Today's Book of Poetry

Today's book of poetry:
The Significance of Moths. Shirley Camia. Turnstone Press. Winnipeg, Manitoba. 2015.

These are quiet, gentle poems, a book of short precise poems, little truths.

These minimalist missives open up on the story of at least part of the Filipino diaspora to Canada, these are stories that have been mostly unheard.

There is an unseen/unnoticed army of Filipino Canadians/new arrivals, who toil as helpers in private homes, look after our children, work for minimum wage at fast food joints, The Significance of Moths gives voice to their stories, their lives.

Part-time Job

you came home that first day
with your uniform pressed

smiling

at the possibilities
it promised

the colour of birch
the scent of lemons

but here now
humbled knowing

cleaning toilets
your road
to distant riches

...

For someone like me, whose white, Anglo-Saxon family probably immigrated on a potato-ship and who grew up within the safety and norms of a dominant culture there really is no way to understand the experience of present day immigrants. The Significance of Moths is a previously unopened door.

Shirley Camia opens up some of those doors of experience. It's never a bad thing to learn more about other people's lives and Camia gives us a good look at a world most of us do not notice.

The Departure

the day was full of years
packed in a broken suitcase

as mama's lip quivered

a violin string
playing a sadness
that rang until hollow

a cry for her old life
and the lives she let go

...

Always powerfully understated and delicately fierce, these poems had Today's book of poetry convinced that they are both a lament and a proud celebration. These poems are front line reports about what people will do for the love of family, for hope.

Most of us have never faced the prospect of waking to the knowledge that we must move to the other side of the world for the good of our family. What would our poems sounds like?

Today's book of poetry is doing Shirley Camia and The Significance of Moths a disservice if we don't talk about the overall feel of this collection. For such short poems, terse but never rude, crisp and fecund, they carry enormous weight. This book weighed a ton.

An Ending

the dance of the moth is over
its antennae drumming with broken fury
until the body gasps
and lies still

silence arrives
to the wings
in unflight

a power
already forgotten

...

Shirley Camia when describing this book said it a tribute to "all those struggling to carve out identities in a new place, but enveloped by the old. Feet on one land, mind on another."

Today's book of poetry asked at the morning read, Milo said that they were "sad little tunes Dude." Our new intern Kathryn is now trying to smile Milo out of it. He takes all of this stuff to heart.

This is brave, bright poetry distilled and pure.

Shirley Camia

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Shirley Camia is a broadcaster and journalist, born in Winnipeg to first-generation Filipino immigrants. She has traveled throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia, sleeping alongside the rice fields of rural Japan and falling in love with Canada's far north. She lives and writes in Toronto.

BLURBS

"Her sense of the Filipino-Canadian "home" is as spiritual as it is temporal or geographic. Home is, as the moth reminds us, where our beloved and their spirit endures."

--Ang Peryodiko

"The Significance of Moths" is one of those collections of free verse that will linger in the mind and memory long after the slender volume has been finished and set back upon the shelf."
--Midwest Book Review

Shirley Camia

Wake

The Significance of Moths

video: Turnstone Press

turnstonepress.com

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DISCLAIMERS

Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher. They are shown here for publicity and review purposes. For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.

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Today's book of poetry:
Dancing on a Pin. Katerina Vaughan Fretwell. Inanna Publications. Toronto, Ontario. 2015.

Susan McCaslin called Dancing on a Pin "a powerful threnody." I sent out the Today's book of poetry research team on a fact finding mission and they came back with this definition: "a mourning song or hymn, performed as a memorial to a dead person."

Well, Dancing on a Pin is certainly that. Katerina Vaughan Fretwell's sad litany is a report from the front lines of a cancer story.

Fretwell is unremorsefully candid in this prolonged banshee wail. If there is beauty she finds it - but these poems are not for the weak of heart.

Cancer en camera

Lung cancer was still the biggest killer among cancers...

No 'Dear' for you -- tap-rooting inside Jack. Dr. Crusher
opens our teleconference, Stage IV, no chemo, your heart can't take it.
Nor mine, the news a steaming cow plop. Lung tumours are kernel
size. Cornfield disguise, clever. CA, Jack loves corny jokes.
Pinhead-size ones hide in the liver?

As we hoe that row, he adds, Come in two months after
another CI scan. Screen blacks out nurse smiles, Didn't suggest making
a will.

So Cancer, how many devils line-dance on a pinhead? It's
you I hate, not Dr C beholden to his Oath. But you lousy garden of
loose strife. I'm Jack's wife. He envisions you yanked out. No matter
what, we allot you not one God-particle of our fertilized love.

...

Fretwell is an open book as she details the climbing of a very difficult mountain.

The cover of Dancing on a Pin is a detail from one of the many paintings Fretwell painted during her perilous trek. These paintings appear throughout this collection of poetry and many of them are sadly beautiful detailed explorations of cancer cells. Fretwell is nothing if not full frontal and full speed ahead. These paintings become very poignant markers of the confrontation Fretwell and her dying husband endure.

Free Ride

But of all diseases, cancer had refused to fall into step in this march of
progress.

You're Kokopele in a gangster's fedora, the rabbit that stomped the
magician's top hat, the sly undercurrent in a cat-tail swamp.

May you slow down, smell the rosebush and forgo shape-shifting.
Eschew the temptation to be a giant Cineplex.

Content yourself as a cornfield kernel. Please yourself as pinhead for
jitterbugging angels and vermillion-devils.

Bromeliad to Jack's Wise Oak, bacterium to his intestinal fortitude --
attest to the truth, you symbiotic parasite.

Guests don't abuse their hosts. It's rude to clog up the plumbing or
the fan, short the circuits dim the halogen.

If you bulge like a tuberous begonia, beware Raid, Weed Killer, and
above all, my Meditation Book and Prayer Wheel.

...

Fretwell inserts as much humour as she can find into this battle. And it is a sad story with just the one ending regardless of how brave Fretwell remains.

We care because these poems work. We are, in our small way, beside Fretwell and her stoic husband as they suffer, as they endure, and as the fates make their final play.

Fretwell remains clear eyed and crystal clear in her frank confrontations. To make art out of this much sorrow is a gift to both her beloved husband and to us grateful readers.

Jack, My Heart

The question ... will not be if we will encounter this immortal
illness (cancer) ... but when.

That sunless afternoon, face roseate, signs vital, surgery set.
I kiss your blue lips, our devotion voiced, you're trucked to OR.

Your Isolation Room bereft, I race for java. Two best friends
bolster me in Family Wait Room. We crawl up the clock. 7pm,
Dr Decker

diagrams upcoming re-section past your gut's inoperable
golf-ball. More waits, more updates. Code Blue Code Blue Code Blue
detonates

our pin-drop silence. My heart-on-ice. More waits, more
updates, sprinting docs & nurses. Eons later, we pilgrimage

to ICU. No heartbeat for twenty minutes, on life support and
clunky respirator, coma. Major brain-damage?

Jenny prods, Touch him! I cup your cold shoulder, promise,
We will share eternity. It's okay for you to die.

To nurse, friends, your eyes stay shut. To me, they open.
Your Spirit's final code for me alone. Us, winners, cancer loser.

January 29, 2013

...

I've read that poem six or seven times now, makes me weep, every time, I'm crying right now.

Today's book of poetry loves it when a book of poetry knocks us on our arse. We love a book that kicks you awake, makes us feel something real.

Katerina Vaughan Fretwell

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Award-winning poet and professional artist, Katerina Vaughan Fretwell’s poetry and art reside across Canada and in Denmark, Japan, and across the United States. Recent poetry collections include Class Acts, Angelic Scintillations and Samsara: Canadian in Asia and Shaking Hands with the Night. Her poetic sequence “Quartzite Dialogues” was set to music by Michael Horwood and performed at the Festival of the Sound in 1999 and 2004 and at the Takefu Music Center in Japan in 1999. She is a member of the feminist caucus of the League of Canadian Poets. She lives just south of Parry Sound, Ontario.

BLURBS

Dancing on a Pin is a powerful threnody for the loss of her husband to the ravages of cancer. It is also a cultural, ecological, and spiritual inquiry into the history of the disease. This poignant process work, complemented by Fretwell's masterful sketches and paintings, spare us neither a direct gaze into cancer's ravaging maw, or an easy dismissal of hope. We become fellow travellers as we dance with Katerina and Jack on the head of a pin, the pin both of the first tiny cancerous tumours and the pinhead of pain and loss. The poet's render ironies guide us into the abyss and back.

- Susan McCaslin, author of Into the Mystic: My Years with Olga

Katerina has translated the broken DNA codes of her husband's cancer, and the broken chains of love it tried to make of their lives, into life. This is mastery: rhyme, metre, space, timing, air, sound and silence, are laid out in DNA strings and sprays of all shapes and all the spirit and physicality of a poet at the peak of her craft. There is the intensity of Emily Dickinson here, the physicality of Ted Hughes, the radiance of Kathleen Raine, the transcendent mourning of Phyllis Nakonechny, and now, I must add to this list: the full presence of Katerina Fretwell.

- Harold Rhenisch, author of The Spoken Word

inanna.ca
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DISCLAIMERS

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything. We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

Today's book of poetry:
Kingdom. Elizabeth Ross. Palimpsest Press. Windsor, Ontario. 2015.

The best thing about my position as Over Lord here at Today's book of poetry is that I get to read a lot of poetry. It's a strange world indeed, for me to read all these poems is a privilege. For my splendid in every way next door neighbour it would be a torture worse than being staked to the ground over a nest of fire-ants.

So with all this poetry to read I was still startled when reading Elizabeth Ross's Kingdom and encountering a poem I already knew. This is Ross's first book.

It took me a minute until I placed it. When it came to me it was an aha moment. Of course Sue Goyette and Molly Peacock had included a Ross poem in their excellent anthology The Best Canadian Poetry 2013 In English.

You can see Today's book of poetry's look at the Goyette/Peacock anthology here:
http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.ca/2014/08/the-best-canadian-poetry-2013-in.html

I'm taking an accidentally long route to the heart of the matter, it's not on purpose, but Elizabeth Ross's Kingdom has me swaying on the branches of a memory tree. Somewhat wobbled like when you hear that one Van Morrison song that makes you weak in the knees.

Prayer

Raise me to cook a healthy diet.
To write thank you letters. To set
and unset the table. Carry things.
Fetch things. Make my bed.
Raise me to behave myself.
No boyfriends with long hair
and ripped jeans who say "chill."
Rap is a definite no:
no bling, no belly buttons.
Raise me to teach myself
a lesson -- perhaps the new French
phrase I learned in school -- tais-toi.
Teach me to keep secrets. To stay
out of other's private business:
rooms, closets, drawers.
To understand not everyone
will like me. That pain
is unavoidable. Teach me
how to tell a lie.

...

These poems are instantly recognizable as true. Poetry true. Real life true. Ross has a way of knowing more and saying it in less that is heartbreakingly sweet. Not sugar sweet -- but Patsy Cline sweet. Honesty always goes a long way and Ross has that covered. These poems absolutely beat the crap out of coy.

At this morning's read there were some interesting responses. Milo liked these poems enough that he read a second one out loud. Our new intern Kathryn read three. Now the two of them are sitting in the corner handing it back and forth.

Dear Diary
June 10, 1995

Linoleum, his mom's kitchen,
she was grocery shopping.

He didn't know what to do
so I lay down and showed him.

Afterward, his knees turned pink.

When his mom came home,
she made us macaroni.

...

Elizabeth Ross's poems burn right through any hip dark cynicism to get at the real DNA of her own heart. No melancholy here, but vivid reporting from the perilous journey. Ross has been held to the flame and these well-tempered poems are first rate steel.

Kingdom is one of those books that Today's book of poetry connected with immediately, on a visceral level. One minute I'm an old man in my book-lined room and the next minute I am a teenage woman with serious decisions to make. Imagine my surprise. Ross transports.

Gin

Juniper branches
in my mouth, a constellation
of twigs, berries, planets

revolving on their helix,
a thrilling science
lesson. But this is

far from kids' stuff,
no bicycle powering a light bulb.
It's DNA

twisting in me.
My father's mother: lipstick, stockings, ice
cracking in our lonely room. Glass

muddled with fingerprints
and mouth marks,
everyone I love

asleep in their beds. Self-
reproach is slippery; a woman
I've never known is easiest to grasp.

I sip some more.

I separate a little.

I hold onto what I can.

...

Kingdom feels a bit like the house where I used to live it is so familiar. How could that be? Good poems don't care who you are they are only concerned with who you are willing to be. Elizabeth Ross has written a book that I like so much I'm just not certain how to tell you.

Ross will have more for us, of that I'm certain. And Today's book of poetry can't wait.

Elizabeth Ross

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Liz is the author of Kingdom (Palimpsest 2015). Her work has been published in a number of literary magazines and selected for inclusion in Best Canadian Poetry 2013, as well as longlisted for the CBC poetry prize. She’s from Vancouver Island and Vancouver, where she was poetry editor of PRISM international; she now lives in Toronto, where she’s currently at work on a series of personal essays and a book of poetry.

BLURBS

“In the lush, vivid poems of Elizabeth Ross’s Kingdom, an agile, engaged and astute mind offers the names for much of the kingdom of the heart. Ross carries us through the dangers and ecstasies of girlhood, with its boundaries and breaches, and into the openings and enclosures of the adult world with its “sound of something bigger.” Kingdom is the startlingly accomplished, brilliant debut collection of an important new voice in Canadian poetry.”

- Rhea Tregebov

“…Elizabeth Ross’s poems seem, to me, to inhabit a transition zone. They are often situated in ordinary domestic moments, but it’s as if there’s a little swinging door inside them and the reader finds herself stepping first to one side, then another as the poet switches views. Liz, herself, is rooted in this stance—a trustworthy observer of the goings on, a witness to the troublesome aspects of the ultimately impenetrable nature of the symbolical, and the potential razor-thin splinter of ice within the commonplace…” -Marilyn Bowering

palimpsestpress.ca

405

DISCLAIMERS

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything. We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

Today's book of poetry:
Backup Singers. Sommer Browning. Birds, LLC. Austin, Minneapolis, New York, Raleigh, USA. 2014.

Sommer Browning has a world class sense of humour. The poems in Backup Singers read like the liner notes off of a waitress's cheque book from a Tom Waits' song. These little ditties are the shadows of the bullets, the echo of some footsteps, the raw retort to a loud nonsensical world. Browning puts together a slick patois for the language she is teaching us.

Sommer, I'm dying

Sommer, I'm dying. I get this message on my phone in line
at Rite Aid. Sommer, I'm dying, you scream in my ear at
the rock show. Sommer, I'm dying, you write in closing on
a postcard from San Francisco. Sommer, I'm dying, it's my
heart. Sommer, I'm dying, can you feel this? Is it normal?
as we stomp through the snow to get cigarettes. Jesus woke up
but who muscled the boulder away? Some prince kissed the
beauty but who wrote it all down? Let's go to the mummy
exhibition. Let's read aloud Fear and Trembling. Let's slow the
flow through one carotid. Sommer, I'm dying. Present tense.
Subject. Verb. The thinning blood vessel, the soft pulsating
stone, retina shriveled and rattling around in the skull. I can
hear it when I jump. Then don't jump, I say.

