Today's Book of Poetry

Today's book of poetry:
Waiting For The Albatross - Found poems from a deck hand's diary, 1936. Jack Shreve/Sandy Shreve. Oolichan Books. Fergie, British Columbia, 2015.

Sandy Shreve has produced a remarkable book of poetry by re-imagining her father's diary. Jack Shreve was a sailor on a freighter in 1936, when he was 21, and he kept a diary of his five month journey from Halifax to Australia and back.

This book is illustrated with photos from Jack Shreve's journey, along with various documents that fill in all the empty spaces in this marvellous story.

The poems speak a language a daughter invented for her father. Wondrous.

Waiting for the Albatross: 2

Couldn't see any albatross at all up on the poop

at breakfast time.

When we throw our garbage over the wall

the albatross usually make a mad scramble for it.

They're a funny sight, paddling for dear life

but I couldn't see any albatross at all at noon

today. Then bos'n came dashing in the foscle

hollering, "Look at the geezly big airplane"

long after I threw our garbage over the wall.

We all dashed out the door, then he hollered

"April Fool" and laughed heartily

when we saw an albatross with a wing spread

of at least ten feet. They very seldom move

their wings and when they bank, chasing

after the garbage we toss over the wall, I've seen

the tips slice the water. If a glider could be patterned

after them! And yet, they're so heavy they have to

go like a seaplane to get up. From the poop, I saw one

take off from the crest of a wave. This morning

I went up on the poop to take pictures -

but couldn't see any albatross at all; not even

at noon when I tossed our garbage over the wall.

...

It is easy to imagine the senior Shreve as a poet on his own, he knows what to look for in the world around him. These short narratives make history real.

Sandy Shreve has done her father a tremendous honour. Many men have sailed the ocean but Sandy Shreve has turned her father's voyage into art.

Waiting For The Albatross is an entirely rewarding collection. Two voices sing with one sound and create a harmony eighty years and tens of thousands of hard miles in the making.

May Day

I wonder what's going on in the world to-day.

The "storm petrels" I saw yesterday lived up to their name

and we're rolling all over the ocean.

We got that damned rice for desert, and stewed prunes

but the officers got apple dumplings and fancy biscuits.

I wonder what's going on in the world to-day.

In the water alongside us, a huge shark was rolling back

and forth and every once in a while turned belly up

as we rolled over the ocean.

Told steward about the maggots we found in our biscuits. "Fresh

meat" as they call it or no, I'd sooner starve than eat that filthy food.

I wonder what's going on in the world to-day.

We've been taking some pretty bad rolls, Got a snap

of the Bon Scot heeled right over and dipping her starboard rails

with her infernal tossing and rolling.

We've taken several seas and lots of spray; I got caught

in one and was washed to the side.

I wonder what's going on in the world to-day

while we're rolling all over the ocean.

...

Today's book of poetry discovered a very soft spot for Sandy Shreve as she navigates through her father's adventures.

At this mornings read Milo drew a big anchor on his forearm before he'd read a word. (There is something going on in our little office because every time Kathryn looks at Milo she looks lost at sea.)

News

Things look bad in Europe. Hitler re-militarizing

the Rhineland, France rushing reinforcements

to the border. Britain concerned. Italy's conquered

the Ethiopians. Things look bad in Europe.

I suppose we'll get home in time to be conscripted

for service in this war they seem to be hatching,

what with Hitler re-militarizing the Rhineland and

France reinforcing the border. Things look bad.

...

Waiting For The Albatross is an old black and white movie suddenly colourized and in the best possible way. Sandy Shreve has canonized her father with Ahab, with Hem's "old man", Lord Nelson and all those other cats who played their stories out on the sea.

These plain-spoken hard-working poems are worth your valuable time. They are Canadian and they sailed around the world just for you.

Sandy Shreve

Jack Shreve

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sandy Shreve has previously published four poetry books, most recently Suddenly, So Much (Exile Editions, 2005), and two chapbooks, Cedar Cottage Suite (Leaf Press, 2010) andLevel Crossing (Alfred Gustav Press, 2012). She co-edited, with Kate Braid, the anthology In Fine Form – The Canadian Book of Form Poetry(Polestar, 2005), edited Working For A Living, a collection of poems and stories by women about their work (Room of One’s Own, 1988) and founded BC’s Poetry in Transit program. Her work is widely anthologized and has won the Earle Birney Prize for Poetry and been short listed for the Milton Acorn People’s Poetry Award and the National Magazine Awards for poetry. Born in Quebec and raised in Sackville, New Brunswick, she now lives on Pender Island, British Columbia. For more information, visit www.shreve.shawwebspace.ca

ABOUT THE AUTHOR'S FATHER

Jack Shreve was born in New Brunswick in 1914 and was raised there and in Nova Scotia, until 1930. In 1934, after spending a few years in Toronto, the family returned to the Maritimes, living in St. Stephen, NB. After his trip on the "Canadian Scottish,” Jack received his amateur radio license and remained an avid ham radio operator for the rest of his life. He did his wireless training at Saint John Vocational School and during WW II was a radio operator, first with the Merchant Marine and then, once it was up and running, with the Ferry Command. He worked as a radio technician for the CBC International Service in Sackville, NB from 1952 until his death, at age 50, in 1965.

BLURBS

“Poignant, salty, full of danger, these poems always manage to dock at our hearts. The experience of reading it is a lot, I imagine, like being there.”
~ Jane Eaton Hamilton, Author of July Nights

“Like a “geezly big airplane” with a ten-foot wingspan, the book you are holding is no ordinary thing. It’s a book of poetry and also a history. It’s formal and plain-spoken, contemplative and bloody-knuckled. It’s then and it’s now. It’s a father and daughter talking across great distances. The voice in Waiting for the Albatross is two voices at once, and the ocean between them. Eighty years after the words were first written they’ve finally
arrived—from his hands, to hers, to yours. Thank goodness for unordinary things.”
~ Rob Taylor, Author of The Other Side of Ourselves

Sandy Shreve

reads her poem "Autumn Pantoum"

Video: Sandy Shreve

oolichan.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:
We Can't Ever Do This Again. Amber McMillan. A Buckrider Book. Wolsak and Wynn. Hamilton, Ontario. 2015.

Let's just start with the title. Today's book of poetry is a big fan of titles and We Can't Ever Do This Again ranks right up there with the King of Titles, Sir Charles of Bukowski. He rained downed titles like The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over The Hills and Play The Piano Drunk Like A Percussion Instrument Until The Fingers Begin To Bleed A Bit.

Amber McMillan cooks things at a very specific temperature. We Can't Ever Do This Again constantly simmers just below the boiling point. Nothing is going to burn but it sure is going to cook.

There is a knowing tenderness in McMillan's but there are no soft edges here, these poems cut just as deep as they need.

Bryson, Quebec, 1996

The question of which is worse

is complicated more by the following

things: I know what I saw. Bright

headlights swept the forest corner

where the thick wood met the road.

I saw the man or ghost boy or boyish

girl caught in the sweep, front-lit

for no more than a second, squatting

on a flat belly between pine trees

and brush, the dark pitch of foliage

shadowed and skewed by the beam.

I saw his or her shirt, button-down,

his or her pants, black, and glassy

glasses, then at the ambit, the car

slide around the corner leaving it all

still again, everything exactly as it

had been before the headlights.

A child myself, the choice became

to remain paralyzed on the road

in terror, or to give in to the sharp

quake of adrenalin meant to mobilize

survival, to run as fast as possible up

the steep hill to your house where

you are sure to greet me sidelong,

drunk-shot and gearing for a fight.

It's a non-choice but I made it,

running for what I thought was my life,

and then to you: manic, scribbling

at the dining room table - a letter,

you told me later, to an infuriated

teacher who had a hand in your

recent termination from the school:

There's no such things as ghosts, dear.

What there are, are crazy people sitting

in the woods in the middle of the night.

...

Amber McMillan is willing to dish out some pretty harsh reality sandwiches in this buffet. This stuff is slick.

We Can't Ever Do This Again reminds Today's book of poetry just much we like to be astonished. These poems march right into your heart, move the furniture around.

Our Wedding Day

For Matt

When you forget, I'll remind you. I'll describe something

about the flowers, or the leaves on the trees, I'll tell you

something about the weather, about what that means.

Do you remember now? When you took my face

in your hands, firm where you stood, as soft

as you could (I think you remember now)

you said, "My name means clearer

of the woods." I whispered back --

only you could hear (for the rain

and the thunderclap were near) -- I

said, "My name means the place

between, my name means

the trap."

You remember now. It was a lovely

ceremony. No one we knew

was there.

...

Our newest intern, Kathryn, took over this mornings read. Not sure her mind was on We Can't Ever Do This Again because she read every line like an accusation and after every line she shot eye-daggers at Milo who was visibly shrinking in the corner. Kathryn was doing McMillan justice, it was a passionate read - but it was clear there was another agenda in play, another dialogue taking place. Milo looked like he was sitting on fire-ants.

We Can't Ever Do This Again reminds me of the first time I read St. Sharon of Olds. Today's book of poetry has all the time in the world for this type of critical hopefulness. These sort of smarts.

Forward

Did I ever tell you the one about TB?

None of this is unfair nor is it surprising,

but there he is, sheltered from the hard

ruby sun inside the dingy white Red Cross

tent. The first of the many trailing wounded

is a thirty-something woman with TB --

and a nasty set of lesser ailments by

comparison -- being handled up the laneway

toward the tent. She's coughing and it's

hot, and phlegm is collecting and spilling

from her every opening: Do you have TB yet?

He shakes his head no, and with that she

gathers up and spits out her next mess

of human mire, aiming as close to his mouth

and eyes as possible, the nearest and most

efficient passageways to infection.

...

We Can't Ever Do This Again feels a little like a guilty pleasure. This a monster first book of poems, I'm almost sixty and I'm still waiting to be this wise.

Amber McMillan

(photo: Nathaniel G. Moore)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amber McMillan’s poems have appeared in The Puritan, CV2, Forget Magazine and subTerrain among others. She currently lives on Protection Island, BC. We Can’t Ever Do This Again is her first book.

BLURBS

“Amber McMillan has a keen eye for the luminous and the absurd. Her directness of address and tenderness of outlook make this book a terrific debut.”
- Sharon Thesen, author of A Pair of Scissors and The Good Bacteria

“It is a rare gift for a poet to successfully recombine the binaries of existence, the nuance of simultaneously feeling joy and grief, love and isolation, hope and cynicism. Rarer still for the poet to achieve this by using her craft as a microscope, its lens keenly focused on details of the everyday. Even rarer, I’d say pseudo-magical, for her to enable me to actually experience these contradictions jeas I read, as though the reading became an act of complicity. Amber McMillan’s poetry is an example of the earned, the hard won, the bruised and bittersweet right to express what might be honestly beautiful about us.”
- David Seymour, author of Inter Alia and For Display Purposes Only

“It’s the mix of exasperation, outrage and wonder towards living implicit in McMillan’s slyly titled We Can’t Ever Do This Again that has fed that ‘other stream’ – a rich, demotic voice that feels delivered so intimately you can almost feel the breath. Readers of Michael Longley, Kathleen Jamie, Seamus Heaney and Jack Gilbert will find in McMillan that perfectly calibrated balance that allows the reader to fall deep into the poem’s sinkhole of thought and emotion, uncovering the necessary innocence and unknowing so vital to a memorable work.”
- Jeff Latosik, author of Tiny, Frantic, Stronger and

Amber McMillan

reads "Variant C"

at Hamilton's LitLive Reading Series

video: Wolsak and Wynn

wolsakandwynn.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:
A World Without End. Matthew Graham. River City Poetry Series, Vol. Six. River City Publishing. Montgomery, Alabama. 2005.

Today's book of poetry is ready to fire our entire research staff. Try as they might, they came up short and almost empty-handed on Matthew Graham. We know that A World Without End was his third book of poetry. We will now send out our poetry swat-team to find those two early volumes. Today's book of poetry sincerely hopes there are other, newer books by Mr. Graham because we need more poets like him.

These poems read like an Edward Hopper painting, you know exactly what you are seeing because the narrative is right in front of you, nothing abstract about it. You also know, right away, that somehow you are the wiser for it. Same thing with Graham. These poems are never sermons (some of our wisest poets fall for that), but he certainly is leading a lesson.

Graham also has a finely tuned sense of humour. When I read "When I Was a Kid" to K last night she almost fell out of our bed. If I really want to know if something is good I read it to K, she has the best poetry barometer going.

When I Was a Kid

I thought pubic hair was public

And the perils of Tarzan were his pearls.

I'm still liable to dial 119.

In the late 1950's they didn't know from dyslexia.

You were just stupid

And got your head slammed against the blackboard.

I'm not complaining.

It made me humble and afraid to write.

It made me a quiet person on paper.

And forget about foreign words.

Once in Germany I ordered a pocketbook of coffee

And in a bar, told a Polish guy

I was a female professor.

Yes it all comes back to language,

That evil little dog at the door --

That brief flash we get

And translate as best we can.

Or as a French friends once said

To our boring host after an opulent dinner,

"Thank you. Thank you so much

For your hostility."

...

The cover art for A World Without End is a painting titled Before The Storm by Graham's wife, the painter Kathryn Waters and it is stunning.

Our intern Kathryn said that she'd happily kill our office techno-wizard Milo for that painting. The rest of us thought of the painting as forbiddingly tender, much like many of these excellent poems.

What It Comes Down To

It happened in the spring,

A false spring, true, Still,

Birth seemed almost possible

In that shifting season.

Then blood, and starlight

Slipped away from a very small star.

I even had, secretively, names

I liked. One was Tess,

The others don't matter.

Later

My wife cried on her hands and knees

On the kitchen floor.

Suddenly the whole world came down

To a woman crying.

...

Today's book of poetry was a hopeless romantic mess when reading some of Graham's poetry. His eulogical poem "News", dedicated to the late Richard V. Hyatt, misted up my glasses something good.

Matthew Graham's poems make the reader trust the poet. In a "lead, follow or get out of the way" world Graham is someone you'd happily follow. He's not shouting directions, his poems simply exude confidence, clarity and wisdom. Who wouldn't follow that guy.

The Sadness of Summer

Another summer gone,

The clapboard cottage swept clean.

Dust rises and falls along the back roads

Of September. Remember

The bouquets of Queen Anne's lace gracing the breakfast table

Beneath the sheer curtains of June?

There are no boats on the water today.

And as I looked at you in the yard

From the upstairs window, as I saw you bend

And clip the last of the wild daisies

And saw my own reflection,

I thought of all the years quietly gone

That we have touched together

And of the life that we have made

And worn

And have become together.

...

Today's book of poetry sometimes feels that my selection of three poems is inadequate and today is one of those days. I have to confess that the three poems I've chosen are not the best three poems from A World Without End. The three I choose today spoke directly to me and I loved them too much not to share. It happens.

Andrew Hudgins is a poet I greatly admire and he is the editor for this series of the River City Poetry Series. Here is what he had to say on the front cover flap about Matthew Graham's A World Without End:

"A thoughtful, elegiac voice pervades Matthew Graham's A World Without End,

his new book and best book yet. A small sense of mourning arises even in his

celebration of deep and continuing love because he knows that love, in the

fullness of time, inevitably ends, even if the lovers never falter in their loving.

That doubled understanding moves him to the richest music in a life's work

rich in music and meditation. A World Without End is stately without stiffness,

thoughtful without pretense, humorous without indecorousness, clear without

simplicity. It offers a pleasure in every line and a fresh moment of insight and

understanding on every page."

What he said.

Matthew Graham

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

(PLEASE NOTE THIS INFORMATION IS FROM 2005)

MATTHEW GRAHAM is the author of two books of poems, New World Architecture (Galileo Press, 1985) and 1946 (Galileo Press, 1991), and the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Indiana Arts Commission, Pushcart, and the Vermont Studio Center.
His poems have appeared in Harvard Magazine, River Styx, and Crab Orchard Review, among many others. He directs the creative writing program at the University of Southern Indiana, where he co-directs the RopeWalk Writers Retreat, and is poetry editor of the Southern Indiana Review.
Graham lives in Evansville, Indiana, and is married to the painter Katie Waters.

