Today's Book of Poetry

Today's book of poetry:

Cobourg Variations - a bunch of poems and an essay. Stuart Ross. Proper Tales Press. Cobourg, Ontario. 2015.

Today's book of poetry has written about the work of Stuart Ross before. Of course we have, our guest room is called the "Stuart Ross" room.

Today we take a look at one of Ross's recent chapbooks, Cobourg Variations - a bunch of poems and an essay. In checking out our Today's book of poetry bookcase, aside from the nine full length trade poetry collections, we counted out over thirty-five chapbooks. It was hard to keep them straight as both Milo and Kathryn went bonkers. We all love Stuart Ross here at TBOP.

So today's disclaimer: I've known Stuart most of my adult life, he is one of my dearest friends, I was recently in his wedding party, and I love him like a brother. Today's book of poetry (Michael Dennis) has a New and Selected coming out in the spring of 2017 from Vancouver's Anvil Press (bless Brian Kaufman's cotton socks) and Stuart Ross is not only editing it, he's selecting the poems. That's how much I love the man.

And I adore the poet.

Cobourg, Night

If I shove the boxes

of books aside, drag

the curtains, crane my neck

just so, I can see the clock

on Victoria Hall. It

chimes twice. My parents

died in another city

75 minutes away. The story

of their lives, as filmed

by Ealing Studios, is screened

on the night sky. Here

it is exotic. Tonight:

the screening. Tomorrow:

the Pulled Pork Festival.

Down below, vines have tumbled

from the brick walls, encumbering

the porch. A green ribbon has

unraveled. I wind it tightly

around my well-sucked thumb.

...

You would be right to think that I am totally biased about the poetry of Stuart Ross, I've been crazy about it for years, decades in fact. You always know that his poems will both amuse and instruct. Cobourg Variations is no exception. The BigSmokeBigEasyBigCity boy has found a new home in a small town and it has been a perplexing and befuddling experience.

We are used to a surreal embrace from the Ross canon and he doesn't let us down in Cobourg Variations, there is dog talk of taking over the town and other strange assaults. There is also a tender homage to Ross's hero David W. McFadden. McFadden is Canada's best least appreciated poet and Ross's affection for him should be a clarion call to us all.

Cobourg Variations contains a series of crisp haiku that show us that Ross is warming up to his new environs whether he wishes to or not.

Cobourg Haiku #7

At Lee's Coin Laundromat

anything is possible. You can

catch your breath in a lint trap.

...

The essay that comes with these poems is titled "The Terrors of Tiny Town: An Essay". Ross is familiarizing himself with the local fauna, flora, tundra and so on. The beautiful thing is that in spite of himself he is coming to the conclusion that he is a small town boy after all.

This has to be distressing to Ross who simply loved his large city. "What has happened to me?" he must say. From here it would appear you can go home again, even if you have to move to a small Ontario town to find it. Didn't someone wiser than TBOP say that "home is where the heart is"?

Closer

Every night I sneak out of bed,

creep to the east end of Cobourg

and shove the town one inch

closer to Toronto.

It will get a bit bumpy

over Port Hope,

but then clean sailing

all the way to Bowmanville.

After that, a dozen or so

easy kilometers again,

until the Durham Region

demands all my ingenuity.

A few nights' rest in

the parking lots of Scarborough,

and then my home

will be home.

"This is the bridge

where In the Skin of the Lion

happens." I'll whisper

to Cobourg, "and this is

the library named after

Judy Merril." And Cobourg

will look up at me and

say, "What I really want to know

is where did Juan Butler live?

There are scenes from The Garbageman

I just can't wipe out of my mind."

...

Ross jokes about dragging his new home closer to his old but always forgets that he is a different man now. He's too busy writing new poems to actually move Cobourg. In fact I suspect Stuart Ross is one good Indian restaurant away from finally finding his place in the world.

Cobourg, who knew?

Stuart Ross

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stuart Ross is the author of nine full-length poetry collections, two books of short stories, two essay collections, one solo and one collaborative novels, and dozens of chapbooks. He is the winner of the 2010 ReLit Prize for Short Fiction for his collection Buying Cigarettes for the Dog and was awarded the only prize given to an anglophone writer in 2013 by l'Academie de la vie litteraire du 21e siecle for his poetry book You Exist. Details Follow. Stuart has taught writing workshops across the country and coaches writers one-on-one. He blogs at bloggamooga.blogspot.com and lives in Cobourg, Ontario.