...

Backup Singers has a rhythm all its own. Some of these poems sound like statements for the defense and others like screams from the prosecution. But they all have the same intelligent urgency about them.

Browning makes juxtapositions by breaking the ankles of the opposition. There is a pinball energy in these poems and it bounces frantic to connect all of her dots.

When I see a tree bend I feel the thick chill of a church pew

When I see a tree bend I feel the thick chill of a church pew
cooling my ass. When I hear the clang of a flag pole I see a
head, bodiless, chewing words on a screen. When I read the news
I see my baby smile at what's behind me. When I slice an onion
and when I tongue a blackberry seed I slide into a wet bathing
suit, when I run up the cellar steps I sing Bible songs, I cheat at
cards, the city coos to its drunks at night, and the city's shores by
morning flap strips of plastic spank the beach who's your daddy
is all anyone thinks and destruction, older than regret. The pastor
in the parish hall, hidden even as he shakes every hand, and the
fingers, open it up and here's the people.

...

At times Browning is almost sweet/surreal and we love that. Today's book of poetry also found a couple of list poems in Backup Singers and you just know how much we love those.

When you were with Emily I was with Matt

When you were with Emily I was with Matt,
when you were with Sarah I was with Paul,
when you were with Sarah I was with Brian,
when you were with Kelly I was with Pat,
when you were with Liz I was with Paul,
when you were with Sarah I was with Johnny,
when you were with Kim I was with Robert,
when you were with Liz I was with Matt and Pat and Andy,
when you were with Erica I was with Robert,
when you were with Liz I was with Jason and Robert,
when you were with Apple Pie I was with the Armenian,
when you were with Eliza I was with Noah.

...

Today's book of poetry was won over early by this crisp collection. Sommer Browning has just become our favourite poet named Browning. We did a straw poll in the office. Robert may have been one hell of a Victorian with all his dramatic monologues, and Elizabeth the B. another, but we are Sommer Browning fans here.

there is a problem with your interrogative

there is a funny joke
about the best medicine for
hatred being
an umbrella -- no
a wheelbarrow

...

Sommer Browning

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sommer Browning writes poems, draws comics and tells jokes. She is the author of three chapbooks, most recently THE BOWLING (Greying Ghost, 2010) with Brandon Shimoda. Her poems and drawings have appeared in The New York Quarterly, Typo, Octopus, past simple, Free Verse, The Stranger and other places. With Julia Cohen she curates The Bad Shadow Affair, a reading series in Denver.

BLURB

There is an enormous amount of joy that comes with the announcement of a new work by Denver, Colorado poet and illustrator Sommer Browning, and the recent AWP in Seattle saw the release of Browning's second trade poetry collection, Backup Singers (Birds, LLC, 2014). Given the amount of her quirky and hilarious comics were utilized as part of her first poetry collection, Either Way I'm Celebrating (Birds, LLC, 2011) [see my review of such here], I must say that a book by Sommer Browning without comics is unexpected (and even slightly disappointing). Still, there aren't many contemporary poets with her penchant for tight lines and terrible jokes (Montreal poet David McGimpsey is a rare exception), and the results are absolutely stunning.

- Rob McLennan

Sommer Browning

Official Trailer for Backup Singers

Video: Birdsllc

birdsllc.com

406

DISCLAIMERS

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything. We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

Today's book of poetry:
Alien Abduction. Lewis Warsh. Ugly Duckling Presse. Brooklyn, New York. 2015.

From what I can tell Lewis Warsh is in a constant dilemma. He has so much to tell us, the dilemma is that he always sees at least two sides to the story. He knows that every story has at least two sides, maybe three, but at least two.

Alien Abduction is a tall drink of water for when you are parched by language. This stuff is cool, sweet, and comforts as it goes down. Warsh has no pompous in him. He drinks the water, shares the water, divines the water and then sprinkles it down on all of us just in case we are thirsty or need to grow.

Up Close and Personal

The Last Chance Bar is never not open. Don't come down
hard on me if you can't get in, and don't spill your drink on
the rug. You were caught in the crosshairs, but it's never too
late to escape. Yesterday's police blotter didn't mention your
name. You were born in the shape of a bird or a flower. You
write your name in the frost on the glass. There's no time to
waste, one person's desire feeds on another. People in prison
have a long time to ponder their mistakes. But aren't they
already locked inside their heads? The movie ended before
we had a chance to sit down. The pension fund is down to
its last dime. Sometimes the intangibles don't show up in
the box score. And maybe you wake up thinking you're not
alone. Maybe you think this is someone else's problem.

...

Today's book of poetry gets the impression that Warsh would never impose his will but he won't be upset if his poems do.

There are a number of excellent longer poems in this collection, including the marvelous title poem "Alien Abduction" that rollicks and rolls in a particularly quiet Warsh way.

Lewis Warsh is one of those men like Shelby Foote or Robin Williams. Once they start talking, about anything, you are theirs. It's a combination of erudition, humour and a fearlessness about not having to be certain. Warsh would be the first to suggest that he might be wrong about some things.

These poems are a poet at work giving voice to his considered ruminations, Warsh is giving his voice room to contemplate. In Alien Abduction Lewis Warsh doesn't seem to be suggesting there are any answers at all but there is sure is a lot to think about.

Promise

I was holding back something I wanted to say.

It seemed like if I said it I might hurt someone's
feelings.

I'm not saying you shouldn't say something
for the fear it might cause someone pain.

Maybe I'm saying that you shouldn't say something
without taking the feeling of the person into account.

There's no point in saying something about someone
for the sake of saying it.

You say something to somebody and that person
tells someone what you said.

You tell someone not to tell anyone what you're
telling them but they break the promise and tell everyone.

You can't assume that anyone, even your closest
friend, can keep a secret.

It was hard to tell anyone what you were feeling
if you thought they would tell what you said to someone
else.

"I promise I won't tell anyone," she said, but it was
just a lie.

You can whisper something in someone's ear and they
might repeat it to someone else.

It's not a secret if you tell someone so maybe it's best
not to say anything.

Best to keep everything locked inside, until it kills you.

...

Lewis Warsh takes not taking things seriously seriously. You never get the idea that Warsh's narrator/poet self, is ever raising his voice. These contemplative and invigoratingly confounding poems stream out from a strong, strong voice deep into exploration and understanding but always secure enough that you feel his confidence. He rambles poetic in a Will Rogers tone of voice.

Warsh is less concerned with making specific points or charges but instead leaves the reader with a broader contentment/disquiet, an aura, a feeling -- and that is what poetry should do.

Five O'Clock Shadow

There's a private party,
and it's going on right now.
If you haven't been invited
there's still a chance that
the guy at the door might let
you in in exchange for a kiss.
But a peck on the cheek isn't
enough. Not in this climate,
where only the comatose
and the vacuous among us have
their day in the sun. My eyes,
yours, a reflection in still
water, what might have been.
Two grasshoppers copulating
under a rock. One step forward,
one step back. Another chorus
of Stachmo singing "Hello Dolly."
I'm going to call room service.
"Room service? I'd like a bowl of
clam chowder and a plate of mahi-
mahi. Hold the lemon." I walk
through the front door and out
the back without thinking
twice. Not only don't I know
anyone at this party, but it's like
I showed up at the wrong address
in a dress and no one cared.
Maybe I'll get into bed with a
bar of halavah and a box of cotton
swabs and call it a day, even
thought it's night and the
shutters are closed, all the
slipshod typists have gone
home and the major arteries
are backed up from Perth
Amboy to Troy, hair flying
over the Dead Sea so many
light years away.

...

Lewis Warsh is that quiet guy at the party that everyone crowds around just to hear what brilliant thing he'll say next.

Lewis Warsh

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lewis Warsh is the author of over thirty volumes of poetry, fiction and autobiography, including One Foot Out the Door: Collected Stories (Spuyten Duyvil, 2014), A Place in the Sun (Spuyten Duyvil, 2014) and Inseparable: Poems 1995-2005 (Granary Books, 2008). He is co-editor ofThe Angel Hair Anthology (Granary Books, 2001) and editor and publisher of United Artists Books. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council of the Arts, The Poet’s Foundation and The Fund for Poetry. Mimeo Mimeo #7 (2012) was devoted to his poetry, fiction and collages, and to a bibliography of his work as a writer and publisher. He has taught at Naropa University, The Poetry Project, SUNY Albany and Long Island University (Brooklyn), where he was director of the MFA program in creative writing from 2007-2013 and where he currently teaches. He lives in Manhattan and in Western Massachusetts.

BLURBS

Lewis Warsh is a poetry icon and a genius. His poems in Alien Abduction sing with a million inner and outer worlds that are both familiar and unfamiliar and speak of a new world of ideas and language that is timeless, gloriously happy and angry, and painstakingly beautiful. Warsh listens closely to everything, and in this book we find the mix of everything that makes up a life: Marx, Rousseau, sour milk, the songbook and the queen of hearts, mescaline, houses and bars and Paris. But in it too we find a life that is always strange because it is living and constantly changing and the eternal songs we must sing until the end of days and must thank Warsh for singing them first to us.

- Dorothea Lasky

Nothing about Lewis Warsh's experiences is resolved, closed, or immune to his inner conflict. The reader follows him from an anecdotal phrase to a pan of the camera, from an often self-deprecatory meditation to droll truism, to astonishment at the obvious. He crafts his sequences so each relocation pertains, its simultaneity has purchase. Alien Abduction is as ambitious and successful as the best of his collections.

- John Godfrey

"Rousseau said something about something." We lean in closer. We want to hear what this very intelligent and charming person is saying. But, no dice. Not only will we never learn what Rousseau said, we won't even know which Rousseau the poet meant. But no matter. We are so seduced by this voice that we follow it down endless corridors, onto street corners, into flittings of the mind that remind us at each turn of our own, they seem so natural, so un-created. That's a trick Lewis Warsh plays, a sleight-of-hand, never more deftly than in his most recent collection, Alien Abduction. Prepare to be abducted. And to enjoy every second of it.

- Vincent Katz

Lewis Warsh

2/9/11

A Reading By The Overpass

video: bytheoverpass

uglyducklingpresse.org

407

DISCLAIMERS

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything. We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

Today's book of poetry:
Headwaters, Poems & Field Notes. Saul Weisberg. Pleasure Boat Studio. New York, New York. 2015.

Saul Weisberg's Headwaters, Poems & Field Notes is a master class in exploring the natural world with a tuned and sympathetic ear. These poems bear a close resemblance to meditations or even prayers. Weisberg is able to report with such an empathetic voice that you begin to expect that he was the Earth's own lungs given sound.

There is nothing pastoral about these brief accounts although that sentiment is in there, no, Weisberg is closer to Basho with his clipped ease. These poems are cut to the bone but never terse and never lacking the underlying warmth Weisberg maintains.

What this poetry most certainly is - is celebratory and there is precious little of that these days. Saul W's Headwaters is marvelously optimistic.

Spring Music

All you need to know
about my day:

winter wren
in the morning.

canyon wren
at dusk.

...

These poems are calming. When you read these poems the possibility of a kinder world is obvious. There is nothing naive about Weisberg's wisdom or the world he portrays, it is the authentic thing.

Again and again, in the simplest possible terms, these poems announce genuine consideration of the natural world and create wonder.

Paddles

The yellow canoe
tied on top of the red car
next to the frozen lake.

Drifting -
it's all right in a canoe,
in life, another story.

Sometimes
when my wind wanders
only the canoe goes straight.

I point my paddles
where I want to go,
the wind has other ideas.

At the edge of the ice
the canoe hovers,
tasting winter.

...

Weisberg's poems read and sound like things we already know. At the morning read today everyone had the same reaction to this sublime poetry. Reverence.

Even Milo was enthusiastic. He also shaved for the first time since August. And is wearing a clean shirt. And is now sitting in the corner with Kathryn, again, and reading Weisberg poems to her. Her Goth demeanour would seem to be in partial swoon.

Milo isn't just reading to Kathryn, he's giving voice to the Weisberg poems in a quiet but authoritative tone. He has us all in a short swoon but we know it will lift us up. Isn't poetry marvelous.

Home Ground

It's good to have a lake close to home,
also rivers, mountains too.
Familiar terrain and the comfort
of well-traveled trails.
In my pocket,
on the torn corner of a map -
directions to a place called home.

...

Headwaters, Poems & Field Notes takes us to a home that is in our better nature, Weisberg reminds us in every poem of who we are and of who we could be.

Splendid.

Saul Weisberg

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Saul Weisberg is the co-founder and Executive Director of North Cascades Institute, a conservation nonprofit with the mission of conserving and restoring Northwest environments founded in 1986. He serves on the board of directors of the Association of Nature Center Administrators, the Natural History Network and the Environmental Education Association of Washington, and is adjunct faculty at Huxley College of the Environment at Western Washington University. In 2013, Weisberg was given the Environmental Heroes Award by ReSources in Bellingham. He has authored From the Mountains to the Sea, North Cascades: The Story behind the Scenery, Teaching for Wilderness, and Living with Mountains. Saul and his family live near the shores of the Salish Sea in Bellingham, Washington.

BLURBS
Headwaters is a peaceful, joyous book. Its poems open my heart. Yes, every moment is a gift. Every bird, a blessing.

—Kathleen Dean Moore

Saul Weisberg’s crisp, lyric poems are grounded deeply in his lifelong engagement with the plants and wildlife, rocks and weather of his home ground, Washington’s rugged North Cascades and the Salish Sea. Buoyant, passionate, playful, and precise, these poems echo Basho in capturing mystery within an image and Rexroth in artfully blending themes of nature and love. But the poet’s joyful celebration of family, friendship, community, and place are all his own. This is a clear and welcome poetic voice from one of the West’s most inspiring locales.

— Tim McNulty

Headwaters drips with the waters of the wild, sings with the voices of thrush, wren, and owl, dances with the butterflies. How wonderful to have Saul Weisberg’s long-awaited poems together in this handsome book – poems that are worshipful and wry, funny and askance, often sexy, and always perceptive. I am thrilled to have Headwaters at loose in the world at last.

— Robert Michael Pyle

The sensual poems of Saul Weisberg are powerful connections to the essential elements in nature that enrich and fashion our lives. With economy he fashions an invitation for us to join in the moment and become appreciative witnesses and his companion in nature. With lines such as “The river gathers friends on its way to the sea” and questions likes “What does it mean to become extinct?” we are challenged to expand how we embrace and steward our natural heritage.

