Poem366: “Our Lady of the Flood” by Alison Pelegrin

Our Lady of the Flood by Alison Pelegrin

Our Lady of the Flood by Alison Pelegrin, Richmond, Virginia: Diode Editions, 2018

I’m still haunted by mental images of the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, and I think I always will be — this despite the fact that I know the Gulf region only as a tourist. But Alison Pelegrin’s Our Lady of the Flood offers an inside view of life afterwards, in poems that bring the waters inside of us so that we can feel them:

                              This water

is no silvered mirage. It clings like tar.

It swallows everything we are.

So says “Quicksilver,” the final poem in the small collection, winner of the Eric Hoffer Award for Excellence in Independent Publishing.

In her endorsement of the book, poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil notes, “This collection vibrates with candor and concern—forging a kinetic blaze into an emotional and physical terrain newly devastated by hurricane.” This is an accurate assessment, beginning with the first and title poem (one of five “Our Lady” poems in the chapbook):

Some saints are untouchable behind glass,

but you ride in open boats

with mildew on the edges of your gown,

a calm commander of the Cajun Navy’s fleet.

Your devotees worship outside

in a circle of ruined pews,

no incense but bug spray, their voices

a cappella because the music of the drowned piano

is too sad to sing to. …

Pelegrin recreates the ruined landscape and its vespers in moments like these.

The poems are also celebratory, like “Rituals for Serving Ambrosia.” I’m guessing a lot of sophisticated readers have never heard of this chilled salad dish, containing pineapple, Jell-O, marshmallows, coconut, and nuts, but I love it, and it’s a surprising pleasure to see a tribute to it, set up on a card table in the garage with the rest of the picnic feast.

In the fascinating “Excising a Memorial to the Confederate General Robert E. Lee,” Pelegrin contemplates the legacy of the South as captured in statuary, and makes no bones about it: “Of course he’s got to go,” she writes. Yet there are memories attached to these old artifacts:

                  So why the scrap

of rebel in me clinging to this piss-soaked ground

where his pillar stands, Mardi Gras memory lane, where

I puked through my nose, observed rats untie shoes

and tunnel up some guy’s pants empty where the leg

should be? I never paid attention to Lee himself ….

In a place like New Orleans, there are layers of history that are visible in everything.

I really love how this collection lets the light shine in, along with the water. “Anything We Want” is a poem that highlights the goodness of people, with its subtitle “Katrina, 2005.” The poem begins, “When they figure out where we are from / everyone wants to give us something.” She recounts servers bringing dessert and singing “Happy Birthday,” strangers plugging quarters into her dryer, people following her through stores to pay for her items: “They won’t quit asking, What do you want?” And as Pelegrin describes so movingly, what she wants is her home with her books, her solitary seat on a street car, and for her mother to speak to her in the Walmart where they are exiled:

I want her to look at me

but her gaze is a storm cloud

threatening from far away,

or else focused up close

as she studies the label on a can

of a strange food we don’t eat.

Where is their ambrosia in their land of refuge? The way Pelegrin has written her home helps me to feel this mother’s loss.

Poem366: “A Crooked Door Cut into the Sky” by Melissa Fite Johnson

A Crooked Door Cut into the Sky by Melissa Fite Johnson

A Crooked Door Cut into the Sky by Melissa Fite Johnson, Providence, Rhode Island: Paper Nautilus Books, 2018.

Melissa Fite Johnson dedicates A Crooked Door Cut into the Sky to her father, and with this, she begins a difficult dive into memories of childhood and her adult decisions about not having children.­­ In the set of poems that make up this chapbook, the defining characteristic is tenderness — even toward the self.

“Visiting My Sixteen-Year-Old Self” offers a beautiful example of this tenderness. She begins, “I want to smooth your hair / like a big sister as you sit on your bed / raw.” We meet her young self on the day of her dad’s funeral, pondering how she squandered the last days of her father’s life with a boy, “making you less than you were.”

The adult version of the self seems worried, though she knows how things will turn out. She writes,

I follow you, class to class,

a few steps behind, never quite able

to catch up, to touch the backpack

strapped to your shoulders,

a defective parachute.

There’s nothing the older consciousness can do for the teen, and the poem ends with the narrator of the poem saying words of comfort that the sixteen-year-old can’t hear. It’s a painful way to reflect on loss, and I’m probably not the only reader who goes down that dark well with Johnson through this haunting poem.

This one is followed by a heartbreaking moment of connection between the teenage speaker of a poem and her father, whom she must drive around following a stroke, and another that shows her experiencing a glimpse of what her father went through with immobility as she, at seventeen, deals with a broken leg. The love for this father is palpable, and the book is such a moving tribute to him.

