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: "Assisted Living" by Erin Murphy

Assisted Living by Erin Murphy

Assisted Living by Erin Murphy, Phenix City, Alabama: Brick Road Poetry Press, 2018

In her seventh collection, Assisted Living, poet Erin Murphy offers 72 poems that are short — seven lines each, a form she invented called demi-sonnets — and very direct. I guess you have to be direct when your time in a poem is so brief. There is no lollygagging in seven lines, and in fact, Murphy’s brevity is a vehicle for razor-sharp insights.

To better understand Murphy’s project, and to make sure I wasn’t overlooking anything, I did a little bit of research on her form. Wikipedia verifies that demi-sonnets are a seven-line form (half a sonnet) that is often aphoristic — and that was certainly my experience — but they also “end with an internal full or slant rhyme.” I noticed some highly innovative rhyme in these poems, but I confess I didn’t see a pattern to it in most poems. That was the pleasure of them for me; I always enjoy rhyme best when it occurs in a surprising way. These micro-poems were surprising through and through — sonically, imagistically, rhetorically, and otherwise.

Speaking of rhetoric, to me the main hallmark of a sonnet is its rhetoric — how an Italian sonnet will offer an octet of problem that resolves in the sestet that follows, or how a Shakespearean sonnet will present its several little arguments before answering them in a tidy couplet. The patness of the rhetorical structure keeps me — and plenty of other contemporary readers, I suspect — at arm’s length. My problems aren’t tidy, and my solutions sometimes feel non-existent, which means that a sonnet’s shape doesn’t suit me at all well.

But do you know what? A demi-sonnet fits the bill beautifully. In these poems, the sonnet and its rhetoric are hacked off at the knees. As I mentioned at the outset, they are direct, but they sometimes don’t offer any resolution at all — and if they do, it’s of a fleeting sort.

I love very short poems, because it’s fun to include full poems in a review. This gives the reader a nice sampling (although I strongly suggested reading Assisted Living from its gorgeous front cover to its end. But here are a few of the poems I most enjoyed.

The first poem in the book was a powerful leap, like a first step onto the moon:

Reverse Alchemy

Forget bullion bricks

and gaudy chains around

the neck. I’m perfecting

the long tradition of turning

gold to lead. See: autumn

leaves. See: lust. See: everyone

you’ve ever loved who’s dead.

Like a conventional sonnet, it presents a problem and then offers some proofs. But the in-your-face quality is decidedly unsonnetlike — and as one who has recently lost someone special, I fully understood how sometimes everything turns to shit.

It’s a theme that was repeated later in the first section:

After the Worst Thing Happens

After the tears and bottomless grief

and hours spent staring at the night

ceiling with tight teeth, after the will

to move leaks from your body like ink

from a pen, there is a feeling of relief.

The worst thing that can happen

has happened and can’t happen again.

This final couplet is the perhaps the biggest nod to a conventional sonnet in the collection, with the slant rhyme in the final two line-ending words and the aphoristic feel of them. There is wisdom here.

Not all of the loss in these poems is personal. “Safety Drill” is a poem about Murphy’s daughter during an active shooter drill:

Safety Drill

In the event of an active shooter,

run in zig-zags behind the school,

my daughter is told. It's harder

to hit a moving target. Run across

the field to the woods. Don’t cower.

But: so many moving targets,

so many wind-blown flowers.

I feel that this poem, in its brevity and its natural imagery, leaves a haiku-like undertone behind. A lot is going on — rapidfire instructions, children transformed into flowers, and the pure lyric impulse of a mother-poet.

Finally, I appreciated the playfulness found in a collection that is often quite heavy, and I’d be remiss not to include an example. I’m also a sucker for a good love poem, and that’s what “Things Are Cuter in Twos” is:

Things Are Cuter in Twos

One Yorkie pup? Sweet enough.

Two? Adorbs! The singleton toddler

you’d never notice is awww-worthy

with his twin. My beau with double

vision can’t thread a needle or drive

at night. But he loves both of me.

What can I say? We’re a delight.

And Murphy is a delight, at times — and an insightful, innovative and skilled poet, always.

