poetry review

[REVIEW] Glass Bikini by Kristin Bock

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(Tupelo Press, 2021)

REVIEW BY CATHERINE IMBRIGLIO

—

In 1949, at a Berkeley symposium on poetry, the young Jack Spicer complained about the smallness of the audience for poetry.  Poetry should be as entertaining as popular culture, he argued.  “The truth is that pure poetry bores everybody,” he said.  “It is even a bore to the poet.” Instead, according to Spicer, poets “must become singers, become entertainers.”   If poetry managed to be more generally entertaining, Spicer thought, it would be less insular, it would have many more readers. 

The situation for poetry hasn’t changed that much since 1949. Though in the US today there are more outlets for poetry than in Spicer’s time and many vibrant nationwide poetry communities and festivals, it’s probably a safe bet that most of the audience for poetry consists of people who write or have written poems themselves.  In terms of the general US populace, poetry has sunk into a mighty insignificance.  (I’d be very happy to be wrong about this.) One only needs to look at the NY Times’ list of 100 notable books of 2021 for evidence. (Two books of poetry made the list.)   Or look for the poetry section in one’s favorite bookstore or local library.  What’s there? (The Boston Globe, which lists 20 best poetry books for 2021, appears to be one of the few media outlets that take contemporary poetry seriously.)

If Spicer is right and entertainment is an essential factor for increasing poetry’s readership and significance, Kristin Bock’s Glass Bikini is more than up to the task.  Her book is disturbingly entertaining, in a rubbernecking at the accident sort of way.   The book delights in picking apart illusions of humanity’s goodness, dignity, and value, instead presenting us with a nightmarish, absurdist poetry that is as bizarre as it is horrifying. In Bock’s inside-out, upside-down, Lewis Carroll-ish scenarios, humans are the deadly accident, the catastrophe.  Art is the first thing to go: the opening poem “Overcome,” with its biblical overtones, starts the book off with a whacky sense of belatedness and loss.  With art gone there is little left that provides us with the inspiration for changing what got us to here. Museum galleries have empty walls. People are entertained by the degrading antics of other human beings.  They piss in DuChamps missing fountain, weep “for what might have been”:

And it came to pass, art became extinct.  Still, we flocked to museums and stared into barren rooms.  Look!  Someone would exclaim.  There’s a man rolling around on the floor, acting like an unbalanced washing machine, knocking into things and coughing up wet rags.  Isn’t it horrifying? Oh, yes, excruciating, someone would yell out.  People whizzed in Duchamp’s missing fountain.  They blew each other like whistles where L’Origine du Monde used to hang.  They wept under restroom signs for what might have been.  People shredded their clothes, oozed from chandeliers.  … And thus began the gnashing of hair and the pulling of teeth that lasted for the rest of the unknown world. 

(My ellipsis, Bock’s italics)

The poems that follow, some with ghoulish titles such as “Snuff Poem,” “Everything Coming Up Rifles,” “The Killing Show,” “Postcard from the Coffin” pull us along with their inventive, unsettling strangeness.  Monsters, mannequins, dolls, robots – the almost human – populate many of the book’s poems, in competition with actual humans.  (The humans are losing.) The book’s overall atmosphere is menacing and creepy, often involving the human body’s dismemberment:

No, those are not starfish scattered on the sand.

Those are hands curling in on themselves, making

little nests on the beach.  Sometimes, they scuttle

away to cut off other hands.

(“The Island of Zerrissenheit”)

Along the same lines, in another poem Bock cuts up body parts to chart humanity’s eventual evolutionary demise:

Some time after the extinction of whales, babies were born in pieces.  Lungs, feet, spleen all separate and in heaps.  We dumped the remains of our babies in the woods, in the fields and into the seas.  To our dismay, the single parts rose and animated.  Heads without necks rolled around trying to connect with other parts.  Hearts, arms, and tongues crept over the Earth in grotesque parades.  Organs and limbs clumped together and survived for a time. …

(“How Rabbits Finally Took Over the World”)