The collection moves into reflections on family with “Apologia for Not Wanting Children,” in which the speaker seems both wistful and triumphant about a decision not to reproduce. If it seems that those moods are incompatible, I guess you have to read it:

Nothing is missing.

No baby cries from a blanket

spread on the floor as if for a picnic.

No chubby arms reach for me.

No hands open and close

like lips desperate for words.

But nothing is missing. You have

my full attention. I have yours.

Obviously, that’s a lot of clear, specific description of the nothing that is missing, though the idea of the two being fully available to one of the other at the end is enviable in its own right. I’d call this a pretty powerful love poem, and more a celebration of being part of a couple than a wistful expression of what could have been.

My favorite poem in the collection is the brief one from which the title is taken, “Visiting the Dead.” Here, the poet imagines a “crooked door / cut into the sky” and how she can use go through it to visit her father. Their interactions are tender:

                  I’d touch his Adam’s apple—

new, plugging the hole cancer made—

and hear his gravelly voice for the first time.

After visiting, though, the speaker is happy to leave — to return to the husband who waits to join her.

The poems here don’t shy away from big topics; most of it is thanatopsis, a deep reflection on death — but they never fail to be original as they probe what must be our oldest obsession. I was moved and inspired by this complex study.

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: “Typing with e.e. cummings” by Lori Desrosiers

Typing with e.e. cummings by Lori Desrosiers

Typing with e.e. cummings by Lori Desrosiers, Glenview, Illinois: Glass Lyre Press, 2019

It is a genuine pleasure to turn my attention to the whimsical Typing with e.e. cummings by one of my favorite Facebook friends, Lori Desrosiers.

Desrosiers channels e.e. cummings in these poems, and I would note that there is a strange nostalgia in revisiting the poet, who provided most of us with our first taste of the possibility of radical experimentation with punctuation, spelling, and sentence structure. As edgy as cummings was during his time, we know him more from poems like “maggie and milly and molly and may” or “I sing of Olaf glad and big,” or, the greatest of his greatest hits, “in Just-,” where “the // goat-footed // ballonMan     whistles / far / and / wee.”

In her stellar collection, Desrosiers begins with a touching poem titled “my sweet old typist,” an appreciation of her mother’s 100 word per minute typing, which she used, twice, to type up her husband’s doctoral dissertation, once unsuccessfully and once successfully. Writes Desrosiers,

ding

at 73

blanch

retired

wrote and typed

2 novels

on her

i

b

m

selectric

It’s a beautiful tribute with a meta touch, as we don’t often see poems in praise of typing.

Desrosiers also remembers her father in the lovely poem, “Poem with first line from e.e. cummings.” She remembers a dad who read Whitman and walked the land until “his brain grew star tumors.” Writes Desrosiers,

his body folded like a bad book

voice quieted, hands gnarled

feet left stepless, cold

gone in winter.

Desrosiers also offers up the tenderest of love poems, as in “I have found what you are like.” She compares her love to “the mud / which gathers up my feet and cleaves / like nothing else.” She sings the praises of mud, and thus her love, by writing that it is

a fodder for flowers

home of worms who eat what we discard

service of soil-studded creatures

joy for dogs and pigs and children

This close attention to a surprising subject reminds me quite a bit of cummings, but Desrosiers is definitely writing her own poems here, despite her tribute.

I recommend this breezy, clever, yet frequently sad collection for its range and beauty.

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: “Present Values” by José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes

Present Values by José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes

Present Values by José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes, Durham, North Carolina: Backbone Press, 2018

Reading José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes’ work reinforces on a gut level something that all reasoning people understand, and that is that exposure to diverse voices matters.

Reyes, who was born and raised in the Philippines, offers a clear-eyed cultural critique of the U.S., and elements from his first country pop up in images and linguistic artifacts; at one point he casts a skewed version of “The Lord’s Prayer” in Tagalog, to remarkable effect.

But this writer also offers diversity through his perspective. No bio I can find backs up this supposition, but I think he comes from a background in finance or economics. The title of the book, explained in the front, is a financial term; “present value,” the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, is “the current monetary value of a future payment or series of payments,” or, more specifically, “the present sum of money that will equal this when the income that the sum will generate and inflation are taken into account.”

I should probably be embarrassed to admit this, in a book review, of all places, but I can’t really make sense of that definition. I have a bit of a block when it comes to financial matters, and I feel flummoxed when I try to sort these matters out. What I take from the definition is that the financial term “present value” refers to the worth of something when we factor in its history (what it cost) and its future (how it will appreciate or depreciate).

