a while for it to     repeat       until you are     asleep you have to      wait
because you      have to. Because your body     is a small country and
small countries wait.      Knowing how small    is the wine we are all
sobered by. We drink          small sips…                        (p.71) Continue reading →