Poem366: "autumn, presencing" by Liang Huichun

autumn, presencing by Liang Huichun

autumn, presencing by Liang Huichun, Strawberry Hedgehog, 2020

Welcome to Poem366 Central, our base of operations. The whole crew is here, test-driving poems and kicking some wheels. (Hi, I’m the whole crew — Karen, poet, lover of poetry.)

Maybe you don’t picture a Poem366 factory, but you probably envision an orderly process for a yearlong poetry appreciation project. One doesn’t jump into such a thing without a plan, right?

Wrong. My husband, the incredible Michael Czyzniejewski, has a Story366 blog that he likes to do on leap years — visit here: https://story366blog.wordpress.com/. My two sons and I fully support his daily book review project, but I should note that it’s not easy. His commitment to his project is one he takes seriously, and so family things have to wait, occasionally, while he reads a book or finishes up a review.

I was inspired by his dedication in 2016, and I saw firsthand the benefits of such a project — staying absolutely current with the newest writers, building discipline in reading and considering what he’s read. Less than a week before the re-start of Mike’s Story366 blog, I decided I’d like to give it a try, too — but with poems, which are a thousand times cooler, obviously. (And shorter, I should add — not a small consideration when reading a book a day.)

A few days before Jan. 1, 2020, I posted a request for books to review to the four winds, and friends and fellow members of writing groups were generous in responding. I like paper copies, but some kind souls were able to zoom some electronic copies my way rather quickly so that I would have a library to draw on right away. I also contacted some presses and requested review copies from 2018 or later. (I must have worded my email in a weird way, because a lot have just sent me 2018 books, thinking that was what I was after.)

But I also have my mailing address on the right side of my blog (over there---à), and sometimes people send me a book or two without my asking, just because. That happened today, and what a delightful surprise it was to open my mail and find two books from a press I was unfamiliar with, Strawberry Hedgehog, by two writers who are from Missouri, which, of course, makes my heart sing.

For today, my focus will be one of these two books: “autumn, presencing” by Liang Huichun (with paintings by Steven Schroeder). Both are gorgeous, and I’m looking forward to reading the other, by Schroeder, soon.

The first thing I love about “autumn, presencing” is that it’s square. I’m a fool for square poetry books (by which I mean that they are exactly as tall as they are wide). Maybe this is a weird preference, but I think they look elegant, and they often signal shorter poems, which I tend to enjoy more than longer work.

I also love that second word, “presencing.” That’s certainly a focus in my life now — I have a daily meditation practice in addition to my daily reading and blogging practices (and momming and working and poeming, etc.) And when I factor in a third factor, the gorgeous cover, featuring a Schroeder watercolor, I am instantly hooked.

The book contains Chinese versions of poems alongside their English translations, and the first piece in the book is the title poem, presented with capital letters here: “Autumn, Presencing.” I am always interested in writers who join me in my effort to recognize the lyricism in everyday life, and Liang delivers:

My verse, still

waiting for winnowing

like wet rice, unharvested, still,

is a story behing told. But autumn

water is crystal clear, flowing

clouds and my mortgage

vanishing together.

She reifies the mortgage reference in the next set of lines: “Everything is in order, / only the four walls of my house standing.” The house is (is this a pun?) foundational to ideas of security, stability, and order, so I found this image very satisfying.

Another poem I enjoyed was “Loneliness,” which stair-stepped from familiar depictions of loneliness to a lovely, unexpected image: “Loneliness is a lane in evening / that can never forget sandals’ echoing.” The truth of that assessment was undeniable.

Poem366: “Almost Famous”­­ by Trish Hopkinson

Almost Famous by Trish Hopkinson

Almost Famous by Trish Hopkinson, Bangalore, India: Yavanika Press, 2019

In Almost Famous, the fourth chapbook by the consummate literary citizen, Trish Hopkinson, we find powerful and painful coming-of-age stories crafted as poems. The book starts with a vivid depiction of her own birth, written from her perspective, and it carries forward into the childhood and teen years, and every poem packs a potent gut-punch. While there were parts of my own life that diverged widely from the childhood Hopkinson describes, there was enough here that was familiar and shared.

For me, the strongest parts of the book were the first and last poems. The first, “Third Day, Third Month, 1972,” describes Hopkinson’s birth, which included the use of forceps:

                  A doctor,

or a man rather, pressed

a tool inside her, like the back

of a soup spoon reaching in

to a bowl of cold grits,

fished around for my tender

skull, and excised me for comfort.