— Tony Angell

Make room in your backpack for the marvelously condensed wisdom of Headwaters: poems that are intricate as a snowflake, as simple as stone, and the very soul of an educational visionary who has spent his life in the high Cascades. Each of these mountain morsels smiles with gentle truth, and lingers on the mind with honest beauty.

— William Dietrich

From the “ecstasy of conifers” and the “infinite ache of wood becoming wood” to rivers that “tremble in their sleep,” Saul Weisberg sees into the heart of the world, revealing all the ways we’re connected to this landscape and to each other. In spare, lyric poems and haiku-like field notes—each one a shining gem—he reminds us how to pay attention, giving us, in poem after poem, “directions to a place called home.”

– Holly J. Hughes

"Not many people know the spirit of the mountains, rivers, lakes and inland sea of Cascadia like Weisberg does. His reverent attentiveness, subtle humor and deep ecological knowledge are apparent in Headwaters, a volume collecting more than 25 years of his poems and journal entries."

— Cascadia Weekly

"Inspired by the landscape around him...Weisberg's work captures the expanse of awe-inspiring wilderness in perfect, distinct moments. Exploring the connection between man and nature, Weisberg's work is is both contemplative and celebratory."

— North Sound Life

pleasureboatstudio.com

408

DISCLAIMERS

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything. We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

Today's book of poetry:
Sumac's Red Arms. Karen Shklanka. Coteau Books. Regina, Saskatchewan. 2009.

Karen Shklanka is a poet I could listen to all day long. Nothing is as exciting as a voice filled with vibrant intelligence and wit. She also happens to be a practicing physician.

The poems in Sumac's Red Arms are small movies worth watching.

Whether Shklanka is in an emergency room stitching scalps or dancing the tango as though her life depended on it Sumac's Red Arms stuns the reader with precision and clarity. These poems charm the reader, if this is dancing, Shklanka is definitely the lead.

Season

Milkweed pods empty themselves to the wind,
dry cups like grandmother's hands.
A child on the bank follows a yellow leaf underwater.
Sumac's red arms gather in the weather.
The river, larger than memory,
pours itself like clear tea through the ravine.

...

Today's book of poetry takes old school pleasure in the way Shklanka's narrative holds the reader by the scruff of the neck. These poems are well traveled, the fruit they serve could be from anywhere.

Sumac's Red Arms is broken up into several separately titled sections and each has some stylistic perk that make them unique but the voice never changes, Shklanka is constantly stone-cold certain. The lucky reader gets to see Shklanka's considerable skills spread out over several different palettes and she has a different gear for each other them.

In The Poem

I won't tell you
about how morning stretches
under the clouds on English Bay
like a bright skin, how
its edges blur tenderly into
the dark, how all moments
accordion into this one
where we touch a stranger's
fingers, how our steps echo
in the street, how you measure
this, the Pont Neuf, my stride,
how you read my back
with your hand, how my sidelong
thoughts slip by
the Seine, out of streets
of the Marais, sniff around you,
intercept a glance, a sudden
kiss before the inevitable
commutation, the door closing
and the gleaming train.

...

The gang in our office for the read this morning was larger than usual. Milo and Kathryn both brought guests, they claim our morning read is better than Bugs Bunny or Oprah. The office rule is that everyone has to read a poem and that included our guests.

One visitor read the entire "Vocabulary A Tango" section of Sumac's Red Arms. The other guest, they both prefer to go unnamed, read two poems, "Dear God," and "Letter to Jesus." Both were excellent reads.

From today forward, Today's book of poetry will be welcoming guests to our morning reading. But if you show up - you HAVE to read.

The Girl From Attawapiskat

She is the fifth Friday night "Tylenol overdose" send from the
Attawapiskat nurses in six weeks. I am new to medicine, to the North,
still can't sleep night before being on-call. We chopper them down:
fifteen or sixteen years old, smooth skin, wary eyes. I never really know
what to do. There's no acetaminophen level. No proof. They get an IV
drip for the night, Mucomyst, then go shopping at the Northern store
the next day. There's not much for a teenager to do in Attawapiskat,a
reserve of a thousand people with their own Cree dialect. Once, we
made the rule, "No Shopping," and the weekend helicopter rides
stopped, for a while.

**

Another Saturday night, the girl from Attawapiskat again. An
"overdose." She refuses to stand, so I sit on the floor of the ER with her.
Her voice is quiet, not wanting to talk to me. She casts her eyes down. I
wait. Look at the scuffmarks on the floor.

She says she heard a voice in her head that gave orders. Kill yourself, the
voice says. This time, I know what to do. There is a psychiatric hospital in
North Bay. The psychiatrist can't refuse. The pilots flying patients to this
hospital insist they wear a straightjacket. We both cry as the orderlies
strap her in. She screams at the men. I stand in the stairwell by the
helicopter pad. She spits on me as they wheel her out on the stretcher.

**

Four months later the girl from Attawapiskat stops me on the road, as I
walk to the hospital. I hardly recognize her. She is pretty now. A bit
plumper. From the medication, I think. Not as quiet. Says she wants to
thank me for sending her to North Bay, that she'd been in
treatment for depression, sexual abuse. She appreciates me taking the
time. Plans to go and stay with her older sister in Fort Albany. I blush,
then release my breath; fight the tears in my eyes.

**

Six months later I get a call at 10 pm from the nurse in Fort Albany, one
community north from Moose Factory on James Bay. A thirty-five year
old woman has been in a gas explosion. From medical school, I know the
key question is, Does she have burns around her mouth? Yes? Then
check inside. Yes? Bits of Black? My mind is tight and clear.

I send the anesthetist up in the chopper in case of swelling of her airway,
then I fall asleep on the living room floor, a blanket over my shoulders,
my husband in the bedroom upstairs. The phones wakes me up at
midnight. I've been drooling. Don't know where I am. The nurse is
panicking. The chopper isn't there yet. The patient is choking.

I talk the nurse through a needle cricothyroidotomy. It doesn't work.
There's blood everywhere, she says. Get the bag and mask, oxygen,
I say, some air will get in. They hear the chopper. Hang up.

I can't sleep, call an hour later to see what's happened. She was barely
hanging in there when the doctor arrived, then she lost her IV. I'd asked
for two, but they'd only managed one, her veins were so shut down.
While they all tried to replace the IV, she stopped breathing, had a
cardiac arrest. The nurse says the woman's sister, the girl from
Attawapiskat, is waiting outside.

...

The feeling around the office was that we all wanted to see more of Karen Shklanka's very fine poetry. Sumac's Red Arms was thoroughly entertaining when Shklanka was dancing, riveting and respectfully sublime every time there was blood on her hands. Shklanka's prescriptions are disguised as poems.

This is great medicine.

Karen Shklanka

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Karen Shklanka is a poet, a family physician and, with her husband, an Argentine Tango dance instructor. Her poetry was included in the 2004 chapbook anthology, Letters We Never Sent, edited by Patrick Lane. She was twice a finalist in ARC magazine's international poem contest, in 2005 and 2006, and has been published in numerous other literary periodicals. Sumac's Red Arms is her first book publication.

Born in Toronto, Karen Shklanka spent 18 years practicing rural and emergency medicine in small and medium-sized Canadian communities. She has lived in Vancouver, Australia, Regina, Houston, Los Angeles and Moose Factory, Ontario, and on Salt Spring Island. She received her M.D. in 1988, and, in 1990, received the top mark in Canada from the Canadian College of Family Physicians. She currently serves as a Clinical Instructor in the Faculty of Family Medicine at UBC.

coteaubooks.com

409

DISCLAIMERS

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything. We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

Today's book of poetry:
No Shape Bends The River So Long. Monica Berlin & Beth Marzoni. Parlor Press/Free Verse Editions. Anderson, South Carolina. 2015.

WINNER OF THE NEW MEASURE POETRY PRIZE

Today's book of poetry is not at all sure how No Shape Bends The River So Long was constructed. Did Monica Berlin write one line and then Beth Marzoni the next? Did they take turns writing poems and then edit them together. It is impossible to discern what wizardry is behind these poems.

Not quite as rare as hen's teeth but Today's book of poetry sees very, very few volumes of poetry written by two poets. In this case the poetry is seamless, and stunning. Marzoni and Berlin may be secret Siamese twins connected where thought begins.

Clearly Marzoni and Berlin are tributaries that merge to sing river.

Air so lousy with it everything's made heavy-thick

& dishearted we'll turn down the news. Dishearted

by the rush of alongside & what is, what

we'll hear scorched & think scoured, here

swallowed, silted. Humbled we'll corner-fold

those pages, map the measure it would take

to burn off all this too muchness. Fire has its own

idiom--its sentence turns, becomes another kind

of weather on our tongues. So, all this talk

to buttress the palate against

some awful caving in. We'd rather the music

of loss quiet. If only a needle

after the album's end. If only

a phone booth, that other era

overseas, a coin's tinny drop. If before

all sound rushes back

then every disaster we've known gathers up

that space in the static of if. As in, if the wind

turns. As in, if the rain holds

or if the bridge cannot. Then then

kicks up its storm in our chests leaden

where dishearted didn't begin but stays on.

Because fire season & then sputtered out,

because gone under & all bears down,

called or not. Edges singed or worn

thin or too saturated, because will run out

of names come winter. Because so many places

we recognize or think that we do

until the river changes its mind. Or

sixty years late & twelve miles from where

it crashed, the plane & its crew surface.

That glaciered silence heaves off any grief

we might call mass grave, call memorial

turned monument turned natural wonder.

...

The Mississippi is one mighty river and has more stories than the fish that swim beneath her waves. Berlin and Marzoni take the river metaphor in every direction at once.

And because we are water only recently free of the primordial ooze these poems draw us in like gravity. Water only flows in one direction and in No Shape Bends The River So Long the reader is reminded again and again and again that the river makes its own path.

Imagine we can hear winter breaking its hold on the river

& how

it might all go down: just a little shove, avulsing, just the body

delta swtiching, like weight one leg to the other, like

balance, like necessity, like that--no, like letting go,

but then not & this & everywhere today

spring all mixed up, birds confused, even scientists

releasing news then taking it back, say heliosphere then interstellar,

revise just farther than anywhere we've mapped. The ocean

floor they map from space so we can watch the earth

heave & sigh, watch ourselves cross the dark we push

away down the hall, down the block, across town. This town,

most any, keeps tight, a closed door, turned down

blind. Think strange, think foreign, think not mine, think

thank god, & claim the stars, weather, even

birdsong a place to close our eyes against ruin. & the flung.

the careening, the slow dissolve we call

against it & the piled-up, wreckage we'll keep

dragging to curb, to landfill, to bury.

When paved avenues again made floodway think

dam or burrow or nest, we remember invention's not

a human thing. We forget places we can walk under

water & forget nothing disappears--it just drops off

our map. Trace spreads out the atlas & physics reports less

stuff we don't understand by a tiny amount & we spread out

to find tiny, & follow the roads we'll always travel

back to iota. We should imagine something

unimaginable: begin with moonscape but then try

that water might bed down deeper places

where the sky cover is less periled, made of more

normal matter. & less periled we might know better

what to make of it & what to do with our hands.

...

These particularly rich and expansive poems are ripe with hope and longing even as they are heavy with the dark clouds of every storm, past and future. Berlin and Marzoni are attempting to have a conversation with a great river, a conversation with water, for all of us.

Today's book of poetry was entirely enthralled in this conversation from the first poem to the last.

This is champion poetry.

When the rain says wait, says not so fast, says this season

we've measured in so many

stunned inches isn't yet through with us, isn't this what you wanted?

So, turn your sorry back to urgent or at least what begs

doing because there's nothing left our bodies can tend. Now every city

that banks itself against what's rising dislocated, every ramshackled-

falling-down, & the highways & the bridges bottomland, grounded low.

Made of less water we might absorb deluge, extend our limbs

to soak up at the washout, wring sopping dry, but the only body

more water than us is water & So, all at sea & maybe worse

than helpless our sad wade through the wires or anxious

waiting on the wires: that kind of course that drifts, that channel

toward lost. Even all hands on deck won't change the facts, can't

unknot: what holds us won't contain what's coming in at the breach

& won't anchor to shore. For all its translucence

we can't figure water & So, the fields

stay unplanted under so much shimmer & wave & elsewhere heavy, that

quiet, when these streets last disappeared. In standing rain we gage

or aimless shove toward grate & gutter, warn children already chaffing

summer's edge back from the creek-sprung moment & it must have

seemed just for them the way it always seemed for us tideless all

these years & then again as if out of nowhere & suddenly &

all at once our ankle-deep & that pull.

...

These poems strike at the American heartland, the valleys of the great Mississippi, the gaping thirsty maw of the land. Water makes up its own mind, floods change the very shape of the land and water loves this. Water shapes the lives of everyone that is touched by rain and Berlin and Marzoni want us fully immersed in the conversation.

They take us into deep water again and again and again.

Beth Marzoni

Monica Berlin

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Monica Berlin
On faculty since 1998, Monica Berlin is the Associate Director for The Program in Creative Writing, an Associate Professor, & Chair of the Department of English at Knox College. A recipient of the Philip Green Wright-Lombard College Prize for Distinguished Teaching, she teaches poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction, & late 20th & 21st century American literature. She holds degrees from Knox College, Western Illinois University, & Vermont College.

Berlin is also the project director for The Knox Writers’ House digital archives of contemporary literature, & runs a small literary studio, The Space, in downtown Galesburg.

Her collaborations with Beth Marzoni have been published in many journals. Their collection of poems, No Shape Bends the River So Long, was awarded the 2013 New Measure Poetry Prize and was published by Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press in January 2015.

New solo poems & creative nonfiction were recently published or are forthcoming in numerous journals, including Passages North, Midwestern Gothic, The Cincinnati Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Cimarron Review, Hobart, Mantis, Quiddity, & Grist. Meanwhile, Berlin is currently at work on a collection of essays & keeps trying to make new poems. She lives in Galesburg, Illinois with her son.

Beth Marzoni

Beth Marzoni is a poet, a teacher, an admirer of bridges, & a pie-enthusiast who lives as close as she can to the confluence of the Black, the La Crosse, & the Mississippi rivers. A graduate of Knox College, she earned her Ph.D. from Western Michigan University, & is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Viterbo University. There she teaches workshops in poetry, fiction, & creative nonfiction as well as courses in 20th & 21st century British literature, modern & contemporary poetry, environmental literature, & composition.

Marzoni plays well with others. Her collaborations with Monica Berlin have been published in Better: Culture & Lit, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Meridian, New Orleans Review, TYPO, & Vela among others. Their book of poems, No Shape Bends the River So Long, won the 2013 New Measure Poetry Prize & was published by Free Verse Editions at Parlor Press in 2015. With Natalie Giarratano, Marzoni co-edits Pilot Light, a journal of 21st century poetics & criticism.

Marzoni's poems have received national recognition from Crazyhorse & New Ohio Review. In 2008 she was the recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Award. Recent work has been published in Hayden's Ferry Review, Cimarron Review, Pastelegram, Puerto del Sol, & Grist.