At the same time, Glass Bikini is darkly humorous, provocatively so.  (Think Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal.)  The humor here is double-edged.  While Bock makes it clear that humor may be one of the few psychic defenses left in times of existential crisis, she also dilutes its power by reminding us of some laughter’s underlying cruelty. In one of the poems that I see as central to her project, she stages an evolutionary reversal, with humans trying to escape back to their watery origins.  The poem starts at a party, where the speaker’s mother “curls into a set of ovaries and vein-blue tubes.”  The speaker picks up her mother and carries her upstairs.   What follows is a laughter that is deeply disturbing:

…. I drop my mother, and everybody laughs.   It’s just so funny.  She slumps over and throbs in the corner.  My brother slouches toward her.  I try to grab him by the stumps, but they are slick from the forewaters.  I keep dropping him in the rising muck.  Everyone is convulsively laughing.  We can’t stop.  We slip, go under.  It’s hilarious.  All of us grabbing onto each other.  All of us ill-made, laughing, and trying to get back inside.

(“Get Back”)

“Get Back”’s suggestion that humans are “ill-made” comes up in other poems.   In “Belief Is a Default Setting,” newly-made human replicas “sense something ugly and festering in the heart of a friend.  Where there is none.” In “Prometheus Report,” human characteristics are explained by mutations in the genes: “Do you have the M-T-H-F-R mutation?  You know, the “Motherfucker” gene? You can’t detox with that one.”  Such deterministic notions of genetic composition, begging the question of whether human life is worth preserving, place Bock’s work within a distinguished line of dystopian writing. Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos immediately comes to mind. (In his book, humans end up as seal-like animals, with no hands.)

A reader might understandably wonder if the book provides any relief from the near-apocalyptic visions which dominate most of Glass Bikini’s poems or if the book is a complete downer. I would say there is a modicum of relief, if one looks carefully. I’ll point out two possibilities.  The first is the poem “Invitation,” where Satan is unexpectedly the hero.  On Monday through Saturday, Satan takes out the garbage of the world.  On Sunday, he writes a short note to the “Dayside Creatures,” a note with lovely lyric simplicity that stands out against the horrors in the surrounding poems:

I am a boy who lives in the woods.

I’ll leave the moon on

all night among the leaves.

The other poem I want to mention, “The Inside-Out,” is also lovely, though sadder and much more complicated.  It could be read as a commentary on the book as a whole, in that it validates the imagination via a “dark specter” that “grows so heavy inside, it’s hard to carry around, hard to bear through the dream of the inside-out, where the wind whistles through the bones of birds choking on their own feathers….”   It’s imagination, even a delusional or despairing one, that compels one to carry on with one’s life, “as if no one can see it beating you down.”  The fact that such imaginative poems, however outrageous, actually exist in Glass Bikini – the book’s pages are obviously not blank, in contrast to the barren museum rooms of the book’s opening poem – gives us at least some short term hope that readers might be moved by Bock’s scathing critiques of our cultural moment. (See the poem “Pluto” for a catalogue of human miscreants.) Like the Emily Dickinson quote that Bock uses as an epigraph to one of her sections (“Tis so appalling – it exhilarates -“), this collection is unsettling, but by no means boring. It demonstrates that the comedic mixed with horror can be more scary and enthralling, more memorable, than pure solemnity.

—

Catherine Imbriglio is the author of two books of poetry, Parts of the Mass (Burning Deck), which received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and Intimacy (Center for Literary Publishing), which received the Colorado Prize in Poetry. Her poetry and criticism have appeared in After Spicer (John Vincent, ed.), American Letters & Commentary, Aufgabe, A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line, Conjunctions, Contemporary Literature, Denver Quarterly, Epoch, Green Mountains Review, New American Writing, Pleiades, West Branch, and elsewhere. A selection of her poetry was anthologized in the Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries, ed. Reginald Shepherd (University of Iowa Press). She is a senior editor in poetry for Tupelo Quarterly.

[REVIEW] Midwest Gothic by Laura Donnelly

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(Ashland Poetry Press, 2020)

REVIEW BY SALLY SMITS MASTEN

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The intertwining of poetry and gardens has a long history, of course, from the pastorals of Hesiod and Virgil to Wordsworth’s daffodils to Anne Spencer’s famous garden and Mary Oliver’s incantatory natural imagery.  And it isn’t new to say that a poetry collection is like a garden, and yet. 