The image here — forceps in a birth canal as a spoon in cold grits — casts the birth scene into an otherworldly sphere, I think mainly because the grits are cold. What kind of birth is this? It’s such a small touch, but a smart poetic decision because of its perfect not-quite-rightness.

At the end of “Third Day,” the poet looks down at her mother, “lying there / — as if dead. Her eyes still to the day, // anesthetized.” This was a startling notion as well, and it set up some questions at the start of the book: Are these biographical poems? Was the mother permanently damaged by the birthing incident? The mother performs ordinary acts, like conversations, through the rest of the chapbook, but the idea that there is no coming back from the birthing room seems to hold.

The dominate voice in the poem seems to cover a lot of ground — Missouri, the western mountains — but in “Kansas Flat,” Hopkinson writes evocatively of mobile home life in tornado country. She writes, “We drag this mobile home / from one town to another trying / to find a job my father can keep.” She offers perfect description of the trailer, with its “rows of science fiction paperbacks / double-parked to fit them all” (a telling detail of escapism), but she ends with the most stunning image of

                  mid-west trailer parks

where timid homes lie down like a dog

being scolded at the foot of a tornado —

sometimes, broken down in its wake,

collapsed like an empty cardboard box.

If any childhood scene is more fraught with danger than a Kansas trailer park, I don’t know what it is.

I mentioned that the first poem was one of my two favorites, but my very favorite — the place where Hopkinson comes into her full-throated own — is “Mixed Tape.” This poem is composed partly of lines from other poems in the collection and partly with new material, and the snippets are numbered and discrete, à la Wallace Stevens. Each section stands alone as its own perfect gem. I offer two favorites, just to give Hopkinson a chance to really strut her stuff here:

IV. I remember the fertile mud smell of the lake in Missouri where I learned to swim. If sense of smell worked underwater, it would smell of catfish and silt and long afternoons of treading water in the sun with the bluegills.

V. Should I ever grow a tail, my sacrum will connect it to my spine and wiggle when I walk or wag. For now, it holds my pelvis in place, gives each side a wall to lean on, like beatniks against a lamppost.

I am enchanted, body and soul, by those beatniks. It’s a perfect, and perfectly surprising, image from a rare talent.

Poem366: “A Live Thing, Clinging with Many Teeth” by Kolleen Carney Hoepfner

A Live Thing, Clinging with Many Teeth by Kolleen Carney Hoepfner

A Live Thing, Clinging with Many Teeth by Kolleen Carney Hoepfner, Indiana: Spooky Girlfriend Press, 2019

I just finished A Live Thing, Clinging with Many Teeth by Kolleen Carney Hoepfner, and it was a fascinating immersion into a world I both did and didn’t recognize.

The chapbook appears to be composed of one long poem, broken up into numbered sections and separate, untitled pieces. These parts of the poem have lush, imagistic language, but they don’t aim to answer any questions; they just offer a tense, worrisome scene with plenty of rather terrifying details.

In the book, a woman seems to be locked up in a place that isn’t clear. She seems to be alone, but then she doesn’t. There is a feeling that time is passing and she is losing hope, but still paying attention to her senses and trying to find ways to bolster her resolve:

The best she could do

was remember how fucking close

she had come

to escape

It’s easy to imagine the frustration that is the closest thing to hope one can have in a nearly hopeless situation. Writes Hoepfner,

She had underested the wind,

the scent of some beloved

but long-lost master

      (or, on the other hand,

shivering and wakeful,

                  the blood-smell

                  of a dream full of teeth,

   hungry but not yet desperate).

At this point, the literal was mostly lost to me (whose master? And who smells the blood?). The best plan of action I’ve found when lost in a poem is to lean in and accept its premises, while trusting that something will happen—there will be explanations, or the sense of the poem will be enough, or you’ll re-read it and everything will click. And this book captured tension better than any I could remember, from poetry at least; it read like a thriller, but with the deeper emotional resonance of a poem.

Something happens midway through the book and involves blood, and it feels like a clue to the literal:

Until clotted, blood

      was as slippery as oil. […]

Her agenda was not complicated:

a quick escape

unconsciousness               death

The growing feeling of fury:

She could feel

that hot, electrical tingle

like a live thing

clinging

with many teeth

There is real drama in the sparse syntax, and as a reader, I’m rooting for this woman, and wondering who she is and what kind of trouble she has found herself in.