Poem366: Barnburner by Erin Hoover

Barnburner by Erin Hoover

Barnburner by Erin Hoover (Denver, Colorado: Elixir Press, 2018)

Erin Hoover’s premier collection, Barnburner, is a lot to take in — like a lunch buffet when you’re used to packing a salad from home. These poems, mostly longish, mostly narrative, are personal ones, and they cover a long span of the poet’s real life, from her infancy in the shadow of Three Mile Island, through adolescence and adulthood and ultimately parenthood.

The neat trick of the collection is that while it’s both narrative and personal (interviews with Hoover bear this out), the reader never gets a sense of really knowing the speaker. We know some stories, or some parts of some stories, but we can’t say we have a relationship with the storyteller.

What does come through is a strong consciousness of class, one that is aware and carefully considered. The first poem in the book, “The Lovely Voice of Samantha West,” is a prose piece that begins, “I once worked at a call center. We weren’t allowed to talk, only script-read, and I thought: Can’t they automate this?” It turns out they could, and Samantha West is the name of the automated voice that can’t quite replace live operators because her uncanny-valley verisimilitude is too off-putting to those who are targeted: “Not eager to be fooled, people recoiled,” writes Hoover.

Instantly in the book, we understand Hoover’s bona-fides. She has worked in a job where she had to clock out to pee, and where “Every three hours on the dot I stood outside in a designated area and burned the high-nicotine cigarettes I’d bought.” In the end, the speaker quits, and she can’t explain why. The reader understands, though, after being walked through the life of a call center operator.

Another class-conscious poem is “The Evacuation Shadow,” a term, Hoover tells us in the book’s notes, that refers to a phenomenon where “far more residents will voluntarily leave the area surrounding a nuclear power plant following an accident than government officials adviseor plan.” This poem shows the speaker as a child near Three Mile Island, “pinned to the evacuation / shadow my parents didn’t // have the means to leave.” The Appalachian setting of the poem is compared to the meltdown site of Chernobyl, Ukraine, where “backyards are seeded with dolls / and basketball decades // flat.”

The poem concludes,

      But everyone

   has to live somewhere, so like adults,

   we children pretended the cornstalks

   could be fine after that, the river

   clear to its depths, still good

   to swim. No choice but to count

   our own bodies as safe to roam

   inside, protected in our skin.

It tends to be the poor who suffer in disasters, human-made or otherwise; since leaving requires means, often the poor are left to make do.

Another poem that is threaded with issues of class and privilege is “If You Are Confused About Whether a Girl Can Consent,” which is based on testimony of Emily Doe in the case against Brock Turner, the privileged Stanford swim team member who raped an unconscious fellow student and got a six-month sentence from a sympathetic judge. The title and epigraph of the poem connect to give nearly a full quote from Turner’s accuser: “Future reference, if you are confused about whether a girl can consent, see if she can speak an entire sentence.” The power differential in rape is compounded by the privilege of the perpetrator.

These are more than personal poems; they are poems of broader witness, and reading them is a clarifying and empowering act. Hoover says it best in “Reading Sappho’s Fragments”:

      It’s convention now

   after the tragic event to say,       There are no words.

         But I believe there are always

   words. There are, after all, bodies

             and they deserve words,

                   anybody’s and mine.

Poem366: “How to Tell If You Are Human” by Jessy Randall

How to Tell If You Are Human by Jessy Randall  

 

How to Tell If You Are Human by Jessy Randall (Warrensburg, Missouri: Pleiades Press, 2018)

Jessy Randall’s collection of what her book cover calls “Diagram Poems,” How to Tell If You Are Human, is not my usual fare. The book features mostly early-twentieth-century diagrams from a variety of arcane sources, and Randall’s text is imposed into and onto these original sources. The result is that dusty, officious and somewhat inscrutable stand-alone images are imbued with warmth and humanity, and in the process, they offer deep and surprising penetration into humanness.

What really surprised me in this collection was its warmth. I felt this most intensely in a poem (or set of poems) accompanying a diagram of a baby nursery. The source image comes from The English Duden: A Pictorial Dictionary with English and German Indexes (London: George G. Harrap, 1960). A “duden” is a German pictorial spelling dictionary (the word was new to me), and the image presented is labeled “Baby Hygiene (Nursing) and Baby’s Equipment.”