And yet. Laura Donnelly’s Midwest Gothic is the garden of Eden and of exile, the garden of inheritance and of renewal. Each poem in the collection shows her to be a master gardener, deftly pruning the lines, digging into the hard ground, nurturing delicate images, unearthing what’s buried, replanting seeds of hope after sorrow.  Midwest Gothic is inventive, smart, poignant, delicate, sometimes bitingly funny, celebratory, sorrowful. With skill and sincerity, Donnelly deploys the garden, the world of the garden, in all directions—as metaphor and motif, image and symbol. In the gardens are the threads between generations, the living representation of her mother’s courageous act(s), the illustration of the difficulty of starting over and eventual triumphs, the image of the roots of family and also the burial of ancestors and the burial of secrets.  As Donnelly writes in “Summer,” the book’s final poem, “It was all garden / and it was all not.”

For the first section of the book, Donnelly’s first poem provides a framework and an aim: “I will gather you back.” This first section, then, becomes an unearthing, a recovery, a way of preserving stories and memories and establishing the ground from which the speaker comes.  These poems meditate on inheritance—they revisit graveyards and basements, old homesteads, tangible hand-me-downs, and her great-grandmother’s written account of her childhood.

In the most striking poems, Donnelly draws together the stories of her ancestors with meditative, prayerful language and juxtapositions from the garden: death and glory, rot and beauty, the quotidian and transcendent.  In “Alice at Five Years Old,” for example, Donnelly moves from a single photograph of her great-grandmother’s family on their homestead to a handed-down memory: “Someday, when the girl meets / her mother-in-law / they’ll share a bowl of oatmeal / as if it’s the body of Christ.” The poem concludes with the contrast of death and renewal in language with resonant, sorrowful long O sounds, an incantation and prayer: “Hear us, oh Lord, in our longest day’s / shadow of bones— // the delphinium grows / from her body / in a choir of indigo.” Similarly, in “Primula vulgaris (Primrose)”—even the title drawing together contrasting language—the speaker digs into the difficult work of gardening first, with “compost, manure, / the pulverized feathers of chickens,” and abruptly shifts to the difficult work of living:

Grandmother does not want to leave

her house for the nursing home.

Mother does not want to leave

her house for the divorce.

In the next two stanzas, the speaker continues working through this cycle of death and rebirth, a frost and roots exposed, a struggle to stay alive, the fuchsia’s centers “bright as slits of flame.”  This poem is rooted in earth, in “blood and bone,” dwelling on this symbolic burial of the birds’ “remains.” But just as in the paradox of that word, the poem is insistent on remaining, on staying alive, on growing from these roots.

While individual poems certainly stand out, the particular brilliance of this section—and indeed the whole book—is in its careful arrangement, Just as a gardener understands how to pair plants so that each thrives, these poems resonate with one another, echoing refrains and images to build a story, a full and blooming world, creating layers and depth of meaning.

The second section digs closer to the surface with more intimate meditations on childhood, what was observed, what images remain, what meaning to make now of what happened then.  A particularly striking pair of poems appear almost at the midpoint of the book, “Transplanting the Flowers” and “Garden Vernacular,” and between them, Donnelly creates a shift in momentum.  There is something like an electric current moving between these two poems. “Transplanting the Flowers” is a visceral reflection on the speaker’s mother, returning to her house four months after leaving the house and the speaker’s father; in the imagery and line breaks here, again, is an insistence on thriving in spite of it all, on preserving the inheritance that is a source of life:

What she won’t leave behind:

a poor woman’s dowry, the perennials

separated, transplanted,

passed down.

But the poem’s end is uncertain; the act of transplanting—the perennials, her own family—is filled with suffering: the spade “slices root,” rips and tears, with an unraveling of roots like thread. 

The poem that immediately follows, however, points toward the garden, in its new unlikely place—“strange on a city block”—thriving.  There are “gloriosa daisies between cracks” and “ferns lapping up the dusky shade.” In this poem is the transcendent moment of hope, after all the quotidian and tedious work of living, after the difficulty of separating, of loss. The garden, like the speaker and the reader, find restoration and even magic in the final lines: “It was not unusual to see bear cubs / in that garden. It was not unusual // to see that garden breathe.”