All was made clear on the acknowledgments page, which explained, “This collection is comprised of found poetry, using Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game as a source.” In Gerald’s Game, as I recall, a woman’s husband dies after chaining her to a bed during sex, and she is left to figure out how to escape. I won’t spoil it for you, but the slippery blood is a relevant plot point.

What fascinated me about this collection was how accurate and familiar it felt to anyone who has experienced sexual violence and domination. King’s source material was not relevant to the deep appreciation I felt for the emotional truth and the tense quasi-narrative. Hoepfner is the artist at work here, and she is masterful at it.

Poem366: “Body Falling, Sunday Morning” by Susana H. Case

Body Falling, Sunday Morning by Susana H. Case

Body Falling, Sunday Morning by Susana H. Case, Cincinnati, Ohio: Milk & Cake, 2019

Frances Glessner Lee was an artist who didn’t consider herself one. She specialized in forensic miniatures, her intricately detailed “Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death,” which helped train crime scene investigators in the 1940s and ‘50s.

Glessner Lee’s dioramas are incredibly detailed, and a chapbook by Susana H. Case, Body Falling, Sunday Morning, describes Glessner Lee’s work in terms that begin to give her the credit she deserves as someone often referred to as the mother of forensic science.

Case starts with an intriguing premise, and photos of Lee’s dioramas are placed throughout the book to heighten the interest. Glessner Lee was known for her keen attention to detail, right down to functioning mousetraps.

The book includes titled poems, but in between some of them are prose sections that have poetic economy of language. These are not titled on the page (the table of contents labels them “Frances 1,” “Frances 2,” etc.), but the crafted language had me convinced that they were prose poems instead of mere background information. Here’s part of one:

Frequenting autopsies to verify the accuracy of her models, Glessner Lee notes the correct amount of bloating among those in her down-at-heels homes and rooms, victims led astray by desire and vice. The inherent vice of materials: degradation over time. Nail polish depicting blood turns purple.

The numbered “Frances” entries are very informative, but there’s something more than information at work here.

One poem, “End of the Affair,” does a nice job of showing how these miniatures functioned as crime-fighting tools. A man, dead by gunshot wound, is found at a hideaway cabin. A bullet is found in the rafters, Case reports:

He bent over and shot himself,

his mistress insists.

Knocked his hat clear off.

How the affair ends.

No matter that the gun’s not under him,

and her fingerprints are on the pistol.

I realized as I read the book that I had heard of Frances Glessner Lee and seen her work in the distant past—years and years ago. They came back to me right away when I saw the images Case had chosen for her book. In my opinion, Case does important work here, reminding readers of a woman of importance in her field and allowing us to appreciate the odd lyricism of her meticulous death scenes. It’s easy to forget our progenitors, especially our woman progenitors. I appreciate Case’s work to keep one of them front and center with this compelling collection.

Poem366: “Nursewifery” by Ruth Williams

Nursewifery by Ruth Williams

Nursewifery by Ruth Williams, Durham, North Carolina: Jacar Press, 2019

Ruth Williams’ elegant chapbook Nursewifery, from Jacar Press, is as clever and innovative collection as I’ve seen, and I hope that my introduction to it here might lead others to discover how special it is.

My mother was a nurse and my two sisters are, too, and I’m interested in the profession, though I was never in any danger of becoming a nurse myself. (Once, as a teenaged candystriper—which, admittedly, feels like the first line of a pornographic novel—I had the embarrassing experience of fainting on the job from witnessing something a little too intense for me. In a family of nurses, I ended up in the gift shop, in the very hospital where my mother was the night nursing supervisor. I’m sure she heard about my experience, but I can promise she didn’t hear it from me.)

Among the majority of the people in the world who are not nurses? Ruth Williams. But she is a feminist scholar with an interest in this woman-dominated profession, and she is also seemingly a student of history. The role of combat nurse captured her fascination acutely enough to produce this outstanding small collection about military field nurses from, seemingly, the era of Florence Nightingale—the Crimean War and thereafter. The nurse whose voice offers up the poems in Nursewifery wears a pinafore and works alongside horses, but the exact conflict in which she serves is unstated, unless I missed a clue somewhere.

