Tony Mancus

[REVIEW] Bye Sea, by Tony Mancus

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Bye Sea

Tree Light Books
41 pages, $12

Review by Hannah Rodabaugh

Tony Mancus’ wonderful chapbook collection Bye Sea is a fascinating excursion into cultural sea tropes and the ways we reclaim them for the personal or private. In this whimsical collection, pirates, madras, the sea shanty, weather predictions (very sailor), cartography, model ships in bottles, and yes, even treasure chests are recreated, or more accurately, regrown into a set of individual gestures that seek to expand outside of their cultural associations while they are still at some level unable to escape them.

However, the first thing that strikes you when reading this collection is not the poems, though they deserve our best attention, but the inspired typography and design. Everything about this collection speaks to the quality of the design process. The cover bears a beautiful, original screen-print of an octopus. (I have a great deal of affection for the octopus, so perhaps I am biased!) The typography and page layouts throughout also are absolutely gorgeous. In all honesty, this is one of the most aesthetically pleasing reading experiences I have had in quite some time. 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 →

Flood Bloom, by Caroline Cabrera (A Review by Tony Mancus)

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H_NGM_N Books

$14.95/102 pgs.

 

The first thing that I encountered when starting to read Caroline Cabrera’s new book of poetry, Flood Bloom, out from H_NGM_N Books, was the honeycombing that acts as endpaper and splits the book in half. The walls of a honeycomb seem like they could be a productive organic and partially decomposing frame for what’s happening through the book. The stuff of memory is being collected chewed up, and regurgitated into form. What’s left is a fortifying byproduct and a well-crafted casing. A hive itself and bees actually arrive early on and with them come the speaker’s worry that the collective is mucked with an “f”:

The people in town are afraid of bees    we are in a hive   my
big concern is colony collapse disorder        everything leaves

(“Movement” – 4)

We are left, but thankfully not alone and the longing that’s semi-present throughout the book is productive precisely because all is not terribly lost. Things are just a bit foggy, and this is OK.

Cabrera deftly plays around with perceptive angles and the occasional use of “we” helps define the speaker more sharply. The author relies on declarative statements, often repeating sentence beginnings, but the effect of this repetition and construction is insistence that we as readers follow her very stable eye, and what that eye sees even though it changes as it’s seen.

I see boats, the wakes they make.

I see ghosts of clouds moving beneath me,

(“Flight Language” – 20)

The lessons presented to and through this speaker are mutable, imbued with the press and pressure: of family, of varied relationships, and the distortion that memory renders. But they’re lessons that we all have our own windows into, which makes these poems easy to enter, but not simple. Continue reading →