In this set of diagrams, the nursery is unbelievably detailed. On the verso page, toddler stands in her crib (to which she is strapped). A uniformed nurse bathes an infant in a collapsible tub. A set of shelves and a table are awash in objects, all of which are labeled in the original duden — “the under-blankets,” “the safety strap,” “the rubber panties,” “the enema, a rubber syringe,” and so on. Recto, another uniformed nurse changes a baby’s “napkin,” again with an entire surface of accoutrements (“the teething ring,” “the rubber animal,” “the tin of ointment (tin of vaseline),” but here is another figure, “the mother (or a wet nurse) feeding (nursing, wet-nursing) the baby (the nursing mother).”

This mom or wet-nurse is unusually well equipped, and the 52 labeled items in the two diagrams range from the necessary to the ridiculous (“the elf picture,” one of Randall’s labels, not in the original). I remember how poorly equipped I felt when I brought each of my two children home from the hospital, and the source images recaptured this feeling for me (when, exactly, should I use an enema, and do I need a safety strap for my crib? [Reader: No, you don’t]). But interspersed with the original text are Randall’s additions: the poem, I suppose, although it all works together, with the original labels serving as a parenthetical heaping of too-muchness. Here is a snippet, with original duden labels in plain text and Randall’s additions in italics (these are numbered on the page, but I’m not sure how to capture that here, since the numbers don’t always line up with the text):

1-52 the nursery,

as if knowing the names for things

will make it all right

the rubber sheet (rubber square)

the medicine

the dreariness

the boredom

the under-blankets;

the nurse (children’s trained nurse, nanny):

more medicine

the terror

the safety strap (safety belt)

the pillow

the elf picture …

You start to see what I’m getting at—the poet, with her fears and sense of overwhelm, poking through the rigid correctness of the source.

It’s hard to tell where Randall’s poems begin and end. This set of nursery images from the dictionary functions clearly as one poem, without a title (except that offered in the dictionary for the set of pages), but the next pages are also from the duden (“The Children’s Playground,” the images are labeled). Are these the same poem, or related ones? They aren’t titled, and the table of contents lists only the source of the images. The two sets of pages feel different—the nursery poem is from the mother’s perspective, I think, while the playground poem feels like it’s from a child’s view.

Uncertainty is sometimes a hindrance to enjoying a book of poetry. It should be clear where a poem begins and ends, right? But in Randall’s hands, the use of uncertainty is a rhetorical tool, and an effective one. The impression I get is of someone who is desperate for answers and locked in an outdated library, grabbing book after book to see what truth reveals itself. In other words, the book enacts my exact feeling about the world most days. It’s inscrutable, and it comes without a clear answer manual, despite what religious fundamentalists will tell you.

I’ve offered a close view of just one poem to give an idea of this phenomenal collection, but it may be interesting to know some of Randall’s other source images: a dictionary of classical ballet, a book of indoor games and amusements, something called The Root Habits of Desert Plants (literal? pun? who knows), a Korean-language museum map, a planning guide for research libraries, and more.

When you find yourself suddenly plopped down in a strange country where you’re not sure you understand the locals, you have a few options: You can do your best to leave it, you can give in to confusion, or you can try to settle in and make sense of things. Randall’s poems are a strange country for me, but by the end of her collection, and certainly by a second trek through, I started to get my bearings. It was rewarding. I’d like to see more of it.

Poem 366: “the weight of dandelions” by Peter J. Gloviczki

the weight of dandelions by Peter J. Gloviczki

the weight of dandelions by Peter J. Gloviczki (County Clare, Ireland: Salmon Poetry, 2019).

   in the breeze …

   the weight

   of dandelions

The title poem of Peter J. Gloviczki’s third full-length collection, The Weight of Dandelions, begins its final section, and it’s impeccable, how the dandelion feels heavy but is practically weightless, borne by the wind.

That’s the collection, in a nutshell, the title entirely apt for what goes on in these fifty-nine contemporary haiku and senryu. These slight forms travel a lot of ground in their handful of syllables, and each conveys an image with sticking power.

When reviewing haiku-length poems, the treat is being able to quote examples in their entirety. Nothing else will really do. Here’s a senryu that deals, like the title poem, with heaviness. It’s untitled, as all of the poems are, and as is typical for haiku:

   job interview …

   the weight

   of Dad’s belt

It’s a poem that represents a father’s hopes and expectations in the powerful symbol of a borrowed belt. We know so much from this poem — that the son doesn’t yet have a professional wardrobe nor a suitable belt; that the son feels awkward in his dad’s clothes; that he goes to his interview as an ill-fitting version of his old man; that he feels the burden of needing to live up to his father’s example. That’s a lot of work for seven words to do, but there you go.