BLURBS

"A World Without End is masterful. The pitch of these poems is nearly perfect -- in the way that the poems of Weldon Kees and Donald Justice (two elegant and dour muses hovering behind this book) are nearly perfect. A reader feels that nothing is missing and that there is not a single extraneous syllable. More than this, I admire the maturity and intelligence with which Matthew Graham treats his book's subject: history and its failures, cruelties, oppressions. Beneath the beautifully modulated images, beneath the insouciance which is Graham's brand of stoicism, the bottom has fallen out of the world and the serpents of history hiss. In poem after poem, one is lulled by the beauty and surprised by the brutality. This is a quietly remarkable book."

- Lynn Emanuel, author of Then, Suddenly, and Hotel Fiesta

"Matthew Graham has been one of the best and the most indispensable poets in America, about America: the dogs of America, the people, the weather, our possessions and our places, the vast matter of what we can and what we cannot afford. In a world where you can hear James Wright singing back-up with Hank Williams, Matthew Graham has a light, tender and elegiac touch that is all his own. Every fine poem here forks over a little wound, and we are better for having had the heard and wit to absorb it."

- Liam Rector, author of American Prodigal and The Executive Director of the Fallen World

http://rivercitypublishing.com/

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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:
Multitudinous Heart - Selected Poems. Carlos Drummond de Andrade. A Bilingual Edition, translated by Richard Zenith. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. New York, New York. 2015.

Carlos Drummond de Andrade (October 31, 1902 - August 17, 1987) is considered by many to be the greatest Brazilian poet. To many he is the national poet.

Imagine this, his poem "Canção Amiga" ("Friendly Song") is printed on the Brazilian 50 cruzado novus bill. The man's poetry is on money.

Drummond was a modernist who marched through several stylistic approaches to his poetry over the decades, he published over forty books of poetry, but as far as Today's book of poetry can tell this body of work always remained accessible to his readers.

Residue

A little of everything remained.
Of my fear. Of your disgust.
Of stuttered cries, Of the rose
a little remained.

A little of the light glancing
off the hat remained.
A little (just a little)
of kindness remained
in the scoundrel's eyes.

Little remained of the dust
that covered your white
shoes. A little clothing,
a few tattered veils, a little,
just a little, a very little remained.

But a little of everything remains.
Of the bombed bridge,
of two blades of grass,
of the empty pack
of cigarettes a little remained.

Because a little of everything
remains: a little of your chin
in the chin of your daughter,
a little of your harsh silence
in the angry walls,
in the speechless,
climbing leaves.

A little of everything remained
in the porcelain saucer,
a cracked dragon, a white flower.
A few lines in your forehead,
a photo
remained.

If a little of everything remains,
why won't a little of me
remain? In the train
for the north, in the boat,
in newspaper ads?
A little of me in London,
a little of me somewhere?
In that consonant...
In that well...

A little remains tossing
in the mouths of rivers,
and the fish don't scorn it:
a little that isn't in books.

A little of everything remains.
Not much: this absurd
drip from a faucet,
half salt, half alcohol,
this frog's leg jumping,
this watch crystal shattered
into a thousand hopes,
this swan's neck,
this childhood secret...
A little of everything remained:
of me, of you, of Abelard.
Hair on my sleeve,
a little of everything remained;
wind in my ears,
a silly burp, a groan
from a disgruntled bowel,
and minuscule artifacts:
bell jar, honeycomb, a bullet
casing, an aspirin capsule.
A little of everything remained.

And a little of everything remains.
Oh open these jars of lotion
and smother
the unbearable stench of memory.

But a little of everything terribly remains.
Under the breaking waves,
under the clouds and winds,
under bridges and under tunnels,
under flames and under sarcasm,
under slobber and under vomit,
under the sob, the jail, the forgotten,
under gala shows and scarlet deaths,
under libraries, asylums, and triumphant churches,
under you yourself and your crusty feet,
under the hinges of class of family
a little of everything always remains.
Sometimes a button. Sometimes a rat.

...

And that, my dear friends, is how the Masters do it.

Multitudinous Heart has poems from about fifteen or so of Carlos Drummond de Andrade's works, poems from 1932 to 1987. Some of these poems tackle social issues, humanitarian concerns, others are ironic, and still others are metaphysical in nature. And bless Drummond's cotton socks, as he got older his work got more erotic. Who doesn't love that?

Drummond de Andrade's short poems feel big and his long poems are epics. The way Today's book of poetry sees it they are timeless, immortal, and nothing better can be said of poems.

Richard Zenith has translated Fernando Pessoa, Antonio Lobo Antunes, Jose Luis Peixote, Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian and so on. His touch here feels invisible, he has rendered Drummond's Portuguese English. Zenith has won numerous awards for his translations and these seamless, natural and vibrant poems show us why.

Declaration in Court

I beg pardon for being
the survivor.
Not for long, of course.
Set your minds at rest.
But I have to acknowledge, to confess,
I'm a survivor.
If it's sad and comical
to keep sitting in the auditorium
after the show has ended
and the theater is closing,
it's sadder, and grotesque, to be the sole actor
left onstage, without a role,
after the audience has all gone home
and only cockroaches
circulate in the sawdust.

Please note: it's not my fault.
I didn't do anything to be
a survivor.
I didn't beseech the powers on high
to keep me going this long.
I didn't kill any companions.
If I didn't make a noisy exit,
if I just stayed on and on and on,
I had no ulterior motive.

They left me here, that's all.
One by one they went away,
without warning, without waving at me,
without saying farewell, they disappeared.
(Some were veritable masters of silence.)
I'm not complaining. Nor do I reproach them.
It surely wasn't their intention
to leave me all on my own,
at a loss,
defenseless.
They didn't realize that one man would remain.
That's how I turned into -- or they turned me into --
a remainder, a leftover.

If it amazes you that I'm still living,
let me clarify: I'm just outliving.
I never really lived except
in plans and projects. Postponements.
Next year's calendar.
I never saw the point of living
when so many around me lived so much!
Sometimes I envied them. Sometimes I felt sorry
to see so much life used up by living
when not-living, out living
is what endured.
And I stood in a corner,
simply and inconsistently
waiting for my turn
to live.

It never came. Cross my heart. There were rehearsals,
trial runs, illustrations, that's all. Real life
smiled from afar, inscrutable.
I gave up. I withdrew
more and more, like a shellfish into its shell. Now
I'm a survivor.

A survivor is more disconcerting
than a ghost. I know: I disconcert myself.
One's own reflection is a ruthless accuser.
However much I hide from the world, I project
my own person, who looks back and taunts me.
It's useless to threaten him. He always returns,
every morning I return, I come back to me
with the regularity of a postman bringing bad news.
Every single day
confirms the strange phenomenon that's me.
My roots and my path
are not where I am,
where I've ended up,
a persistent, redundant, nagging
survivor
of the life I still haven't
lived, I swear to God and the Devil, I never lived.

Not that I've confessed, what will be
my punishment, or my pardon?
My hunch is nothing can be done
for or against me.

How to do or undo
the undoable not-done?
If I'm a survivor, I'm a survivor.
You have to allow me at least
this quality. I'm the only one, you see,
of a very old group
unremembered on the streets
and in video films.
Only I still linger, sleep,
dine, urinate,
stumble, even smile
at odd moments, I assure you I smile,
like now, for instance, when I'm smiling
for being I (with relish?) a survivor.

I'm just waiting -- all right? --
for this time of surviving to end
and for everything to conclude without scandal
in the eyes of indifferent justice.
I've just noticed, without surprise,
that you hear but don't care if you understand me,
nor does it matter that a survivor
has come to present his case, to defend
or accuse himself, it's all the same
nothing at all, and void.

...

There was much excitement at this morning's read. Apparently Kathryn and Milo have mended their fences and buried the hatchet because they were sitting close enough to each other today that they only needed one chair. The two of them made every poem sound like a love poem this morning. And they weren't wrong, Drummond is on a high plain, his poems are love poems to us all.

Now Milo and Kathryn are sitting in Milo's corner of the office watching alternating videos of the Cure and Tori Amos. Not sure how this will end but I expect there will be more fireworks. Milo is definitely a Ted Hughes man and Kathryn loves Sylvia.

Richard Zenith's excellent dance with Drummond frees his voice to our language. These peoms feel as natural as Roy Hobbs/Robert Redford swinging for the fences in Bernard Malamud's ace.

Drummond has poems that simply march across the page and timelessly down through the decades like some sort of epic troubadour. Drummond can really lay it out.

The Body's Contradictions

My body's not my body,
it's the illusion of another
being. A master at the art
of hiding me, it even
hides me from myself.

My body's not my agent.
It's my sealed envelope,
a threatening gun,
and finally my jailer:
it knows me better than I do.

My body deletes the memory
I once had of my mind.
It plants in me its pathos,
which strikes, wounds, condemns me
for crimes I didn't commit.

Its most diabolical trick
is to make itself sick, forcing
me to bear the weight
of each new ache it weaves
and passes to me in disgust.

That's why my body invented
pain: to make it internal,
an integral part of my id,
where it dims the light that tried
to spread into every corner.

At times by body has fun
without my knowledge and against
my will, and as the vicious
pleasure runs through its cells,
it laughs at my nonreaction.

Ordering me to go out
in search of what I don't want,
it negates my ego, affirming
itself to be lord of my I,
reduced to a servile dog.

Instead of me, my greedy
body is the one that feels
my most exquisite pleasure,
giving only chewed-up scraps
to my unsatiated hunger.

If I try to get away
by thinking of abstract things,
it comes back to me with all
the weight of its filthy flesh,
its boredom and discomfort.

I want to break with my body,
I want to confront and accuse it
for having annulled my essence,
but it goes off on its own
and doesn't even hear me.

Constantly pressed by its pulse
that never misses a beat,
I'm not who I used to be:
led by its sensual step,
I do dancing with my body.

...

Today's book of poetry thinks Drummond "sings the body electric" with the best of 'em. Today's book of poetry is a small and slight forum for giants like this but we certainly appreciate him dropping by.

Carlos Drummond de Andrade

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902-1987) was born in a small town in Minas Gerais. While he spent most of his life working as a government bureaucrat, he regarded poetry as his true vocation, and his first book was published in 1930. During six decades of writing, his work went through many phases, transcending styles and schools while being strongly influenced by modernism. Few critics or serious readers would dispute his status as Brazil's greatest poet.

Richard Zenith

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Richard Zenith lived in Brazil and France before immigrating to Portugal in 1987. He has translated the poetry of Luís de Camões, Fernando Pessoa, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, and João Cabral de Melo Neto.

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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:
Hive. Christina Stoddard. University of Wisconsin Press. Madison, Wisconsin. 2015.
Winner of The Brittingham Prize in Poetry

Christina Stoddard "brings the hammer down" hard. These poems are the flaming sparks you get from raising a hammer high and bringing it down hard on an anvil. And she doesn't miss a beat. Every time you turn a page in this spellbinding collection you can feel the heat. Stoddard is fully armed and taking names, and she is shooting in every direction.

Hive is as rewarding a book of poetry as you'll find out there, this woman can burn.

Stoddard grew up in the Mormon Church and she is not all that happy about it. These poems are brutal and beautiful, terrifying and exciting.

The Oxford Unabridged

was how I learned the word fellatio,

though I paused to look up orgasm

and my understanding of male genitals was abstract

at best. I had read the word fellatio in the newspaper,

Local section, in a story

about three runaways, two boys and a girl.

A man held them in a cabin

for two weeks. He raped the girl

and forced the boys to perform fellatio on him

repeatedly. I didn't have to look up rape--

I'd know that word since fourth grade

when Takeisha told me

that her uncle took off his pants

when he babysat and we told

our teacher. But I read

the definition of fellatio

and I considered what I knew

about repeatedly.

The man picked up the kids

hitching o the freeway

and said he'd take them as far

as Enumclaw. The girl

gave her testimony yesterday,

which sounded strange when I read it

because in our church

testimony was when we all stood up

to bear witness of Christ

on the first Sunday, in lieu of a sermon.

The article said the girl had a glass eye.

the man stabbed out her real one

when she tried to escape. The man

told her: I will not kill you, I will

take some things away.

...

One of the many things Today's book of poetry absolutely loved about Christina Stoddard's Hive is the sustain. Stoddard never takes her foot off of the gas. She pops these out of the park, page after page, like she was taking batting practice for fun.

There is a dark menacing undertoad that rolls under these pages. Its a dark cloud hanging over the prayer you cannot retract. Stoddard controls all the momentum with the precision of a surgeon.

The entire Today's book of poetry staff were sitting around our large central table this morning for today's read. Everyone seemed in a rather solemn, somber mood. We agreed that Stoddard did have a sense of humour but she is one tough nut. The laughs don't come often but the dazzle is always on. Every person in the room ate up these intense little diamonds because they are such perfectly articulated anger. Unanimous.

I Ask My Father If the Green River

Killer's Victims Go to Heaven

Because we are not equally loved on this earth,

because we are all God's children,

in the temple we baptize

lists of the dead. It is why

I step into the font, white dress

dragging like sailcloth.

An Elder takes both wrists

and pushes my body underwater

while saying a stranger's name.

In the water, I'm supposed to go absent.

I baptize you in the name of Lynette Snyder, who is dead

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost

As I go under, I glimpse

the howling green river,

the parade of persuaded girls.

I see you, I tell them, I know

you are here.

I baptize you in the name of Karen Haskill, who is dead

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost

Fifty times I drown.

I baptize you in the name of Melissa Porter, who is dead

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost

I am weightless, light as a nest.

To save the others, the Elder

has to hold me down.

...

Christina Stoddard has a luminous career ahead of her. Today's book of poetry knows great when we see it.

Hive questions faith in a world where faith is the beginning and the end to all things. In a world where faith means belonging and questions mean banishment/escape to the dark and foreboding woods. Stoddard response is to scream like she has been scalded.

God Made Everything Out of Nothing,

But the Nothingness Shows Through

The woman you are trying to love

has finally let you see her naked.

A clutch of seagull-shaped scars

ranges over her breasts

and you have never seen anything

like it, but that only means

you haven't seen much.

You have questions and

all I can tell you is that the earth

is full of ashes. I know

it is beautiful sometimes to be violent.

That flood of surprise and pleasure

at what we are capable of

in the instant before blood

escapes the skin. We are

often told that loves comes

from inside us and maybe

she tired of waiting for it.

I know it is power

to open yourself. It is power

to stand naked before a man.

And there are those of us who need

to look upon the face

of the deep, who know

that emptiness was first, before God

allowed there to be light.

...

Today's book of poetry doubts that Hive was written in blood, but it sure seems that honest, it certainly feels that true. This is brave stuff.

Stoddard had better be working on her next book or TBOP will be sending out our Poetry Swat Team to investigate.

If Today's book of poetry handed out stars Hive would get them all.

Christina Stoddard

photo: Dennis Wile

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christina Stoddard is the author ofHive, which was selected by Lucia Perillo for the 2015 Brittingham Prize in Poetry (University of Wisconsin Press). Christina’s poems have appeared in various journals includingstorySouth, DIAGRAM, and Spoon River Poetry Review. Originally from Tacoma, WA, Christina received her MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she was the Fred Chappell Fellow. Christina is an Associate Editor at Tupelo Quarterly and a Contributing Editor at Cave Wall. She currently lives in Nashville, TN where she is the Managing Editor of a scholarly journal in economics and decision theory.

http://www.christinastoddard.com/index.html

BLURBS

“Hive is a joyride in a fast car that sometimes gets pulled over by a man in a suit with a Bible in his hand. Read these poems and you’ll know what I’m talking about!”
—Lucia Perillo, Brittingham Prize judge

“Hive investigates the intersections of religion, race, class, and sexuality with grace and knowing. This is a revisiting of a Pacific Northwest that we often forget in our rush toward nostalgia—while the world was busy lauding the grunge scene, women went missing in the woods, and children died in the streets. Stoddard’s exquisite craft never forgets the errand: she raises the dead and offers full tribute and salve for those of us who have survived it.”
—TJ Jarrett, author of Ain’t No Grave

“Christina Stoddard’s stunning first collection begins in ruin and the buzz of gathering flies. And that buzz grows into a more and more menacing hum in a journey through rapes and murders, through stray bullets and serial killers, through mental and physical and emotional and sexual and even spiritual abuse until the voice speaking the poems seems to come from a ‘mouth / fill[ed] with swarm.’ Yet in the end, miraculously—by their sheer courageous existence—these fierce poems soothe as much as they sting.”
—Dan Albergotti, author of Millennial Teeth

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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:
4 Rms w Vu. Susana H. Case. Mayapple Press. Woodstock, New York. 2014.