Stuart Ross

(near the window where he can spy on Victoria Hall)

propertalespress@gmail.com

443

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:
The Genome Rhapsodies. Anna George Meek. The Ashland Poetry Press. Ashland, Ohio. 2015.

Winner of the Richard Snyder Publication Prize

bri·co·lage

ˌbrēkōˈläZH,ˌbrikə-/

noun

(in art or literature) construction or creation from a diverse range of available things.
"the chaotic bricolage of the novel is brought together in a unifying gesture"
- something constructed or created from a diverse range of available things.
  "bricolages of painted junk"
Anna George Meek's The Genome Rhapsodies are a series of delightfully curious bricolage. She draws together the oddest coupling of sources and distills them with beautiful alchemy until they become epiphany.

Meek provides her sources for some of the poems and they range from odd Wikipedia finds to Sigmund the Freud, Harlequin novels to patent applications. Even when the sources aren't listed you know Meek is distilling something that is going to turn into fascination.

Meek tackles some big issues with her diverse range, the struggle families endure coming to terms with ailing and aging parents as senility and time steal their voice and reason. Meek travels back and forth in time to reach for the connections to her family that will make her continued existence possible, reasonable and palatable.

Heirloom

I inhabit lace, and delicate folds.
On my wedding day, I wear my father's
Swedish blond and shy face, and the skin
of my mother's dress. And she, years before,

in her mother's, and her mother's. The body fits
against heavy silk faille, horsehair crinoline, gores
and flares. Corset of bone. Before the bobbin,
before the vote. In my adulthood, I have been given
the shape of women I've never known.

A terrible force gathers in Germany, the year
my young grandmother holds lilacs to her hip.
From her honeymoon balcony, she leans over the parade

to spit into Hitler's hair. Startling
and translucent stuff, in half-story's half-light. The drape
of weighty public event under family memory's
inscrutable lace: these are hems that touch those

who still live, and must care for them. I have yet to clean
the stains from the old dress, my wedding now years
behind me. But it's impossible. When Brahms dies,

my great-grandmother marries, and the electron
is discovered. Suddenly,
atoms fill her skirts, and the second symphony
becomes the sepulcher of a man. Consequences of fabric

and accumulation. Women collect in the dress
the alterations of their various body sizes;
I know precisely where I stop short of my mother.
And how her shape becomes me.

...

Today's book of poetry is impressed by the range Meek has at the end of her magical fingertips. This poem about her wedding dress, "Heirloom," tells the stories of several generations in one elegant swoop, and we get some spittle directed to towards that terrible man. Beauty.

Many of the poems in this collection are labelled as "Bricolage" but all of them draw on a rich well filled with vast resources.

Muscle Memory
My husband is bathing our baby
in the clawfoot tub. She rides its pleasures;
the porcelain ocean swirls and slaps.

Not water alone, uterine longing, such glistening
muscle; in my daughter, a nautilus
where mind lives. Its chambers open
deep, each quiet curl of her neurons. Her body
rocks and leans into the silver underworld.

From the next room, I watch her
as I play the violin; its music wanders
the hall, the bath, where my daughter
doesn't realize she listens. I study
the curious ventriloquism of my hands/
Their fingers strike down like diving birds.

No longer able to speak, my father listens
to the music, eyes closed, and swaying.
Under his lashes, tears brim. He cannot remember
my name from my daughter's, yet always,

when he embraces me, his hands fall just so
between my shoulder blades.

I can hear my father's breath lifting and falling;
hear the pads of my husband's fingers
massaging the baby's skull. One day her body
will remember his hands, just so, and who I may be,

no matter. For a moment,
I lift the bow from the strings; sound
dissipates; rosin atoms spin away in clouds as they will.

...

Today's book of poetry is breaking our own three poem rule today simply because we couldn't decide which poems not to use. There was heated debate in the TBOP offices and it was only after I agreed to use all four poems that cooler heads prevailed.

I couldn't not use "Dracula's Housecat" which you will see in a moment. Milo insisted on "Muscle Memory" because he has a soft, soft heart under all those black clothes. Kathryn insisted on "Heirloom", she read it twice during this morning's reading. "Haunted House" found its own way to the table.