I also like some of the more straightforward, imagistic pieces, like this one from the first section:

   back home …

   digging the key

   out of the plant

There’s more here than what’s on the surface (like the idea of home as a place where we put in roots), but I’m captivated by the poem at face value — the image so vivid and familiar. (I wonder if Gloviczki really keeps his key in a potted plant? If so, after the publication of The Weight of Dandelions, he probably needs to buy a fake rock like the rest of us.)

Most, if not all, of the poems begin with a place-finding gesture. The poet establishes a setting in which to position an image or an action. Some examples of first lines: “five-thirty …,” “rummage sale …,” “at the nightclub …,” “December snowstorm ….” One would think think this would feel repetitive, but we don’t really mind the presence of a stage when we go to a play, and a reader of this collection doesn’t particularly notice or mind a small set of words to serve as a launching pad for the poem.

I’ll conclude by presenting my very favorite poem in the collection. Here it is:

   homecoming:

   I ask a stranger

   for directions

This is another pendulous raindrop of a poem, with a lot held inside its meniscus. I had a strong personal reaction to this one, since it spells out better than I’ve ever been able to how foreign I feel when I go back to my hometown. On the one hand, I have the magic glasses time provides — I can see through every street and building to its version from forty years ago, yet I’m not always quite sure how to get from here to there. I ask the stranger for directions, yes, but in reality, I am the stranger, and I can never be anything else in that place — not now, not anymore. I admire the absolute accuracy of this poem, which ends the book.

By the way, the poet himself was once kind enough to set me straight about contemporary American haiku. Serious practitioners tend to reject the 5-7-5 syllable count we all learned in grade school as they try to go deeper and be even more spare. A haiku doesn’t have to be three lines; some of the ones in this collection aren’t, and why should they be?

A haiku does tend to address nature and the passage of time or the seasons, but a poem with the same shape but a different aim, the senryu, deals with human nature. This collection has both, intermingled, and they work so beautifully together. While a low word-count means it doesn’t take a lot of time to read this collection, I suspect readers will want to linger, as I did.

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.

Basic ethics of the literary book review

It’s a conundrum. We literary writers frequently publish on small presses, and it can be hard to catch the attention of major review outlets, like Publisher’s Weekly or Kirkus Reviews. 

Poets have it worse than writers of other genres. Kirkus, for instance, doesn’t even review poetry except for pay—currently starting at $425. But that doesn’t mean it’s an easy feat for a prose literary title on a small or university press to get traction.

But aside from the major outlets, it’s hard to find anyone to review our titles, even in more small-press-friendly litmags. Often it seems that the same small-press titles get all of the attention, and I’m not sure that the quality of the writing is the reason. A standout title or a timely theme can be just as big as factors.

Make no mistake: We want reviews because we want readers. Our hard work demands that we find an audience for the books we publish; sometime it seems as though the stories, poems, and essays themselves stand up and demand to be heard.

But our desire to find reviewers can lead us to what the journalist in me regards as missteps—practices I’d caution us away from.

Several of my social media circles are inhabited by authors, and every now and then, someone will chime in with the idea that members trade reviews—a you-do-me-and-I’ll-do-you kind of arrangement.

This is a very efficient plan; two books get reviewed where none before did. I find that it’s not so hard to publish a review. Many magazines that are too low-budget to pay reviewers are hungry for this kind of free content, and as long as their length and style guidelines are followed, they’ll provide a hungry yes to a review submission.

The problem is that a reader trusts a reviewer to be honest and candid about a book’s merits. Even if some journals publish only recommendations instead of reviews, the reader believes that a recommendation is based on literary merit, and not tit for tat.

In my undergraduate journalism education, a course on reviewing was a required part of the curriculum. Mostly we all went to a classroom at night and watched classic movies—All About Eve and Citizen Kane, for instance—and then wrote cheesy reviews of them. (Two thumbs up for Casablanca!) But in between installments from the Golden Age of Hollywood, my classmates and I actually did get a thorough grounding in this sort of criticism. What was drilled into us from start to finish was our ethical responsibility to our readers.