There is nothing better than the powerful whisper-blow of Ben Webster's tenor and that is what we are listening to this morning in the Today's book of poetry office. It's -19 C or some other ungodly temperature outside. Every time Milo and I want to have a smoke we have to bundle up like explorers. We both end up looking like kids going off to kindergarten, everything but mittens on a string.

But now that we are back here in our warm office and listening to Ben we can tell you why we are excited by Susana H. Case and her utterly vibrant 4 Rms w Vu, although given any sort of chance Case would handle that with aplomb. Case writes our kind of poetry. Her poetry is down to earth, wildly emotional but almost controlled, anarchy of the best kind.

And Now Let's Revisit Sex and Death

Getting into bed with you,

it's afternoon, my mind on play,

I'm wearing chiffon, I'm grinning

like the cows have already come home

for me when you say,

could you take a look at my lip -- I'm thinking cancer,

which of course stops the whole thing dead

while we go to the lamp

get you angled right and yes,

there's something there, could be anything,

there's a definite thing that doesn't belong,

like a dog in a tree

and you couldn't know the number of my women friends

whose men are no longer here,

how it always starts with,

could you look at this bump on my neck, this spot on my leg,

as if any of us had expertise in more than fear and rage,

rage because you just had to wrap your lips

around your smoke, didn't you, instead of around

some more compliant part of me,

always this conjunction of sex and death,

it's like the good twin hopelessly

sharing a brain with the evil twin,

the one who pops open a beer,

whispers, go ahead--light the match--mess it all up,

through nicotine-yellow teeth, the one

who makes me think that if you're ill,

I'll shoot you myself, kill you right now

for carelessly leaving me in this fucked-up place alone.

...

Case has no problem leading with her heart but be careful because she is coming for yours and she is a take-no-prisoners poet.

4 Rms w Vu takes the reader to the steppes of Kazakhstan, the Adirondacks, a car accident in Kansas and a new apartment in New York City. The last Inca ruler plays a part and so does Charlie Parker. Susana H. Case is an equal opportunity poet. But regardless of the setting she is always aiming for some new truth, a better understanding of the tumultuous relationships that make us human.

While Case is striding through all this scenery the important consideration is how engaged you become as a reader, how invested you become in the outcome. Case is all about relationships but has no trouble at all blowing them up to get a better look at what was inside. And we get to go along for the frenetic ride.

Girls You Could Love

girls you could fuck

and straddle-both-world girls

like me, you showed off

to your friends. Peaking early

girls. Peaking late. Prom queens.

Science girls. Nasty girls.

Straight-A girl with my intricate

knowledge of each protrusion, slit,

crevice. Don't forget the stockings,

the heels, you'd say, fetish boy

with your dual-career

parents, your empty house,

housekeeper who pretended

not to notice, the gilt phones I laughed

about to my friends. So good to be

inside you--or--you

inside me. I got so lost in it. My parents

who devoured relationship

books frowned, symbiosis

--a big word for us, fat

on the tongue--and yes,

I thought I'd crumple without

you, but also knew to direct you, slowly

run your hand up here, along the 15 denier

nylon you had so crazily fixed upon. Little

garter button indents red on my thighs

that read: the one with these legs

knows exactly how to want.

Anyone who thought the power was yours

really didn't understand.

...

Case is trying, quite diligently, to break down all impediments to the truth in these narratives. These poems hit like a wrecking ball. 4 Rms w Vu reminds us here at Today's book of poetry of Maryse Holder's Give Sorrow Words, if only for a moment. Case has some of the same intensity of emotional clarity and frankly, some of the same female anger that compelled Holder.

That's not a bad thing at all.

Today's book of poetry loved Give Sorrow Words and we are quite fond of Susana H. Case at the moment, we have nothing but admiration for any poet who is willing to put it all on the table.

Incantation

The best thing to die from is living.

Let me kill myself slowly with pleasure.

Let me dance round and round in circles first.

Let me blow a lot of fuses.

Let me age like a good slab of steak, tender

with the mold trimmed. Let me be

a car going 80 miles per hour.

Let me reach 80--the exquisite

torture of those many years is compelling.

Let them not be Chaplinesque. Let them say

she never knew what hit her. Let it be like

the one James Dean got, only much later.

Let me not surrender to humiliations.

Let me end when my mind, still sharp,

is somewhere else--dreaming of perfectly

grilled lamb, the rosemary perfume so strong,

it could be sealed in my pillow, of hot sex,

and let that be not so long gone

that it burns like a bad joke. In the valley

of the shadow of death, I'd still like

my red lipstick please. Let my breasts not reach

my waist. Let there be very little

scar tissue on me at the time and

let there be a weeping willow, under it

a significantly younger man,

my own little honey cake, who is weeping,

too--thought I don't wish that on him for long,

He'll have a life to live.

...

Is a good life possible? Today's book of poetry thinks so and so does Susana H. Case, she just makes it clear it won't come easy or without bruising. It might leave a scar. Just like these poems.

Susana H. Case

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Susana H. Case is a Professor and Program Coordinator at the New York Institute of Technology. Her photos have appeared in Blue Hour Magazine, pacificREVIEW, and San Pedro River Review, among others. Author of several chapbooks, her Slapering Hol Press chapbook, The Scottish Café, was published in a dual-language version, Kawiarnia Szkocka, by Poland’s Opole University Press. Her previous books of poetry are: Salem In Séance (WordTech Editions), Elvis Presley’s Hips & Mick Jagger’s Lips (Anaphora Literary Press), and Earth and Below(Anaphora Literary Press). Please visit her online at: http://iris.nyit.edu/~shcase/.

BLURBS
The poems in 4 Rms w Vu, like most of Susana H. Case’s work, demand full participation—no watching here—that we live in their apartments, wear their clothes, down to the “denier nylon.” At the end we’re a little shaken, but a lot wiser. Susana is a daring poet, not so much for the sake of issuing challenges, but more to the cause of poetry itself; she defies one to bring the whole body and soul, and deny no part of this experience called living.

– Mervyn Taylor, author of The Waving Gallery
4 Rms w Vu is a poetic open house in which Susana H. Case guides us through the rooms of the heart. In poems addressed to husbands, lovers and parents, Case shows how the past, the curious details of daily life and wonderings about the future all weave together endlessly, how nothing is ever really lost—not a loved one, not a hurt—if you can remember. In her moving new collection, we see how this poet’s art is an act of holding on in language that is sure-footed.

– Matthew Thorburn, author of This Time Tomorrow

Susana H. Case’s 4 Rms w Vu superimposes an intricate map of a lover’s mind on the floorplan of a New York City apartment in poems that never shrink from the “weep and stink of everyday brutality.” Moving from room to room and year to year, 4 Rms w Vu passes through meditations on life with dogs, the metaphysics of lipstick, and the peculiarly American primal scene of the isolating, moving, colliding car, in square footage inhabited by a woman with the brio to ask, as final prayer — “Let me blow a lot of fuses.”

-B. K. Fischer, author of St. Rage’s Vault

In these poems, Susana H. Case captures a vision of New York that can no longer be seen but in memory. Filled with characters frenzied by love, desire & hope, 4 Rm w Vu reminds us not only where we’re from but also who we are.

-Gerry LaFemina, author of

Susana H. Case

reading her poem "Copiapo" from

the poetry anthology "Rabbit Ears"

video: Rabbit Ears TV

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Today's book of poetry:
Astonished to Wake. Julie Suk. Jacar Press. Durham, North Carolina. 2016.

"Only the dead have the last say", this is a line from Julie Suk's poem "Vacancies" and it jumped right off the page and slapped me across the face. Suk is right.

But then she turns around and pleads a convincing case for the living in her beautifully sad Astonished To Wake. Today's book of poetry was entranced by this collection early on. The poems are good from the start and form a steady, striding beat, Suk never drops a note. Suk is leading with her well worn heart.

There are ghosts in Astonished To Wake and they haunt these pages like a tremor but Suk has found a way to make their sad dirges not only palatable but intriguingly necessary.

I'm Astonished To Wake

in a world the same as yesterday--

irrational dreams led me to believe otherwise.

No more lopping off passionate words,

no more leaving you with empty hands.

Were you hurt?

I warned you

the harmless and venomous alike can deceive,

the hognose snake hiss and inflate its head

into a triangular shape.

Foolish bravado

when what we need is heart pressed against heart.

Stay,

Surely the sun will slash us with color

as it climbs to the top of a ravishing day.

The cock will crow and hens lay.

Maybe we'll forget

the hours that pad behind our scent

with unsheathed claws.

Don't be astonished if you wake

splattered with blood.

Be astonished to wake.

...

There is both eulogy and prayer intertwined between every word Julie Suk puts down in Astonished To Wake. It's a somber exploration of death, loss and mourning that is conducted with restrained class and punctuated heart-stopping truths.

The banshee screams of lost love are in here, tempered and held at bay by an inquisitive mind never completely lost to the guilt of survival or grief.

Little Islets Of The Past

float by, one scene segued into another,

the stories we've lived trying us on again,

the same brutish hour hovering on its limb,

the same never again littering the day.

Maybe next time...

but the scene-stealing dead usurp our lives,

leaving us shivering and bruised,

so we lie to save ourselves,

one act after another disassembled,

reassembled,

otherwise

we'd be on our knees for years.

...

Astonished To Wake is a sad journey. We had our regular morning read in the office, but the place is almost empty now. Our new intern Kathryn's last words as she left the building in tears were something like "that is so beautifully fucking sad." I think that is what she said. Milo grabbed his gear and flung himself out the door after her. His last words were "That is some truly, madly, deeply sad shit." I know Milo, "shit" was not derogatory, it was an exclamation. He was saying the poetry was solid.

Neither of them, Kathryn or Milo, swear very often. But I think I understand. Julie Suk has some serious truths about living and dying, about loss and surviving, and that can be disturbing. The better the poetry the further under the skin it goes. These poems go bone deep.

Astonished To Wake is one of those books of poetry your friends will be glad you made them read. They will want to pass it on to their friends, and so on. This is sad wisdom, hard-earned knowledge and Suk shares it with us in poems that are cut like diamonds, little pieces of something harder than our hearts, shining in every facet.

Between Lives

And what if it's true that the life we've lived

flashes by at the moment of death?

Not even for an instant would I want repeated

the boring drone of guilt,

nor the shabby aftermath of desire.

The black tunnel lit with epiphanies

would be my take--

sighs of contentment, laughter, a wild calling out--

and at the end,

a brief flaring of the one we'd hoped to become

escorting us into the light.

...

This sad glamour does have some hope, it's in there working its way to surface. Today's book of poetry loved Suk's honesty, it takes a lot to make poetry out of loss and then it takes a lot more to make it beautiful. Julie Suk is a stone-cold killer poet - she's welcome at our fire anytime.

Julie Suk

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Julie Suk is the author of five previous volumes of poetry. The Angel of Obsession won the University of Arkansas Poetry Competition, the Roanoke-Chowan Award and was on the short

list for the Poets Prize. The Dark Takes Aim was awarded the Brockman-Campbell, and the Oscar Arnold Young awards. Suk is also a recipient of the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry magazine, and received the Irene Honecutt Lifetime Achievement Award from Central Piedmont Community College. She was formerly a managing editor of Southern Poetry Review, and co-editor of Bear Crossings, an Anthology of North American Poets.

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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:
The Green of Sunset. John Brantingham. Moon Tide Press. Irving, California. 2013.

The Green of Sunset is what you might get if you made a benevolent Frankenstein out of Hemmingway, Jim Harrison and the very sensible Sharon Olds. Who knows what Brantingham will think of that when he sees it. But it is meant in an entirely complimentary way. This is big boy stuff with attitude, and then when you least expect it Brantingham's heart and voice turn sentimental but never soft.

There is a manly, tough-guy veneer to these poems and Harrison would approve. And these poems would pass Hem's scrutiny because they are as solid as poems get, as solid as iron, there are no chinks in this armour. Then there is all that intelligent tenderness and hard earned emotional wisdom.

The Wages of Cynicism

Imagine me, cynic that I was, 19 years old, sneering at a Yu-

goslavian village whose favorite daughters and sons talked

directly to Mary--the gut reaction of a clever kid--who would,

in the next five days, see himself for what he was and learn to hate

that fraud inside himself. It's taken me these last twenty years to

forgive myself for that, and God, so much more, and it makes

me wonder how long it will take for me to forgive myself for all

that I am doing today.

...

Brantingham isn't afraid to call himself on his own bullshit and that is refreshing. The Green of Sunset is a palette where Brantingham is mixing colours and digging into the canvas hard, it's a big canvas and he is using all of it.

This is the first time Today's book of poetry has encountered the poetry of John Brantingham even though almost every poem in this collection was previously published. These poems feel familiar, like you have heard them before, they are like stories passed down at late night fires.

Brantingham's narratives almost always circle back on themselves with new and deeper revelations about who the poet really is and as these coils filled with joy and power and remorse tighten, the palatable tension rises.

The Art of Merging

He's been on the road five hours after taking it from his boss all

day, when a big white truck cuts into his space on the freeway.

He lets it all go at once; the job he didn't want, the miscarriage,

the wife he betrayed, his brother's addictions, everything in one

long sentence of hatred, and the truck takes his sentence and

his sins, and it hauls them away forever like that beautiful goat

wandering the Sinai.

...

Today's book of poetry is using three of Brantingham's shorter poems from The Green of Sunset for today's blog/review - but it could just as easily have been three longer poems. At this morning's reading the short poems took on a Richard Brautigan flare, Brantingham's longer poems took on the tone of sacred text from a modern voice, a hit on folklore and legend.

Poem about the Pacific Crest Trail that Devolves into a Kind of

Sentimentality I'm Not Ashamed of

On the couch last night, I realized that I was never going to hike

the Pacific Crest Trail--not the whole thing--and I guess I

could add that to my long list of regrets if I had ever wasted time

with that kind of list.

There was a time twenty years ago when I dreamed of tak-

ing the hike from Canada to Mexico in a three-month journey of

silence and self-reflection, swimming into myself and finding the

peace that lay in the middle.

What a pretentious ass I was, and what a fool I was to think

that peace lay some place inside me when it was sitting right here

the whole time on the couch in that space beside you.

...

Today's book of poetry liked how real and true every word in this collection sounded. The Green of Sunset has a moral center that these great prose poems revolve around like planets

fighting for the sun. Brantingham likes the clean message and these poems gleam.

John Brantingham

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Brantingham is the author of hundreds of poems, stories, and essays published in magazines in the United States and United Kingdom. His books include Mann of War, a crime novel, Let Us All Pray Now to Our Own Strange Gods, a short story collection, The Gift of Form, an instruction guide for beginning formal poetry, and East of Los Angeles, a poetry collection. He teaches English at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, California and lives in Seal Beach with his wife Annie and dog, Archie Goodboy.

BLURBS

"It is difficult to praise a book of poems that you already feel so emotionally connected to: it seems unnecessary, a gesture that only takes away from the beauty, wisdom, goodness, honesty, imaginativeness, and spirituality of the work itself. Nevertheless, John Brantingham's The Green of Sunset is the finest collection of poems he has ever written, which is saying something, considering he's been producing excellent work for going on 20 years now. Let the prose poems contained in this collection stand alongside those in Mark Strand's Almost Invisible and Jim Harrison's In Search of Small Gods as some of the most accomplished of the past decade. Simply put, these poems are the work of a writer operating at the very top of his craft."