The most fascinating thing Williams does is her focus on the different types of stitches nurses use to suture wounds. Some of the poems bear the names of stitches as titles—titles like “Vertical Mattress Suture,” “Locked Suture,” “Corset Plication Stitch,” “Far-Near Near-Far Modified Vertical Mattress Suture” (no, really …), and more.

It turns out that our means of repairing ripped or cut skin offer potent metaphors. She explains each stitch in an epigraph taken from the Medscape website. The quote to start “Deep Tip Stitch” offers a powerful example:

The deep tip stitch provides longer-term support than the traditional corner stitch and improves alignment of the tip with the sides of the closure.

The unnamed nurse persona who voices each poem identifies with this stitch:

We thought ourselves exceptional,

though we knew we were merely women

wearing uniforms to distinguish us, not as individuals,

but as a type of caring, a calm blue

stitch.

Williams continues in this voice, saying, “We pulled together // what could not otherwise be touched,” adding that ability was the nurses’ “special softness, // our elegant way of aligning the world.” I offer a lot of this small poem, but I’m really fascinated by how Williams takes something so prosaic and makes it in to such a powerful symbol. The life of the nurse is exactly like the description of the deep tip stitch, and Williams proves it.

As I savored this chapbook, I took time out to hit YouTube, where there are quite a few stitching demonstration videos, most of them featuring thick, fatty squares of fake human flesh, sort of Caucasian-ish on top and yellow underneath. As I looked up demos of each of the stitches Williams named, the same calm male voice explained how to execute each suture, and a video showed a hooked sewing needle manipulated by forceps. Throughout, he peppered some of the same jargon used by Williams; for instance, the first poke of the sewing needle through the skin seems to be called “the bite”—another strong metaphor.

Williams has much more than a good concept going for her, though. This is also a powerful collection, with the suture poems “stitched” throughout the book, which offers a daming critique of war and the harm it does.

One of my favorite poems in the collection is called “The Suitor,” which recalls a first dance with an early beau of the battlefield nurse. It continues,

Later, you’ll

find him again

on the table

red weather

between you.

This is a small poem, but it packs a dramatic wallop, and damage from war being referred to as “red weather” is highly arresting to me.

Williams is the author of two other collections, so her work shouldn’t be hard to find. I recommend you read her work—stat.

Poem366: “The Last Mastodon” by Christina Olson

The Last Mastodon by Christina Olson

The Last Mastodon by Christina Olson, Studio City, California: Rattle, 2019

Since the book itself is an appreciation of relics, I suppose it’s OK to begin by singing the praises of an artifact: Christina Olson’s The Last Mastodon is a beautiful chapbook, with a deep teal, matte cover emblazoned with a hot-pink title and byline. Open it, and laaa! Crisp hot-pink endsheets envelop the text. It’s a slim volume, at only 36 pages, but the dimensions, 6 inches by 9 inches, are pretty big for a chap. The author photo on the back flap shows Olson sitting on the floor in shorts and an I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening grin beside a mastodon skull and a set of tusks.

I was disposed to like this book from the outset—and I did!

This is the third Rattle Chapbook Prize winner I’ve featured in this series, and it’s still January, so that’s weird. I happened to have some at home because I entered the contest a few times, and entrants receive a copy of the winning edition. With the death of my mother and some work make-up frenzy, I needed short books, and I really like physical copies. Hitting 2018 winners Mather Schneider and Raquel Vasquez Gilliland made sense for size reasons, and that’s partly why I chose to read Olson’s book, too. (I needed a chap today because I was nowhere near done with a gorgeous but difficult full-length collection that will need to percolate for a bit.)

Gosh, this is the most personal appreciation I’ve written so far, and I’ve said virtually nothing about Olson’s poems. I’m realizing, though, that Rattle has an unusually good chapbook series, and they’re three for three with me—not a stinker in the bunch.

The Last Mastodon was born during a three-day poetry residency Olson experienced in the Western Science Center in Hemet, California. Olson got to spend time with and touch relics and talk to paleontologists at work there, and I can only imagine how inspiring that was. The resulting poems certainly are.

Olson is as playful as her cover photo promised she would be (although many poems or parts of poems are darkly philosophical, too). I like the poem that is framed in the form of a “how-to” manual, “How to Care for Your American Mastodon”:

An adult mastodon consumes nearly three pounds of coniferous twigs a day. They prefer the tender greens. Brittle twigs will stick in a mastodon’s throat. Your baby mastodon will spend most of its early life huddled against its mother in the cold spruce woodlands. Like you, it will learn to navigate. Or it will die.  Always lift at the midsection, not by the legs.

