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: “Goodbye Toothless House” by Kelly Fordon

Goodbye Toothless House by Kelly Fordon

Goodbye Toothless House by Kelly Fordon, Somerville, Massachusetts: Kattywompus Press, 2019

The first time I had a chance to show my husband my hometown, I found myself focusing on the underside: where my dogs were buried; where a boy was struck by lightning; where a woman fell from a tower while trying to catch a bird. These parts just seemed like part of the important story the place had to tell—the other part being me.

Kelly Fordon’s Goodbye Toothless House offers its own tour of suburbia, and it’s clear we have something in common. Peppered throughout the book are poems about neighbors, and their titles end with an address, like “Housecoat: 19 Ballard Avenue” (listed merely as “Housecoat” in the table of contents). In this prose poem, a neighbor is described:

You in your cat housecoat, your pumpkin housecoat, your Santa Claus housecoat satnding sentry on your stoop across the street. No matter how you fixed your gaze, people never paused in passing.

But one person did, the poem reveals: the postman, and even he didn’t know this neighbor had cancer, until she was gone. It’s a sad indictment of the concept of neighbor, and so are others in this series, like “Beatrice: 11 Ballard Avenue,” about a woman who ran naked down the street with a kitchen knife, but then found herself friendless after the “medication took.” Or like “Gina II: 22 Ballard Avenue,” about a seemingly too-perfect neighbor whose kids are too polite and whose house is too put-together. “Every day, my face started to ooze off the bone like meat that has simmered too long in a crockpot,” Fordon writes, contrasting the speaker’s view of her life with Gina II’s idealized one.

Maybe Fordon and I can’t really grab hold of a neighborhood that is doused in slick perfection. We need the knobby and rotten bits to get a toehold. Some of the troubled consciousness at work in these poems (and let’s admit it, at work in my life) seems linked to aging. As the poem “M.A.P. (Middle aged problems)” advises,

Distance runners

know better than

to look up halfway

through, why

did you?

It’s a good question, but for me, and seemingly for Fordon, that’s where the poems show up.

At any rate, it’s good to have a little company in middle age, and Fordon offers it with perfect clarity in “The Girls in the Camper,” about Barbie, post-Ken:

Barbie left Ken about a year ago.

Now she spends her days playing

canasta with the girls in the camper.

That’s right she got the camper.

Ken scored the townhouse with its elevator, it turns out. Ken is 52 in this poem, and his stripper girlfriend is only 25. Muses Barbie in the poem, “Why did she think they would make it / through decrepitude and beyond?” And this reader can identify with that uncomfortable question—and so can the poet, who follows up immediately by confessing, “I’m putting thoughts in her mind.”

Misery, or at least perplexity, loves company, even if it doesn’t want to mix with the neighbors.

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: "Scared Violent Like Horses" by John McCarthy

Scared Violent Like Horses by John McCarthy

Scared Violent Like Horses by John McCarthy, Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed, 2019

I’ve spent most of my life in the Midwest … arguably speaking. I’ve been on the fringes — the Appalachian part of Ohio and southern Missouri, both sort of liminal spaces within the region, but also northwestern Ohio, right there in America’s bread basket, if you’re willing to count Ohio as part of the Midwest. (It’s got to start somewhere, right?)

Anyway, when you look at something from the edges, you probably get a better idea of what it’s all about, so I think I have a pretty good bead on the Midwest — and John McCarthy definitely deserves some overalls, a pickup truck, and a piece of hay to chew on, because he’s the real deal.

Of course, the real Midwest can be a pretty cosmopolitan place. You can eat at 25 different Michelin-starred restaurants in the Windy City alone, if you’re so inclined, and thoroughly modern industry and culture throughout the region.

But in Scared Violent Like Horses, McCarthy writes about Springfield, Illinois, and the honest-to-goodness corn country surrounding it. He proves his bona-fides by knowing the names of grain — zoysia, sedgegrass, corn, sunflowers, panicgrass, switchgrass, wheat, they all show up in this book, just as they do in central Illinois. Maybe they show up in L.A. as well, but it’s unlikely that most who observe it outside of farmland could identify it.