- Paul Kareem Tayyar

"In an age of superficiality, mediocrity and sound-cliches, John Brantingham is a genuine throwback to when Men of Letters roamed the literary prairies: a scholar, novelist, poet, essayist, scriptwriter, public speaker, reviewer, professor, mentor, and festival organizer. He is first-rate in everything he turns his mind and hand to. His poems benefit from the breadth of his life experiences as well as his formal academic training. His creative and intellectual emanations brim with his enthusiasms, his versatility, and the depths of spirituality and social conscience at the core of his soul. There is no one of whom I could speak more highly, as a write and as a person."

- Gerald Locklin

"Our best writers weigh their words carefully, and John Brantingham is certainly one of them. He is a craftsman with a huge heart who cares deeply about people and stories and the chaos we call our lives. His characters are beautifully rendered, real and true, at once vulnerable and courageous. Wise and insightful, Brantingham's work brilliantly captures the light and darkness in us all."

- James Brown

John Brantingham's

poetry reading at the EP Foster Library

video: AskewPoetryJournal

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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:
Pin Pricks. Phlip Arima. Quattro Books. Toronto, Ontario. 2014.

Here's the thing. Today's book of poetry is pretty sure you could walk the streets of any city in the world with a copy of Phlip Arima's Pin Pricks in your pocket and find the answers to almost any question you might be asked. Not a direct answer, but a perfect response.

Pin Pricks is full of sharp and quick teasers, taunts, lamentations, celebrations and exclamations. Sharp and quick but never terse. Mr. Arima is a delight.

Pin Prick 3

Naked

I walk to the wall

count the cracks

that disappear

into the floor.

Listening

I hear a siren

screaming toward

a greater

drama.

...

Pin Prick 17

Two men of different skin

talking as they walk

down the street.

An obscenity is shot

from a passing car.

They pause, sigh

never stop holding hands.

...

Because Arima chooses such brevity in Pin Pricks Today's book of poetry has taken the unusual step of including three two-poem clusters instead our usual three poems. Pin Pricks merits this by being constantly surprising and consistently right on the mark. These poems are clusters of pearls.

Pin Prick 40

There's a crack in the floor

that lengthens each time

I step over it.

Its edge resemble

a cut on my hand

that will not heal.

Into it I've swept

the names I no longer

write on my calendar.

...

Pin Prick 51

The tortoise was fully evolved

before mankind existed.

There are trees that have outlived

civilizations.

Just prior to the Second World War

we split the atom.

...

At our office this morning all hell broke loose. Everyone was in high spirits because we had guests show up for this morning's reading. The ghosts of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Ezra Pound bounded into our offices around eight-thirty, they were arm in arm, Vladimir politely demanded vodka and Ezra demurely requested "strong tea".

Who knew that Milo spoke Russian? Milo and Mayakovsky are now sitting in the corner, Milo talking a mile a minute, Vlad occasionally shaking his head, "nyet, nyet."

The two giants joined in on this morning's read, each taking their turn in stride. Hearing Phlip Arima read in Russian, Milo translating in Vlad's ear, was a gas.

The old poets are never wrong. Not here at Today's book of poetry, and it might have been our best morning read yet.

Pin Prick 74

The elephant rolls over

and everyone applauds.

He stands on one leg

and everyone applauds.

He shits as he is leaving

and everyone pretends

not to notice.

...

Pin Prick 11

Abandoned trousers in the street

a young face at a window

someone waves an ancient flag

a glass of wine falls over.

A line of cars run out of gas

bets are placed on politicians

dogs are freed from a kennel.

A summer storm destroys a city

soldiers put their helmets on

debates are staged for television.

Sticks of incense near an altar

lose their scent to time.

...

NOTE: VLADIMIR INSISTED ON READING THIS POEM, THEN EZRA READ IT TOO.

...

Today's book of poetry would be remiss if we didn't mention how much we liked the very striking cover of Phlip Arima's Pin Pricks. Designed by Sarah Beaudin and using an electric image by Thomas Hendry, this book looks as great as it reads.

Arima's aphorisms and poems are proof in the pudding that bigger is not always better. Today's book of poetry had the ghosts of giants show up at our offices this morning to prove it.

Phlip Arima

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Phlip Arima is a Toronto author of three previous poetry books:Breathe Now, Damaged, and Beneath the Beauty. Broken Accidents, a collection of short fiction, was short-listed for a 2003 Relit Award. His poetry has been adapted to video by Vision Television, and his fiction to stage by Newfoundland’s RCA Theatre.

quattrobooks.ca

431

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:
Asbestos Heights - The Canonical Notebooks. David McGimpsey. Coach House Press. Toronto, Ontario. 2015.

You just can't stop reading David McGimpsey once you start, his poems are like potato chips you've kept in the freezer, perfect salty and crisp.

Asbestos Heights is what happens when one of the best poets in the land riffs in hungry excitement. Trying to tell you what it is about would be like pointing to a set of encyclopedia set in witty type, a baseball box-score sheet in strict limerick form and all the menus from all of the best burger joints from here to end of time, and saying "here, read this."

Pomegranate

There are two kinds of people in the world:

those who say they love to eat pomegranates

and those who tell the truth. But, yes, they're red,

and healthy foods taste either red or red.

Steak, cherry popsicle, red velvet cake.

Full of such health, I stayed up all summer

sketching a fringe play called Dangling Apricocks

and collapsing somewhere near Jolicoeur.

When somebody looks over their glasses and says,

'Look at it this way, m'sieur, you have a scar

but at least you still have most of your face,'

what can you say but, 'D'you like daiquiris?'

Healthy red medicines, or even those blushed

Pepto pink, die in the Canadian cold;

you can't keep Diet Coke at home for fear

the deliciousness will dull you to God.

...

These poems are peppered with characters like "Herman 'Babe' Melville" and McGimpsey cracks me up. I guess you could say that there is baseball in here, you'd have say it, but it would be a bit like saying that there's hockey in the Canadian dream. Baseball is just one of McGimpsey's personae. It could just as easily be astronomy - McGimpsey is going to soar regardless up into that stratosphere where we, the reader, simply want more.

Take this morning's reading. Milo simply would not sit down. Of course every poem he read sounded like a love poem and he was aiming them all at Kathryn. It was very touching and very funny, Milo was playing the giant ham in love and it was endearing. Milo's reading and McGimpsey's poems have left everyone in the office feeling better. Somehow these poems imbue the reader with some of the poet's confidence. How charming is that?

Walt Whitman

Whitman saw great things in the 'game of base'

and predicted that one day there'd be a team

in Albany called the Angel-Snappers

who would play shirtless in the summer sun.

When the rules disallowed 'soaking'

(throwing a runner out by throwing at him),

the fun of Whitman's game was gone,

and he died good in Camden, New Jersey.

Nineteenth-century baseball, as you know,

featured spectacular mustachio play

and ad endorsements were for 'stropping,'

'hamboiling,''stonerail fixing' and 'unsnaking,'

Whitman's baseball rap has no real substance,

of course; his thoughts on the game exist

to comfort all washed-up peanut-tossers,

long assured they were unfit for poetry.

...

David "The Crown Prince of Canadian Poetry" McGimpsey is going to absolutely delight his current legion of fans with Asbestos Heights and gain new poetry armies of followers from anyone who opens the book.

Today's book of poetry is convinced that no poet in Canada, or anywhere else for that matter, writes with more joy than our esteemed David McGimpsey. These poems sparkle with Coltranesque wit, McGimpsey riffs through scales that include all the known notes and a few of his own. It is splendid stuff.

Canadian poet Gwendolyn MacEwen kept four wrens in

her apartment in Toronto, once even sewing little Beatles

outfits for them.

Daily, I curl into whatever fries

and curd combination keeps me alive,

and by alive I just mean witlessly

reply-tweeting to Alyssa Milano.

I'm not saying I suddenly got too old.

I was too old years ago. That was clear

when I started buying things - anything -

that promised cheap relief of ankle pain.

My mother would cry if she knew how

much money I waste on taxis. I pray

I get through lunch without hearing someone

say, 'I, the Duke of Poetry, spit on you!'

I cry when I listen to those country songs

written at the height of the Iraq War.

I mean, those are the only things that ever

move me to tears now that my friends are gone.

...

Today's book of poetry declares today David McGimpsey Day! These poems will swipe that smile right off of your face and replace it with a smirk.

O Captain, my Captain!

NOTE: You have to read what Michael Robbins says in the BLURB below. What he said.

David McGimpsey

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David McGimpsey is the author of five collections of poetry includingLi'l Bastard which was named one of the 'books of the year' by both theQuill & Quire and the National Post and was shortlisted for Canada's Governor General's Award. He is also the author of the short fiction collection Certifiable and the award-winning critical study Imagining Baseball: America's Pastime and Popular Culture. Named by the CBC as one of the 'Top Ten English language poets in Canada,' his work was also the subject of the book of essays Population Me: Essays on David McGimpsey. He lives in Montréal.

BLURB
"David McGimpsey is unfuckwithable, poetrywise, and I'll stand on John Ashbery's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that."
- Michael Robbins

David McGimpsey

Reads at the opening night of VERSeFest

2011, Ottawa, Ontario

video: versefest's channel

chbooks.com

432

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:
Walking: Not a Nun's Diary. Concetta Principe. DC Books. Montreal, Quebec. 2013.

Compelling. Heart wrenching. Concetta Principe's Walking: Not a Nun's Diary grabbed me and would not let me go. Today's book of poetry would tell you that grace under pressure is where the hardest gems are formed.

Principe is a flaneur in the Michael Herr fashion and these poems are like punches to the stomach, little bombs that you can't avoid, arrows straight to the heart.

Hands 19

Carlos' best friend is a Jewish woman who sneaks from her

home to visit him. He hates all Jews who are not his best

friend, and waits for the final Judgement when the evil that

they have done will smite them down. Moshe has a theory

that the Arabs all age too fast: it is genetic. He smiles at

them, but that's all I've seen him do. The woman who lives

in Berlin refuses to look into the kitchen of the cheapest

kosher hotel in town. And there are Born Agains who

claim their Jewish roots in order to have the right to sit and

wait for the Second Coming. He is due soon. They identify

with the Orthodox Jews who keep to themselves.

and where is God?

ah, yes

those maps are precious

even if you do get one

by accident or manipulation

you must acquire the art

of reading what is not there

...

Got to the end of my first read of Walking: Not a Nun's Diary and was reading Concetta Principe's "Notes" and "Thanks" and lo and behold -- the first person she thanks is Luba Szkambara. Luba is a lady, a lawyer, a legend. Luba and I have been dearest friends for over thirty years. She is one of TBOP's biggest fans and supporters, Luba reposts almost every TBOP blog/review, bless her cotton socks.

Today's book of poetry is not surprised to hear that Luba had an eye on this poetry. Luba knows her stuff and likes it strong.

Concetta Principe isn't timid about walking into the mix, most of Luba's friends aren't. This book is a pilgrimage that unglues the politic of a centuries old struggle, Principe renders this titan conflict human, she cuts it down to scale.

Frontier of Construction - Gaza

For Rachel Corrie, aged 23. killed 5:20 p.m., Rafah,

Palestine, March 16, 2003 by an IDF bulldozer

If I were a soldier driving a bulldozer,

a peace activist would be a fly

on the wall of the house

I am here to destroy.

If I were a peace activist

I would look into the eye of the blind

and make hurricanes with the wind of my moving arms.

If I were a soldier

I would lie rather than admit

to murder.

If I were a peace activist

I would hate with all my heart the fact

that I am privileged enough to have a home

while theirs are broken in their faces.

If I were a soldier

I would hate peace activists even more than Arabs

because they grew up in happy parks

while our playground here is war.

I am a peace activist

wishing I could move my arms to make heaven fall

and crush the soldier with the weight of its light.

I am a soldier

trained to detect and wipe out danger

and ignore what can't be changed.

I am a peace activist

thanking God he is not my brother.

I am a soldier

Unable to sleep at night due to nightmares that haunted

my mother until her death.

My name is Rachel

and I would do it again and again and again

until he does what's right and kills the engine.

I am an Israeli soldier,

prepared to wait until my next life

to cry for the things that happen here.

...

Principe has a hard, firm hand and these poems show it, there is no slack in this rope.

This morning's reading was a relatively quiet affair. These poems marched into the room and shut everyone up. Very steady readings and intent listening. Now Milo and Kathryn are in the corner pulling down names of Israeli poets, Palestinian poets, Jewish poets, Lebanese poets, Syrian poets, and so on. Once those two go into the corner, that's the day. They have become a universe of two.

Kathryn picked the first two poems for today's blog, Milo choose this one:

My German 8

My father is an 8 year old in the dusty little town in the

rocky hills of southern Italy, Calabria, where they grow

olives and figs at their door. The smell of jasmine is a mist

dispersed by the towering puppet of the Madonna paraded

through the streets of her feast day in August.

I think it is a fall day when father runs through the dust

of inner streets to arrive home panting at his papa who, in

World War I, lost two unimportant fingers from his right

hand, and the lower half of his left arm.

They live on his war pension in one room with a stove.

My father says, "Papa, you must buy me a black shirt, now."

"For what?" replies papa.

"Because tomorrow we are having a concert. Everyone

in the school is in the concert and we must each wear a

black shirt."

"Give me your shirt," orders his father, and then puts the

good white cotton in the over, still hot from baking.

In minutes the shirt is done, covered in good soot. Papa

gives it to my father, still warm saying, "Tell them that is as

black as we can afford," and laughs.

...

Principe's sense of humour is sooty and we like that here at Today's book of poetry. "My German 8" reminds TBOP of that one time we were in a small barbershop in Barga, Italy. The elderly gentleman who had so kindly translated my hair-cutting needs, upon leaving the barbershop and entering the street, paused in the doorway, raised his one arm in a dramatic gesture, gave the fascist salute and then yelled "Il Duce!" at the top of his lungs. Then he turned, smiled, nodded and walked out into the Italian sun and the Italian afternoon.

Most of the time we don't know a damned thing. If we are are lucky, someone like Concetta Principe comes along with a book like Walking: Not a Nun's Diary and shines a little light.

Concetta Principe

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Concetta Principe is the author of two previous books-Stained Glass (1997) and Interference (1999)-and has written and directed for TV, including the Vision TV series on Biblical archaeology, The Naked Archaeologist. She is currently completing her PhD at York University, where her work considers representations of the messiah and the Muselmann in twentieth century cultural and intellectual works, arguing that these figures are evidence of a trauma of secularism dating to first century Judea. She has managed to find coherence in her unconscious compulsion to think politics and revelation together.

dcbooks.ca

433

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:
Paper Wings. Rosemary Clewes. Guernica Editions. Essential Poets Series 215. Toronto - Buffalo - Lancaster (UK). 2014.

Rosemary Clewes got my full attention when she Tom Thompsoned into poetry her kayaking experience in Georgian Bay. Then she turned all eloquent Billy Bishipish and flew me into World World I with her father. These were both excellent maneuvers.

Clewes writes with a thorough clarity that has you instantly involved and invested in her narrative. These narratives travel, visit the arctic, fall in love, age graceful and curious.

Shadows

When the cloudless sky has both eyes open

and you're wandering

in the dim keep of the old growth forest,

you might notice the absence of twitter.

The till's tinny ring after lunch

that sense and nonsense traded between the tiny tables

made you hungry for earth smell,

sun's hesitation amongst the ferns.

This is August after all.

You leave the protection of Sitka spruce and pine

for the sea, the eleven mile beach of light & light.

Sun, looking for a shadow,

falls headlong over you,

puddles a Quasimodo at your feet.

You take a photograph of this to remind you

the geometry of light is incalculable.

* * *

There's an epicene beauty peculiar to shadows.

You suspected you were lost to your real shape and name --

yet the sun's blind flourish rights itself,

assures you, you are a woman:

shade's voluptuary, flaring hips over sand.

* * *

Sundown's elongations are dying to go home.

Sit. Wait now for the faint music of your shadow's

protraction,

your shadow's shadow filling up with moon.

This is no trick.

Don't leave the desert beach

until you see

how ocean's ebb leaves ripple-repeat in sand,

the same signature over and over,

like stories you tell about yourself.

You have told so many, you think you know who you are.

...