BLURBS

“What to make of this grand experiment over months and miles of river by two poets, not one—Monica Berlin and Beth Marzoni—plus whatever third spirit they’ve invented together? Like music from the 8th century written by Anonymous, that haunting ubiquitous voice, these poems feel unsettlingly interchangeable, keep coming like the country’s longest river dream-documented here in a rich rush, dense with repetition and sorrow by poets who ‘think like a glacier or a stone, sand . . . years / like consistent rain.’ The Mississippi never had better companions or more devoted ones, save Mark Twain perhaps, or more to the point, his troubled, star-crossed Huck. The sense of human and nonhuman history, even prehistory stuns, keeps bothering this shared-solitary work. ‘Wake to any weather & know that / long ago there also was.’ I’ll take that as rare solace.”
—Marianne Boruch

“No Shape Bends the River So Long is a book of atmospheric turbulence and diminishing water levels, inner weather forecasts, dark and light, friendship, the stillness in waiting rooms, a river’s traffic—or what poets Monica Berlin and Beth Marzoni, a So & So in dialogue with us and each other, call ‘the rush of alongside & what is.’ In the zig-zag process of traveling the Mississippi River Valley, together they navigate with beauty and resonance the ‘hours of drought, of waiting, the new low- / watermarks of the lakes,’ the trees ‘that sound like rain & morning.’ This is ecopoetry, it is intimate conversation, it is meditation, the turning inward, the swinging back out from mind to world around the bend. I deeply respect and admire this book for its love of place; its tumbling, digressive progress; its glints of joy and thoughts too deep for tears.”
—Nancy Eimers

TBOP sidebar. The poems in this collection were selected by Carolyn Forche, which is a good thing, AND you must watch the killer video below. It's a very fine poetry video.

Monica Berlin & Beth Marzoni

"All the particular places we've known [...]"

Video: Better Magazine

parlorpress.com

410

DISCLAIMERS

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything. We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

Today's book of poetry:
Vancouver - The City Series: Number One. Michael Prior, Editor. Shane Neilson, Series Editor. Frog Hollow Press. Victoria, British Columbia. 2015.

Today's book of poetry rarely looks at anthologies but there are exceptions to every rule and anything that comes through our door from the esteemed Frog Hollow Press is going to get a serious look. Good thing.

Vancouver - The City Series: Number One is the start of a very excellent idea.

Here's what Shane Neilson has to say:

Frog Hollow Press aims to publish a series of chapbooks which are edited
by an emerging poet from a Canadian city. This poet will curate 10 other
poets from their hometown. Each of these poets are provided two pages of
stage. The poets will not have been published in chapbook or trade book
forms at the time of our selection process, and their poems are meant to
reflect the city they live in.

Brauron

The soles of my feet brown and hard from blisters
earned chasing sunlight patches under cedar cathedral

canopies. I squeezed loam and clutched seeds between
my toes to lay roots everywhere I walked and crowned

myself queen with vines and leaves. This was my
kingdom, promises tucked under lichen, my name pressed

into knotholes. Sun-baked blackberries crushed inside my
mouth. I was always careful to avoid thorns but

my fingers still stained red. My lips still stained red. I wore a
yellow dress so in the late afternoons, landscape turned to

gold. Uncle Jack could see me flickering between trees as
he sat on the patio, vanilla pipe smoke calling me back. "You're

lucky," he said, "There used to be bears here. Big ones. They
used to come right up to the house asking to come in. You're

lucky they're gone now. They're all gone." And when the cold air
curled against me I wrapped myself in quilts and cricket

lullabies, sat under a shimmering river, and drew pictures in
the pin-holed darkness. I don't remember going to sleep back

then, only waking up. No one recognized me when I returned
home. I had to relearn how to tie my shoelaces. The freckles on

my shoulders faded but I kept the yellow dress. It doesn't fit
anymore but sometimes I bring it to my face and it smells of smoke

and ivy. Sometimes I grab handfuls of soil, handfuls of sun. I still
catch myself putting clover behind my ears, humming old

songs from far away. Sometimes my reflection looks more bear
than woman and I think: Oh, so that's where they went.

EMILY CHOU

...

Now that is the way to announce your entry into Canadian letters with authority. Emily Chou's "Brauron" is a delight. It is vibrant, clever and full of immense promise. Marian Engel will love this poem, I think. We certainly did here at Today's book of poetry.

There are ten interesting reasons to like this chapbook and to feel very hopeful about future editions, Michael Prior has done good work in rounding up these young pros.

Take Megan Jones as another example. "The Skydiver" is one sublime piece of work.

The Skydiver
after "untitled" by Chad P Murray

In the unfinished painting,
a man in a red suit
floats above white
clouds, frayed bits
of cotton. The skydiver looks
down onto green-gold fields furrowed
in two by an indigo line.

A bright flame, his body licks
the divide. With arms outstretched
he meets the air--hard, brittle, one million
doors slamming
in a vortex--but the painter hides
in the lee of the easel, making it
look easy. And our bodies
become buoyant, too.

Half the painting is sky, after all.

We look to the diver
for how we should feel:
but his face is all beige
a brushstroke, a question mark.

Green-fields darken where
clouds hunch, still as stunned
rabbits. Will he pull
the cord, releasing the parachute?

The unfinished painting leans
against metal table legs.
The lines of the poem lean
away from the poet: how can language

trick itself out of the plane, and what plummets, there:
the flaming question mark;
the blank sky;
the painter
who pauses to take a photo.
Later, he'll text it to his mother; she will be at Costco.
She will be buying him a bike helmet.

MEGAN JONES

...
Vancouver - The City Series: Number One is a great start to what Today's book of poetry hopes will be a series with as many volumes as we have Canadian cities. If Today's book of poetry has learned anything from this blog - it is that there is a lot more good poetry out there than anyone realizes. Shane Neilson and the good folks at Frog Hollow Press aim to tap from the source with this smart series and we couldn't be more pleased.

The Man Who Took Photos of Windows
for Fred Herzog

In one, a life is laid out in the form of watches and fishing tackle, a dented trumpet,
a Coleman stove, a trio of medals from World War II. It was taken
in 1957, in a city that isn't there anymore, even if some of the windows are,
like the one where a woman stands in an open aperture of floral drapes,
the words "Bargain Shop" above her, and behind her nothing at all. It's easy to see
why he took them: the windows were already photos, frame and all,
though no one else noticed at the time. There's one

where a cedar box is being torn up for concrete forms, and another
where a fifty cent top has just begun to spin--it later became a Kodachrome tornado
that rolled down Granville Street, sucking up cigarette butts and bits
of bloody tissue paper. When he took a photo of his West End room, it showed
the window, toothbrush and safety razor on the sill, the same
razor as the man in the window of a Main Street diner, whose features
are blurred but whose fear is there as plain as the words on a menu.

SHAUN ROBINSON

...

That little ditty was one of two excellent poems Shaun Robinson has in this slim little monster. Michael Prior has done some good work in finding these ten unknown, unpublished poets.

Emily Chou - Emily Davidson

Ruth Daniell - Sugar Le Fae

Megan Jones - Darius Kinney

Alessandra Naccarato - Shazia Hafiz Ramji

Laura Ritland - Shaun Robinson

Sugar Le Fae's "West Coast Winter, a triptych" was a poem I simply adored - but Milo reminded me about our three poem ceiling.

Today's office reading was particularly spirited. No guests today but the first snow of the season is upon us and I think it has unglued my staff. I lashed them back to work with my pointed and soul-withering tongue. They are all off in their corners mumbling mutiny.

I will ply them with sweets later.

Today's book of poetry can only look forward to Number Two, Number Three and so on, of this series. Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Halifax, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Saint John, St. John's and so on.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Emily Chou is a second-generation Vancouverite who keeps her chin up but still has difficulty seeing over crowds. Her work has appeared in Ricepaper, Room and Lemon Hound. If she's not making comics, writing poems, or attempting a novel (isn't everyone?), she is probably watching dumb cartoons and blathering on about fairy tales.

Megan Jones grew up in small towns on Vancouver Island before moving to Vancouver, where she writes poetry and works in book publishing. Her work has appeared in Lemonhound and Poetry Is Dead Magazine. She is currently working on her first book of poems.

Shaun Robinson was born in 100 Mile House, British Columbia, and currently lives in Vancouver. His poems have appeared in Fugue, lichen and Versal. He will begin his MFA in Creative Writing at UBC this fall.

Michael Prior's poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in publications such as Canadian Notes and Queries, Carousel, DIAGRAM (USA),The Collagist (USA), Cv2, The Fiddlehead, Fjords Review (USA), Geist, Grain,Lemon Hound,Magma (UK), The Malahat Review, Moth Magazine (IRL), Prism International, Ricepaper Magazine,The New Quarterly, This Magazine, Tin House Online (USA) , Qwerty, Vallum, and The Walrus.

Michael was the recipient of Matrix Magazine‘s 2015 Lit POP Award for Poetry, The Walrus‘s 2014 Poetry Prize, Gra in Magazine‘s 2014 Short Grain Prize, Vallum Magazine‘s 2013 Poetry Prize, and Magma Poetry‘s 2013 Editors’ Prize. He received runner-up in The Antigonish Review‘s 2014 Great Blue Heron Poetry Prize and The New Quarterly‘s 2014 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest.

Michael’s first chapbook, Swan Dive, was published by Frog Hollow Press in late 2014. His first full-length collection, Model Disciple, will be published by Véhicule Press’s Signal Editions in 2016. Michael holds an MA in English from the University of Toronto and will be starting an MFA in poetry at Cornell University in Fall 2015.

http://www.froghollowpress.com/gallery/vancouver-toc.html

411

DISCLAIMERS

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything. We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

Today's book of poetry:
The Yellow Door. Amy Uyematsu. Red Hen Press. Pasadena, California. 2015.

The first thing I would tell you about Amy Uyematsu's very smart collection The Yellow Door is that this narrative is not going to be what you think.

Uyematsu has endured a life of being the "yellow other" with her eyes wide open. These poems tackle her journey as she explains the world to herself. Uyematsu is a not-quite-invisible minority living in a society that was quite willing to forcibly encamp her family and every other person she knew. Joy Kogawa admirably tread this water in her unforgettable novel Obasan which was published in 1981. Amy Uyematsu adds to that necessary conversation with the interceding thirty-five years experience in the dominant culture.

These poems take us from then to now, share both the lessons we need to remember and those we need to forget.

Mugsheet

for Roger Shimomura's "Eighty-Three Dirty Japs"

this is not buttercup happy sun poem no yellow happy faces to paste all over my room
I still pay attention to yellow light warnings my young life unfolding along that yellow peril trail
just like you, Roger, always the foreigner the ugly jap strange how ugly can still mean invisible
the slitty-eyed general the snake with thick horn-rimmed glasses the eunuch commie spy
charlie chan and fu man chu are just the jekyll and hyde of the same yellow bellied alien
and piss-yellow terror can be seen in the eyes of that white trucker in redwood city
who tells me there's nothing worse than a pregnant jap but at least he's better
than the yellow fetish freaks who can't get enough of us sexy geisha and china girls
no matter if we're from vietnam korea or san francisco we lotus lovelies are all the same
just listen to that blue-eyed boyfriend who swears I look like hong kong-born Kathy
though she's 5 inches taller with eyes pointing down and mine slanting up
yellow lurks in hordes like the 83 of us dirty japs mugging for the camera
but sure as the law which put Roger and Grandpa and Auntie Alice in camp
there's no way to tell the good yellows from the bad and I'll be ready the next time
we're misnamed the enemy yes the first to line up with my fellow
genghis and samurai invaders raising our yellow devil fists

...

Today's book of poetry gets the sense that Uyematsu is not bitter but there is plenty of righteous anger underneath a hard, hard line of polite poetic civility.

As you will remember, Today's book of poetry is a complete sucker for the list poem and Amy Uyematsu hits this one right out of the park.

At Least 47 Shades

The goldfinch in its full spring molt.
The bee pollen of sticky and thick.
The quince to perfume a new bride's kiss.
The ocher yellow in Vermeer's pearl-necklaced woman.
The opal cream floral on a kimonoed sleeve.
The zest yellow of a Nike Quickstrike in limited numbers.
The imperial yellow embroidered robes.
The Aztec gold sent by Cortes to Spain.
The Zinnia gold favored by butterflies.
The iguana who keeps watch on Mayan ruins.
The straw hat a cone woven with young bamboo.
The rising sun of Japan's Amaterasu leaving her cave.
The sand dune that swallows the film's lovers but keeps them alive.
The coast light of sun lost in fog.
The chilled lemonade from the fruit of bitterness.
The Manila tint to sunny the laundry room.
The blond and boring heartthrob.
The yellow flash before the grin gets too tight.
The lemon tart with a mouth to match.
The starfruit which can mean two-faced in Tagalog.
The fool's gold of sojourners and farmers.
The golden promise that still lures us here.
The sunshower which turns my tawny skin brown.
The banana split of Asian outside white underneath.
The Chinese mustard stirred with a dribble of soy sauce.
The yellowtail tuna father cleaned and sliced thin.
The yolk we ate raw with sukiyaki and rice.
The pear ice cream we licked that Tohoku summer.
The moonscape suffusing a rice paper screen.
The theater lights which make the audience vanish.
The electric yellow called Lake Malawi's yellow prince.
The daffodil that doesn't match these mean streets.
The marigold for night sweats and contusions.
The summer haze which splits open the sky.
The slicker yellow bands on those 9/11 jackets.
The dandelion that bursts through sidewalks.
The blazing star we still can't see rushing towards us.
The yellow rose legend of a Texas slave woman.
The atomic tangerine of Los Almos, New Mexico.
The Jasper yellow of gemstone and James Byrd.
The flame yellow as bone turns to ash.
The wick moving in time with my measured breath.
The first light an eyes latches on to.
The whisper yellow as a pale strand of moon.
The yellow lotus that's nourished by mud.
The poppy spring returns to the Antelope Valley.
The wonderstruck even in these old eyes.
The Chinese lantern riding a night sky.
The sparkler a child waves in the dark.

...

Charlie Chan, Bruce Lee, Madame Butterfly, Suzy Wong, General Tojo, Genghis Khan and every other stereotype march through Amy Uyematsu's The Yellow Door. As a matter of fact I am listening to Ryuichi Sakamoto's "The Last Emperor" as I'm typing this up. Stereotypes abound - but so does Yuji Ichioka and all he represents. Yuji Ichioka was an American historian and civil rights activist who coined the term "Asian-American."

Uyematsu isn't trying to instruct her audience in anything but she is willing to share her insight into what it is like growing up inside a dominant culture endlessly amused by the shape of one's eyes.

Uyematsu is able to work her painful decades of assimilation into this narrative without rancour, her absolution comes with accepting and rejoicing in the parts of her ancestral culture that give her a stronger sense of belonging to something that loves and celebrates that which she cherishes.