Dracula's Housecat
More lithe I am, and living,
than he who also hunts by night.
We whisper the fields where titmice quiver;
we sip black water from the kills.
I leap the grass blades, the air unsheathed,
moon the shape of my eye. He's quick
for a little bat, but I feast first:
mortality coils in my haunches.
I eat and bare my belly in bloodroot
to tease the lean eagles who desire me.
And still, the bat is suckling his corpse.
I would rip off his wings and roll his soul
immortality between my paws,
but he alone lets me in before dawn
to climb the castle drapes. Later,
I rapture in sunlight while he sleeps
in his box--which I have only once
misused. I love my warm body thrumming.
I love my delicious short life.

...

Meek strongly believes in the interconnectedness of all things, it's apparent in the operatic range of her curiosity. Anna George Meek is questioning more than she is answering in The GenomeRhapsodies but they are such interesting questions. She wants to understand where language comes from and where language goes when her father can no longer make words.

Meek takes it all on, the good and the bad and she makes good music out of it. As a result our morning read here in the office was a spirited affair.

Haunted House
The last owner of this body
still creaks the floorboards,
makes books and dishes fly
and smash against the walls.
She turns the lights on and off
at odd hours of the night.
I wish I knew what she wanted,
wish she would show herself,
and then I would understand her
slow destruction
of the place.

...

Too good.

Today's book of poetry has to confess that some of the poems in The Genome Rhapsodies were above my pay grade, they made my research staff a little testy and caused us to open a few unopened pages of our dictionary. Yes, here at Today's book of poetry we still look stuff up in books.

But we don't mind being challenged and were enthralled from the the start. Anna George Meek has some serious poetry chops.

Anna George Meek

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Anna George Meek has published in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Seneca Review, The Missouri Review (where she was awarded the Tom McAfee Discovery Prize), Water~Stone, Crazyhorse, and dozens of other national journals. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, two Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowships, and an Academy of American Poetry Prize. She has also been a finalist for the National Poetry Series (three times), the Minnesota Book Award, and the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Her first book, Acts of Contortion, won the Brittingham Prize in Poetry; her chapbook Engraved won the Snowbound Chapbook Competition and was published fall 2013. Meek lives with her husband and daughter where she sings professionally with the Vocal Essence Ensemble Singers, and is a professor of English in the Twin Cities.

BLURB

"The Genome Rhapsodies opens with Gregor Mendel’s question: 'What is inherited, and how?' Like strands of DNA, the syntax in these brilliant and moving poems intertwines with the infinitely recombinant moments and utterances that comprise our lives, revealing that what we inherit, first and finally, is language itself. … 'Try to Remember Before Language,' one poem urges us, but of course we can’t. These poems re-member us in language and reveal how the past becomes us, in every sense of the word; they are gorgeous, unforgettable works of art.”

— Angie Estes, 2014 Snyder Prize Judge

"There are moments in our lives when a veil seems lifted and the interconnectedness of the world is revealed. The Genome Rhapsodies seems born from these epiphanic flashes. Lacing her own poetic voice together with a disparate array of voices and texts through bricolage, Meek’s poems explore the many forms of inheritance. As her poem built from her father’s lines, 'The Voice That is Mine and Not Mine,' points out: we become the words poured into us. Where we begin and end is not easily definable, after all, 'The boundaries of an organism are nearly always disputable.'"
—- Matt Rasmussen, author of Black Aperture, National Book Award finalist

"What makes Anna George Meek’s The Genome Rhapsodies so impressive is its honesty about and alertness to everyday experience: 'Dear sachet, dear cherished household hooks / and torch and toys, I am coming back a stranger / to the materials of being alive.' Her musician’s ear is particularly keyed to the bare-boned contradictions of life, such as nature vs. nurture, and joy vs. grief. American poetry could use a good dose of her tenacity, wit, and spirit. Meek is that rare poet who wears her heart on both sleeves."
— David Roderick, author of The Americans and winner of the APR/Honickman Prize.

"In Genome Rhapsodies we consider the basic components of the human body, the notes that make familiar music, and single memories composing the whole of memory itself. As the collection builds toward rhapsody, it is at first many other fine things: “The script/for an ancient story,” the verbal virtuosity and “dumb throbbing” of “derivations of grief” in violent times. Most often, Genome Rhapsodies is a linguistic bricolage in which meticulous focus on the micro juxtaposes with the macro to move us toward the hugeness of union. Anna Meek’s tone is intimate, erotic, and intellectual at once. Each body flows, she shows us, into the next body like “a plate of honey” both “sweet, and ominous.” We touch one another, whether we want to touch or not."
— Heid E. Erdrich, author of Cell Traffic, New and Selected Poems

ashlandpoetrypress.com

444

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:
Floating is Everything. Sheryda Warrener. Nightwood Editions. Gibsons, British Columbia. 2015.