I have a positive impression of the Midwest, but McCarthy takes a darker view of it. Maybe it’s because cruel people and difficult situations inhabit the pages. The result is edgy sometimes, sad others, but it always feels like looking through a dirty window into a place we don’t usually get a glimpse of.

Some of McCarthy’s lush description is notable in the poem “Confirmation”:

   [W]e used to dance in The Corner Tavern’s neon light

where the pickup exhaust wafted inside like harvest dust.

   Life in the Midwest is like one long goodbye because life is the same

everyday, and I didn’t realize you had left until there was nothing

   but hard work and long days ending with the wind’s silent dirge

that sounds like trying not to die but dies in smaller ways —

   screen doors that slam shut but don’t shut all the way

because the house has settled and the roof is warping from the sky

   boiling over with thunder and rain. …

As I write this, I’m actually sitting in the lower Midwest, and the sky is boiling over with … well, thundersleet. It’s winter, after all. Practically the same, though. I find the imagery here very accurate and evocative, and it’s this way on almost every page.

Here’s another glimpse of McCarthy’s specific imagery, from the title poem, “Scared Violent Like Horses”:

            Back then, everyone I ever called a friend held fire in their fists

when they talked to me. Their fists were dingy, grime-covered, and grease-slick

      as if they were made of horsehair, as if they were untamed and lonely,

   galloping and wind-swollen. We didn’t know how to talk about loss …

I know that in the Emersonian sense, all people kind of experience the same feelings, no matter where they are: “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius.” So intellectually, I know that there’s nothing unique about the particular feeling young Midwesterners know — how they ache to escape, “fire in their fists,” “as if they were made of horsehair” (itching for more?), “untamed and lonely, / galloping and wind-swollen.” This is a violent poem, about a boy kicked dead by a horse, but it also punched me in the gut, because I remember what it was like to be young in the middle of nowhere. McCarthy’s writing is honest and accurate, and it takes me right back to where I started it all.

Poem366: “The Tethered Ground” by Lanette Cadle

The Tethered Ground by Lanette Cadle

The Tethered Ground by Lanette Cadle, Topeka, Kansas: Woodley Press, 2019

I got to know the poet Lanette Cadle in Ohio, and we have continued our friendship in Missouri, but make no mistake: Cadle is a Kansan, through and through. She is also an observant one, and this shows in her premier collection The Tethered Ground.

Cadle’s love for her home state is apparent through the level of attention she pays to its animals, its neighborhoods, its people—even its winds. The title poem, which takes pole position in the book, offers a close look at the weather:

   The clouds press the ground today, rolling in

   and dropping buckets before they roll out

   fast as sin. It’s hard to be lighthearted, even though

   I know it’s just the barometer and will pass.

   My body hears the message it sends—run

   and hide. The storms are coming. …

This poem contains a sentence I love for its simplicity: “Soft clouds, // hard times,” before offering the observation that “if not for this tethered ground we would float away.” And it’s true—gravity, both kinds, keep us rooted, as so many of Cadle’s poems demonstrate.

The poet’s reliable eye for the weather continues in the stunning “On Living Too Far South for Snow.” People who live in the southern United States are aware that northern neighbors scoff at us—how a light spitting of snow can shut the entire region down. Only thing is, the snow isn’t the problem; it’s the ice that comes with it, the product of precipitation and freezing and thawing and freezing again. Cadle writes about this, and in doing so, she demonstrates the ruthlessness of Kansas weather. The poem begins, “It snows, but not that often. Serious snow / is a legend imported from other states.” It continues,

Too much ice

   is more likely, and with it, tree limbs, downed wires,

   and dead plantings that don’t come back. My granny

   used to snap off the top of saplings to see

   if they were alive or dead, a fifty-fifty shot

   after a Kansas winter.

The very next poem in the book belies some of its predecessor’s claims, and begins, “Forget what I said earlier. It snows here / all the time.” This one outlines how people get lost and freeze on the way to the mailbox or die in a neighbor’s yard. Kansas doesn’t accept slights easily.