In the third section of the book, Donnelly’s masterpiece is in choosing exactly the right source and exactly the right method; these are “The Secret Garden Erasures.”  Donnelly works with this classic of childhood, makes this inheritance her own, releases, like her mother’s garden, its secrets, and unearths new meaning from it.  In this section, too, are echoes of the previous sections; it becomes a kind of mirror for the speaker, a new way to understand her history.  Here, too, is a breathing garden; here, too, are flowers named and blooming.  It ends, perfectly: “I thought / I could dig somewhere.”

The final section of the book moves beyond the boundaries of the garden, family history, and the speaker’s inheritance; true to the title of one poem, “Theme and Variations,” it keeps contact with its roots, in poems like “Perennial” and “Calendula officinalis (Marigold),” but its tendrils spread outward, in content and form.  Here, there is a pantoum, sparse and musical couplets, layered meditations on summer, the “flesh and saturation” of tomatoes, knives in kitchens and surgeries. And there are more directly confessional poems, contrasting forgiveness with a “bitter twang in [her] throat.”  In an echo of “Garden Vernacular,” the poems now, rather than the garden, tend the speaker’s family secrets, transforming sorrow and anger into sharply drawn images and language.    

Donnelly’s book is an inheritance—of family mythology and secrets, the knowledge and language of gardens, and musical and literary traditions.  In 1972, Adrienne Rich published a review of Eleanor Ross Taylor’s work, noting that her poems “speak of the underground life of women…the woman-writer, the woman in the family, coping, hoarding, preserving, observing, keeping up appearances, seeing through the myths and hypocrisies, nursing the sick, conspiring with sister-women, possessed of a will to survive and to see others survive.”  Donnelly has continued in this tradition, sustaining and nurturing it, and adding her own sheer intelligence, deep reflection, delicate phrasing, sharp imagery, and deft and resonant deployment of metaphor and motif.  The poems dig deep for their thriving roots; they do not shy away from “blood and bone” in the soil and the difficult work of unearthing.  And then, they are carefully placed in the book’s garden plot, and both individually and together, these poems create a flourishing, brilliant collection.

—

Sally Smits Masten’s poems have been published in Crab Orchard Review, The Georgia Review, Smartish Pace, Northwords, The Laurel Review, and other journals.  She earned her MFA in poetry from the University of North Carolina Wilmington and her PhD in American literature from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro.  She currently teaches at Western Governors University.

After the Witch Hunt by Megan Falley (A Review by Jason Carney)

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Write Bloody Books

120 pgs/$8.84

Beautiful lines, harsh realities, absolute truths, and precise images combine in the poems offered in After the Witch Hunt by Megan Falley to create a book that sings in an authentic voice. This is Falley’s first book, yet the originality of the poet shows experience and craft beyond her years. I found myself getting lost in the text, each time I tried to read the book with a critical eye, my mind was drawn in by the artistic beauty of poems such as “Pendulum.”

“Pendulum” is a stark and sad poem, that deals with the suicide of a friend’s sibling, after a night of partying. The poem is formulated almost as a list of the previous night’s activities, common everyday teenage associations (music, dancing, and drinking games). Could have been anywhere, anyone. The first half of the poem gives the reader the sense of normalcy; the tome of the poem turns with the most beautiful passage delivering the truth of the situation, an indescribable horror, with a child like splendor.

“In the morning he thought he could resurrect/ the simplicity of childhood by turning/ himself into a tire swing.”

So impactful is the beauty of the image portrayed that the rest of the poem is an echo of its emotion until the final line-  a question posed by the poet that leaves the reader searching for the answer to why someone feels such loneliness.

“When he turned himself into a pendulum, / what became of time?”

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Good Grief by Stevie Edwards (A Review by Gretchen Primack)

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Write Bloody

112 pgs/$14

I just wrote up a piece for a literary magazine’s Contributors’ Blog, and in it I described what I look for in poems: “I admire the poet who keeps a gleam in his rolled eye. I like a poet to look to her gut but not her navel; I like subject matter to be tough but not gratuitous or looking to shock. And I want lovely music in every poem I read, no matter how unlovely the subject.”