Clewes tells us "the geometry of light is incalculable" but that doesn't stop her from showering her considerable light in calculated measures sure as a metronome. Today's book of poetry was touched to my fragile heart by how Rosemary Clewes understood water from a kayak's point of view. Kayaking is a relatively new experience for me but Clewes gives words to the most eloquent of my own imaginings in such a way that I am both jealous and grateful.

Milo read the flying poems this morning and imagined himself all Snoopy and Red Baron, he imagined himself airborne. Kathryn read the kayaking poems and is now doing a google-search for everything else Rosemary Clewes. After this morning's read Kathryn quickly nixed Milo's flying lesson plans and told him that they were going on a kayaking trip this summer. Neither of them asked me about holidays. Milo has never been away from electricity but he has also yet to say no to Kathryn.

I read the other poems and it was my pleasure. Paper Wings is from Guernica Editions "Essential Poets" series and Today's book of poetry couldn't agree more, every poetry collection should have some Clewes in in.

Dawn Paddle on Lake Huron

Before the wind so much as shivers the bay

I'm out in my quick yellow kayak

cutting trails through the reflected sky

bent on everything;

silence, light and big water,

the seeable clearness of under,

the slip-shod tongues of rubbled stone,

the green reach into shadowed boulders.

Some undercurrent of the lake's body always alive

quivers on the crooked field of stones beneath my bow.

I drift, seabird idle,

summoned beyond myself, restless for the never end,

the spine and flex in the mind,

the inside-out of water,

the sedges, the silt and swimming things.

Put me inside that too.

The gills, the cyclopic eye and the still mouth.

...

Today's book of poetry is now a Rosemary Clewes admirer. We're pretty sure that anyone else who picks up a copy of Paper Wings is going to be an admirer as well. This is smart poetry by a witty and wise woman who sees the universe with optimism. There's no sentimentalism in the Clewes canon but there sure is a lot of grace.

Bill

You died, and then I dreamed we were young again.

You fed me sweet cake, spreading it over my lips

so I could taste it. I wake to the scent of gardenia,

creamy petals, deckled brown

crushing against your blue serge suit.

I'll See You In My Dreams, always the final cut

the disc jockey played to wind up another holiday ball.

When I learned you were sick I wrote, reminded you

of the 'snowball dance' we won at Judy Blackey's party;

how you doubled me back over your arm, kissed me

under the mistletoe.

I wore pale yellow net, boned bodice with a frill

to hide my budless chest, and after supper

you 'dosey-doed' my strapless dress from front to rear

and when I thought you weren't looking

I swung it back.

Earlier still, your sweet trebles at our piano --

my brother, you,

rehearsing Gilbert & Sullivan's Mikado:

the light rain of your voice falling fifty years

like a continuing sentence.

How you noted my name.

...

Today's book of poetry was thrilled to be introduced to Rosemary Clewes and Paper Wings. Clewes struck me as someone I've been reading my entire life, or should have been, that's how natural her voice feels. TBOP felt like Clewes had been giving the low-down all along.

We're sure glad she's come along. This sort of charm and experience doesn't come along nearly often enough.

Rosemary Clewes

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Toronto poet Rosemary Clewes is the author of two books: Thule Explorer: Kayaking North of 77 Degrees(2008) and Once Houses Could Fly: Kayaking North of 79 Degrees (2012). In 2005, she was nominated by The Malahat Review for The National Magazine Awards and, in 2006, a finalist in the CBC Literary Awards. She has made seven trips to the Arctic, travelling by kayak, raft and icebreaker.

BLURBS

Paper Wings is born in the ground of the Bruce Peninsula and then hovers above its landscape like a hawk, surveying rock/shore/tree magic, moving into the imagination, the spirit, other landscapes, all the way to the Yukon and the High Arctic … Using her intense language and the white page in original patterns, Rosemary Clewes goes beyond what is real or what isn’t into the poetry of the spirit, the great journey. It’s a book of power and energy and image and rhythm and prayer – and marks her immediately as a poet to watch.
- Brian Brett

Here is a poet utterly taken by the universe, by the created world, natural and human, in all its glory and with all its artifacts, its deep and delicate mysteries. Her lines cut a clean kayak-path through the waves and currents of experience. Her words, with disarming ease and grace, pilot through the skies of the Great War with a father long dead, and perform surprise tangos on the gravel bar of a northern river. These poems are talismans for keeping the ordinary, extraordinary.
- John Terpstra

guernicaeditions.com

434

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:
Hick Poetics - An Anthology of Contemporary Rural American Poetry. Shelby Taylor & Abraham Smith editors. Lost Roads Press. Jackson, Wyoming. 2015.

Shelly Taylor and Abraham Smith have amassed a small poetry army and they are on the attack.

Abraham Smith had this to say in his introduction to Hick Poetics:

" so come on here where the dogs are bored and the doors are unlocked & the flies growl unoriginal in their nascarlefthandturnings, loam under a nail, for you, dear reader: this lush hustle of the beyond as heard & slapped or gentled awake by 40 poets, without only tourist eyes, who have known, in their times, a back road, a lost road, by ear & by hand."

Today's book of poetry rarely takes on anthologies so why Hick Poetics? Jim Harrison.

If his name is on it - I'm in. Turns out Harrison is in some splendid company. There are forty of 'em and they seem determined to burn the house down. These poems might be of rural origin but you're going to recognize the song they are singing.

Let's start with this untitled atomicbombpoem by Tim Early:

A dog beneath and a dog above. The trailer single-wide or double,

underpinned or not, on its lot or part of a larger park, has lost its

formaldehyde smell or not, is level or not, has broken windows or not, is

landscaped with mulch and monkey grass and hibiscus or not, has septic tank

that ceases to function during heavy rain. A hound kicked to death or not,

that spent its life rolling over other hounds in the muck beneath the stoop,

that gnashed into the ribcage of a deer, that was crushed onto the asphalt

or not, a nimbus of fleas around its asshole. Pill bottles on the counter, "an

illiterate person has my pills,""get me my scripts,""get me my fucking nerve

pill," a preacher's crotch distended into the River Jordan, a coterie of Elvises

in various stages of decline, crush it up, honeysuckle, kudzu, dandelions, ivy

trellis, railroad trellis, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. Sugar, sugar diabetes,

brown lung, loom-plucked scalp, missing fingers, SPAM, LITTLE DEBBIES,

nerve endings on fire, bad liver, glaucomyrrh, LOST TIME ACCIDENT,

GOODY POWDER, seven dust, asbestos in the brake pads, ROUND UP,

smelled like formaldehyde for a solid month, THEY THEY IS SOME DIRT

THAT IS PERMANENT!, he was an alcoholic and he married this woman he

met across the state line playing the poker machines and they moved in next

to her brother's liquor store and they kept him drunk all the time and he

died on the floor in own shit and piss and she got his pension and kept

on living in that house. Direckly, tireckly, notish, law they, lordy, I declare,

I'm fixin' to you fucks, bait, pison, deef, spicket, his'n, her'n, yourn, airish,

kindly, poorly, they said Mr. McGillicuddy lived in the chimney and he was

insane and had a long pecker and they did not say it was shaped like a scythe

but in my imagination it was shaped like a scythe and I saw him mowing the

field with his pecker and the other thing like I said was he was insane and

the older cousins would shove our heads up into the chimney so our heads

would just loom up into his insane darkness and he had long teeth and then I

figured it out he was metaphor for my Aunt Gypsy Rose Lee with the bullet

fragments in her skull and for my cousin who died in restraints at the mental

hospital in Morganton and for my grandmother's mania and for her. SATAN. "I

will beat your ass.""Gary got his ass beat,""that boy needs a fucking beating,"

"Eddie tried to kill that dude with a railroad spike he is a stupid bastard,"

Peppertown, Ragtown, Daryl was handsome and dated white girls they cut up

his face with a straight razor, thirty or forty cuts, each an inch or so long, they

sprayed David with bird shot just for fun, he killed his best friend for fucking

his wife invited him over to watch the race and met him with a shotgun at the

door when his friend turned away he shot him point-blank in the back, DALE

EARNHARDT HEALS THE SICK, you fucks, my brother lost fifty pounds after

Dale was killed at Daytona he was so depressed, JANE SMILEY WRITES of

THE SCOTCH-IRISH: "Mean as a snake and twice as quick...oh, excuse me. I

am losing my judicious tone...". Fuck you, Jane Smiley, Minstrel Corn

Pone. Minstrel Corn Pone. Whistle Pig, peaked, job it with a stick, job that

shit with a stick, catched that tree frog, I knowed to throw it back, Jesus face,

Sissy Holler, we is just folks and these is just some cultural interstices, "the

absence of teeth, and the compromised nature of the gums, give the tongue

freer range, and indeed, create an almost limitless field for linguistic play and

invention. Teeth have everything to do with the Lord and social Darwinism

and distract the poet from his orphic emptiness," gum it up in the Berkeley,

gum it up in the New Yorks City, POETRY! POETRY! POETRY! you subhuman

fucks.

...

Yes, Tim Earley got our full and undivided attention post haste. Earley also made for a spectacular reading here in our offices this morning, Milo took him on and did him proud.

Hick Poetics is modern country with lots of Earl Scruggs/Johnny Cash/Patsy Cline tucked into the back pocket for leverage. Across the board the poets in this anthology had the hammer down. Some very calloused and hard working hands wrote these poems.

Desert Snow - Jim Harrison

I don't know what happens after death

but I'll have to chance it. I've been waking

at 5 a.m. and making a full study of darkness.

I was upset not hearing the predicted rain

that I very much need for my wildflowers.

At first light I see that it was the silent rain

of snow. I didn't hear this softest sigh

of windless snow softly falling

here on the Mexican border in the mountains,

snow in a white landscape of high desert.

The birds are confounded by this rare snow

so I go out with a spatula to clean the feeders,

turn on the radio not to the world's wretched news

but to the hot, primary colors of cantina music,

the warbles and shrieks of love, laughter, and bullets.

...

Jim Harrison never disappoints me. Today's book of poetry has been a big fan of Harrison since 1977 when I picked up a copy of his book Plain Song at Toronto's This Ain't The Rosedale Library Bookstore (a great and dearly missed treasure).

For a tough old coot Harrison can be down right tender.

Harrison is a known commodity, the really pleasant surprise with Hick Poetics was that the poetry didn't fall off after the big guns had their say. Quite the contrary, the poets that were new to me were all pitching big league heat. Taylor and Smith must have had a ball putting this project together and they've chosen wisely.

The Dead Girls Speak in Unison - Danielle Pafunda

I felt a funeral, we whisper.

A shiver as the procession

marches cross our graves.

Such grave robbers

we, taking the spunk

out of the cemetery

and the blush off the urn.

Taking heart, and boiling it clean

like a beet. Deepest pink.

Under our nails flesh,

and a rivulet

runs the elbow.

Everything tastes dirt

in the companionable ground

where we lie open-mouthed.

And dirt means nothing,

just like life

or air used to do.

When it wasn't something

you could get a speck of it

on you.

Stop.

We sound almost chipper,

this flock of dun-colored birds.

Broken-beaked maracas.

...

Danielle Pafunda has a new chapbook from Birds of Lace Press called When You Left Me in the Rutted Terrain of Our Love at the Border, Which I Could Not Cross, Remaining a Citizen of This Corrupt Land. Today's book of poetry is a big fan of the long title and this one is aces.

Pafunda, Harrison and Tim Earley are all clearly from different poetry planets but all three fit quite nicely into the Hick Poetics quilt. And that is a good way to think of an anthology, as a quilt.

This one is rural, colourful and it will keep you warm.

lostroads.org

435

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:
Folding the Wilderness Within. Joan Shillington. Frontenac House Poetry. Calgary, Alberta. 2014.

Joan Shillington's second book of poetry, Folding the Wilderness Within, is rock steady from the first page to the last. These poems are gorgeous constructions ripe with tension, drama and passion.

Shillington's poems carve us a new notion of what it is to grieve, to lose. That loss is there like a weight but then these poems redeem and reward the reader with intelligent surprise.

The Neighbour Speaks from Beyond

Let me say, this is not how anyone could imagine it is to drown.

August water creeping over my soles, then ankles. Slow list of

boat and there I was, caught between nightmare and reality. I

tipped the last of the twenty-six past my lips then lashed my

wrists to a rope and eased myself across the overturned hull.

Rum burned in my gut as if I had swallowed glass from the

bottle. Haunted voices hurled themselves from a distant

shoreline. Words, distorted, sank. Confused letters on black

water. I counted the seconds between lightening and thunder.

Paper, scissors, rock. Our Father who Art in Heaven. Cold

cleaved my body. I rocked and swayed with waves. I became

boat. Storm. Water. Rain. Soon, I was not seen but could see. I

saw the dark beyond the cottage. Family. Wife. Children. A girl

on the opposite shore who could not come. And now, she has

forgotten my name.

...

Today's book of poetry picked out a hoard of poems from this collections that we felt you HAD to see. Shillington sets the bar rather high at the start of Folding the Wilderness Within and then she sustains that fierce standard like John Coltrane holding a moment of beauty in one note and turning it into a song. We liked this book. Shillington calls on the voices of the dead and the dying to help when no other voices will do.

Shillington mentions poet Richard Harrison as a friend and mentor in her notes. Harrison is an old and respected friend of Today's Book of Poetry. We don't quite go back to our teens, but close.

It is easy to imagine this manuscript going through Richard's disciplined hands. If these poems meet his standard then they certainly meet ours.

Ordinary

After Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what ordinary is, you must visit a funeral home

and view the body of a friend you made plans with just a few

days before. You must watch as the people dearest to you, buried

beneath flowers, sympathy cards and lasagne casseroles, have

their mother's urn pressed into their hands. You must stand in

their home and see the unmade bed and laundry still scattered

on the floor. Then you must hug and kiss good-bye, turn the key

in your car and drive home less than a week after the phone call

and discover that milk and bread still line grocery store shelves,

traffic lights change green, yellow, red. Your dog needs grooming.

You step into the rain, walk through the neighbourhood,

past the church. Yellow parking lines gleam wet, your dog busy

on new grass and then look you look up as an SUV pulls

alongside and see the smiling face of Vivian, who you haven't

seen in six months. She rolls down her window and you pick up

your wet dog, hold him as he shivers beneath your jacket. Your

feet sink into the soft earth as you walk across the boulevard and

then you stand in the rain as the city hums around you, and

become one of the two women talking in the quiet of a road.

...

The poems in Folding the Wilderness Within, romantic lamentations, prayers, praise-songs, made for a very passionate morning read at the Today's book of poetry offices. Our head tech Milo and our new intern Kathryn both brought in friends for the event - and as you all know - you show up for the morning read then you have to participate in the morning read.

Today's guests were an excellent addition to the poetry reading team. We here at TBOP believe that the real music in poems is best heard aloud. Ms. Shillington did not let us down. These beauties sounded better than spare change.

TBOP's morning reads are open to the public.

Summoning

Please come before winter.

Before north winds crumple veined leaves to the ground

and prairie grass is laid by snow.

Before river's rage slows to a trickle between ice floes

or low clouds obscure landscape and snow muffles earth.

Please come before frost snaps limbs or yellow birdsong

is erased by this season.

Please come before the absence of light weighs on me.

Please.

...

Joan Shillington's narratives follow a hard clean line and we like that, clean as the burn from the flame of a one-hundred and fifty proof flame.

Joan Shillington

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joan Shillington is a Calgary poet and has been published in The Antigonish Review, Fiddlehead, Grain, Prairie Fire and Freefall Magazine as well as four anthologies. She has won various contests over the years. She is currently a poetry editor for Freefall Magazine. Joan’s first book of poetry, Revolutions, was published by Leaf Press (2008).

BLURBS
These poems, at their best, achieve their power through withholding, to create an intimacy – sometimes gentle, sometimes brutal – that involves us even as it reveals the unspoken otherness of lives not our own. Though there is much loss here, the poems’ sustained attention to what endures makes the collection a celebration of the essential force of family.