There is more to this book than observations about Kansas, but it does seem to offer a Kansas point of view, even when talking about seemingly unrelated topics, like overcoming cancer or losing a friend. It’s the unflinching view, I think—the willingness to tell hard truths in a straightforward way—that feels like a Midwestern mode to me. It’s a voice we don’t hear nearly enough, and I recommend The Tethered Ground to hear those earnest cadences.

Poem 366: 'Bully Love' by Patricia Colleen Murphy

Bully Love by Patricia Colleen Murphy 

Bully Love by Patricia Colleen Murphy (Winston-Salem, N.C.: Press 53, 2019).

I’m from rural Ohio, and when you’re from a place like rural Ohio, you tend to spend a good portion of your time comparing the place you are know with the place that set your understanding of the world. I don’t know—maybe that’s true no matter where you’re from. But the Midwest tends to feel like Ground Zero material by its nature, whereas other places feel more charged and particular.

Patricia Colleen Murphy, author of Bully Love, her second full-length collection, is also from Ohio, and I was relieved, in that “I’m not the only one” kind of way, to see that her poems reflect this tendency. Murphy teaches creative writing at Arizona State University, and in many of her poems, she sets off on a trail or observes a landscape, and it’s pretty clear she’s seeing it all through the eyes of someone who came from a different kind of normal.

A good example of Murphy’s practice of weighing Arizona against Ohio—or one reality against another—is found in the first poem in the collection, “Monsoon Season, Tempe Arizona. The poem describes a dust storm, a “house crowned / with the wind’s dark tiara,” and continues,

   My father called from Ohio.

   He saw the brown

   shadow on TV—

   forty stories tall,

   opaque and rushing.

   So this is what it means

   to be close to the sky.

   What was here is now gone.

Beyond comparison of place to place, in the background of these poems is the speaker’s mother’s mental illness, which extends back into the speaker’s childhood. (These are very personal poems expressed in a singular voice, so it’s awkward, but still appropriate, to refer to “the speaker”—but it’s a speaker you get to know as an overarching consciousness for this group of sixty-seen poems that are presented in a single cohesive section. It does feel as though Murphy is writing very personal notes to the reader about her life and experiences.)

A volatile personality can keep a household on edge, and those who grow up in such a home keep careful track of what is necessary to keep an eruption at bay, much like a fire survivor who can’t enter a room without tabulating the distance to each exit. Maybe this is why so many of the poems in Bully Love take careful note of the things we pack along with us on our travels. On a couple of occasions, the speaker expresses disbelief at someone who has hiked deep into the wilderness with only a pocket full of nuts, or, as she writes in “Fossil Springs Cutaway,” “We’re surprised // by a group hiking down with no packs. / The sun is dropping as quickly as they are.” Elsewhere a forest ranger warns travelers about unstable conditions, or the speaker weighs what can or cannot fit in her pack, or she encounters other campers who are fully equipped, even with sidearms. Knowing what to carry is important.

Similarly, in “What Good Does a Drop Do,” Murphy writes about approaching fire, and recalls having left a watering can at her cabin …

   As if we have time to

   garden or to know how.

   It is easy to be pious when

   your life is not on fire.

   Here ours is a life of lanterns,

   wood stoves, chairs worn on the arms.

   And so what if the wind stopped the fire

   an acre away from our own rustic wood?

I could say much more about this collection, which I appreciate for its lush description and its insistence on the importance of everyday, daily life. In their blurbs, Alberto Ríos describes it as “quietly fierce,” and Bob Hicok refers to the poet leaving the Midwest to travel west, “mythically and actually.” For those who like place-based poetry, Bully Love is a worthy read.

Poem366: Bulletproof by Matthew Murrey

Bulletproof by Matthew Murrey

Something kind of magical is underway in my dining room. My husband, Michael Czyzniejewski, is putting the finishing touches on the first installment in the 2020 incarnation of Story366, the leap year blog where he reviews a different book of short stories every single day.

It was a big commitment when I witnessed it in 2016. Sometimes our family travel was interrupted by the need to stop at McDonald’s, with its reliable, password-free WiFi, and sit around eating ice cream while he finished a day’s installment. It was a whole-family commitment, and we are all proud of the fact that he never missed a day.