Soon after, I cracked Stevie Edwards’ new book. Well, I might as well have written “See Good Grief“ after the line above.

To achieve this requires expert handling of most of the tools in a poet’s toolbox, so let’s take a look. Here’s the last stanza of the first poem in the book, “For my Brother on his Sixteenth Birthday”:

He tells me he’s cold. I press my lighter

to his sleeves and tell him it’ll be

okay, hug him until we’re both charred

and warm. He tells me it’s gone.

Violence and tenderness do a waltz with tells, tell, tell as the beat, press and hug and warm the spaces between, and the smell of charring flesh permeates the air. Tough, but not gratuitous- a recognition of the feelings someone has simply as a function of living and loving here on this planet in this moment. I believe the speaker; I believe the violence, the tenderness, and both together. Continue reading →

Sweet Nothing by Nate Pritts (A Review by Brian Fanelli)

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Lowbrow Press

107 pages, $13

 American poet and critic Ezra Pound once described a poetic image as something that should capture an emotional and intellectual complex in an instant of time. Nate Pritts’ latest collection of poems, Sweet Nothing, is filled with images that do just that, while also capturing the beauty of the everyday, including the feel of the sun in one’s hair or its reflection on a lover’s shoulders. His latest work is also a celebration of language itself and trying to find the right words to capture wonderful, but often fleeting moments.

Pritts’ collection covers a sweeping range of emotions, including longing, love, and even frustration, but as a whole, the poems remind the reader to appreciate the everyday and the small moments that we sometimes take for granted. In the poem “What it Means to be in Transit,” he writes, “I see the street from bird level because I like to feel/the sun in my hair/because this is temporary this moment/this is my time & now/it is gone already.”

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Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah by Patricia Smith (A Review by Jason Carney)

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Coffee House Press

116 pgs/$16

 Patricia Smith’s newest collection, Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, evokes a sense of history and self-awareness combined with precise storytelling and the most crafted verse. Each poem delves deeper into the mythology of her family, her childhood dreams, personal scars, small triumphs that create larger identity, and the emotions of growing up a southern transplant in a northern city. Mrs. Smith’s fifth book of poetry is on par with her past work, such as Blooddazzler (National Book Award Finalist). In her current incarnation, we find one of the most authentic voices of Modern American Poetry.

Poems such as “An All-Purpose Product”, “Baby of the Mistaken Hue”, “13 Ways of Looking at 13”, and “Laugh Your Troubles Away” all confront the emotional turmoil of being a black girl in the largest city in the American Midwest. These poems are valuable teaching tools for young people of all races; each poem with its own twist speaks to American White Privilege, more precisely, the scorn that imposes itself on anyone who cannot be assimilated. These lessons are presented in ways easily obtained and grasped by the reader through insightful personal pains of her first blossoming love as in “Open Letter To Joseph Peters Naras, Take 2.”

“I will throw you out of my house if I hear about you seeing/ that black girl again. Joe, I loved you then and love you/ still.”

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Nectar by Lisa Bellamy (A Review by P. Jonas Bekker)

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Encircle Press

24 pgs/$12.95

 

I staggered out of the theater after Waiting for Godot.
Jeez, I griped to Peter, That’s it? We’re all just wind and gristle?
Yep, he said after a minute, and I knew he was trying to remember
whether he’d stuck the parking ticket in his wallet or pocket.

I love it when a poet tells you what a poetry collection is all about in the first poem. In these four lines from the opening poem, ‘Monkey Spinning a Prayer Wheel’, Lisa Bellamy lays out a framework of what she’s concerning herself with in this chapbook called Nectar. The senselessness and mundanity of everything makes the protagonist call for her mother like a little girl:

 in my memory of chipping my tooth on the granite rock in our backyard,
and me wailing as my mother ran from her chaise lounge
where she’d been sunbathing and reading Leon Uris, her freckled arms
and the smell of her suntan oil—where is she? Where is she?