Zen Brush

it was like holding a piece of straw
above an endless ocean

--Monk Song Yoon

I am dreaming of fields
before the harvest

where everything moves
to sun and wind

wave after wave
a sea of golden yellow

embracing the ground
with seeded eyes--

what rain will fatten
this piece of straw

which warm beam
of morning light--

with a single stem
I wake once more

to know how far
I've come to taste you.

...

The Yellow Door sure made for an interesting morning read today. We were all humbled by the words we could not pronounce, the names we mumbled through, and we were deeply moved by the rest of it. Amy Uyematsu's journey to a better understanding of her life experience is a chance for us Gaijin, those on the outside of Uyematsu's Japanese experience, to get a look inside. She has given us an opportunity to better understand her perilous trek.

Arigato.

Amy Uyematsu

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amy Uyematsu is a third-generation Japanese-American poet and teacher from Los Angeles. She has published three previous poetry collections: 30 Miles from J-Town (Story Line Press, 1992), Nights of Fire, Nights of Rain (Story Line Press, 1997), and Stone Bow Prayer (Copper Canyon Press, 2005). Her first book was awarded the 1992 Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Her forthcoming title is The Yellow Door (Red Hen Press, 2015). Amy was a co-editor of the widely-used UCLA Asian American Studies anthology Roots: An Asian American Reader.

- See more at: http://redhen.org/poetry-in-performance/#sthash.gqtv7YzB.dpuf

BLURBS

"The Yellow Door is both an exuberant and heartfelt dialogue between the poet's past and present. Amy Uyematsu, now a grandmother herself, now stands in the middle of five generations, pondering decisions made by her immigrant grandparents as well as her younger self. The role of yellow in forming and reforming Uyematsu's ethnic and political consciousness is explored ferociously without apology. Once viewing herself as an outsider, Uyematsu has found freedom to truly dance. A pitch-perfect collection by one of LA's finest poets."
- Naomi Hirahara, Edgar Awardwinning novelist

"The Yellow Door is a mature and ambitious book, unapologetic about identity politics and peopled with literary friends of the Asian-American movement and other vivid 'historicized' apparitions. Charlie Chan, relocation camps, Executive Order 9066, sansei brides . . . all the familiar movement monikers will make the reader nostalgic for her activist past. . . . Sigh, those were the days when social protest really mattered! A thoroughly compelling read! An enthusiastic 'thumbs up!'"
- Marilyn Chin

"Amy Uyematsu holds nothing back in this insightful, compelling and poetic narrative that gives a personal voice to the history of our nation's Asian-American citizens. Indeed, there are poems of struggle and pain here, but also of humor and joy, for at the heart of this work is the love, honor and rightful pride of a Japanese-American poet whose commitment to freedom and justice combines with dignity and compassion as she unflinchingly engages the world that brings itself to her door. I am terrifically moved by this work."
- Peter Levitt, Recipient of the Lannan Foundation Award in Poetry

"Amy Uyematsu is one of LA's best poets, one of our most necessary voices. The Yellow Door takes us on neighborhood walks and beach walks along the Pacific and across generations, enjambing eras and pungent seasons in a phrase, granitic continents and the salt of history folded in the creases of caesura. I'm grateful for this book, which I receive like a bowl offered redolent and steaming with both hands."
- Sesshu Foster

Amy Uyematsu

Reads her poem, "Three"

@ Beyond Baroque, Venice, California

December 7, 2013

Video: Askew Poetry Journal

redhen.org

412

DISCLAIMERS

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything. We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

Today's book of poetry would like to say goodnight to

Judith Fitzgerald.

Ms. Fitzgerald died suddenly, but peacefully, at her Northern Ontario home on Wednesday, November 25, 2015 in her 64th year. Cremation has taken place. A Celebration of her Life will be announced at a later date. Judith Fitzgerald was the author of twenty-plus collections of poetry and three best-selling volumes of creative non-fiction. Her work was nominated and short-listed for the Governor General's Award, the Pat Lowther Award, a Writers' Choice Award, and the Trillium Award. Impeccable Regret was launched this year at BookFest Windsor to critical acclaim. Judith also wrote columns for the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star, among others. "Her work is incredible...entirely inventive, deeply moving, and universally attractive." -- Leonard Cohen. For further information, to make a donation, order flowers or leave a message of condolence or tribute please go to www.paulfuneralhome.ca or call Paul Funeral Home, Powassan, ON (705) 724-2024.

* * *

I met Judith back in the late 70's at Artspace in Peterborough, Ontario. Dennis Tourbin had arranged for Judith to do a reading at CityStage or perhaps even in the main gallery, I don't remember. Dennis introduced me to Judith because she wanted to meet poets from Peterborough. Judith was extremely kind and supportive from our first meeting. It really was the first time I'd met a real published (with an established press) poet who had taken a genuine interest in my work. We corresponded for a long time because writing letters is what you did back then and I miss getting and sending letters. Now I'll have to miss Judith as well.

We were friends for a while and then fell out of touch like many people do. I'd see a new book of hers and hope she was doing well.

It saddens me to the core when poets I know pass away.

Today's book of poetry wants you to remember her name, at least for today.

* * *

Touch

you touch me
inside and out
shower me
inside and out

bringing in the evening
through your hands
like sheep and sheep dogs
in the hills

bringing in my love
like crazy hills
dropping the sky
into our hands

- Judith Fitzgerald
Lacerating Heartwood, Coach House Press, 1977)

* * *

Here is the Wikipedia list of Judith's work:

Poetry[edit]

1970: Octave. Toronto: Dreadnaught
1972: City Park. Agincourt, ON: Northern Concept
1975: Journal Entries. Toronto: Dreadnaught Press
1975: Victory. Toronto: Coach House Press
1977: Lacerating Heartwood. Toronto: Coach House Press
1981: Easy Over. Windsor: Black Moss Press
1983: Split/Levels. Toronto: Coach House Press
1984: The Syntax of Things. Toronto: Prototype
1983: Heart Attack[s]. Canada: privately published
1984: Beneath the Skin of Paradise: The Piaf Poems. Windsor: Black Moss Press
1985: My Orange Gorange. Windsor: Black Moss Press
1985: Given Names: New and Selected Poems 1972-1985. Ed. Frank Davey. Windsor: Black Moss Press
1986: Whale Waddleby. Windsor: Black Moss Press
1987: Diary of Desire. Windsor, ON: Black Moss Press
1991: Rapturous Chronicles. Stratford, ON: Mercury Press
Ultimate Midnight. Windsor, ON: Black Moss Press
1992: Habit of Blues: Rapturous Chronicles II. Stratford, ON: Mercury Press, 1993
1993: walkin' wounded. Windsor, ON: Black Moss Press
1995: River. Toronto: ECW Press
1999: 26 Ways Out of This World. Ottawa: Oberon
2003: Iphigenia's Song (Adagios Quartet vol. 1). Ottawa: Oberon Press
2004: Orestes' Lament (Adagios Quartet vol. 2). Ottawa: Oberon Press
2006: Electra's Benison (Adagios Quartet vol. 3). Ottawa: Oberon Press
2007: O, Clytaemnestra! (Adagios Quartet vol. 4). Ottawa: Oberon Press
2015: wtf,

Prose[edit]

1997: Building A Mystery: The Story of Sarah McLachlan and Lilith Fair. Kingston, ON: Quarry Music Books
2000: Sarah McLachlan: Building a Mystery. Kingston, ON: Quarry Music Books, Millennial Edition
2001: Marshall McLuhan: Wise Guy. Montreal: XYZ

Edited[edit]

1982: Un Dozen: Thirteen Canadian Poets. Windsor, ON: Black Moss
1986: SP/ELLES: Poetry by Canadian Women. Windsor, ON: Black Moss Press
1988: First Person Plural. Windsor, ON: Black Moss Press
2000: Bagne, or, Criteria for Heaven, by Rob Mclennan. Fredericton, NB: Broken Jaw Press

* * *

It's a sad day here in our office. Milo is sitting in the corner. We have fourteen or fifteen of Judith's titles on our shelves and Milo is plowing through them with a "do not disturb" sign taped to his forehead. Kathryn is making lists of dead poets and has the Cure blaring some sad song.

Tomorrow is another day. Goodnight Judith, goodnight Judith, goodbye Judith.

Today's book of poetry:
History. Rodger Moody. sight | for | sight books. Eugene, Oregon. 2015.

This is the second time Today's book of poetry has had the opportunity to read a book of poems by the talented Rodger Moody. The first was Self-Portrait/Sixteen Sevenlings and we wrote about that here:

http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.ca/2014/02/self-portraitsixteen-sevenlings-rodger_9050.html

Moody was brilliantly terse with some self-composed restraints in the first book of his we looked at but clearly he has more than one trick up his sleeve.

With History, the curiously clever Moody has taken off the gloves and allowed himself fuller disclosure. I get the impression that Rodger Moody is a soft spoken man, very considered. That would be just like these poems. History has a quirky certainty to every word, it hums honest.

Lament

I've come back

to tell you about my life

along the river, about the rusty iron

bridge where my friends shot carp,

about how the cruelty of farmers

is the cruelty of fathers,

about how they lingered in hayfields

or drank beers on dark back roads,

or how they arched over small town girls

and summer shorts so tight each pair

shaped a butterfly between a girl's legs.

...

Moody is telling the story of his own life and it is story-telling of the highest order. This story is shaped by and reflects the America of Moody's generation as he reveals the innermost workings of a heart that wants to feel joy. Rodger Moody's History is hopeful in the face of less hopeful times.

He can also be one outrageously funny dude.

Milo is reading over my shoulder and has just insisted I rephrase that last sentence.

Now Milo is sitting in the corner, facing the wall, and memorizing my NO EDITING FROM THE ELVES manifesto, and he's wearing the Jewel Poetry Cap of Shame.

But he was right.

Rodger Moody can also be a darkly outrageous and funny dude.

I can hear Milo snickering in the corner. Kathryn is now wearing the Jewel Cap. It looks better on her. Wait until Milo sees his homework! It's Ezra's Cantos for Milo tonight. That will desmirk him.

Rodger Moody's History is a journey to the present for the poet and it encompasses all of his past, all the ghosts, living and dead. Today's book of poetry identifies with these poems, they seem carved from such a similar understanding of the world and it's tumultuous currents.

Unbending Intent

It's 1987. I'm married now.

I have two boys. My hair

is shorter. I drive a Subaru.

Old friends hardly know me.

The mustache that once curled

over my delicate upper lip

is gone. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't

decadent, I was just looking

for myself in the long dark

of my early years when Dad

prodded me into his own lost dream.

He thought the way to hold

your head above the water

was to see the world in a sailor suit,

one made to order for any boy

who wanted to press his rubbery frame

into its blue lie, blue the color

of warmth, a warmth that would never

penetrate the smooth skin of desire.

No matter how gentle the wind

appeared in 1969, there was a big

lie in the air around everyone's body

in that year of riots and napalm.

Now my own boys fight;

I ask myself what can it mean?

But there's love in how they look out

for each other; then the older one

will turn on his smaller brother

like a stray animal too long on its own.

But for what I still ask myself?

A parent's attention shifts

between births almost like fashion

among those monied enough to care.

I can't follow it all, and wonder

will my boys ever see

their real father, how he told

the ship's chaplain that he wouldn't

sail when the ship left port

for the Gulf of Tonkin. Would

they understand his three months

on the psych ward feigning insanity

to avoid the craziness of a country

gone totally mad? Unbending intent

was my phrase, the saving grace

that steeled my blood against those

who wouldn't listen, that carried

me through to those who would.

...

With History, Today's book of poetry's second Rodger Moody book, it is confirmed, we are big fans and very fond of his poetry. We liked it before, we love it now. I don't want to say that Moody is doing it quietly, he is an understated, walk softly poet, The big stick aspect would be his clarity. Moody is as honest as your best friend, you always know exactly what is in his heart. His very human heart.

Thoughts on the Seven Year Itch

In the beginning I loved my wife,

and she loved me, opening the gates

to her passion, giving of herself

and taking, in turn, from me, that which

I had to give. But the years wear us down,

and the children, and the responsibilities

curb the fire, set the mind to thinking.

There's danger in freedom, desire the last

thing you want to leave behind when you leave

the house. The day comes as the front porch

fades from sight, and the days tumble over one

another like the pile of dirty clothes

by the bidet. The street outside is gravel,

a cul-de-sac where the neighbors build their fences

flush against the street, guarding every inch

of their bought and paid for freedom. I dream

about the beach on the Atlantic side of the Cape,

debris and waves crashing together on the shore,

a legacy of sadness like the millstone marriage brings

to those with weak hearts; saltwater and sea air,

rightly rolled joints, autoeroticism, all of these help,

if only a little, in the half-light of dreamy

daytime thoughts of romance and meeting someone new.

In the end it doesn't add up, or even need to.

...

A reluctant optimist. That's the ticket and I'm going with it. Rodger Moody's History is first a modern life contemplated with compassion and gentle consideration, and secondly, an accurate emotional barometer of our times.

Today's book of poetry had a regular morning read, before Milo's corner of the room/Jewel Cap incident. Milo is back in the pack, with a different Rodger Moody book in each hand. The consensus at the morning read was easy to see, everyone was big smiles and thumbs up. Rodger Moody is on solid, solid ground here at Today's book of poetry.

Rodger Moody

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rodger Moody was the recipient of the C. Hamilton Bailey Fellowship in Poetry from Literary Arts in Portland, Oregon. His poems have appeared in ZYZZYVA, Caliban, Indiana Review, Mudfish, uspstreet, and other magazines. He is the founding editor of Siverfish Review Press.

BLURB

Rodger Moody s HISTORY is not just his own story. Yes, these poems tell the story of one man s life from the American mid- century on to the present moment. But they also chart the ways a soul may gradually grow more ample, complex, supple, and humane. From childhood bewilderments and adolescent desires, to inevitable encounters with the world s savageries and insanities, and then to the tender dilemmas of parenthood and the stern losses one must learn to absorb, these poems reveal what Moody calls the real work. As he says in the title poem, the labor of soul-making begins in the long dark before you turn on the lights, and is lonely / against the backdrop of ordinary days.

— Fred Marchant.

414

DISCLAIMERS

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything. We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

Today's book of poetry:
Sabotage. Priscila Uppal. Mansfield Press. Toronto, Ontario. 2015.

Priscila Uppal is some piece of work. Sabotage, her eleventh book of poetry, is the child with the nasty grin taking his/her finger out of the dike just to see what happens.

Like the Batman's butler said, "Some men just want to see things burn."

These poems are precision bombing, smart strikes into the daily minutia that makes up our lives. Subjects big and small are jury-rigged for destruction.

The Police Came for a Visit

just as grandma used to drop by before

her nervous breakdown & the stroke.