That feels like a potent metaphor to me, but it’s also an unusual one. Most poets aren’t talking about money. (Despite my misgivings about the topic, I actually write about money all the time, as a way of coping with my discomfort or fear — but I have noticed that very few poets are willing to touch this fraught and complicated topic.)

And the poetic currencies found in this chapbook somewhat resemble the change jar I keep on my kitchen counter. Reyes offers so many different looks, including a ghazal, a sonnet, a villanelle — and this last offering imitates an important Filipino poet José Garcia Villa by including a comma after every word. My change jar is pretty picked over — completely empty of quarters, which are useful at the laundromat, but with the odd international coin settled at the bottom, designating pesos or drams or yuans.

The poem “Present Values,” coming near the end of its eponymous collection, shows the money-minded poet at his most complex and interesting:

From their towers

little gods wage wars,

deploying their red currencies.

“Mine.”

      “Yours.”

                              Couched in possession,

each retort enlarges a world,

constricts another’s.

Reyes unflinchingly examines capitalistic values in this collection, and he finds them wanting. We all knew this, but he lays the evidence bare like a prosecutor:

Arbitrageur, hand poised

to level his skewed

balance; Speculator,

eyes wholly invested in the future.

Finance comes down to a matter of perspective, it would seem — and wars have been started over less.

Of course, when reading about another culture, there are sometimes delightful tidbits, too, like in “Boondocks”:

To show our appreciation for your gift

of language, we’d like to offer you one word

of our own, bundók, which means “mountain.”

In the context of Reyes’ poetry, we are reminded that money, too, is a kind of currency, its value set by the powerful.

While much of Reyes’ work is simply fascinating for the quality of its information, I can’t believe I’ve gotten this far in without specifically praising the quality of his verse. I have a giant poetry crush on his vivid, precise, and frequently unusual vocabulary, and he has an intuitive sense of form, each line working beautifully as line, with the received forms perfectly chosen and occurring very naturally among its sisters in the collection.

But my favorite part of Reyes’ writing is his knock-your-socks-off imagery. In “Jardin des Plantes” is the very pinnacle of this feature, as Reyes describes two gulls fighting over a sparrow, which they ultimately pull apart, with the losing gull (I picture a short end of a wishbone kind of scenario) walking away and the winning bird feasting:

                  When he fishes out the intestine,

like a magician pulling from his pocket a braid of handkerchiefs,

those who have been watching cannot help

but cheer and applaud, even the schoolchildren.

“Like a magician.” Yeah, that works. And there is magic on every page of this excellent volume.

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: “the elephants are asking” by Karen Neuberg

the elephants are asking by Karen Neuberg

the elephants are asking by Karen Neuberg, Glenview, Illinois: Glass Lyre Press, 2018

Unrelenting. That’s a good word to describe Karen Neuberg’s chapbook the elephants are asking, a collection that sounds a clear alarm about the environmental catastrophe that some refer to as “looming,” but that is clearly happening all around us.

The title poem lays the responsibility for addressing the issue squarely at the feet of the reader. It states,

the elephants are asking—

and the bees and the bats, the prairie dogs, the lemurs, the dolphins—one in six species—asking!

And the coral reefs, the rivers & oceans, the islands & shorelines—asking!

The poem goes through a longer list before nothing that the baby, with wiggling toes and plump arms, is asking. “Even God is asking,” Neuberg writes. With urgent work to be done, these animals and babies are asking us what we plan to do about the situation, and maybe why it exists.

The poem I liked most in the collection is called “Information,” and it starts with an epigraph by Gertrude Stein: “Everyone gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.” It’s a powerful indictment, I can say after noting that I have been on phone or internet this entire day as I write this. It’s no wonder the environment has gone to hell; its caretakers are asleep at the wheel. Writes Neuberg,

I see another spectacle blocking my view,

another fad slipping into my bed.

The cave walls are filled with conflicting shadows

demanding attention in urgent & dazzling tones.

How small respect has become. …

The poem points out that a barrage of information is “burying us beneath ourselves,” and perhaps there is such a thing as “TMI.”

Look, it’s not an optimistic collection, and the keening, desperate feeling of those who care about the world is summed up in “Occupy Today.” “I have seen falling / continue to increase its pace,” the poem states, and continues,

Some days I want only

my mother. Some days I want to wrap

my arms around the world. I see

the future falling at accelerating speed.