It’s fun, how committed she is to the concept. I forget for a moment that there’s zero chance I’ll accidentally pick up a mastodon by the legs.

Positioned alongside some truly funny moments are some gut-punches — more impactful, probably, because of the juxtaposition. I felt almost knocked over by some lines in “Among the Bones,” a rumination about the speaker’s tendency to collect bits of dead things (her dog’s hair, a skull, a sand dollar), set off by a memory of her father. Writes Olson,

The advantage to dead thins

is that you cannot hurt them

anymore. Instead, they hurt you,

over and over and over.

This is undeniably, inescapably true, delivered in a manner that only poetry can serve up.

Embedded in the book are details about the life of Thomas Jefferson (who believed his Louisiana Purchase would yield mastodons) and ecological messages. I like “Broken Sonnet on Teeth,” in which Olson describes the popularity of the sabre-tooth at the La Brea Tar Pits (“eight-inch knives in its mouth that / even now haunt our dreams”). Concludes Olson,

                                          We fear the knife

of the sabre-tooth, its name a clear warning, but we

miss its point—Smilodon died when its big prey

died out, but we’ll expire when the smallest life

on Earth does. Surely you’ve noticed the bees

have gone quiet? Forget teeth. Time to pray.

For a chapbook, The Lost Mastodon is a satisfying read, full of humor and insights. I recommend it.

Poem366: “the ghost comes with me” by Letitia Trent

the ghost comes with me by Letitia Trent

the ghost comes with me by Letitia Trent, Syracuse, New York: Ghost City Press, 2019

So I’m sitting here in the half-dark of a cold evening in the Ozarks, and I’m reading poems about … what’s this? Ghosts in the Ozarks. This is a rare place — the wind, the weather, distinctive; the light pinning you in place like a moth.

It’s in this just-rightness that I encounter Letitia Trent through her chapbook the ghost comes with me, and I have to say, it’s an impressive book. It’s composed of a single poem in eleven parts, and all have something to do with ghosts or the other world.

Trent establishes her uneasy motif in the first numbered section, where she describes ghosts as “genderless / dead, but present.” Though it has left the body,

      … you are still

here, ceaselessly

moving and confusing

the smoke alarms

the silken curtains

the good, small dogs

the cat on the mantel

the television signal

What I get from this is the pervasiveness of the ghost — how it leaves its clammy mark on everything.

When Trent talks about ghosts, it’s clear she’s a believer; her bio explains that she lives in a haunted town, and she writes about hauntings as if they are facts. I like that she isn’t being artful, or at least not merely artful, when she invokes ghosts. This probably gives her a great deal of credibility with some readers. It does with me.

However, I don’t think Trent’s ghosts are necessarily spirits of departed humans. I suspect some of her ghosts are actually old hopes, or maybe regrets. But they resonate the same way, like a current in the floorboard that finds its way up your spine.

The ghost motif is sustained throughout the book, sometimes with a twist, wherein the speaker herself becomes a ghost to her son:

    when I’m dead maybe

my son will suddenly remember

the importance of roses, the smell of sandalwood,

maybe he’ll need to sit on the ground

sometimes because he know

that’s where I am.

I’m intrigued with a character who seems to daydream as she makes plans for her own future haunting.

It is deeply satisfying to read poems that demonstrate an almost supernatural vision—second sight into the after world. But such moments present themselves again and again in this impressive collection.

I am especially smitten with the fourth section, where the speaker muses on the nature of ghosts:

Maybe ghosts are the dead left in the places where they lived or died, attached to the world as we’re attached when alive, loving a particular place but never able to touch it fully, loving people who they can watch from a distance but never feel with their bodies or breath.

There’s this belief that the body and the real self are made of different stuff and one can slip off the other like a stocking from a pointed foot.

That image with its exquisite detail—stocking, pointed foot—is indicative of the power of the pictures Trent paints throughout this collection. It’s a lush and satisfying read.

Poem366: “Tales from the House of Vasquez” by Raquel Vasquez Gilliland

Tales from the House of Vasquez by Raquel Vasquez Gilliland

Tales from the House of Vasquez by Raquel Vasquez Gilliland, Studio City, California: Rattle, 2018

I love getting lost in a book of poetry, partly because they’re all so different. Some work their magic through flawless reasoning or beautiful words. In Tales from the House of Vasquez, Raquel Vasquez Gilliland’s particular magic is … magic, actually—and it makes for compelling reading.