Sheryda Warrener's second book of poetry, Floating is Everything, is seasoned with a quirky optimism that Today's book of poetry finds very satisfying. You start off thinking that these poems are going to do particular things but then when you least expect it -- ghosts. There are traces of them everywhere.

Warrener also has a suitably dark sense of humour and Today's book of poetry is always as sucker for that.

from Trace Object

Patterns loosen, collapse. Floating gold and black diamonds

shimmer unhinged from their place in the world's effortless

pattern. Fill in with new. Shortly after he died, she sat on

the corner sofa watching Wheel of Fortune. Turned toward

the nothing that was once her husband and said, Hello Love.

There's an underside to everything! She's sure he called

from his cellphone, and when she slid open the patio door

he was there at the corner of the lawn looking back at her.

Into his phone he saying, I know what you did. Meaning

he watched her get ride of all his shoes and he's not happy

about it.

...

At this morning's reading Milo teared up when he read "Oh, Yoko" and then Kathryn looked at him like he were made of gold and dipped in honey.

The rest of us tried not to intrude on the blue sparks that ensued.

Warrener's Floating is Everything pulls off the difficult yet charming trick of sounding sweet while being serious as a heart attack. Warrener is able to look at some difficult horizons and still come out shining because she has procured the goods to remain hopeful.

That, and there's ghosts.

Oh, Yoko

Imagine on repeat on the record player,

Front cover, a polaroid of a man's head inside

a cloud. Back cover, a photograph taken by

a woman whose husband will warp is body around her body

in the famous picture by Leibovitz circa 1981

wearing a black sweater and jeans while he's naked

just hours before he's shot, and still no one knows

what to think about it. In Tokyo, a red rotary telephone

floats on a plinth in the middle of the exhibit space.

The label on the wall reads. At any moment, Ms. Ono

might call. When the phone rings, if the phone rings,

what would her voice sound like? A could wrung

inside out, a cloud with her husband's face inside.

Vibrations travelling thousands of miles

through wire, frequencies transmitted without

our knowing, only to arrive. I pull on

a black sweater and jeans in solidarity.

My son, three, wants "Oh Yoko!" again, makes a performance

of singing along. There are things he does

and doesn't understand. His voice lags a little behind,

but in the early morning dark he's got that hopeful

human feeling right.

...

How sweet is that! Warrener does that, hits sweet and completely avoids saccharine.

Floating is Everything takes us to outer-space and back again with Yuri Gagarin and Warrener quotes Elizabeth Bachinsky (author of The Hottest Summer in Recorded History, Bachinsky has round table status here at Today's book of poetry). Warrener is giving us a little taste of the best of heaven and earth.

These poems range dramatically in subject matter, everything from the air quality in Reykjavik to the hair quality on the chest of Steven Morrissey (The Smiths) is up for discussion. Everything gets the same intelligent discourse - and then there are ghosts.

Pools in Florida

After Ginger Shore, Causeway Inn, Tampa, Florida, November 17, 1977

by Stephen Shore

Never mind that it's November and there's a woman to her

waist in it. We can't see the woman's face or maybe it's a

girl. Her aquamarine suit ties at the shoulders. Miniature

wet bows. The frame of the photograph makes a triangle of

ledge and railing. She's looking past the sun chairs reclin-

ing toward the natural bay. The pool water is cheerful, no

one's arguing against that. The auburn of the girl's hair and

skin makes for great proximity effect. Does she feel lonely?

Dusty rose of the bay in the distance, bright sunburst pat-

tern on the surface of the pool. Yes, she's longing to be else-

where. Just past the sun deck there's something invisible

worth having.

...

Sheryda Warrener's poems can carry a sense of suspense like the promise of a delicate dessert and they can be earthy like the smell of your backyard after rain. that is a knock out combination any day.

Today's book of poetry, Milo and Kathryn, we all liked Floating is Everything very much.

Sheryda Warrener

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sheryda Warrener is the author of two poetry collections, including her debut Hard Feelings (Snare/Invisible, 2010). Her work has been shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, the Arc Magazine Poem of the Year, the Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, and was a runner-up for Lemon Hound’s inaugural poetry contest. She lives in Vancouver, where she teaches at the University of British Columbia.