This year I thought I might try joining him with “Poem366”—not a blog of its own, but a feature within my existing blog. I don’t know if I’ll make it every day, and honestly, I don’t have quite as many recent poetry collections to choose from (feel free to send me an ARC for a recent poetry title—within 18 months—if you’d like to be considered, to karen.craigo@gmail.com). But as a sign of solidarity for Mike’s truly wonderful project, I’m going to give it a whirl.

One thing: I’m not aiming to do reviews. My plan is to offer appreciations—acknowledgements of what poets are doing well. I’d be dishonest if I didn’t own up to my sideways goal of finding some inspiration for my own work in the concerns and formal choices and imagery offered by other writers, so I’m looking for aspects of their work to love, rather than focusing on problems.

With all of that being said, here I go, but from the family room. You can hear a lot of tap-tap-tapping in my house right now, and since the younger kid is now able to amuse himself for an hour with a videogame, there’s a good bit of pew-pew-pewing as well.

Bulletproof by Matthew Murrey (Durham, NC: Jacar Press, 2019)

A collection in two parts, Bulletproof by Matthew Murrey begins with bullets and ends, I believe, in proof—of our humanity, our frailty and our better natures. It is unusually well constructed for a first collection, and the poems demonstrate surprising range while also adhering to the theme.

When I say the collection begins with bullets, I’m being literal. The first poem is titled “.38 Special,” and it begins with a steady aim of a gun that nevertheless misses the mark, until it doesn’t. The handgun gives the speaker of the poem power to kill someone, maybe himself:

    I’m holding death’s hand

    as killers and suicides have done

    and—I hate to tell you—

    its weight feels good

    like a sack of coins, a bag of blood,

    a book of history, a pound of meat.

I didn’t want to like a collection about guns and shooting, but the sensual ending has me weighing an invisible bag of blood in my hand, and I’m drawn in, warily. The first section does not let up on the gun stuff at all—thirty-two poems in total, and almost all of them about a topic that is deeply felt by most of us in the U.S. But Murrey offers an open-eyed look at weaponry and the destruction it wreaks, and I found that I appreciated the direct approach to a hard topic.

Some of the poems are not about the act of shooting, but rather are about the results of it. We see the speaker’s father strapping on a bulletproof vest to go to work as a bartender, and we begin to understand why the topic matters. And we also see an elegy to the victims of the Oct. 1, 2017, mass shooting in Las Vegas, titled “Who Now Will.” The unpunctuated prose poem enacts the chaos and confusion of the attack, while remembering those who were lost. The title, “Who Will Know,” edges into the body of the poem, which lists,

paint flowers on the storefront check the straps on the car seat tune the guitar by the couch blow out all the candles drink Bloody Marys on Sunday make four lunches and bag them button his uniform and check the cells fill in for the teacher who is home sick tell jokes to the kids leave the night light on call the attendance office …

And this automatic, rapid-fire rattatattat continues for two pages before concluding with the question of who will …

hold on to a shockingly brave stranger’s hand until there’s no more strength in him to hold it and he has to let it go forever?

I was very moved by the thoroughness of the list, and the places where the lives felt especially familiar, like my own and those of my loved ones. Turns out this wasn’t a book that glorified violence, despite its uncomfortable start.

The second of the two sections is not quite as clear in its purpose, but I intuit from the contents and from the treatment of the book’s title on its cover that this is the “Proof” half. The poems here have more to do with nature and the spirit, with keen insights that I didn’t expect at the outset. I am drawn particularly to the metaphysics of “Skies,” a poem that posits “Beneath sky lies harder sky,” adding,

    And sometimes I’ve glimpsed it—

    in a coyote sprinting in, then out of

    the headlights; or in a deer midair

    leaping a fence before disappearing into

    the trees—the third sky, the one wanting

    answers […]

This shadow place was also visible in my favorite poem in the collection, “Coyotes,” which features a small plan that must wait to land because the runway is overrun with coyotes.

    With my face against the little window

    as we banked and turned, I watched

    half a dozen lean ghosts disappear

    into the tall grass below.

There seems to be a sort of scrim between worlds in Murrey’s construction of things, and that’s how I see it, too. Those guns and bullets of the first half sometimes force us prematurely from one, the world of things, into the other, that of shadows.