~ Stephanie Bolster

Joan Shillington’s new collection mines “this threshold of ordinary” to show the gleaming moments in all our small lives. Anchored in the detritus of daily routine, Joan knows “each word and their order”, revealing memories as archetypal as a hand of cards. Her adolescent narrator is unforgettable, “flamed one hundred and fifty proof in metal spoons, / sliced elk membrane from out-of-season carcasses, / fur falling wild …” For Shillington, the dead “are just people who / are very quiet.” But Shillington gives the quiet ones space to roar. Her poems spill over with the full throttle details of lives thoroughly lived. This book illuminates, offering us moments of grace in our flawed world.

~ Lisa Pasold

Welcome. You’re in for a treat, a second book from a poet fully committed to the art. I’d say a perfect second book because I can hear, in the Tsar-like footsteps of the poet’s father in all his daring, bare face turned to the wind, the echoes of history’s grasp on Joan’s first poems. And then hear the change in the insights that arise from a story but flash free of it to stand outside of any particular narrative in order to fit with many. Consider, “I dozed beside sleep,” or, of a butterfly on her arm, “Now this little epistle pleats its bright wings slowly,” or, of anywhere: “Here, we are all strangers, separated by death pains and dusty roads, quiet about the wrongs in our lives.” These are poems filled with the double-pleasure of poetic truth: the secrets are disclosed, but the mystery remains.

~ Richard Harrison

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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:
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
[Sharps]. Stevie Howell. Icehouse Poetry. An Imprint of Goose Lane Editions. Fredericton, New Brunswick. 2014.

The Today's book of poetry offices are empty this morning. The windchill it is -39C here in Ottawa - but get this, it has warmed up from yesterday.

Milo, our head tech and Kathryn, our new intern, both called in this morning with a case of the St. Valentine's Day Flu. The same telephone number popped up on the screen for both calls, quelle surprise.

Happy, happy, happy Valentine's Day my poetry puppets.

/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ [Sharps] is made up of sledgehammer blows and razor-sharp ax swings. Get into it or get the hell out of the way, Stevie Howell cut Today's book of poetry to shreds. At every turn of the page Howell was able to bust up a different corner of my heart.

If you talk Rip Torn, if you dedicate a poem to Jimmy Webb you damned well better know the way to Phoenix and Galveston and every damned thing in between. And Howell does! She knows everything in some dark twist of fate. [Sharps] is an attempt to go public with her larceny and after reading it you're going to want more.

No Good

There's only one thing you can do

With a sawed-off rifle, a low IQ, and curiosity

about human biology.

You wake at sunset, yourself still,

a storm-eye of boredom, drink and LSD.

The only thing that

ever made sense, was tidy or clean:

how convenient and pre-emptive excuses are,

arising out of capitulated-to

desires, imbibing, cussing, so many

'good times.'

We can assume you were estranged

from yourself that night. But this is even truer

sober. We can guess your past

is a neighbour's unfinished basement,

and when you recline you feel his breath

on your freckles again.

You are a victim too, and the violence

of your life is all you've ever known. It gulps to unwind

its weaving, unknot, and breathe,

but undone can't be done

by doing.

Rabbit trapped, quickening,

you march a man through a thicket, where no one

can hear him plead.

You crush by moving, mulch

the recently fallen autumn leaves, snap branches,

snag open the tear in your jeans.

Your panting.

His panting.

It's a kind of transfusion.

...

There is some dark, dank and dangerous territory in Stevie Howell's world and she is fearless. Todays' book of poetry was dazed and confused several times before I cracked dawn at the end of Howell's [Sharps]. The language in these poems comes off of the page as though an Al Capone tommy-gun were spitting the words at you in a ratatatatatat exclamation, Howell spills it over the sides of the cup, she turns up the volume, more, more more more.

[Sharps] is exciting stuff - full stop.

Howell has the ability to both kick and kiss your ass at the same time. She is a poetry contortionist.

Airporter driver, ex-European tour guide, through Canmore says,

Canmore smokeless coal afforded war destroyers their

stealth. Stealthier. Carved out coal beds,

the town eroded, as a cough strip-mines and deepens.

The mine was shuttered in the seventies.

An open-mouthed, boomerang valley. The Olympic luge

was going to save it all, they said,

but the price was dear. Up on that peak, it is coiled and asleep.

They used if for that film about

the Jamaican boblsed team, Cool Runnings.

Now the wealth is folks clamouring in who aren't allowed

to buy a home in Banff. They come to ski

or hunt and try to stay -- royalty, celebrities, you name it.

But you have to own a business in town.

One woman, a doctor, schemed and plotted: promised

she'd open a medical office. Council said yes.

She bought a chalet up the side of a hill, leased a storefront on Buffalo,

placed a desk and phone inside, and never crossed

the threshold again. A bitter pill.

They filmed Brokeback Mountain on the Three Sisters. Little Big Man.

See those rocks there, those fingers

of rock like ribs? They say it's a man reclined. The Edge was filmed

up on that range. A terrible film, we can agree.

Alec Baldwin, his grimace and spittle-coated crescendos, beseeching

Sir Anthony Hopkins: How the fuck are we

going to get out of this hellhole? At the free screening

for the residents, we screamed: Look behind you,

you idiot! At the highway!

They dug animal tunnels beneath the road, like a colliery, and paved

animal bridges above. Cougars stalk their prey

from the bridges. Chain-link along the road discourages animals,

but doesn't repel them completely. Years ago, the big fire

cut us off from Banff. Wilder than anything Hollywood could dream--

smoke hurling bears, wolves, elk out of the woods--

ursus jaws, saber teeth, antlers, nautilus claws,

fur for miles, pummelling the fence,

droving their own hearts into the wire.

...

TBOP would be remiss if we didn't mention the spectacular cover on [Sharps]. Julie Scriver has given us an almost perfect looking book. Icehouse Poetry is making us all look better.

The best part of the Today's book of poetry world is opening up a book like Stevie Howell's [Sharps] If you love poetry, and we do, books like this fill you with hope, not necessarily in the world, but in poetry's ability to give you a real experience. Maryse Holder would have said "to give sorrow words."

[Sharps] is an ontological scat of particular beauty, it is a roller coaster ride worthy of St. Charles of Parker. Howell isn't trying to impress on us a system for a better understanding of God or faith but instead is sharing her rather unpredictable exuberance to light up some dark corners.

Ballad of Blood Hotel

A film on Bill Callahan,

I was to be the soundwoman.

The director and I rode a limo through Manhattan,

rented my equipment, then he queried what

I thought of every suit jacket he tried on at Kenneth Cole Reaction.

He insisted I sleep in

his 1-bedroom apartment,

informed me we would share a room when we visited

Drag City. Why didn't I move to New York to become

his live-in assistant? He darkened when I said I had a concert ticket

and plans that evening.

He filmed me while muttering

'I might not let you go -- and who'd know if I didn't?'

I made a fake call to a 'friend' as proof

someone was waiting for me. There's footage of this.

Outside, from a sticky payphone,

I cold-called hotels getting 'no, no, no';

until a vacancy by the Hudson, a scoliotic mansion.

A man inside a bullet-proof terrarium, lined in wire,

with taped up chicken-scratch signs: No visitors in rooms.

TV show laugh tracks

ricocheted through the ingress.

Four locks. Inside, a double-hung window,

the faint waft of bleach. The sun-faded floor

highlighted a dark rectangle where the bed had once been.

A black cockroach

the size of a butterflied sausage

hustled across the plaster wall and clung

to the window screen. I pulled down the pane, trapped him

in the lower sash, and he body-drew a panicked infinity sign.

Sweat spurted

from my scalp as I staked

blattaria. Closet: One wire hanger.

Nightstand: Bible-less. Beneath the bed: Not one mote

of dust. Behind the headboard, instead of bugs, an inch-wide

ray of blood sprayed

down the wall, thick as a surveyor's

fluorescent cross on an arterial. A line

steadied by force, the splatter deviated from mean,

skewed left. An ax, no doubt, one blow, to a person prone.

I kneeled on the bed and wept

about Woody Allen, Joan Didion, even Billy Joel's

insipid hit, A New York State of Mind. A class action lawsuit

ought to be launched over the decades of artists' propaganda that lures

you to New York, only to find yourself using a rooming house's

communal washroom,

where a man is asleep or expired

in a shower stall, door agape, water pelting his rump

like an instagram of a foreign countryside. 'Well, that's one way to escape.'

Bill Callahan fired the filmmaker on the third day.

There's all this.

There's all this unedited tape.

...

Stevie Howell just won over some serious fans here at Today's book of poetry. I can hardly wait to foist this upon the troops when they return tomorrow. /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ [Sharps] is so good you should wear gloves, it might cut you.

It got me right to the bone.

Stevie Howell

(photo by Neil Harrison)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stevie Howell’s poetry and criticism have appeared in publications such as The Walrus, Maisonneuve, The Globe and Mail, and National Post.
Her poems have been finalists for the 2013 Montreal International Poetry Prize and the 2012 Walrus Poetry Prize.
She is from Scarborough, lives near the Mink Mile, and studies psychology.

BLURB

"These poems are coded emergency and emergent code; hail, cut glass, cathedrals, systems, skeletons, and scorched earth. Stevie Howell has found a fault line underwriting Reality and turned this fissure, this terrible brokenness, into a lens. She sees the queasy, exact particular and can phase from its contours into metaphysics and back before we sense the ground shifting. As astounding debut. An astonishing collection, full stop."

- Ken Babstock, author of Methodist Hatchet

Stevie Howell

Live at the Thirty-fifth Taddle Creek Happening

(June 12, 2015)

video: Taddle Creek

gooselane.com

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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:
No Soap, Radio! Bruce Cohen. Black Lawrence Press. Pittsburgh, PA. 2015.

"In this life you are only a tourist and your camera is disposable." - Bruce Cohen

Today's book of poetry might just have a new favourite poet. Bruce Cohen's No Soap, Radio! is a freakishly big lighthouse in the dark while the rest of us are using candles. It's not that Cohen is shining his light on happy news and golden horizons, quite the opposite. No Soap, Radio! is beautifully grim.

Everything happens in these big, big poems. Cohen rolls out line after line that will take you to your knees, and he does it non-stop.

Take a deep breath before you read this:

Nervous Breakdown

After the opening credits, peasants are lugging their ship over mossy alien terrain.

All I'm saying is there are "circumstances" where people chip in, disassemble their

Mobility & carry it, piece by piece, to a more welcoming landscape.

Sometimes you flip on the car radio & the song you were unconsciously singing

Is actually playing; sometimes a person who you haven't considered since high school

Randomly impregnates your daydream then saunters into your favorite watering hole.

No! It only looks exactly like her, which is quadruple-freaky with a cherry on top.

I hardly half-know people I know. Half-people are the most complete though.

All I'm saying is who doesn't have metaphorical barbed wire encompassing his secret

Playground? In city congestion the honking seems arbitrary -- though directed

At some unknown target. I hardly know my address without

Checking the yellow pages; I lean on that phone book to preserve autumn, not just

To flatten the magnificent colored leaves. I review the expiration date on a can of split

Pea soup before I use it to prop up the sofa after the weakest leg collapses. All I'm

Saying is some stuff has multiple purposes to the creative mind. One human being

Can be an object of love or blame depending. Numerically, one through ten is not

Adequate; we should have extra digits, flexible numbers, spare pliable days, secret hands.

People in our lives who don't fall neatly into categories, & X-ray sunglasses.

Shouldn't we all pocket at least one saintly friend whose name we never learn?

All I'm saying is we're too obsessed with terminology & order. You see large household

Appliances or sawed-in-half sofas on the highways but never the culprits. Darling,

I think I would like to dump this malfunctioning washing machine off the next overpass.

All I'm saying is I'm really trying, but I'm not sure there's meaning to life

Except to make each other feel okay at times, with unsolicited utterances that may not

Have any loyalty to the truth, but are untucked-shirt-drunk with kindness,

Which is all I'm really saying. We're all extremely depleted & human poverty makes us

Immobile not less mobile, huddled in jungles not exactly jungles per se, trees leafless &

The car skeleton tireless with no windshield but windshield wipers intact.

We all stash photographs in our wallets that are decades from the tender.

I feel odd when I see a neighbor kid driving his parents' luxury car for the first time.

All I'm saying is sleeves nicely camouflage food stains, autumn foliage has cowardly

Tendencies, half-people have mirror-issues & re-wear underwear they take out

Of their hampers & waiters nibble sent-back desserts. Unfinished entrees into eternity.

All I'm saying is life is heart-wrenching enough without making it worse.

We need to scrape barnacles off the underside before the ship is seaworthy again.

Because I'm sick of my music I'm not sure what song I want played at my funeral.

All I mean is I change my mind maybe too much. If God is so clever how come--

How come time travels more slowly than our lives?

Impure forgiveness is like some nasty metallic sugar substitute, the aftertaste.

Where is the actual sweetness? Cars run out of fuel yet we don't junk them

& buy a new jalopy. It ain't perfect is all I guess I'm saying

But there are perfect moments. I want to be unquestionably loved; that puts me

Out there, doesn't it? Doesn't it? I have no qualms about ripping open my favorite

Shirt & inviting, begging, daring the world to stab me as though I were some

Delusional Superman. How come time does travel more slowly than our lives?

...

This morning's read was simply manic. Everyone was deep-snow-happy. We've had at least eight inches of snow in the last couple of hours and it is still coming down as though it meant it. The whole city looks like a bowl of vanilla ice-cream. It makes people silly-happy as it slows down the world. And that must be just the right mood for reading No Soap, Radio! because Milo brought the house down, he was operatic and howling.

Kathryn, our new intern, went the other way with her reading, quiet and slowed right down to a crawl. It was like she haunted the room with the quirky sermons of a drunken priest full of wisdom and spite.

Everyone loved these poems. They made us feel small in a vast world and then Cohen would say something that made us know he had not given up.

Regrets Only

My old man knew I always loved music so he pinched a stereo

That "fell off a truck" that dinged all my original recordings,

Made them skip, even though I replaced the diamond needle

& weighted the crooked arm with Scotch Tape & Indian pennies.

When he left for his extended stay in heaven without life

Insurance it was clear the concept of angels was a misconception.

God's associates were more akin to Insurance Claims-Adjusters

Screwing you out of your life's fondest moments. It ain't

Like there's a shortage of things anyone prays would turn out

Differently. At the reunion the cheerleader who doesn't show

Is the girl who bludgeoned her parents with unused garden tools--

No one is surprised by the late arriving transvestite who

You could just tell even then. There are a hundred types

Of forgetfulness wedged between I can't find my car keys

& who am I! I'm at the age where I shouldn't have too many

Individual regrets, when my life is record-skipping into one

Massive regret. Each evening I overfull my whisky glass above

The imaginary line. You are afforded only so many opportunities

To adjust your life--most of us ignore them, zipper our parkas

& trudge head down into the bitter wind, high-stepping

Unpredictable precipitation. You look around--no wonder

Gods a haunted insomniac. You have to admit people were

A very fancy idea. The girl who murdered her parents, when

She comes up for parole, is just an abstraction her sisters nix.

The mixed bouquets, after a few days, regret their involuntary

Violent departure from the cultivated soil though they've earned

Journeyman status at the slow art of decay. Despite my bitter

Intuition, I've been a lazy, angry, irresponsible father, a horrible

Example, pounding the coffee table, threatening what I didn't

Even mean, nicking the mahogany with my father's wedding ring.

...

Cohen takes on all the big subjects, finds a perspective that whittles them into Cohen-reason. Take Tom Waits, Will Rogers, Ron Koertge, St. Raymond of Carver and the inebriated ghost of a plucky Anne Sexton and swirl them around your head for a bit. Today's book of poetry is convinced these dandies and dozens more have taken up residence in the noggin of Bruce Cohen. How else could he spew such splendid poetry like whim. Every page of No Soap, Radio! is a different and exhilarating slap in the face.

American Vacations

If you are honest with yourself, you'd say life is disappointing

& disappointingly incomplete, more than just a little something

Is missing, like flat soda on a scorching day with no ice; the ice

Machine's busted: a sign posted at the truck stop. You're a fan

Of crushed over cubes anyway. At the motel you peek under

The Murphy bed and instead of customary dust bunnies you find

Actual monsters. The problem with humanitarian traps is once

You trap them you have to deal with releasing them somewhere.