There is the magic described in the poems—a specialized understanding carried down through generations of women—but there is also the incantatory quality of the work itself that helps to effect the numinous quality of this chapbook.

There are fourteen poems in the collection, all beginning with “The Tale of …” (“The Tale of the Serpant,” “The Tale of Kitchen Spirits,” etc.). The tales are family stories that involve mothers and aunts and grandmothers, and through them, the intelligence behind the poems comes into her own.

A prevalent symbol in the collection is the eye. Some of the Vasquez women have four of them, two in front and two in back. “The Tale of Madness” explains the story; in it, a bear visits one of the speaker’s ancestors, and the ancestor sang a song that pleased him. In exchange, the bear offered her the ability to see.

Pero señor, Inez said. I can already see.

This sort of seeing opens your other eyes.

The ones in the back of your head.

The bear explains that the back eyes offer a different kind of sight. The ancestor accepted the gift, but as the bear began to open one of her back eyes, the moon emerged and interrupted the process, and the bear could not open the second eye. The bear tells the ancestor, “One of your back eyes will see what is behind / you. And the other will see what is within you.”

The bear continues,

The madness will gather under that closed eye.

And it will be passed on to your daughter,

and her daughter, and her daughter,

until one of your daughters will not bear

it any longer. It will nearly kill her,

but she will pry the other eye open

with her bear hands, and she will see

the spines of stars.

It’s a powerful prophecy that begins to play out in the book in fascinating ways through tightly linked, mystical poems.

In these poems, madness is held in awe. “The Tale of Desire” explains that madness comes from terror:

                  … The fear that causes your spirit

to break into pieces and run into all directions,

one piece under the crook of the lily leaf,

another over the eyelid of birch.

What is so striking to me as a reader is how these fantastical, imagistic explanations of a woman’s magic seem so accurate. I believe every word of what is presented as a kind of fairy tale.

Something is happening beneath the surface of language in these poems, so that “The Tale of Kitchen Spirits” feels almost like an answer key when it says,

If you listen close, you can hear

her talk to the spirits. Sometimes

she even prays aloud, even though

the spirits have always preferred

fingers and bone.

Tales from the House of Vasquez is a small book that has big things to say, and I’m happy to have stumbled across it. The poet’s bio notes that she has another book to her credit, Dirt and Honey, and I plan to hunt it down and read it in one sitting.

Poem366: “Rue” by Kathryn Nuernberger

Rue by Kathryn Nuernberger

Rue by Kathryn Nuernberger, Rochester, New York: BOA Editions, 2020

Reader, you’re in for a treat. I was lucky enough to get my hands on an advance review copy of Rue by Kathryn Nuernberger, forthcoming from BOA Editions in April, and it’s stellar work, fascinating from cover to cover.

All poets have their thing — that aspect of poetry they do best. I’m always excited by poets who can lean hard into an image and make it dance in unexpected ways, and I also love poets who have a musical ear for language and sound. But Nuernberger’s particular skill is rhetoric, and it’s fascinating to see how each poem’s argument unfolds. She is brilliant, of course — well educated, well read, a careful thinker — and her poems come together in such smart ways. As a bonus, they’re well crafted, and imagery and sound considerations are very much on point. But the best thing about these poems is seeing a sharp mind at work to solve a rhetorical problem.

Although I’m going on and on about the rhetoric here, don’t think for a moment that Nuernberger doesn’t get personal. Within the bounds of these arguments, the speaker of these poems talks about her workplace politics (and I absolutely love that she writes about this topic), or she calls out a townsperson who is too touchy-feely at the coffee shop, or she indicts an obstetrician who treats her roughly during childbirth.

This latter example is found in the poem “Poor Crow’s Got Too Much Fight to Live,” which begins with a crow struggling with a trapped foot but then takes surprising turns to tell the speaker’s birthing story. There’s a Catch-22 in the whole childbirth scenario these days; every baby book tells us to formulate a birth plan, something many doctors will flatly ignore, and some will openly mock, with the attitude that they’re the doctor, and they’re going to focus on getting the baby safely into the world.

in “Poor Crow’s,” Nuernberger writes about a doctor who seemed to react to her birth plan with malice. Writes Nuernberger,

                                                      That guy

jammed his hand into me hard and without warning,

I think because he was offended by our conversation

about my birth plan, which was boilerplate stuff

about avoiding drugs and letting my body run its course.