Bulletproof was a good starting point—earthy (it has poems about box turtles and slugs) and dirty, but ultimately ephemeral and transcendent. I recommend it.

Read each day's installment of Mike Czyzniejewski's Story366 at https://story366blog.wordpress.com/. Today's installment is on Zadie Smith's 2019 collection, Grand Union.

Publishing: It's more than just printing

Every now and then, it’s necessary to push the reset button. 

My first full-length collection came out last year, and it didn’t happen by accident. I envisioned it and I planned for it; I sent it to a press I believed in, Sundress Publications, and I’ve been so happy with my relationship with them, and with the exposure my little book has received. I would change nothing about the Sundress experience, and I highly recommend the press to any writer.

This year was to have been the year that my second collection would be released by a second press, but that’s a different kind of story. I would have had my second book in my hands right about now, had I stuck with that contract—but instead I pulled it, and I remain a poet with one full-length collection.

There are a lot of reasons to pull a book, but for me, it came down to my own readiness to do it justice, and to my new press’s ability to meet my demands. 

My second book was going to be released as one of twenty-six titles coming out from my press in a year. That press was basically a one-person show, past the manuscript selection stage, and while the publisher was unbelievably capable when it came to producing attractive books, the policy of the press was not to edit its chosen manuscripts; rather, that was something writers could pursue on their own.

I found that I wanted something more than a beautiful book; I wanted my poems to sing. With my first book, I enjoyed an extended conversation with two different editors, and the result was a manuscript that was greatly changed over the course of several months of feedback. I still love the results. 

Notably, the things I felt unsure about after some long consideration were very clearly specified in the contract I signed with the second press. This is another key expectation—transparency and openness about the process—and the press absolutely met that requirement. But writers have the responsibility to read contracts carefully (I wish I had done so), and they should remember that the initial contract they receive is just the opening of a negotiation about their book. 

Just because poetry book sales are small, that doesn’t mean that the writer needs to accept every aspect of a contract. That’s not how contacts work. The difficulty of having a manuscript accepted can overwhelm us, I know—by the time a contract arrives, we may feel ready to go along with anything to bring the book into the world. But we should probably slow things down and think them over at this point. It’s a good idea to take at least a week to think things through, and also to run the contract by trusted advisers.

I have a few thoughts about choosing a publisher—and I’m speaking generally here, rather that specifically about my would-be press, which I continue to love and support. That publisher does the near-holy work of putting poetry and fiction out into the world and of amplifying underrepresented voices. I am in awe of the tremendous effort that press puts out, and, in fact, of the work that all presses do. I feel we owe them a great debt.

But writers are also owed a debt, and a commitment to publish a book should include a promise to do much more than just that.

Writers who go the small-press route—and that’s most poets and writers of short fiction—should be careful that their publisher is going to do more than put a collection in print. The fact is, printing isn’t publishing. Printing is just reproducing. These days digital printing is literally the same as photocopying.

What should a publisher do with an accepted book? Here are my expectations.

• Manuscript selection should be efficient and careful, and a response is absolutely called for every time, even if the manuscript is rejected.

• Acceptance rates should be a tiny fraction of the number of submissions. A whole bunch of good books come out every year; thus, the bar for adding a title to the marketplace should be a high one. I’d rather see a press choose a handful of excellent manuscripts than a bunch of good ones.

• The real work begins after acceptance. Presses should commit to an intensive editing process that is more than just copyediting. Careful editorial work is the value that a press adds to a collection.

• Months before production, promotion must begin, with collection of blurbs and with advance review copies distributed to major reviewing outlets. Promotion must include a plan for attaining media coverage. At the same time, a press needs to make sure that the people who hear about a release can purchase it—online or in the author’s local bookstore.

• Books should be produced on an announced schedule, and production targets should be faithfully met.

• A release event is needed. For a small press, the work of putting together a release party or signing may well fall to the author, but the author should get plenty of support from the publisher.

• Author copies should be very affordable, and authors should not be discouraged from keeping books on hand or from selling them personally.

• The author should work with the press to set up readings wherever possible. The job of the press, then, is to make sure that books are provided for signings.