I laid out two pots of loose-leaf tea

& a selection of wheat-free, dairy-free cookies.

They removed their boots & caps

but looped their guns around their fingers

& joined me on the carpet where I taught them 2

expert knitting stitches while they explained

clause 3.21 of the Search & Seizures Regulations.

My bladder was full so they insisted on escorting

me & standing guard as I washed my hands

with cranberry soap. We traded photographs.

Yes, yes, that's my uncle, I assured the tall one,

no, no, he's not a doctor, he's a nurse.

The short one placed uncle in a special envelope.

I put on a video while they napped &

napped & napped--why wouldn't they wake up?

Just like grandma, I thought, to visit & leave

you to lift crumbs off your floor. I was looking

forward to testing out the sirens & earning

a new badge, kissing their smooth cheeks & waving

like a widow from the driveway.

The walkie-talkie won't stop bleating. In a few

moments, after I finish combing their hair

I'll sing Happy Birthday to You to the dispatcher

just like Marilyn Monroe.

...

If it can go wrong you'll find it in here. Priscilla Uppal is your tongue prodding your sorest tooth. Poke. Poke. Poke. Uppal is all about pushing over the apple cart, because that's what humans do. These poems dive in and out of our continuous fall from grace as though Uppal got the directions for conduct right out of our collective unconscious.

She is on top of every devious moment since the beginning of time and she knows who to blame.

Survivor

A millionaire is shot. And his wife. And their unborn child.

Revenge selects an arsenal of weapons.

Armies drawn by lots construct arguments.

Leaders rise like tanks and airplanes.

Gardens plant anxious roots.

Gossip punished by banishment.

Goodbye beautiful youth.

Perhaps you would like to marry a sweet blond or bouncy brunette

before the bullet rounds.

Perhaps you would like to use a lifeline to mail a letter

to your attorney, or ask your dear

old mother for advice.

Each week, ten thousand foot soldiers are served

faulty gas masks, ten thousand more must give up

their limbs for tent pegs.

The challenges get crueler. The prizes stranger.

The confessions more predictable.

Nations text their ballots into the trenches,

go back to genetically modified dinners

and genetically modified cares.

As soon as a commercial break calls truce,

the fan website nearly crashes from all the orders

for bright red poppies and T-shirts that read Never Forget.

...

If it weren't for my trusted Pharoah Sanders playing "Body and Soul" in our office right now -- I think we might have a mutiny. Sabotage is entirely that. At our morning read Sabotage stirred things up. The more we read, the more you could see it, our gentle Milo was ready to kick the chair out from under the first person he could just to see the look on their face. These poems are the just-lit match heading for the fuse. They rile readers into various degrees shitstorm.

Frankly Today's book of poetry thinks more poetry should be this incendiary.

Sabotage had a whole bunch of poems we wanted to share just to rattle the cage, but we stuck with our three strike rule. We even overlooked a fine list poem of sorts -"In The Psych Ward". Uppal speaks with such natural authority it never occurs to you not to listen with care.

There Are No Timeouts in History

At best there are pauses between rounds

to stitch skin, wipe blood, spit into the bin,

& except for a few predictable platitudes,

collect bets & wave to what's left of the crowd.

...

Poem after perfect poem in this dart shooting contest just nails the bulls-eye with a laser taut moment. Uppal really does have her finger on the pulse and the jugular.

Today's book of poetry gives out big props for Sabotage. Sustained smarts like this are what make that poetry train hum down those tracks.

Priscilla Uppal

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Priscila Uppal is a Toronto poet, fiction writer and York University Professor. Among her publications are ten collections of poetry, most recently, Ontological Necessities (2006; shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry
Prize), Traumatology (2010), Successful Tragedies: Poems 1998-2010 (Bloodaxe Books, U.K.), and Winter Sport: Poems and Summer Sport: Poems; the critically-acclaimed novels The Divine Economy of Salvation(2002) and To Whom It May Concern (2009); the study We Are What We Mourn: The Contemporary English-Canadian Elegy (2009), and the memoir Projection: Encounters with My Runaway Mother (2013; shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Prize and the Governor General’s Award). Her work has been published internationally and translated into Croatian, Dutch, French, Greek, Italian, Korean and Latvian. She was the first-ever poet-in-residence for Canadian Athletes Now during the 2010 Vancouver and 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic games as well as the Roger’s Cup Tennis Tournament in 2011. Six Essential Questions, her first play, had its world premiere as part of the Factory Theatre 2013-2014 season, and will be published by Playwrights Canada Press in 2015. Time Out London recently dubbed her “Canada’s coolest poet.”

Priscila Uppal

reads "Obsessive Compulsive Cycling Disorder"

Video: PBS NewsHour

mansfieldpress.net

415

DISCLAIMERS

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything. We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

Today's book of poetry:
Diversion. George Murray. ECW Press. Toronto, Ontario. 2015.

George Murray has a very eloquent chip on his formidable shoulders. Let's call these raucous rants the shot across the bow for the real rebellion. Murray jumps on the gas with his foot to the floor from the first line of this opus and he never lets up. Full speed through to the last page, out through the back cover and blasting into your head as though slammed there by collision.

#ClockworkOrRage

Come all you haters and see what I have wrought.
Our primary role as teachers is to demonstrate how to best waste time.
I survived Seamus Heaney and all I got was this lousy career.
Monuments are built daily to distraction.
The terms rescuers and salvagers are mostly interchangeable.
Before the sun has risen it is just a bright hill.
Only 24 men have walked on the moon and/or behind Jesus.
Crack the spine of The Gutenberg Bubble.
Statistically speaking there has to be a secret door around here somewhere.
Moses flicked his cigarette into the dead bush.
Plan your strategic withdrawal from wishing everyone a happy fucking birthday.
You have 73 important updates waiting.
A more likely zombie apocalypse would be a horde of abandoned buildings.
What we call the sociopaths among us is neighbours.
The number of Aboriginal women missing from this line is difficult to estimate.
Heaven don't want him and Hell's afraid he'll go to Columbine.
Poets are the unacknowledged escalators of the world.
We all see dead people now.
The subtitles have been subtly lying to us for years.
Sleeper cells awaken and begin plotting in your spreadsheets.
Ennui is an alert that pops us to tell you there are currently no alerts.
The Illuminati left their lights on again.
Bombs strapped to our babies in their dear little TNT onesies.
A Room of One's Pwn.
If I had it to do all over again it would be a cookbook.
Simply breathing is moving forward.
Every breast exposed in the Sistine Chapel is a new big bang.
xx is right next to cc.
The emperor of YKK pulls himself together.
Look into the dead shark eyes of our leader.
You are what you contract.
Violence has an exchange rate against the price of oil.
I heard about him but I never dreamed he'd have blue eyes and blue jeans.
Truly elegant equations deserve cartouches.
Naked old men in flip-flops roam the change room with their hanging tits and balls.
Religion is like sucking in your gut while standing on the scale.
Glitter arcs from the TV remote.
There's been a sudden spike in the number of lives ended on knees in front of a SWAT unit.
I want to die with my boots on or at least my slippers.
Hitler's ghost slow claps in the silence men call Hell.

...

Reading George Murray's Diversion makes me feel sorry for almost every other poet out there. You could build a rock solid poem out of almost every single line in this book. Most of us are digging rocks, Murray is mining diamonds.

It's like watching Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier create such beautiful carnage. These poems aren't amateur swats, these are professional punches and they will take the wind right out of you. Make no mistake, George Murray isn't the least bit interested in taking prisoners.

#AvengeMyBreath

In Xanadu did Newton-John a freaky pleather-dome decree.
Heaven fills up with dogs and lesser popes.
Cut in half a circle of fifths to make a chromatic rainbow.
Meteors tangent the planet and skip their cataclysms back into space.
Police say the victim and assailant were known to one another.
The genocide expert's accent is too thick to understand but there isn't time anyways.
Rome wasn't spilt in a day.
An ambulance sits outside the cathedral on Good Friday.
He speaks as though he has a pimple on his tongue.
Birds ghosts only walk.
Rock and roll is using a guitar pick to scratch your lottery tickets.
Gendarmes round up gendarme-costumed actors on a porno set.
Danish albums arrive in the mail again.
Hoodie strings hang like an idiot's garrote.
You have to take the sample mid-stream for this one.
Skin is a kind of armour.
All the news fit to print comes in flyer form now.
Splinters chip from every wooden eye.
A million lights dancing slightly out of sync is just called light.
Coronal mass ejaculation.
There's nostalgia in realizing that now is the only possibility.
A one-size-fits -all crown.
Murderers are one-person riots.
Tsks from a cranky old lady are the chick-chick-chicks of life's hi-hat.
Monks chant harmonies for girl choirs.
Santa's knowledge of your sleeping habits isn't creepy or legal.
The last good band name caused a brawl among dirty musicians.
Keep some confidence as your shield and make the rest your sword.
This is as sexy as 41 can be.
All the psychopaths starts to bioluminesce.
The equator's tracksuit waistband cinches tighter.
Since the advent of robot handjobs in Japan we don't even need ourselves anymore.
These kids today have solid selfie-esteem.
3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944
I can't keep up with which aspects of my life I should be ashamed of.
Do miles fall just behind you or other directions as well?
The circle of life touches a line of inquiry.
Wipers push away the snow even as the motor burns out.
Aiming piss directly at shit stains on the porcelain is not a public service.
This woman's pigeon-growling stomach just warbled a bar of "Ave Maria."
Hey you with the sad eyes.

...

This morning, at today's reading, people were screaming in line. Milo surpassed himself with three or four excellent kicks at the can, Kathryn let us see yet another side of her very together Sybillian self. They raised the roof.

And why not? This is incendiary stuff. Today's book of poetry enjoyed this danger/unexploded bomb of a book, this encyclopedia of charm and nasty virility as much as anything I've read since Buk bit the dust. Bless Charles Bukowski and never take his name in vain.

Don't get me wrong, there is no comparison to be made between Murray and Bukowski. Both are great in my house but they are different drinks entirely. I just wanted you to know how much I liked this one.

Diversion is quite simply riveting.

You should always try reading poems aloud, it gives them a different life and you, the reader, a better feel for the meat of it, the weight of the poem. And you should especially read George Murray's Diversion out loud, loudly.

#TheBookOfRevolutions

Be strong and discreet in how you end things.
Enter every room and immediately scout out the emergency exists.
Our tiny reflective robots sprinkle infections over planets we hope to one day shit on.
The most prevalent disability is thought/no thought (circle one).
It's increasingly difficult to not offer a direct assessment.
Lenticular clouds hover as though picking a spot to start their counterstrike.
Every point is terminal in infinity.
Paying dues to people more privileged than you is called culture.
You say I love you and I say I love YouTube.
Seek religiously battery LEDs not flashing red.
The huge bellies and dangly bits of naked old men look dredged from the sea.
Scientists chip away at our constants as effectively as priests shore them up.
No one ever talks about all the goats at the mountain's foot.
Warship is just a misspelling of worship.
Schrodinger's babies wriggle under the rubble.
How do you provide a buck and change in an age dedicated to penny nails?
Death continues to a mostly boom industry.
I was baptized in utero by rum and Marlboros.
Set a circus-worth of zebras end on end and climb the stripes.
Teeth grind down in the face of performed politics.
Irony and parody fucked one night and left us this kid to raise.
You can raise up or you can raze down.
Direct all self-harm into one spot and hope it's not lethal.
If the world had a biography it would be titled Are You Fucking Kidding Me?
The difference between a six pack and a small keg is 15 years and a bad marriage.
My people are only recently mutted.
Who needs art when you got a hatred of women and a selfie of your dick?
The life coaches are tsking.
You now own all the blood I can spare for my enemies.
Photon sails unfold in space like God's hankies.
Fuel lights continue to blink their tyrants orders.
Consciousness is a virus infecting the brain's software.
I wish I didn't have an opinion on the root of our nastiness.
Please consider this slapping you as foreplay.
I made a deal with the Devil that I don't plan to honour.
How easy it would be if the choice was really only red pill or blue pill.
Death the crash and sleep the logout.
Negotiating the point at which I won't bear anymore is more exhausting that just bearing.
The emergency is there is no emergency.
Dozing will overtake me the moment I finish typing this line.
Is this thing even on?

...

No other way of saying it, Diversion is without doubt one of the very best books of poetry I have read this year.

Today's book of poetry wants to remind you all that the 3rd annual KITTY LEWIS HAZEL MILLER DENNIS TOURBIN POETRY PRIZE is coming up in the next two weeks. Our previous winners are Kayla Czaga's For Your Safety Please Hold On and Nora Gould's I See My Love More Clearly From A Distance. Diversion is a strong contender for this year's prize.

George Murray

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

George Murray is the author of five acclaimed books of poetry, one bestselling book of aphorisms, and two books for children. He lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

ecwpress.com

416

DISCLAIMERS

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything. We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

Today's book of poetry:
Tidal. Josh Kalscheur. Four Way Books. New York, New York. 2015.

Winner of THE FOUR WAY BOOKS LEVIS PRIZE IN POETRY

Josh Kalscheur sets Tidal in Chuuk State. Chuuk State is a small island that is part of the Federated States of Micronesia. Think west of Hawaii/Marshall Islands and east of Indonesia.

Chuuk State has both a rhythm and a language all its own and Kalscheur is immersed. He has gone inside the stories, legends and miseries of a culture on the fringes of the western world and found a world not so different from our own.

Explanation

I slung rocks into the roadside mango tree,

as the rotted clumps aching to drop what was too sweet

to hold any longer. I played my ukulele

and the strings broke. I sat and watched you.

The engine in the truck you rode whined

to a stall. Let me tell you this had nothing to do

with your thighs or the chewed pulp-red betelnut

wedged in your cheek, spat like sickness

into the jungle. You'd come this way before,

a turtle shell comb lodged in your hair, singing

acappella. You think I wanted to fuck you,

lead you to some concrete showerhouse and sing

a love song into the blossom tucked behind your ear?

It's true. You could've raised your eyebrows

and meant yes. You could've tugged on your skirt

for the men at the corner. I stripped a ukulele string,

sacrificed the neck, lobbed a mango your way.

It wouldn't fall but floated to the cliff above

the road, sweeping down and cutting wings

into its skin. It flew back to the branch. It looked past

where I sat on the carcass of a Honda, past the sway

of banana leaf, to the wall of mud behind me

and up the striated wall to the cliff again. It waited

for the ocean to sing to the shore, for exhaust to gray

in the sky and disappear. And then it fell softly

into the wind, the trail of juice and flies running after,

buzzing and catching in the braids of your hair.

...

The specifics of place dictate food and influence everything that shapes culture. Place shapes how you see/appreciate the sun, how you walk across the ground. Tidal both microscopes in on a specific time and place, Chuuk State, and telescopes out to encompass all that big world beyond all that big blue sea.