In short, a review is an opinion—ideally a very informed and educated opinion. I have no palate to speak of, so it would be ridiculous for me to write a review of the cuisine in a high-end restaurant. I just like to eat, and a lot of things taste really good to me. I’m simple like that.

A restaurant reviewer should know quite a bit about kitchen chemistry and processes, and about culinary history and trends. A nice meal costs a little more than this consumer can easily afford, so when I do go out, I’d like to know what I’m getting into, and whether Restaurant A is a better choice than Restaurant B. Reviews can make a difference in how I spend my (meager) resources.

Ditto with movie reviews. A reviewer who understands storytelling, cinematography, acting, and culture can help me to make a good choice when I finally pay a babysitter and venture out to one of the two or three non-animated, non-superhero movies I’m likely to see in a given year.

Let’s presume that literary reviewers haven’t already lost their credibility with readers through back-scratch-trading with writers and favor-currying with publishers. Don’t we sort of look to book reviews in the same way? Something like half a million books are published each year in the U.S., and a new release can run in the $20 range. Where do we put our cash? Attention from reviewers can alert us to and pique our interest in new releases, and they can also help us choose from among all of the books vying for our attention. When these writers abuse our trust, there’s a sense that they’re playing fast and loose with our money.

Another ethical concern reviewers must be impartial. Just because a fellow writer is a friend doesn’t mean that the person has written a top-notch memoir. The opposite—the polar opposite—may be true. But we don’t trash our friends—that’s a different sort of baseline ethics, one from universe that is larger than the literary world.

But we shouldn’t review our friends. Even if we have the sort of near-superhuman power to be impartial, we must avoid the appearance of impartiality. Readers trust that we’re not beholden to the people whose work we’re reviewing, whether by money or love or common interest.

Along similar lines, a reviewer is ethically bound to be honest. We shouldn’t downplay flaws in a book, just as we shouldn’t be more effusive in our praise than the work merits. We should aim for accuracy in description and honesty in assessment. 

Additionally, a reviewer should be educated and informed, so that the assessment of the reviewer matters. When an impartial, honest, well-read reviewer offers effusive praise, it means something.

I should mention that some magazines shy away from negative reviews. After all, a book of poetry from a small press is pretty much destined to be ignored by the larger culture; there’s no sense in a journal kicking it when it’s down. I don’t actually object to this practice; why not recommend good books instead of blasting bad ones? The danger is that a reviewer might adapt an assessment to score the publication, rather than choosing to review books that merit a strong review.

As the author of one full-length poetry collection, with another on the way, I can attest that a positive review feels incomparably good. I appreciated the handful of reviews that appeared in literary publications, but I also loved seeing what my friends thought when they posted customer reviews in places like Amazon and Goodreads. 

I wish we had a vibrant reviewing culture—one in which authors don’t have to form secret reviewing circles for their books to get a little attention. Maybe instead of making pledges to one another, we should make a promise to literature that we’ll pay attention and spread the word.

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Poem366: VILLAIN SONGS by Tammy Robacker

The poem in Tammy Robacker’s collection Villain Songs (ELJ, 2017) that I come back to again and again is “The Cuckoo Clock.”

When I was a girl

I wanted to live

inside of one.

A wooden, small

place to hold me.

I was in love

with its bird

face. …

This is the wondrous beginning of the poem, and I’ve felt this—a sense that there was some magic in that chamber where the bird lived, or, in some versions, where the tiny woodcutter keeps his table, or the milkmaid has her bed.

But this poem goes darker, and its danger is the same throughout the entire collection. It’s an overwhelming sense of masculine oppression, built into the whorls and knots of the timepiece.

Clockmakers all carve

the same male game

in their overhang.

Reared buckhorns

and alpha beasts—

They rule the ornate

roost. …

Robacker ends the piece by referring to the pinecone weights of these clocks, “dangling / their gonadal hang.” And just like that, a child’s wonder is given over to oppression and fear.

Villain Songs calls out the dangers the world poses to its children—and particularly its girls—in poems of witness, poems of incest, a poem with a buried fetus, poems with nighttime dangers and unwelcome touch.