That is a powerful, if disconcerting, start to a book of poetry. Continue reading →

L’Vis Lives! by Kevin Coval (A Review by Brian Fanelli)

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Haymarket Books

103 pages, $16

Renowned poet Patricia Smith writes in the introduction to Kevin Coval’s newest collection of poems, L’Vis Lives, that his latest offering is a “relentless book, brave and uncomfortable.” Indeed, Coval’s collection is brave and forceful in the way it deals with race, exploring why suburban white kids would want to shed their identify and imitate black culture. It’s a topic on race that has rarely, if ever, been explored in contemporary poetry collections. Coval’s book, also dubbed “racemusic poems,” confronts the issue through recent music history, specifically Elvis, Vanilla Ice, the Beastie Boys, and Eminem, all artists that owe their success to black music and what they took from it. Coval’s poems, while unsettling at times, highlight a truth about how white rappers and even rock ‘n roll pioneers made riches off of black music and culture.

Early on in the collection, Coval depicts a time when hip-hop was purer, during the beginning of the Ronald Reagan presidency, when the music had yet to burst into the mainstream. In the prosaic poem “the crossover,” he writes of a tapedeck and a walkman, music that “truthed” and was a “middle finger fuck you” to President Reagan who “sent uncle dave crazy back into the streets.” In the poem, and throughout the collection, Coval’s form imitates the rawness of early hip-hop. Like the poet’s other collections, he forgoes capitalization, even of names, places, and some titles of poems, thus making the poems a little more unrefined.

In the beginning of the collection, Coval also places his white speaker in front of a mirror, wishing he was cooler. In the poem “posing,” the young speaker confesses that his nose is still too big for his face and that his chin hairs “struggle for articulation.” A few clipped lines later, the speaker also admits that he wishes every muscle in his body were bigger. Anyone who suffered through an awkward adolescence, wishing for a newfound hipness and cool, can relate to the poem. Continue reading →

Flood Letters by Karin Gottshall (A Review by Aiden Arata)

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Argos Books

$10

In an age when apocalyptic threats have become a plague unto themselves—whether one kneels at the alter of spirituality, science, or general confusion—a collection of letters from a protagonist beyond salvation may seem like overkill.  Karin Gottshall’s second collection of poetry, however, reminds us of the true weight of rapture: Flood Letters demurely and achingly catalogues the final transmissions of a hurricane survivor, stretching the narrator’s consciousness into animal and divine worlds as she fights to remain human under the forces of nature. Flood Letters is quite possibly the most openly desperate manuscript I’ve read in a long time. The words’ power lies not in the clamor of despondency, however, but in its quiet. There’s little bite; this is a gentle mauling. It seems a shame to break up the collection, and I’m compelled to at least quote the piece “Dear Lucidity, no one else” in its entirety:

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Morocco by Kendra Grant Malone & Matthew Savoca (A Review by Gina Myers)

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Dark Sky Books

116 pages/$10

Inappropriate relationships and illicit affairs have long been the stuff of literature. Morocco, a new collection of poetry from Dark Sky Books, contributes to this tradition but strips away the romance, showing things for what they are: sometimes tender, but often manipulative, cruel, and downright ugly.

Written jointly by Kendra Grant Malone and Matthew Savoca, the narrative begins with two would-be lovers who each already have a significant other, one a boyfriend, the other a wife. At some point during the collection, the speakers cross the boundary they had previously established for themselves, but by the end they seem no less tortured by each other and no happier than they were at the beginning. While some moments are tender and even humorous, the book shows how obsessive and unhealthy relationships can be as the two speakers look to each other for escape but then discover that escaping into each other’s bodies does not fix anything.

While written together, this isn’t a book of collaborations, rather a collection of poems written in conversation with one another. The writers share a similar style, which employs plain-spoken/direct, stripped-down language, uses all lower case letters and short lines, and lacks all end-punctuation marks. At the outset of the book, it isn’t always entirely clear (without referring to the index at the end) who the author of an individual piece is, especially since there is not a clear back-and-forth pattern between the poems. But as the book progresses, each poet’s voice emerges, and it becomes unnecessary to refer to the index.

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