I’d like to prosecute him, for myself and even more

for everyone else, but it took me months to understand

what he had done and why and by then it could so easily

be time telling the story instead of truth. …

I know so many mothers who have part of this story to tell — a birth plan mocked and ignored, with no chance that it will be put into effect — but the story told here, of a doctor physically hurting the speaker, goes much further. I find myself cheering for Nuernberger at the end of the poem, which does all but name this doctor:

I’m sorry, other people he might have or still yet

hurt, but I’m not so naively idealistic as to think

any good could come of saying to the public that I was

assaulted by an OB/GYN in his office in Logan, OH

in May 2010 and I’m willing to testify to that.

I grew up about 60 miles from Logan, as it happens, and I know there aren’t a lot of OB/GYNs in an Appalachian town of 7,000, so I also know how bold this poem is, and I am here for it.

Nuernberger is also a delightful nerd, sharing her crush on Carl Linnaeus, who invented the system we use to classify and name living things. It makes sense that a science-minded poet would appreciate this historic figure — a guy who named the largest mammal, the blue whale, “Balaenoptera musculus,” or “the mouse whale,” Nuernberger points out. She basically shows how adorable he is to fellow nature-lovers and word nerds, but then she finishes by pointing out a problematic aspect of this figure — that he classified people by color. “What do you / think?” she asks the reader. “Can we love him anyway? Did we / ever really even in the first place?” This is the sort of thoughtful probing found often in the long, detailed poems in the book.

The argumentation in the poems is the high note for me, but let me be clear: Nuernberger also has beautiful, lyrical moments, like I encountered in “Dear Reader, I’ve Been Preoccupied Lately by My Own Private Business.” Nuernberger describes a silent movie with philosophers who travel to the moon (“Le Voyage dans la lune,” I believe):

Their moon, when they got there, was full of can-can girls.

Their moon wanted a fist in the kisser.

Their moon wanted to pull off those stockings.

Their moon was orbited by a comet made of fire, not some accuracy of ice.

Ah, I love “some accuracy of ice” in this context. Even Nuernberger’s lyricism is brainy, and that’s delightful to encounter.

I suspect you can preorder Rue right now — and I suggest you do. I’ve lingered over these poems all day, and I am convinced.

Poem366: “Love Me, Anyway” by Minadora Macheret

Love Me, Anyway by Minadora Macheret

Love Me, Anyway by Minadora Macheret, Cincinnati, Ohio: Porkbelly Press, 2018

I know several people who contend with PCOS — polycystic ovary syndrome — and I know, too, that they suffer in myriad ways from the condition, with dangerously heavy periods and physical manifestations, like excessive hair growth, that can make them feel ashamed and exposed.

Until reading Minadora Macheret’s explosive chapbook on the subject—Love Me, Anyway, from Porkbelly Press—I didn’t fully understand the disease. I still don’t, for that matter, but I’ve come closer, and I hold those who suffer from it in the light as Macheret brings me face to face with the burden they carry.

Coupled with the trauma of disease is that of losing the mother, a subject I became too familiar with last week, on hearing that my own mother had passed away. This was a hard collection to read, but it is good to have company in grief—to sit shiva with a fellow poet who has a more advanced understanding of that kind of loss, thanks to the passage of time and the hard focus of poetry.

Macheret’s poems are forthright and honest, and they offer a frank glimpse into the life of one who contends with this disease. “Woman with PCOS Describes Aversion to Tests” provides one such moment, as the speaker describes nurses who “stick needle after needle / into scarred flesh,” until she feels “there is no blood left”:

There never is an answer

just test the body, so the doctors know

it’s still living.

She concludes that her heart beats irregularly, and “as long as it doesn’t stop, “I’ll be fine—.” It’s haunting to think of all of the people who suffer with this condition, alone in the phlebotomist’s chair that they have occupied so many times before. I wonder if it’s a comfort to some, having a book that sees them there, and having readers who know them as they haven’t before.

It looks to me from the medical writing on the subject that PCOS can mean explosively heavy, painful periods or periods that are missed altogether. The prose poem “Body of Nothing (Not Even Blood)” seems to explore this, with its haunting opening sentence: “Settle in beautiful body, settle in before the night takes you.” It then offers a painful, poetic view of what happens in the reproductive organs (“Silence the ovaries, choke on pearls”), before concluding, “The cycles have stopped. Somewhere, a clock hand lingers between today and tomorrow.” Macheret seems to be addressing the frustration of not knowing what your body plans to do and when it’s going to do it.