BLURB

"So much of measurement / is the pleasure of going / by feel..." suggests Sheryda Warrener in Floating is Everything. And there is great pleasure to be found in her whip-smart poems, in their cunning associative leaps. Elsewhere she writes, "When seeking a pattern, subvert the pattern." Whether tracing the inward depths of memory and relationship or the outer realms of place and space, Warrener's boldly imaginative poems take this as their credo. By the light of her generous and ranging intellect, readers see the world anew. Here is a collection that strives to get that "hopeful, human feeling right."

- Sheri Benning

nightwoodeditions.com

445

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:
But For Now. Gordon Johnston. The Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series. McGill-Queen's University Press. Montreal & Kingston, London, Ithaca. 2013.

At the heart of it Gordon Johnston's But For Now is a celebration of each new day, each new breath. Johnson's But For Now is a declaration of faith and hope.

Johnston has many questions about faith, about the very existence of God, that counterbalance the certainty of his own belief, yet underneath it all the reader can see that Johnston's God is omnipresent.

A New Psalm, of Uncertainty

How shall we speak of you, O God?

Is the thunder crack your angry voice?

Are we children huddled under a blanket of faith?

We are needy, O God, and we need to tell you so.

We need plants to grow, and come to grain or fruit.

We need animals to offer their milk, and themselves.

We need a roof or tarpaulin, a blanket, a cup.

How shall we speak to you, O God?

If we beg, do you listen to us?

Hear us, O God, in our neediness and fear,

And in our uncertainty, here,

In our threadbare faith.

...

These are careful poems, each of them constructed with some inner musical ear that gives them all a quiet power. Johnston tempers his certainty with a gentle and experienced knowledge that questions his own belief.

Johnston is suggesting that the way we look at God and faith may need to be rethought and he is doing it with charming eloquence. But For Now is never proselytizing, which is a good thing for this heathen, he is always on topic and that means he is always searching for a better understanding of our time on this mortal coil. Johnston is never trying to muddy the water, quite the contrary, But For Now is Johnston distilling faith into reason with music.

Factorem Caeli

from CREDO

Most days don't need heaven; here's enough.

Don't even like the sound of it, what I've heard:

all those people, and me not good in crowds.

Why would anyone want to be immortal?

What would you do every day all day, if they call it

day there? And rest eternal sounds the same, but night.

When I dream of reaching to hold you, my arms go through

you;

I hear your voice, but it comes from too great a distance;

you appear in a crazy story, then you vanish.

What I want heaven for, more than anything,

is to see you again. I need to see you again.

In heaven I want to hear you, and see you, and hold you.

...

Factorem Caeli translates as "maker of heaven".

Reading But For Now was a treat, underneath everything is a feeling of quiet certainty that exudes a calming joy. Johnston has finessed faith into a questioning beauty with this work and the resulting poems have a tight logic that is all their own.

When I tell you that there is a lightness to these poems do not think I mean they are slight, rather that they are illuminated from within by Johnston's hope. Too much? Today's book of poetry stands on every word -- you won't be able to read But For Now without experiencing it.

Finally The End of Poetry

Finally,

the end

of poetry.

No more

poems, or

the need for them.

We shall write to each

other now

from the heart

with the best

words we

can find

in the full light

of everything we know.

...

At least one of our staff had the pleasure of being a student in a Gordon Johnston poetry class at Trent University, and look at where we are now. Today's book of poetry was honoured to read But For Now and sends a big dip of our hat to its author.

Gordon Johnston

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gordon Johnston lives in Peterborough where he taught poetry for forty years at Trent University.

mqup.ca

447

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:
Harvest the Dirt. Wil Gibson. Great Weather for MEDIA. New York, New York, 2015.

Harvest the Dirt, Wil Gibson, front cover border grey

Spend some very enjoyable time reading Harvest the Dirt by Wil Gibson and you might be inclined to think that he is one dark and rough piece of bark.

That is until you read his terribly tender ode to Kurt Vonnegut Jr., "So It Goes." There is almost always an exception to the rule.

Gibson's rules might run along the lines of the "drink 'em, smoke 'em, crank 'em when you've got them" school. These poems describe a difficult life of great turmoil and torment, a road full of bad turns and bad choices.

So how does Gibson turn this into such bittersweet poetry?

What I should've said to the older gentleman

who happened into the bar during a poetry

reading and stayed for the duration:

I saw you nod in approval with the first bent heart poem you

heard. Was that the first time you heard someone else speak your

mind? I saw that you dropped a twenty dollar bill in the passed

hat payday, so I assume the open wounds on stage were enough

for you. I saw my Granddaddy nod the same way the first time I

read him a poem. He knew the poem was about him and smiled

a struck match to burn away the lost cause from the dust bowl

lump in my throat. In your open mind I saw Granddad's pride. In

your accidently art-filled evening you gave back to me a reason for

writing I thought I had lost or forgotten.