You're not a killer after all. Mornings you wake hopeful till

The bathroom mirror butts in. Your family would run smoothly if

Everyone committed to sing language. Arguments would be more

Vanilla compact. Jerked around by your choke collar, your life tugs

You in this direction, not that. This Saturday, instead of a picnic, tour

The countryside to select the idyllic location for your grave. Isn't this fun

Kiddos? Some knucklehead is scratching his lottery tickets while you're

Trying to pre-pay for your fill-up of high test. Mostly you wish you had more.

Or less. Sometimes even weather fucks you in the ass. Historically speaking,

People paid off their mortgages, had mortgage burning shindigs,

Whisppersnappers torched draft cards and millionaires fired

Their non-Cuban cigars with "fitty" dollar bills. Now people are wicked

Different. It's all very different. The only liberating burning is our skin

On vacation. You'd rather not leave a child or dog unattended in a car.

The windows rolled up, on a sweltering beach-day. And what do you do

About the pieces of fruit rotting in the bowl, drosophila incubating on

The browning bananas and bruised mangos? This is your life now: the heater

And air conditioner simultaneously stuck on full blast and time's a stashed snowball

With a piece of glass meticulously placed in the center. You tuck it in the freezer,

Saving it for summer, snowball monopoly. But there are too many flip-flops

In the world, more flip-flops than feet. Successful people vacation with successful

People. That's why the unsuccessful spill red wine at parties and their suits seem

Wrinkled, out of date. Even Freud dreaded, some days, seeing his patients,

Unable to drag himself to the office. Let's all call in sick for no reason!

Some people nap through their lives and suffer insomnia during

Their deaths. Suspend all your superfluous subscriptions.

You might as well change your phone number. Not unlisted though.

You're not completely anti-social. Just once before you die, China

Would like to visit you. In the grocery, cows with anxiety

Between the meat and milk sections organize an impromptu stampede.

While brushing your teeth the foamy truth rabidly seeps out. Finally,

In this life you are only a tourist and your camera is disposable.

...

Today's book of poetry is completely smitten by the poems of Bruce Cohen. No Soap, Radio! is a small book, 6" x 7", and it may be the biggest thing I've read in years.

Cohen has mastered an utterly splendid dark geometry of the human heart.

Bruce Cohen

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born in the Bronx, New York, Bruce Cohen’s poems and non-fiction essays have appeared in over a hundred literary periodicals such as AGNI, The Georgia Review, The Harvard Review, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner & The Southern Review as well as being featured on Poetry Daily & Verse Daily—He has published three previous volumes of poetry: Disloyal Yo-Yo (Dream Horse Press), which was awarded the 2007 Orphic Poetry Prize,Swerve (Black Lawrence Press) and Placebo Junkies Conspiring with the Half-Asleep (Black Lawrence Press). A new manuscript, Imminent Disappearances, Impossible Numbers & Panoramic X-Rays recently won the Green Rose Prize from New Issues Press and will be published in spring 2016. A recipient of an individual artist grant from the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism, prior to joining the Creative Writing faculty at the University of Connecticut in 2012, he directed, developed, and implemented nationally recognized academic enhancement programs at the University of Arizona, The University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Connecticut.

BLURB
"Mutability may be the rightful subject of the twenty-first century, and if it is, Bruce Cohen’s No Soap, Radio! is its funny, wise, and cantankerous handbook. These poems, part Luddite, part intrepid time traveler, inspect, reject, and grumpily give in to the racket of change: the slippage of language from pun to insight, gender transition at the gym, the endless potential of marital argument late capitalism-style, and vacations on which picking out burial sites is every bit as much fun as finding real monsters under the motel room bed. The mission here is to 'pinpoint where it all went chaotic,' and each poem charms us with oddly reassuring reminders of demolished places where, like Cohen’s displaced Tu Fu, we finally discovered we were supposed to be."
—Lisa Lewis author of Vivisect
"No Soap, Radio! is a carnival ride of poetry. This book is whipsmart and strange, unsettling and joyous. Bruce Cohen interweaves the comic and the absurd with heartstopping tenderness. Crackling with jubilant complexity, these poems whirl and gut punch through today’s weird living—where 'most of us / are in a constant state of personal revision.' To shape his body for the beach, Tu Fu is 'all about protein.' But the vivid grace of Cohen’s poems is the way he Frankensteins together giddy and goddamn! In No Soap, Radio! you will find yourself the lucky winner of the most coveted prize in the midway—magnificent fun, jabbing you back into the exuberance of being fully alive."
—Alex Lemon author of The Wish Book and Happy: A Memoir
"Bruce Cohen knows how to surprise and entertain. In No Soap, Radio! Tu Fu explores New York City, a sheet of paper falls 'Icarus-like,' and a man confesses, 'I speak in a Felix the Cat voice/ after a third vodka.' Wise to both the vetted and the lowbrow, the speaker in these poems is forthright, curious, and snarky. But beneath the exhilarating swagger, a world-weary loneliness pulses. Cohen transforms the loneliness into 'gossip & little reminisces' that tether—sometimes briefly—one life to another life. Highly entertaining, yes. But these poems are also empathic, brave."
—Eduardo C. Corral author Slow Lightning, Yale Younger Poet Winner

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TBOP is expierencing some very strange technicals quirks and difficulties today. Milo is in danger of being fired. Hopefully we will be back to our regular broadcast on Thursday. xo
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.

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"
and that for our readers in Europe there had to be notification of the use of those "cookies. Please be aware that TBOP may employ the use of some "cookies" (whatever they are) and you should take that into consideration.

Today's book of poetry:
A Crown for Gumecindo. Laurie Ann Guerrero. Paintings by Maceo Montoya. Aztlan Libre Press. San Antonio, Texas. 2015.

"I will offer his name, Gumecindo Martinez Guerrero, as a symbol for all the missing names in all the history books past and future." - Laurie Ann Guerrero

And so begins Laurie Ann Guerrero's sonnets of grief and love.

A Crown for Gumecindo is an eulogy, crisp and elegant, for a beloved family patriarch.

Without You I am Cactus

Like yours, mi muerto, the last time I saw you,

October's eyes are gray. Today, you are

not a dead man: October resurrects.

Today your blood, my blood, fills the private

rooms of my barbed and thorny limbs. I have

come to love October in the name of you.

Today, I say, you're back. Today, swallow, rain.

Today, I soften on the earth; you emerge

from it. Today, I breathe life into your

dead lung. Today, I am God. Today, I

beat marrow into your bones. Today, yours

are the hands that pull spines from my spine.

Today, I shed my cactus skin for flood;

we'll look at our reflection in the mud.

...

Laurie Ann Guerrero is creating new myths from her own family legend. This suite of poems is an attempt to distill the agonies and sorrow of loss into a palatable and reaffirming elixir and it works.

Aztlan Libre Press has given Guerrero a lot of room to play in this beautiful over-sized hardcover book. A Crown for Gumecindo is hauntingly illustrated by the foreboding paintings of Maceo Montoya and they bring a solemn majesty to the project. Today's book of poetry is rather naive about American painters but we thought that Montoya darkly inhabits the space between painters like Maynard Dixon and the great Mexican painter Diego Rivera.

Stone Fruit

Good? I would ask. Good enough, you would say
of the wine we made from plums. Didn't we,
for years, tend the mothertree? Didn't we,
for years, prune, pluck, hold in our hands the purpled
bodies bursting, that begged: me next, have me?
Weren't we so nourished in the nerve? Someone
is buying our tree. You are reduced to pit.
I put seed in dirt, wait for you to come
back to me in a jar by the window.
You are not growing. Aren't you a plum?
Little red, little kidney, little mouth
singing, calling, I'm here! I'm here! I thought
the dirt would give you something to take hold of:
I've buried everything I've ever loved.

...

It was solemn reading in the Today's book of poetry offices this morning. You can't read the tender and longing love poems Laurie Ann Guerrero has written to deal with the dying, death and absence of her beloved grandfather without emotionally accessing your own personal book of the dead.

For me, my father, Russell William White, died a short six months ago. Now I wear his old shirts and his old winter coat. I wear his old watch and silently pray that some of his goodness wears off onto me. Milo's grandmother died last spring and he was gutted, she'd been the one who introduced him to poetry. Our new intern, Kathryn, she hasn't had a relative or anyone else particularly close meet the end of their mortal coil yet - but she read real sad and pensive as she gave A Crown for Gumecindo a voice.

Goodbye Sonnet

And yes, I am the Laurie Ann you left,
who begged: Don't go alone. Don't cross the line.
  Aren't you a plum?
I've learned to keep my finger off the trigger,
How many times did you say
That to me? How many times?
spare the goats who've come to say hello,
shaking in their skins, faces split like mine--
like yours, mi muerto, the last time I saw you
   sing.
I look for your reflection in the mud,
Let me say your name again:
that oddity that was put in my hands.
Gumecindo
I hear your song--water rising from dirt:
Good? I ask. Good enough, you say.
I've buried everything I've ever loved:
Gumecindo
You are always going to be dead.
    I sing to bees:
Gumecindo
Gumecindo
One day in hot July: my kind you were gone--
only the page on which to place your crown.

...

Memory holds all the high cards when it comes to dreamscape. Laurie Ann Guerrero has honoured her grandfather in the most timeless way -- she has made his name eternal.

For all time, when the name Gumecindo Martinez Guerrero is called out, those of us who've had the pleasure of reading A Crown for Gumecindo will shout out as a chorus:

¡Presente!

Laurie Ann Guerrero

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Laurie Ann Guerrero was born and raised in the Southside of San Antonio, Texas and was named Poet Laureate of the City of San Antonio in 2014 by former mayor, Julián Castro. Her first full-length collection, A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying, was selected by Francisco X. Alarcón as winner of the 2012 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize and published by the University of Notre Dame Press in 2013. Guerrero holds a B.A. in English Language & Literature from Smith College and an MFA in Poetry from Drew University. She is the inaugural Poet-in-Residence at Palo Alto College in San Antonio and continues to live and write in her hometown.

BLURBS

"Guerrero skillfully shapes the sonnet to build a crown of memory, tenderness, and grief for a man who becomes more than a man in this collection...Gumecindo, in these poems, becomes our beloved, our grandfather, the carpenter and king of our broken hearts."

- Natalie Diaz, author of When My Brother Was an Aztec

"After the death of her beloved grandfather, Guerrero turns to the work and craft of poem-making and collaboration as methods of survival. The result is a tenaciously, keenly honed crown of sonnets that live in the territory of loss, resilience, and grief. In this book, the formal projects are profoundly linked to the heart of the content: interruptions, ruptures, and layers of texts seem to be as much about the anxiety of losing, loss, and, sometimes, of forgetting. A Crown for Gumecindo was worked for, and earned, and now without great resistance. The result of that work is staggering."

Aracelis Girmay, author of Kingdom Animalia

"This crown of sonnets and the Maceo Montoya paintings that accompany them embody the complexity and depth of elegy. Wrought from both love and anguish, Guerrero, one of our finest lyric poets...invites us to the complex and dense universe of familial bonds."

Carmen Gimenez Smith, author of Milk and Filth

"A craftswoman, the poet makes home with her hands. Digging up dirt and memories and dreams. Guerrero carves this heroic crown out from the depths of her sorrow and lays her grief, her mourning, down on the page. We feel the fragility of time and life, the absence, the loss, but find refuge in these poems masterfully constructed by her hands, the foundation laid in Gumecindo's song. An exquisite collection."

Virginia Grise, author of blu

Laurie Ann Guerrero

A Crown for Gumecindo

Book Trailer from Aztlan Libre Press

aztlanlibrepress.com

439

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:
Frayed Opus For Strings & Wind Instruments.
Ulrikka S. Gernes. Translated by Patrick Friesen & Per Brask. Brick Books. London, Ontario. 2015.

Today's book of poetry has never read Ulrikka S. Gernes in Danish because I'm a uni-lingual fool, I can only imagine how fine that would be because she is a pistol all the way through Frayed Opus For Strings & Wind Instruments. Patrick Friesen and Per Brask have given Gernes an English voice full of humour, wisdom, wit and some serious chops, her timing is all jazz.

K WAS SUPPOSED TO COME WITH THE KEY, I WAS

to wait outside the gate. I arrived on time,

the time we had agreed on and waited, as agreed,

outside the gate. I waited a long time, waited

and waited, waited a very long time. I stood

next to the security guard from Securitas, who also

stood outside the gate. I waited, the security guard

from Securitas just stood there, he wasn't waiting,

it was his job to stand there, he didn't take

any breaks, he just stood there, keeping an eye

on what he was supposed to keep an eye on. K

didn't show up. I waited. When the security guard

from Securitas finished his shift I went home

with him, sat down across from him at the kitchen

table, ate spicy meatballs on rice, summer cabbage

followed by green tea and mango from Brazil.

In the night he laid his human hand between

my shoulder blades before we both stumbled

across the threshold into a brand new now.

...

Ulrikka S. Gernes has almost certainly read Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I say that because Gernes has found the same light to shine into corners that illuminated Kundera's opus. These poems are great songs about the details of ordinary life - writ large and modest at the same time.

What Gernes is suggesting is that "the world is magical and dangerous," she says so in her very helpful and enlightening Afterword: Notes on a Collection of Poems Considered at a Distance.

I HAVE TO FIND F. I DON'T KNOW WHY AND I DON'T KNOW

where, but if I find F I'll get the answer to an important

question. I don't know the question, but at some

point I'll be told. It's something to do with an

envelope. And a parrot feather. I'm in London.

I have a photo of an English row house, the kind of house

there are a million of in London. I have no address.

I only know that it's in London and that F is in the house

in the photo. I must find that house. I have two large

suitcases that are very heavy. In addition I have a rucksack

on my back. It too is heavy. I can barely carry my luggage.

I also have a dog. A small, black and white dog which is

very lively. I have it on a leash but it constantly runs

away from me. Its name is Ziggy. I call and call after it.

It leaps and jumps and barks. It's impossible to control it.

We walk through dark, narrow passages and alleys that

dead-end and we have to walk back. It seems hopeless,

but I mustn't give up. I yell and yell after the dog that

constantly skips away from me. In my pocket I have

the photo of the house, I have to stop continually, put

the suitcases down, take the photo from my pocket

and compare the house in the photo with the houses

we pass. In this way seventeen years go by.

...

Gernes asks "have I loved, have I loved, have I loved enough." in her poem On H. C. Anderson Boulevard During Rush Hour and it may be the most important question any of us ever ask of ourselves. I think it is the main discussion taking place in Frayed Opus For Strings & Wind Instruments. Gernes gets to these difficult places where our hearts hide and harvest those secrets we think we need.

These poems start off with a possible lightness, they are crystal clear, so easy to access and inhabit, but Gernes is no lightweight, she owns a hammer. Once you're inside these delightful and assassin deadly poems - she has you. Then the fireworks ensue, time and again, her precise knowledge of where to apply gentle pressure determines how the reader's heart beats.

REMEMBER, LONGING DOESN'T DIMINISH OVER THE YEARS,

rather it grows, he says, and I know that the allusion

isn't directed at me as we both grow quiet at the sight

of tradesmen with naked torsos in the midday heat

in the square in front of the church, both of us marvelling

at a neat pattern of body hair across a chest, down along

the navel, the play of muscles in the network of drops

of sweat, the bird-like flight of an upper lip's arch; arms, hands,

the bend in the neck and its toss, to be a man, to be a man,

to be a woman, love knows no age and no gender,

love is a window, and maybe it's because the air shimmers

short of breath from heat, death and lavender

that all at once I wish for nothing else but for him

to hold me on a discarded mattress in the parking lot beneath

the Tears of St. Lawrence, he can fuck me in the ass, if he wants,

for a moment the both of us can abandon who we are.

...

Controlled abandon, precise as tacks on a map, this translation is slick in the very best way. Ulrikka S. Gernes should be very happy about her treatment at the hands of Friesen and Brask. Today's book of poetry will be raving about Frayed Opus For Strings & Wind Instruments, we'll tell anyone who listens that we think Gernes is the Danish Susan Musgrave.

Today's book of poetry can offer no higher praise.