But there is one beautiful poem that does offer a glimmer of hope, and in fact it reminds me of the folk song “If I Had a Hammer”; written in an era of tremendous turmoil and struggle, that anthem acknowledges the power of one person to make a difference. So does “If all I have is a teaspoon,” located near the end of this chapbook:

If all I have is a teaspoon

and if there’s a calamity; say, a raging fire,

then I’ll carry my teaspoon

filled with water and I’ll pour it on

the raging fire and I’ll go back and get

more water and that’s what I’ll do …

The poem describes a small act—an act so small that it feels inconsequential—but any act is better than none at all, and there remains a hope that thousands or millions or even billions of others will add their own teaspoons, and together we might find salvation.

Poem366: “Accommodations” by Sarah Carey

Accommodations by Sarah Carey

Accommodations by Sarah Carey, Tillamook, Oregon: Concrete Wolf, 2019

My mother’s celebration of life was today, so of course I wanted to turn my attention to something both gentle and deserving. I could not have chosen a better selection than Sarah Carey’s lovely chapbook, Accommodations.

Named to the Concrete Wolf Poetry Chapbook Award Series and published in 2019, Carey’s book deals with family and loss. It’s largely a sorrowful work, but sometimes sorrowful words provide the comfort and connection we need.

Almost every poem in the book calculates some sort of pain, usually the pain of losing someone. But some address other losses, as the marvelous list poem “What We Carry” demonstrates:

Some things we took for granted vanished

long ago: a store, a mall, a whole shopping plaza

an entire country we grew up in, moving

state to state, when welcome signs

marked the borders, and no one spoke

of red and blue intent …

This is a recognizable grief; it seems that at one point there was a country that looked like the one Carey describes.

Today, I was especially moved by “We Gather in Florida to Celebrate My Father’s Life” and its profoundly beautiful ending:

My father is salt and mineral, crushed bone.

We arrange to arrange to arrange.

Did you know, I told the gathered group,

flowers from each state he lived in flank the pulpit,

bloom today in all of them, in all of you:

dogwood, peony, forget-me-not.

Carey gets mourning exactly right here, and I’m struck by the translation of the father into salt and mineral. We’ll all get there eventually; my mom got there today, and I was glad for Sarah’s company as I dealt with that hard fact.

Carey presents one beautiful poem after another in this gorgeous, painful, but just-right collection, which I highly recommend.

Poem366: “A Bag of Hands” by Mather Schneider

 

A Bag of Hands by Mather Schneider

A Bag of Hands by Mather Schneider, Studio City, California: Rattle, 2018

It’s interesting to thumb through a chapbook that won a prize I myself was vying for. I open a book like that not with jealousy, but with hope. I really want a book that beat mine for a prize to be good. Being an also-ran to a bad book would feel pretty rotten.

The good news is that it’s pretty hard to deny the merit of A Bag of Hands by Mather Schneider, a 2018 Rattle Chapbook Prize selection. It’s terrific! And that’s a relief.

The Rattle Chapbook Prize is a particularly nice award. It’s big money — $5,000 at present — and the winning title gets distributed to Rattle’s 7,000 subscribers, according to its website. Additionally, the author receives 500 copies of the chapbook, and that’s pretty generous, too.

Schneider’s book fascinates from its unusual title to the first glimpse of the cover, which features original art by the author — a hand (Schneider’s?) seen resting on the frame of a car door through the side mirror. It’s a familiar enough scene, but strangely disorienting, with sky reflected against parking lot pavement and scruffy turf and an inset mirror offering a slightly different view.

That’s what the poems offer, too — an unusual perspective. Many of these are from the point of view of a cab driver who loves a woman from Mexico but transports people who look down their noses at immigrants. In “Consequences,” a woman’s boyfriend reports that 54 people have died in the last month crossing the border from Mexico into Arizona.

The other woman looks out the cab window

and says,

Well, I’m glad.

The man looks at her with something

that is almost horror,

almost human.

It’s a surprising link that the speaker of the poem has with this man, joined as they are by their disgust with the woman’s racism. “There are consequences,” she concludes, feeling fine about the death of so many.

“A Bag of Hands” is another poem that addresses the immigration issue. This poem is about 12 severed hands found in a bag in Jalisco, Mexico. “I’ve stolen things. Hasn’t everybody?” the speaker of the poem asks while considering the hands, removed, perhaps, for that infraction.

He considers the hands of his passengers, and of others:

Some of them are beautiful and smooth

as buckeyes. Some of them are so calloused they cut

you when you shake them. Some of them cup

the sunlight.

Imagine the hands

that held the thieves down, the hands that raised

the machete, the hands

that fell.

“Smooth // as buckeyes.” That’s quite beautiful to me, and such a different way of looking at hands. That kind of insight is found throughout this small collection, which deserves to be in the world, doing its careful and beautiful work.