• After a book’s release, authors should be provided with sales numbers and, if the publishing agreement provides for them, with on-time payment of royalties.

• The book should be kept in print for the life of the press. If the press decides to fold, writers should be notified in advance so that they can obtain as many copies as they wish while they are still available.

Almost every expectation I outline here is easy-peasy for a large publishing house, and a few, like keeping a title in print, are even easier for a small press. Not one of these expectations is unreasonable, and I believe each is reasonable and should be honored.

Small presses have no business putting out books if they aren’t prepared to promote them and keep them available to the reading public. That’s my goal for my own second collection, and it’s also my hope for all poets and writers.

Publishing a book is about connecting with readers, and that is no small part of the creative process. Work really isn’t finished if it isn’t received, and so a writer’s goal should be to reach as many readers as possible. Here’s hoping my second book finds its own welcoming place in readers’ hands and on their shelves.

.

Do you review?

What if you threw a party and no one came?

Or what if you published a book and no one read it?

Some of us try for years before finding a publisher for our book, and when we finally succeed, we may think the hard work is over. But the truth is that if we publish with a small or university press, a whole lot of work is just beginning, as we try to make the larger world notice a book’s existence.

Some presses do a better job with promotion than others do. There was a time I contemplated starting a press myself, but I made a decision: Unless I could guarantee strong distribution and promotion, I had no business taking on the sacred trust of publishing a writer’s work.

Truth is, anyone can print up a book. It’s publishing that’s the real trick—a word that means “making public.” The most beautifully produced book is of little worth if it fails to end up in the hands of readers, and every ethical publisher must understand that a book isn’t published until the public knows about it.

One way we try to find readers is to have a book reviewed. Better publishers send out ARCs, advance review copies, either in print or electronically, to people who might be willing to weigh in on a new collection. It’s hard to get the attention of reviewers, and there are a lot of ways to try. 

Here are some ways publishers attempt to get attention for their writers:

• Craft a news release and media packet to send to electronic and print media outlets associated with the writer’s hometown, current city, alma mater, etc.
• Send copies to people who are known to review books regularly.
• Send copies to litmags that review books.
• Contact national media outlets that feature writers and writing.
• Send copies with suggested pages marked to places that feature daily poems—e.g., The Writer’s Almanac, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, etc.

But then again, publishers may choose not to do any of these things—and then writers are left to their own devices to drum up interest.

I recently had a discussion with some writer friends about how to get reviews for books. A suggestion that came up—and it is one I hear rather commonly—was to exchange reviews in a you-do-me-I’ll-do-you kind of way. 

As a former journalist, with a degree in the subject, I just can’t sign off on this plan, which sounds perfectly practical and solves a problem, because from a journalistic perspective, it is inherently flawed.

Reviewers don’t answer to the people they’re reviewing. Instead, as journalists of sorts, they are fully responsive to their readers. The expectation in doing a review is that the reviewer is unbiased and truthful—and a tit-for-tat interview is simply not trustworthy.

The poetry world is different than, say, the restaurant world. When a reviewer enters the hot new bistro to write an assessment of it, that reviewer is almost never a restaurateur, and the readers of the reviewer’s outlet likewise don’t own restaurants. The reviewer is supposed to have some expertise or understanding in the field, from restaurants to movies to books, being reviewed. But impartiality is presumed, in any field that is subject to review besides small-press literature.

When we read the “Tables for Two” feature in The New Yorker, we trust that the person who finds the ceviche to be zingy isn’t besties with the chef, or that the person who loves the latest Star Wars incarnation isn’t Felicity Jones’ dad.

When we read a review of a poetry collection, we understand that about half the time, the reviewer is pals with the author and is awaiting a review in return.

I’m not sure what the key is to finding audiences for new literary titles. What I do know is that one has to either work hard or be incredibly lucky. It’s not even enough to be talented. Excellent books are ignored all the time. We’re ignoring countless excellent books right this minute.

A lot of creative work vies constantly for our attention. If we love the arts, maybe the kindest thing we can do is share what we love. With literary arts, it may be as simple as a Goodreads review, a social media recommendation, or, the kindest gesture of all, prolonged attention—positive or otherwise—in a careful, detailed review.