I appreciate the tenderness the poet offers herself in a world that can be far less loving, as in “The First Time PCOS Spoke.” Writes Macheret,

Please gentle the body—I

thicken it with sleep.

When you slow down,

you will be

a woman,

again.

I really appreciate that line break in the first of the quoted set above. “Gentle the body—I” suggests that the body is the self, though so much of our time is spent trying to rise above it. On the one hand we view our body as a flesh-sleeve, something we ultimately pull ourselves out of, but then on the other, this body is our precious vessel, the only thing we can truly be said to own.

My thoughts about ownership here transport me instantly to the most moving part of this powerful chapbook, found in “To the Bearded Lady I Am (Age 26),” which begins with the speaker with tweezers in front of the mirror. In this clear-eyed view of how the speaker contends with the preponderance of hair that PCOS brings, she ends with an image: “I’m like a teacup left out, dust covered, a chip in my side.” There is a beautiful rhythm to that sentence, and a moving view into the writer’s lived experience. It takes my breath away.

I certainly recommend this small powerhouse of a book, and I look forward to reading more by this poet.

Poem366: “Blue Birds and Red Horses” by Inna Kabysh, translated by Katherine E. Young

Blue Birds and Red Horses by Inna Kabysh, translated by Katherine E. Young

Blue Birds and Red Horses by Inna Kabysh, translated by Katherine E. Young, Toad Press, 2018

I traveled to Russia this snowy Sunday morning as I read the chapbook Blue Birds and Red Horses, poems of Inna Kabysh, in translation by Katherine E. Young.

Kabysh is a Russian-language poet, though I couldn’t pin down exactly where she lives. I did locate some information: She is a former schoolteacher, born in 1963, and is the author of seven books of poetry.

Young’s translations of Kabysh cast the poet’s work in a naturalistic light. They feature a ragged right edge, with very long and very short lines appearing side by side, and direct language that suits the bold first-person voices found her. Kabysh’s poems, here, at least, a longer ones, and they tend to read as frantic observations, as if an awful discovery is being made in real time. The result was kind of nerve-wracking for me; I felt very wound up as I raced to see what was going to happen. After a few collections that invite the reader to luxuriate and to chew on the subject, this collection felt like a shot of adrenaline. I appreciate the difference—and Kabysh’s poems really do offer a nice departure from my normal poetic fare.

There are only five poems in the chapbook, and they begin with the striking “Cat and Mouse,” in which a young child is abandoned by her mother to live with her grandmother, but does not feel unlucky. “Look what fell from the sky for you,” the grandmother tells her upon reading the news that the mother has decided to leave the country. This is a poem of marvelous detail, and it includes quick dialogue that pushes the narrative along to its lovely ending.

“Shine On, Shine On, My Star,” the second poem in the book, features a young couple in school:

   We sat in fur coats and felt boots,

   and the teacher in mittens

   wrote out on the board:

   “What I Want To Be When I Grow Up.”

   And Lyoshka wrote:

   “Hell Driver.”

   And I sighed and wrote

   that I wanted to be a poet.

   And all the others—astronauts.

In the course of the poem, the speaker loses her love, presumably to death, but she imagines his return:

   And so everything would be okay,

   and we’d get married.

   And he’d smile his Gagarin smile

   at me

   because, in point of fact,

   he wanted

   to be an astronaut

   more than anyone.

It’s a gripping and tender love story, told with uncommonly forthright honesty.

The book ends with the poem “Children’s Resurrection Day,” about the afterlife for aborted children—and these are children, instead of embryos, because they have beds and clothes and speak a language. In a surprising turn, the janitor in the poem helps the children to dig toward their resurrection:

   And then he hit the shovel on something made of iron,

   opened the lid above his head

   and, pulling himself up by his hands, crawled out—

   and pulled us out.

It was a surprise to me when the janitor’s long digging resulted in a thunk above his head, and another when it was revealed that the tunnel opened into Children’s World, which sounded like a fantastical paradise of toys until I read the book’s notes, which explained that this was a Moscow shopping destination for children’s goods during the Soviet era.

It’s healthy to look outside of ourselves a bit, and through these careful translations of Katherine E. Young, I was able to do just that for a morning.