And they resonate. The poems in Villain Songs hit home for anyone who has encountered a cockthrust on a public bus or the weird attention of a creepy uncle—its intentions obvious in retrospect, but puzzling to a child.

Once I was at a gas station and a man exposed himself to me. The front of his pants were open, and he stood there as if the presence of his penis were an accident of which he was unaware. I called him out and he ran, and when I got to my car, where my mother waited, I worried that I had made an error. Maybe he didn’t know. My mother shook her head. “Men always know where their penis is,” she said, and I think it’s true.

In Villain Songs, my mother’s words stay with me. The men whose selfish and violating acts are recounted know what they are doing. There are no accidents here. And Robacker knows what she’s doing; she’s bearing witness. She says as much in the poem “Blocked Memories”:

             … I could never tell

the poor man it happened then.

I tucked the secret beneath my body.

Silence fell across me like down.

For forty years I have slept

on it. Blank as a sheet till now.

As Rick Barot states in his blurb for the collection, “Poetry’s work as retrieval and repair has never been more vigorously practiced than in Villain Songs.” He also cites superb craft, and poems “as artful as they are wounded.” It’s not an easy collection to process, but it houses important truths—and poets know there is beauty in that.

On blogging: Would it kill you people to 'like' and share?

You may as well know, since you’re feeding my habit right now, but I’m addicted to hits.

After I post to my blog each day, I obsessively refresh the page that tells me how many hits I have. I like it when one (mine) turns to two and ten and twenty, then one hundred, two hundred, more ….

I also analyze my stats. I try to figure out what themes and topics appeal to people, what time or day to post for the best results, and just who the heck is reading me in Jakarta.

My findings are highly unscientific, but what I think I’ve learned is that people like the inside-baseball stuff—tricks of the submitting trade, and a sense of how the editorial process works. Even readers who are themselves editors seem to enjoy a glimpse into other journals processes, other possibilities, or other governing philosophies.

I remember when I was starting out with submissions. I felt like there were secrets to the process. My bio seemed like an important element—and a deficient one. What I lacked in a publication record, I tried to make up for in trivia. Enjoys nature. Likes cats. And dammit, I do like nature and cats, which feels like it should matter, and cats in nature? An unbeatable combo. 

It seemed to me like I wouldn’t get published if I hadn’t been published, much like the conundrum of the never-employed feeling unemployable. And I think my readers either feel the same or have felt the same, and a post about that issue resonates. 

There is a lot of disagreement, actually. How helpful are previous publications? For me, decisions come down mostly to the work itself—but a record of publications can reinforce my judgment about bold or unusual work. I can’t be too far wrong if other editors have found work to their liking, right? (Of course, I’m quite middle-aged and very firmly in the who-cares-what-other-editors-do camp, but at one time, maybe, when I was younger, this sort of reinforcement mattered.)

And I’m digressing, and someone in Jakarta is beginning to reach for the remote.

I think a lot about the people who read my work. I’m interested in how my poems, stories, and essays are received, obviously, but that stuff doesn’t have a dashboard. The poems don’t come with comment sections, which I don’t mind—I don’t really want to know how to make $10,000 at home, or the ways in which my poems obliquely relate to the theme of MAKINGAMERICAGREATAGAIN.

On another side note, one thing that may surprise some readers is the poor response a book review receives. Most writers talk a lot about the literary community, and so I started publishing daily appreciations of poetry book titles. I devoted hours to each, and I tried to offer some insights into the work I was addressing—but the stats didn't follow. Writers like the idea of book reviews, but perhaps they are not terribly interested in reading them. I’m happy to add to the conversation, and I post the reviews on sites like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Goodreads to help give writers a boost, but the posts themselves don’t get a whole lot of traction. This is one of the lessons I’ve learned from blogging.

I have to admit, even aside from overlooked book reviews, there are days when I’m convinced I posted a real winner—some groundbreaking stuff—and I get very few hits. And then there are days like yesterday, when a post expresses something encouraging but small (specifically, the value of writers sharing our good news with one another), and the post just takes off.

I write these posts because I’m hoping for connection. And I think people read them because they are, too. Writing is hard, and we just want a little company on our journey—not so much company that it stalls our journey, mind you, but a knowing glance in our direction, similar to that two-fingered steering-wheel wave on a sparsely traveled road.

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.