Beer and men and women and desire - that is a universal story. I assure you that when we finally meet aliens and are taught their strange language by our new overlords, we are going to discover the same fault lines. Alien beer and alien men and alien women and alien desire.

With Tidal Josh Kalscheur has both broadened our scope with his loving mural of a strangish yet familiar land and reconfirmed our long held belief that we are all the same silly meat.

Explanation

She dives off the dock along on her lightest day

of bleeding and even the leaves in the guava trees

shake free, even the mangrove branches crack

and clutter the shore. she breaks the waves clear

and turns a funnel of foam still, her song lost

in clouds of spray. Her mother wants to stop it

in the taro patch, twist the roots and squeeze saltwater

through raw cracks and veins that keep

leaking to the mud below. The clan must be saved

somehow. The sisters bury the rotting breadfruit

and wait for it to sweeten and run. The undertow

pulls shadows from the surface of the seafloor,

moving in blocks with schools of yellow-fins.

The aunties dry the seaweed caught in the coral.

They want to cover her piece by piece, heal her.

The brothers do what they can with dust

they rub off a tree they won't name. They take it

to heart when she grows sick and pats their cheeks

with the back of her hand. She wants a shift

in the night-wind, a distance to rush through

the way a fishbone threads a palm. She wants

to massage herself with swordgrass and bent stems,

to wait for harvest to swell and cleanse her.

...

Tidal is a both a celebration and a lament, but it feels more like an eulogy than a prayer, Kalscheur has a big emotional investment in Chuuk State; it is a small corner of the world but for the length of this good read it becomes the center of the universe. Kalscheur has a tender affection for his islands but that never tempers the fear of change nor the desperate clamor for it.

Funeral

The women wrap their dresses under their shins.

Their voices leave the meetinghouse for tree-beds

and cracked sheet metal roofs. Plumerias cover

the floor where a basket of money sits, where my father

shakes hands. Braided fronds loosen on the fence

by the road, and girls who knew my brother well

crouch by the wall looking in, their hands red

from plucking the rusted wire of a window.

I'm watching my mother fan the face and touch

the mouth with oil. I'm watching my cousins

who wear collared shirts pass a bag of betelnut

between them. My oldest uncle leans on a pipe,

his arms bulging from the sleeves. The generator clicks in

and shadows fade from unpounded nails

and sagging beams. I'm told they found him

two compounds from here, by the dying breadfruit tree,

by the house of a girl he went with, a spot he swept

the leaves from. In the waiting line aunties ask for plates,

for the bin of pig meat. They ask if I've had enough.

I remember shoving him to the edge of his truck

in front of my father and bruising his knee.

He slashed a V into my arm and ran off

to carve his canoe. And on the tables, flies pull bits

of fish from bones left by men I'm told are uncles.

I've never met them. Men file through with bags of rice.

Boys sit by the door or wait in picked-apart cars

alive with tapioca growing from the engine

or through springs under the seats,

where even the floor is rotted out and blooming.

...

Josh Kalsheur's Tidal is both the beautiful bloom of the flower and the inevitable descent of the petals to the dirt below. Island life doesn't sound ideal but Kalsheur certainly makes it sound real. Today's book of poetry thoroughly enjoyed this trip.

Josh Kalscheur

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Josh Kalscheur has published poems in Boston Review, Slate, jubilat, Ninth Letter, Witness, Blackbird andBest New Poets 2013, among others. A graduate of Saint Olaf College and UW-Madison, he teaches classes at both UW-Madison and Madison College in Madison, Wisconsin.

BLURB
"Some great books of poems feel driven by the play of language, endlessly inventive syntax propelling us headlong down the page. Other great books feel driven by conviction, the poet enraptured by a world that feels bigger, messier than the language at hand. Josh Kalscheur's Tidal is both these books at once. Set from start to finish in the seductively claustrophobic culture of Micronesia, the poems make the act of recording the world seem indistinguishable from an act of the highest imagination. Every perspective (male, female, old, young, outsider, insider) is rendered here in a language whose inventiveness feels inexhaustible--syntax, line, and diction colluding to build poems that are themselves the world in which the poet walks. This world, the world of human suffering, human folly, belongs to all of us, but the language--pulsing, tender, giddy, suave--is Josh Kalscheur's alone." -- James Longenbach, judge

Josh Kalscheur

reading at the Midwest Writing Center's SPECTRA poetry event

Rozz-Tox, Rock Island

October 29, 2015

Video: Therese Guise

www.upne.com

417

DISCLAIMERS

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything. We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

Today's book of poetry:
Dissection. Care Santos. Translated by Lawrence Schimel. Periscope #3. A Midsummer Night's Press. New York, New York. 2014

Today's book of poetry is honoured to have the Spanish poet Care Santos visit us care of A Midsummer Night's Press. Although Santos is best known for her novels and short story collections we would never suspect a thing, these poems are poet born.

The voice of these poems demand a nod of the head, a tilt of the hat, a round of applause for Lawrence Schimel, the translator. These poems never feel translated, they still feel wet from the hand of the poet. Today's book of poetry gets the feeling that nothing was lost in translation.

Care Santos has a delicious and savory sense of humour and you'll find it in full bloom in Dissection. Santos has that last line knock-out punch down pat.

Big Game

My vagina above the chimney

would be a good decoration.

"...And it gave birth to my three children," you'd tell

visitors, with a trace of pride.

Of course, mine would not be the only one

nor even the most appreciated (as is known,

the hunter appreciates the difficult)

but in the collection

of stuffed and mounted vulvas

it would enjoy a certain privileged position.

On rainy days, alone,

you would drink a coffee before the chimney

looking at your trophies.

You'd close your eyes.

You'd shed tears

in perfect time with the beat of the memory

and then you'd close the shutters

and say goodbye until the next day.

All murderers usually miss

the breath of life they steal from their victims.

...

Santos needs her sense of humour because she also has some serious despair. I've always wondered why so many extremely intelligent people are so poor at protecting their hearts. Santos breaks her unprotected heart just like the rest of us and it is a beautifully sad fall.

Intercity Call

I hear cats meow while you say

"It's late."

They seem angry (perhaps your presence bother them):

they're creatures not especially given to social life.

"I'm going to hang up,"

you mutter,

"my dinner is getting cold."

They complain, piteously, wearied: they detest you.

You invade a place beside their owner

who belongs to them.

If only they knew how to do it

tonight, slowly, while you're sleeping,

with a single blow, they would open your throat

and fill you with sawdust and cotton

after devouring your entrails.

But no.

Those creatures and I are very similar:

our courage reaches only to humiliate ourselves.

Words like stakes for this farewell

that doesn't ever end.

I crack, I split into pieces, I grow old,

the sadness of my skin dirties the tiles.

With each new reply, one of my limbs gangrenes,

but you are calm because you haven't noticed,

you keep talking. Shattering. Demolishing.

Tomorrow I'll buy large quantities

of cotton and sawdust. (Embalming oneself

is quite difficult, but I adore challenges.)

The cats alliterate their inharmonious hates.

What an absurd chorus you've given my collapse.

III

If I knew their names I'd say I liked them.

Now I envy them because they sleep with you.

I sleep with death. It is my pet

(or cotton and sawdust). It bears a cat's name.

The night is very dark or I've closed my eyes.

The silence warns me that I no longer breathe

or that you've hung up the phone (it's the same).

Frost coats the thresholds

of all the exits of my life.

...

Santos is honest and brave. Not walk into a burning building brave, although I'm sure if it were a matter of the heart no burning building would hold her back. No, honest brave, my heart is on fire, my heart is charred, here is my heart, brave.

The reader can't help but be pulled into her longing to be whole, to repair or recapture, love.

Transylvania Effect

Vampire (according to Freud) is that which causes damage

because they've made it immune to suffering,

because it ignores the pain it causes its victim,

because it ignores, no more, because it ignores.

A vampire, legend tells us,

can never sleep outside its house,

nor be far from its bed and shelter

that makes the monster monstrous.

At last I've understood

you're aversion to trips,

or the rejection of sleeping in strange beds,

or of going out very early

or dishes with garlic

or so many other things.

I've dismantled the bed, and I give it away.

There are no coffins for two sleepers

(not even in IKEA). Now our bedroom

is a crypt.

My carelessness already has a just price.

I can't find my reflection in mirrors.

...

Today's morning read was a real frown and tickle. Everyone liked Dissection and the poems were a gas to read aloud -- but there were so many laugh-or-cry moments it was hard to keep poetic equilibrium.

Today's book of poetry was deeply impressed by Care Santos and Dissection, so much so that we are evoking the rarely used 4th POEM CLAUSE.

This last poem is an indulgence and because I'm the boss in this small universe, indulge I will. I thought the last poem in Care Santos' collection was near perfect, here it is.

Penitence

If you've reached here

and you're still breathing

you've already paid for everything you've done.

...

Care Santos

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Care Santos (Mataró, 1970) is one of Spain’s most versatile and prolific writers. Writing in both Catalan and Spanish, she is the author of over 40 books in different genres, including novels, short story collections, young adult and children’s books, poetry, etc. She has won numerous prizes and awards, including the Ateneo Joven from Seville, the Alfonso de Cossío Short Story Prize, and in young adult literature both the Gran Angular Prize and the Barco de Vapor Prize, among many others. Dissection won the Carmen Conde Award for a book of poetry by a woman writer in 2007. Her most recent adult novel, Desig de xocolata, won the 34th Ramon Llull Prize. Her work has also been translated into Basque, Galician, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Korean, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Swedish, as well as English. She lives with her family in Mataró, Barcelona.

Lawrence Schimel

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Lawrence Schimel (New York, 1971) writes in both English and Spanish and has published over 100 books in many different genres as author or anthologist. He has won the Lambda Literary Award twice, for PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality (with Carol Queen; Cleis) and First Person Queer (with Richard Labonté; Arsenal Pulp). His children's books ¿Lees un libro conmigo? (Panamericana) and Igual que ellos/Just Like Them (Ediciones del Viento) were chosen by IBBY for Outstanding Books for Young People with Disabilities 2007 and 2013, respectively, and No hay nada como el original (Destino) was chosen for the White Ravens 2005. His picture book ¡Vamos a ver a papà! (Ekaré) was translated into English by Elisa Amado and published as Let's Go See Papá! (Groundwood Books). His most recent publications as a translator are the graphic novel EuroNightmare by Aleix Saló (Penguin Random House) and the forthcoming children's book Mister H by Daniel Nesquens (Eerdmans). He lives in Madrid, Spain, where he is a Spanish->English translator.

amidsummernightspress.com

418

DISCLAIMERS

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything. We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

Today's book of poetry:
Emergency Anthems. Alex Green. Brooklyn Arts Press. Brooklyn, New York, 2014.

This book could walk on water.

Today's book of poetry was re-reading Emergency Anthems in bed last night and screaming out loud as a result. Luckily K was awake because there was no way she could have slept through my repeated exclamations, shouts of joy and wonder. How in the hell was Alex Green touching nerve endings I didn't know I had?

K could see and hear my obvious delight and excitement and asked me to read one aloud. I gave her "The Wide Gates of the Lowlands" and she was hooked, she sat bolt upright in bed and said "I have got to hear another." I hit her with "All Night the Airfields, Amy Winehouse" and that was it. K was in, she gave me carte blanche for outlandish displays and loud retorts. She was amazed too.

It's what David Porter, in his very worthwhile review of Emergency Anthems at Amazon.ca, says, "The best poetry reads like a secret language in which you are already fluent."

Why a Chokehold only Works

if the Person Is Standing near You

On the news you never hear about someone who is good at

karate saving the day; banks get robbed, cars get stolen, buildings

explode, but no crime ever gets derailed by a black belt who can

kick the air into stars and snap limbs behind his back. Once you

signed up for a martial arts class, but in the first few minutes you

tore your groin so badly you felt the muscle split from the bone

and orbit violently below your abdomen. In the car, the pain

vibrated in the new pocket of empty space. When you got home

you needed the retired magician with emphysema to help you

out of your car and into your house. You feel asleep on the couch

to a cooking show in which everybody cheered when alcohol

and cheese got added to pasta sauce. When you woke up, the

magician was still there, sitting next to you and passing coins

over his fingers; you watched the silver rise from nowhere, stand

up like wheels, and roll down his wrists, moving to the best of

what little breath he had left. You could hear how the gears of his

lungs had snapped and were gone--you imagined them wet and

frayed, dangling over the boneless galaxies of his throat. There

was dried blood on the wall, the lights kept flickering and you

were sure you would never be amazed by anything ever again.

...

All hell broke loose at our morning read. Milo phoned three friends, Kathryn called in reinforcements. Now all of them are in the back room reading Alex Green with a megaphone Milo made out of my desk blotter. We are going to need better locks on the doors. Milo and Kathryn insisted that their friends votes should count, the consensus was we hadn't seen a book we liked more yet this year.

I first read Nicanor Parra's Emergency Poems (New Directions Publishing, 1972) back in the late 70's. It's been a cornerstone book ever since. I'm here to tell you that Alex Green's Emergency Anthems is a book I will return to for a long, long time. Once I love something I love it forever, if I can.

Green has the surgeon's scalpel, the laser touch. He consistently cuts closer to the bone. These prose poems are uncanny magic. In Green's universe there are archetypes and certain seasons that shape the tides of men. There are sharks and Captains and the end of summer is always looming -- and we feel it all as a new familiar.

Blue Door Option

Everybody knew the magician was dying and this would be

his last party. All of his ex-girlfriends were there -- even Stacey

Mitchell, the news anchor who he had lived with on a houseboat

in the '70s when he held his breath for the whole summer. Today

he was taking requests. He would make birds explode from his

chest, he would steal wallets from anyone in the room, he would

build a house of cards on the back of his hands. All anyone

had to do was ask. But no one did, because they were sure he

would crack in the middle, fall to the floor, and leave something

suspended they could never fix. So instead of magic, he sang an

old Nathan McCoy song about losing something in Hawaii. He

had a falsetto you could feel across your shoulders. His hands

were thin, he hadn't slept in two months, and you were the only

one who knew that a few weeks earlier he had parked his car

somewhere and lost it. When he was too sick to come out for his

own garage sale, he told you to give everything away. You watched

people take his couch, his television, his doves, and you felt like

you were officiating a slow robbery. If you're a decent magician, he

once told you, when you die people will miss you. But if you're a really

great magician, they'll always think you're alive and in the middle of the

best trick of all time. Even though you watched him fade in front

of a machine, heard his breathing disappear like a radio station

slipping off the air, you still look for his now. In the eyes of the

teller at the bank, in the stands at minor league baseball games,

in the credits of independent movies from Iceland. The only way

to be sure is to look everywhere.

...

These novels disguised as poems read like insights in an autobiography you are part of. Green's personal universe is filled with symbols we somehow recognize, his sad songs a lament so familiar it sounds like an echo.

Green has a Bill Hicks funny bone and a Raymond Carver brain.