Ulrikka S. Gernes

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ulrikka S. Gernes was born in 1965 in Sweden of Danish parents. At the age of twenty-two she moved to Copenhagen, Denmark, already a published and highly acclaimed poet. Her first collection, Natsværmer (Moth), was published in Denmark in 1984, when she was eighteen years old. Since then she has published an additional ten collections, all of them received gratefully in the Danish press. She is also the author of two books for children, as well as many short stories, songs, and various contributions to literary anthologies, art catalogues, magazines, newspapers and Danish National radio.

In 2001 A Sudden Sky: Selected Poems, translated into English by Per Brask and Patrick Friesen, was published by Brick Books. Over the decades, poetry has put her on several flights across the Atlantic ocean to read at festivals in Canada as well as sending her on missions to numerous other locations across the planet. She manages the estate and artistic legacy of her father, the internationally known visual artist Poul Gernes, and lives in Copenhagen, Denmark with her daughter Perle. Frayed Opus for String & Wind Instruments is the second translation of Ulrikka’s work published by Brick Books (2015).

Ulrikka S. Germes

reads from Frayed Opus For Strings

& Wind Instruments

video: Brick Books

brickbooks.ca

440

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:
Tailgating At The Gates Of Hell and other poems. Justin Karcher. Ghost City Press. Syracuse, New York. 2015.

Tailgating In Hell To Snowmen With No Snow, Poetry From The Mind Of Justin Karcher

Although the cover of Justin Karcher's Tailgating At The Gates Of Hell and other poems may be the worst we have ever seen we here at Today's book of poetry do not judge a book by its cover. Good thing.

Tailgating At The Gates Of Hell and other poems is an energetic and enthusiastic rantish ramble with no seat belts, bad brakes and a foot-to-the-floor mentality. Karcher is from the more is more school of thought and these poems rampage over the pages like Ti Jean in that Columbia backfield before that broken leg.

We're Worse than Frankenstein's Monster

The one night, Sam and I are pretty drunk on the Champagne

Of Beers. We aren't really talking or anything,

But the silence is cracked open like an egg

When I foolishly reach for a can of beer and Sam says,

"Sorry, I drank it all," callously and inconsiderate.

"Come on Sam, " I say, "I chipped in on the beer."

I want to punch him in his lax face; you have like no idea,

But I quickly forgive him. "Eh, it's ok," I say. "This beer tastes

Like blood and nickels anyway." Sam is quiet like Tibet

And I wonder if he took some monkish vow of silence.

His mind must be on other things, like Russia invading Ukraine

Or how ISIS is recruiting fellow hipsters from England.

Blood will be spilled and here we are,

Drunk in front of Advance Auto Parts

Like we always are on Tuesdays,

Trying to reassemble our bodies,

Hoping we've put together stronger and happier.

Suddenly, Sam throws his can and says, "Shit man,

The world really is a hospital made of snow.

It's always melting, falling apart. No cure really lasts."

Ever since his near-death experience at 17,

Sam's been obsessed with death.

The moon's out, so I try changing the subject.

"You ever look at the moon

And think it's some tongue-tied piano,

Like deep down you know that

Cratered cue ball has a song just for you.

But it's been quiet, eerily quiet, so you wonder

When God's gonna shoot it in the corner pocket?"

There's no answer.

Sam must not be speaking again. Well, one day,

Sam and I will break into Advance Auto Parts

And steal from their superior selection of jumper cables,

So we can jumpstart our lives.

...

Karcher's sidekick Sam is the perfect foil to the deadpan and nonplussed world these poems navigate. Justin Karcher is never trying to mount a formal front, he has great stories to tell and settles into a conversational tone. Karcher is also a playwright and many of these poems could be monologues, they certainly can be theatrical. And there is nothing wrong with that.

Today's book of poetry likes to see a little chaos theory in action and Tailgating... is all about that.

There's more than enough vibrant energy in Tailgating At The Gates Of Hell and other poems to start any poetry engine. It certainly revved things up in here this morning at the reading. Milo and Kathryn did their usual stints, both of them are getting better at it every day. Even Bruce from shipping and our receptionist Jane read poems this morning. That was a first.

Bruce surprised us three different way from Sunday, this was his selection:

The Only Casanova in This Dead Country

"She was so hot," Sam says. "It was like she was blasting out

chunks of magma. When we finished, the whole apartment looked

like Pompeii. Anyway - how'd you do with your lucky lady?"

I light up a cigarette and think for a moment.

"I was depressed the next day. Does that answer your question?"

"You tellin' me you didn't make a formaldehyde fetus?"

"Oh we had unprotected sex. I don't know. Something doesn't sit

well inside."

Sam puts his hand on my chest. "There's nothing comfortable

inside that heart of yours," he says, "It's an abandoned

archaeological site. Like America."

...

Karcher's hard edged romanticism has an extremely sharp point on the end of his blade. Tailgating At The Gates Of Hell and other poems is all hard surface, crusty demeanor, but that is fine. Today's book of poetry doesn't mind. We like kick in the ass poems from time to time.

There's some Kerouac in here, some Bukowski bloodline running through Karcher's pen and you all know what we think of those two here.

Snow Angels Going to Their First AA Meeting

2-something in the morning

I've been drinking for 16 years

I suppose that means my alcoholism can get a driver's license

Does my loss of appetite regarding just about everything

Imply that I'm not beastly

Or am I making out with depression again?

Buffalo night, how you shove that Janus mask on my hormones

I either masturbate my tragedies away or cry out comedies

Living on the bipolar Rust Belt

And my cat's carrying a toy in her mouth

And meowing like an orchestra in heat

TV tells me ancient aliens played Russian roulette

With our DNA & here I am smoking real cigarettes

Because ecigs are like a daydream & I want the real thing

Fantasy & celibacy ain't for me, not here

So I go outside & collect rain drops in a jelly jar

& drip them on the living room floor in the shape of an angel

Like I'm Pollock because when feeling freezes over

those raindrops will be a snow angel.

...

Although constantly buoyed by unrealistic hopes and dreams there is no way out for anyone in Tailgating At The Gates Of Hell and other poems. It all reminds us here at Today's book of poetry of the comic/tragic and legendary Canadian film by Bruce MacDonald, "Hard Core Logo." There is the same innocent nihilism in ethic and style. Plenty of broken bottles for every broken dream.

And then there is that heroic YAWP, the one that keeps moving us forward. Catch this while it is still on fire.

Justin Karcher

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Justin Karcher is a playwright and poet living in Buffalo, N.Y. He is the Co-Artistic Director of Theater Jugend as well as its Playwright-in-Residence. His recent works have been published in 3:AM Magazine, The Buffalo News, Plentitude Magazine, Melancholy Hyperbole, and more. He is the recent winner of the 2015 Just Buffalo Literary Center member's writing competition.

He tweets @Justin_Karcher.

Justin Karcher

reads his poem All Balloons Must Pop, All Animals Must Die

from his collection Tailgating At The Gates Of Hell and other poems

Live at Milkie's on Elmwood

10-18-15

ghostcitypress.tumblr.com/store

441

Today's book of poetry:
Blond Boy. Lucia May. Evening Street Poetry. Dubin, Ohio. 2014.

"Forgiveness is the answer to the child's dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is made clean again."

- Dag Hammarskjold

Lucia May starts Blond Boy with this marvelous quote from Dag Hammarskjold about forgiveness and it is good to keep this in mind when reading through this murky pool of regret and hope.

Blond Boy is May's poetic attempt to forgive her father and to forgive herself for crimes and misdemeanors large and small. May's father was a young boy in Poland at the outbreak of World War II and came of age under a Nazi occupied Poland where he suffered great and unforgettable torment at the hands of German soldiers. May's anecdotes make clear that her father saw things no young boy/man should ever see.

After the war May's father got to the United States and found May's mother, they married, May was conceived and new tragedies and drama unfold.

Luck Runs in My Family

In Poland

during World War II

a certain Nazi

liked to stand my father

against a wall,

walk back

and fire

his pistol

as close as possible

to my father's head

for sport.

My father didn't

feel lucky,

frozen against the wall,

but he'd live

to call it luck.

My brother Billy

died by shooting

himself. He didn't

know that luck

has nothing to do

with Russian Roulette.

I am lucky

that my daughter is

lucky to be

recovering.

When she burst

into the house

with her eighteen

month medallion

I felt lucky

I didn't feel lucky

driving her

to those first

counseling meetings.

Her scabbed arms,

shaved head,

and scaly warts

made me look away

as if she were a snail

being torn

from its shell.

...

There's no reconciling May's father's tortured past and turning it into a reasonable present. May's father becomes possessed by a religious furor and his obsessions alienate and eventualy shatter a tattered family. Clearly haunted, the father is doomed.

There are poems set during wartime Poland, others in an American home in the late fifties, early sixties, and it is falling apart at the seams while May's father tries to fix the cracks with sermons.

These poems are a dysfunctional family's epitaph and it is clouded with ghosts that go unnamed.

May wants to let go of the past and these poems may be her only shot at redemption, they certainly feel that way. This is intense and compelling stuff.

For Any Abiding Place on Earth

after Carl Dennis

All my grandmother needed at her farm in Poland

was time to raise the crops of corn and cousins.

I met my grandmother when I was seven.

As our taxi from Warsaw came to stop in the dust

she sputtered and screamed around this barnyard

with the alarmed chickens. She tugged off her apron

and tucked her hair into her babushka.

I stand at the farm's grave and find only ceramic tile pieces

in the disemboweled earth where the kitchen once stood.

There are no abiding places on earth, unless memory is a place

and I doubt it. Gather all memories and they wouldn't fill

one square inch of this remembered ground.

They are lighter than dust and even less confined.

...

That last verse is gold. Solid gold.

Luck can cast some pretty dark shadows and the Nazi occupation of Poland left scars beyond what Lucia May's father could rationally endure. These scars were big enough to scar generations and whether or not May is out from under this horrid history depends on who she forgives.

These poems are, in spite of the father's faults, an apology for her father, to her father, and then to herself.

May is mining some awfully deep torment in Blond Boy. It makes for some startling poetry.

Blond Boy and the Plan for Eastern Europe

(Generalplan Ost)

Cattle wagons transported

children aged six to ten years

to temporary selection camps.

A sympathetic Nazi guard

could sell a Catholic child back

to its Polish family for 25 zloty.

The blond boy was twelve in 1939

when the Nazis invade Poland.

He is too old for Germanization,

too old to be desirable enough

to undergo racial exams by experts.

Some younger Polish gentiles live

and die as Germans, unsuspecting,

but he is too old to forget Polish

nursery rhymes and his Polish name.

Armed Nazis seize him from the family farm

and he is conscripted as a Zivilarbeiter--

civilian worker--forbidden to swim

in public pools, to ride public transport,

to own a bicycle, or under penalty of death,

to have sex with a German.

By law the blond boy's wages are lower than

German citizens', his nutrition substandard.

He chips stone seven days a week

in a German quarry. He may not attend

church and must wear a purple "P" badge.

His superiors encourage him to sign

the Deutsche Vaolksliste for benefits

like more calories and freedoms.

He refuses to sign and after the war

is spared being tried in Poland for high treason.

...

Blond Boy is full of brave poetry from the wounded heart of a survivor. Nothing in Blond Boy is going to make you happy - but you are certainly going to glad you spent time with this riveting book of poems.

Lucia May

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lucia May is a poet and longtime arts advocate in St. Paul, MN. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Main Channel Voices, the Evening Street Review, Hot Metal Press, Paperdarts, the Prose-Poem Project, Pemmican, Talking Stick, Tall Grass, Burnt Bridge, The Widow’s Handbook Anthology, The Awakenings Review, The Mom Egg, Verse Wisconsin, Kurier Polski Min-nesota, and the Little Red Tree Inter-national Poetry Prize 2010: Anthology. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Verse Wisconsin for her poem “Explain in an Essay.”

BLURBS

In Lucia May's inaugural poetry collection, Blond Boy, she records with gracious precision the personal horrors of the boy who would become her father. Taken from his home by the Nazis, the boy's humanity was forever scarred by his experiences. Of his torture, Lucia writes, "...the boys accepted their penalties/like cows on the farm before the knife." Lucia weaves his story into her own through poetry that is brutally honest while being "bathed in the light" of forgiveness. She manages well the difficult task of showing grief and loss unsentimentally, with a glance, a gesture, an image that glows vividly on the page. This slim book offers readers the chance to share in emotions as complex as Bach played with panache on a well-tuned violin. At the end, we are left with memories that are "lighter than dust and even less confined."
—Linda Back McKay, author of The Next Best Thing and Out of the Shadows: Stories of Adoption and Reunion.

A man who suffered a wretched childhood extended bitterness and perverse misery to his own children. He became a religious fanatic, who in his distorted view deemed the music of Bach and Beethoven wholly unacceptable. Growing up in a nightmarish environment, his daughter, Lucia P. May, did not fall victim to depression, suicide, alcoholism or drug addiction. Miss May escaped the quicksand of her father's cruelty through art, music and literature. She writes exquisite poetry that shines light in the darkness.
—Robert O Fisch, author of Light from the Yellow Star: A Lesson of Love from the Holocaust and The Sky Is Not the Limit

Lucia Piaskowiak May writes without any sentimentality whatsoever about her father's life in World War II Poland and about the shadow he cast over her own life. She compresses enormous emotion into tense spare lines to create poetry that is fierce and true.
—Keith Maillard, author of The Clarinet Polka

A memoir in poetry, in Blond Boy Lucia May tells the tragic and amazing story of her father's survival in Nazi-occupied Poland, his marriage to her mother, her visit to Auschwitz, taking violin lessons and attending healing services at a Presbyterian church. This is a story well worth telling and it comes wonderfully alive in all its mesmerizing details. These memories will dance in our minds for a long time. May writes of them as 'lighter than dust and even less confined.' May we all be thankful that she has captured them for a moment.
—Mary Logue, author of Hand Work and Trees

Lucia May's book, Blond Boy, is a tough, intense collection of poems. It's a book about what luck means. It's a book about a father, that blond boy who survived World War II, and where the luck of surviving led him. It's a collection that offers its readers portraits of a family, of how religion affected them, vignettes that allow us to see a family's suffering, and how pain and discord shaped their lives. We are given stories that cover many years, and we see how the lucky and unlucky in this single family lose or find their strength, their sense of purpose inside a family, inside history. This collection is blunt in its truth-telling, and ambitious in its range. I won't forget these poems.
—Deborah Keenan, author of From Tiger to Prayer and so she had the world

To see the trailer for Blond Boy please click here:

https:/4WhB8z2prT8 /youtu.be/

eveningstreetpress.com

442

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"

Waiting For The Albatross - Found poems from a deck hand's diary, 1936 - Jack Shreve/Sandy Shreve. (Oolichan Books)

We Can't Ever Do This Again - Amber McMillan (A Buckrider Book/Wolsak and Wynn)

A World Without End - Matthew Graham (River City Publishing)

Multitudinous Heart - Selected Poems - Carlos Drummond de Andrade (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Hive - Christina Stoddard (University of Wisconsin Press)

4 Rms w Vu - Susana H. Case (Mayapple Press)

Astonished to Wake - Julie Suk (Jacar Press)

The Green of Sunset - John Brantingham (MoonTide Press)

Pin Pricks - Phlip Arima (Quattro Books)

Asbestos Heights - David McGimpsey (Coach House Press)

Walking: Not a Nun's Diary - Concetta Principe (DC Books)

Paper Wings - Rosemary Clewes (Guernica Editions)

Hick Poetics - Shelby Taylor & Abraham Smith eds. (Lost Roads Press)

Folding the Wilderness Within - Joan Shillington (Frontenac House Poetry)

/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/ [Sharps] - Stevie Howell (Icehouse Poetry)

No Soap, Radio! - Bruce Cohen (Black Lawrence Press)

A Crown for Gumecindo - Laurie Ann Guerrero (Aztlan Libre Press)

Frayed Opus For Strings & Wind Instruments - Ulrikka S. Gernes (Brick Books)

Tailgating At The Gates Of Hell and other poems - Justin Karcher (Ghost City Press)

Blond Boy - Lucia May (Evening Street Poetry)