Emergency Anthem

When the guy with the gun ran into the restaurant she owned,

stole a strawberry danish, and shot his head off in the women's

bathroom, you stood around the body unsure of what to do

with your hands. The man with the beard and the hat said he

had known a little bit about him, told you he'd swallowed glass

at a party once to prove a point. What was the point, she asked.

Just chewed it up and swallowed it while everyone watched, he

said. What was the point? she asked again. It's probably still in

him, he said. The the police came and did quick math around

the body, all the while not looking worried, as if the seriousness

of a thing depended on how long it took to clean it up. Later,

she closed the restaurant and the two of you sat around the big

black table in the back. She was sad about the man and you were

sorry you had nothing clever to say about dying. On the news a

boy broke a record by skipping a rock thirty-four times, baseball

players were traded for other baseball players to be named later,

and the weatherman you went to high school with said the big

storm was going to be bigger than he thought. You held her hand

and waited for the rain and thought about how terrible it is that

we remember so much.

...

There were lines in almost every poem in this book that made me shout out loud.

I really do have the best job in the world for a man like me. Pharoah is barking out "I Want To Talk About You" on the box, I have a good friend coming over and we are going out to lunch, later today I'm meeting K downtown for an event we are both excited about. And with any luck at all another book of poetry will come through the mailbox while I'm out to lunch.

Emergency Anthems is THE book I will be recommending to all my friends. Today's book of poetry believes discerning readers will be doing the same for years. Alex Green's first book is so much better than I am able to express.

Alex Green

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alex Green was born in California and raised in the East Bay. A two-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize in Poetry, his work has appeared in RHINO, The Canary, Mid-American Review, and Barrow Street. He is the author of The Stone Roses (Bloomsbury Academic), currently teaches at St. Mary’s College of California, and is Editor of Stereo Embers Magazine. You can visit him at www.alexgreenbooks.com.

BLURBS
“Alex Green’s work blossoms on the page like small explosions. A surf-side Spoon River tinged with Chandler, Dali, and David Lynch. Neon sunsets, lost girls, grifting tennis instructors, and dazed surfers with bite scars shaped like lightning bolts. And through it all, the dark, swift flash of sharks. Serious and hilarious, Green’s pop culture satire lunges with the same deft surprise as those sharks.”

-- Tom DiCillo, director of When You're Strange and Living in Oblivion

“Green’s short pieces read like secrets, someone sharing a passion, a bias, a humiliation, a love. They crash into your ears like the surf, and you flip the page, awaiting the next beauty, the next set of waves.”

-- Joshua Mohr, author of Some Things That Meant The World To Me

“Alex Green is the uncrowned poet laureate of the last day of Summer and his first book is an absolute stunner—rich with metaphor, confessional honesty, and melancholy narrative. In Green’s sun-battered landscape, it’s always the last day of summer, nothing worked out the way it was supposed to, and the optimistic pop songs in the background play a jangly counterpoint to real life disappointments. In the afterglow, he finds humor, revelation, and that much maligned old measure of poetic meaning: beauty. Green forgoes opaque linguistic ornamentation in favor of coherent narrative, honesty, and lyricism. His gift for sudden and surprising metaphors is unmatched. This is a collection to return to over and over again and one that marks the debut of an important and refreshing poetic voice. Emergency Anthems is incredible, my favorite book of poetry of the last five years. Maybe of any five years.”

-- Jesse Michaels, author of Whispering Bodies

brooklynartspress.com

419

DISCLAIMERS

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything. We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

Today's book of poetry:
Listening Long and Late. Peter Everwine. Pitt Poetry Series. University of Pittsburgh Press. Pittsburgh, P.A. 2013.

Man, oh man. If you've got something to say it wouldn't hurt to mention it around Peter Everwine, that cat is listening. Everwine seems to have heard everything from the sound of the blood cursing through your very veins to the silent voices of the buzzards who feed off of the dead.

What this witless and inarticulate blogger wants to tell you about is how unnervingly articulate Listening Long and Late is on every page. Everwine is an everyman voice filtered through a good scholar's wisdom. His ear is firmly to the ground but his brain knows what Zarathustra mused.

Elegy For The Poet Charles Moulton

When we were last together,

you read me your latest poem from a sheaf

of hand-scrawled pages, dog-eared

and rolled together by a rubber band.

You didn't ask me to look at it.

We both knew why: I thought a catfish

had a better grasp of English spelling;

you thought my soul had narrowed

from too many years in a classroom.

Yours was a freedom one might envy,

listening to your drawl of gravelly music,

that wild guffaw when a line pleased you.

I have a photo of you, taken

on some mountain -- big grin,

arms held out wide, you're dancing a jig

buck-naked in your broken boots

and there's so much joy in your grizzled face

I have to turn away.

You look like you're getting ready to fly.

...

Today's book of poetry is a big fan of hope in poetry, joy too. Everwine has joy and hope in abundance but it never comes at the cost of reason. He knows it all comes at a cost. Sorrow and the inevitable slide towards the long dirt nap, it's all in here - but with Everwine's keen ear and deadly sense of humour we can accept certain inevitability's.

These poems are grounded in faith but there is no preaching here. Listening Long and Late is no sermon, these songs come from a respected elder. If there is any pretense in these poems Today's book of poetry couldn't find it.

Today's book of poetry is a sucker for particular specifics. Our friend and mentor Stuart Ross has suggested that I am particularly susceptible to any mention of Charlie Parker (he's in one of these splendid poems), Lester Young, Coltrane, and he is right. But I'm also a fall on the floor sucker for old timey country and bluegrass.

The Banjo Dream

One morning Earl Scruggs sits up in bed, reaches for his fa-

mous banjo and plays nine consecutive wrong notes to a tune

he's known all his life. What's happening? he cries, holding up

his hands, which he no longer recognizes. Meanwhile, thou-

sands of miles away, I have awakened from a disturbing dream

to discover that my hands--they no longer seem mine--have

become thick-veined and tremble on my quilt like small horses

in the starting gates. I am suddenly overwhelmed by happi-

ness. Everything lies open before me: Days. Blue distances.

The song that will unlock the gates of paradise.

...

I had to assign Milo to the task of deciphering from the Nahuatl, I knew he'd spent considerable time in the Valley of Mexico. Kathryn looked after the Hebrew and did some research on Yaakov Orland before this mornings read. What we all agreed on was how deceptively simple these beautifully crafted poems are. The bite in these poems is so deft you don't feel the pinch but you do feel the anti-venom thundering through your veins. You feel wiser.

The Train Station of Milan

Leaving Milan, what I remember

is the old man in a blue cap

who stood apart from the press of travelers,

waving goodbye as if bereft.

In the failing light of that winter day,

framed by the great vault of the station

and growing smaller in the distance,

he seemed already blurred with Time.

I was young then, with few cares

and a suitcase full of destinations.

I gave him little thought in passing.

The old man surely is dead now,

and I am of the age he was

when I first saw him -- as I see

him now -- that winter afternoon

in Milan, his hand extended, palm up,

his fingers opening and closing,

as if he were setting free something

he held, if only for a moment,

then beckoning it to come back.

...

Watching and listening is something but it is not enough. Someone has to give it all meaning by understanding what it is we need to be better miners, to be better caretakers, to be better. Listening Long and Late is a strong step in that direction. This is sublime work by a learned and generous heart.

Today's book of poetry takes heart, poems like these give us all hope.

Peter Everwine

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Everwine is the author of seven previous poetry collections, including From The Meadow and Collecting the Animals, which won the Lamont Poetry Prize in 1972. Everwine is the recipient of numerous honours, including two Pushcart Prizes, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is emeritus professor of English at California State University, Fresno, and was a senior Fulbright lecturer in American poetry at the University of Haifa, Israel.

BLURBS

“What a rich array of music lies within Listening Long and Late. With refreshing authenticity, Everwine weds playfulness to practice, lyricism to narrative, pathos to the ordinary. Indeed, he has listened ‘long and late’ to the music of such venerable masters as Tu Fu, the hidden genius on the street, and the anonymous Aztec poets of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Everwine writes with the same ‘deified heart’ that divines the mystery of his quotidian subjects in a language that is at once plain and poetic. His own work seamlessly segues into his translations from the Hebrew and Nahuatl, as if all the poems belonged to the same poet, which they in fact do, as the glorious multitudes of Peter Everwine, one of the masters of our age.”

— Chard deNiord

“The poems in Peter Everwine’s Listening Long and Late are woven out of memory and mystery, with surprising translations from the Nahuatl and Hebrew. Everwine is a faithful listener, always keeping ‘one ear cocked for the unsayable.’ These elegiac poems murmur and sing and celebrate the most humble creatures among us.”

— Anne Marie Macari

“[Everwine’s] poems . . . possess the simplicity and clarity I find in the great Spanish poems of Antonio Machado and his contemporary Juan Ramón Jimenez but in contemporary English and in the rhythms of our speech, that rhythm glorified.”

— Philip Levine, Ploughshares

“Peter Everwine is a poet’s poet, the kind of writer other poets read with equal parts of envy, gratitude, and joy. . . . [His] poems are crystalline, pared to essentials; they are heartrending, and they are beautiful.”

— Gary Young

Peter Everwine

At NEC

Video: Poetrymind

upress.pit.edu

420

DISCLAIMERS

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything. We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

Today's book of poetry would like to announce the winner of the
3rd Annual
Kitty Lewis
Hazel Millar
Dennis Tourbin
Poetry Prize

Eva H.D. Rotten Perfect Mouth. Mansfield Press, Toronto, Ontario, 2015.

To see Today's book of poetry on Eva H.D. and Rotten Perfect Mouth:

http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.ca/2015/07/rotten-perfect-mouth-eva-hd-mansfield.html

Today's book of poetry will return firing on all cylinders in the new year. We wish all our friends a safe and family filled holiday season.

Today's book of poetry:
Dickhead. Wayne F. Burke. BareBack Press. Hamilton, Ontario. 2015.

Happy New Year Puppets!

Today's book of poetry thought about you guys every day. We were in Toronto checking out the Aga Khan Museum, the Turner show at the Art Gallery of Ontario and a production of Kinky Boots on King Street. It was by accident that we had lunch at Korean place called Ka Chi, it is on Dundas, one block west of the art gallery, a basement place. Incredible. Excellent food, excellent service and very reasonable. It was the bomb. Toronto really is a great city. Hooked up with old friends, argued too much because I am an ass, drank our share of wine, came home sated on the last train out of town.

Today's book of poetry wanted to start the new year off right so we kept Dickhead in mind. It is a monster among us, a dangerous beast in our midst.

Dickhead by Wayne F. Burke is a great book to lead out of the gate. Start as you mean to go on I always say. If you read TBOP at all you know our fondness for St. Charles of Bukowski. Burke, in no small way, reads like the best of Hank. Dead serious, no nonsense and it feels absolutely true.

Showdown

As I lifted weights in the cellar

I listened to the floor boards overhead

creak

from the weight of my Uncle's feet;

I thought of my fist

landing SPLAT in the middle

of his fat face.

His days as boss man

were past

and he knew it too;

and one morning, in the kitchen

as I combed my hair,

which I had let grow long

he asked when

I was going to get a haircut

and I said "never"

and he flinched

like he'd been slapped

and stared

black-eyed

with the glare that used to

pin me to floor like a rabbit

but this time I glared back

and we stood

with the sun burning the roof above

and the years piled up between

us;

and then he turned his head

and with a sick smile

fled

out the door

as gutlessly

as every other bully

whoever ran.

...

No pawing the ground for grubs here, no pretense, Burke is going for the big game. These poems power off of the page with beautiful raw energy. But that alone is never enough - what lifts Dickhead to a more elevated plateau is that every poem Burke writes resounds like the retort of a pistol, stings like a slap to the face.

No way around it, these poems are not gentle. They won't warm you up by the fire. TBOP felt right at home with Dickhead. Burke speaks our language.

Doughnuts

I got off work at 3 in the morning

after working another twelve hour shift

and I drove my car

to the P & C Market

where I turned a few doughnuts

on the ice

before I parked and

got out

and walked to the door

where some guy,

who stood looking at me

said "I don't care how old you are,

don't pull doughnuts in the lot"

and I said

"FUCK YOU"

and he blinked behind

his cock-eyed glasses

and I followed him inside

and asked if he'd heard

what I said,

but he did not reply

and I went about my shopping

too tired to

give a shit

take any

either.

...

A man after my own heart. I'm hearing poetry from the beautiful heart of the dead Bill Hicks.

And speaking of hearts, Milo and Kathryn were pretty funny this morning. When they arrived, together, I noticed that Kathryn was wearing one of Milo's toque. At this morning's read they made every poem in Dickhead sound like a love song. They couldn't help themselves.

These may be love songs, but not the way my obviously lovesick interns would have you believe. These are love songs the way a matador hums to the tiring bull. There is nothing but hard cold steel at the end of these suckers.

good as winning the lottery

without having bought

a ticket;

good as watching

Ali vs: Frazier

or Army vs: Navy;

good as reading the

poetry of

Peter Jelen;

good as a Cadillac's

engine;

good as having my cock

squeezed by

Miss America.

...

Wayne F. Burke swaggers through Dickhead with such confidence you could almost resent his easy elan. We loved it. This is lead, follow or get the fuck out of the way stuff.

These poems will wake you up, clear your head, knock shit around in your attic.

Wayne F. Burke

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wayne F. Burke was born in Adams, Massachusetts and raised by his paternal grandparents. As a boy he was an All-Star baseball player, and in High School an All Class-A football player. He attended the University of Massachusetts—where he was a member of the freshman football team—and three other institutions of higher learning before graduating from Goddard College in 1979. His work history includes stints as bartender, moving man, cook, machine shop operator, sign painter, substitute school teacher, carpenter, truck driver, book reviewer (for the Burlington Free Press newspaper, Burlington, Vermont), and, for the past four years, LPN in a nursing home. His stories, essays, reviews, and poems have appeared in numerous publications. His first collection of poems "Words that Burn" was published by BareBackPress (2013). DICKHEAD is his follow up collection, which will be released June 2015.

BLURB

"A poet who takes no prisoners, pulls no punches, wastes no words and knows how to tell a good story...Burke not only has the guts to admit his part in the fractured society he makes comment on, he also has the audacity to make art out of it...A sane voice in a mad world."

- Matthew J. Hall, Screaming With Brevity

"Burke writes with confidence, and swag...Unforgettable imagery, black humour...something in these experiences that everyone can, or will, relate to."

- Peter Jelen, author of Impressions Of An Expatriate

"Burke is a tough young poet who, like all the rest of us, has learned some lessons from William Carlos Williams, but without imitating Williams. Burke writes the language of where he came from and with respect for it, and more power to him."

- Alan Dugan, Winner of The National Book Award and the Prix de Rome

barebackpress.com

422

DISCLAIMERS

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything. We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

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3rd Annual Kitty Lewis Hazel Millar Dennis Tourbin Poetry Prize

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