...

Gibson is a romantic, no doubt about that, but he doesn't give in to it easily. It's all kicking and screaming, coming across the finishing line on fire sort of stuff.

Harvest the Dirt is earthy stuff, an eight-ball, dime bag, bobo huffing earthy stuff that hits the nail, repeatedly, right on its big flat head. Gibson is almost polymorphous in his range of romantic follies. He is affectionate about: certain country singers, Tom Waits, Bobbie Gentry, his family, the American South, meth labs...

Last Man Standing

I refused to smoke or snort meth the first time I did it. The more

experienced tweakers put it in toilet paper and told me to swallow

it. When my stomach acid dissolved the thin wood pulp, the

explosion of crank into my system burned a hole from my hips to

my mouth. Each organ etched its name into my skin with a cattle

prod. Lightning shot through my intestines.

I ran to the bathroom and shit out everything I had ever eaten in

my entire life. I shit out my mother's breast milk, and the amniotic

fluid I floated in for nine months. I shit out things I thought about

eating. I shit our everything I had seen other people eat and all the

food in all the commercials I had ever seen. I vowed to never do

this horrible drug ever again.

Twenty minutes later I had a straw to my nose and was being

passed a freshly packed light bulb to smoke from. I inhaled the

sweet smell of impending snow and hot chemicals. My head

spun like the world around me. I didn't eat, sleep, or do anything

remotely sane for the next fifty-three hours.

The next seven years were facsimile nights and carbon paper days.

Everything was broken light bulbs, broken promises, broken

promises, broken promises, broken hearts, and full-blown crazy.

Most things were broken. I lived awake and died in my dreams

every rare time I slept. I still have trouble sleeping.

...

Wil Gibson's Harvest the Dirt is the meat section of the grocery store, pure bloody protein.

Today's book of poetry's morning read was raucous to say the least. Milo has seemingly overcome any trace of his previous shyness. He can't wait to get up in front of us and read and he has become quite good at it. Many mornings now we simply let him read to the rest of us. Today everyone wanted to get in on it. Kathryn insisted on reading the Vonnegut poem, twice.

Whole. South. Side.

Dust bunnies scratched weak scream claw marks down

the hallway.

No milk in a new house,

third this year, another cupboard empty.

June is a terrible month to move,

made easier when you lack clothes and furniture.

The new cockroaches were smaller.

The new neighbors mutter "poor white trash"

under their breath, never to our faces.

They don't mean it as hurtful or angry,

they only mean we were pitiful.

They smile with sad eyes and treat us like

a man whose wife cheats on him.

There is no way to tell someone they have been forgotten.

...

Gibson takes it all on in Harvest the Dirt - poverty, race, violence, drugs, country music and so on. He does it with the slow grace of a poetic Richard Pryor. Saint Richard of Pryor never passed a pipe he didn't like and was the best straight-up stand-up there has ever been. We here at Today's book of poetry like to make big proclamations just to see who is listening.

Wil Gibson is a slap and a caress, not always in equal portions. Poetry like this can make you squirm in your seat and that is a good thing. A damned good thing.

Wil Gibson

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wil Gibson was born from a good idea and a bottle of bourbon and raised in some of the poorest communities northern Illinois and eastern Arkansas have to offer. He is a proud, mistake-prone, father of four.

BLURBS

Harvest the Dirt is the fuck-you-listen-to-me reminder that life is real, and raw, and constantly in a state of push and pull and break. Gibson doesn’t need metaphors to talk about drugs and despair and life. There’s no hidden meaning. This is not a collection of self-help pieces. He’s not going to tell you that anything will ever be better. What Gibson will do though is craft a guide of real-world, worst-case scenarios, so that maybe you’ll give a damn about yourself, or the world around you, or art, or whatever it is to which you yearn to cling. This is Jim Carroll and William Burroughs meets George Carlin and Sam Kinison in a dark alley for an I’ll-raise-you-a-story kind of raw. This is not a book of poetry; this is an experience.—Chris Margolin, The Poetry Question

Harvest the Dirt is a gritty, relentless testament to the survival song that is Wil Gibson. Each poem is a bloody ride out of the city that birthed you; a psalm in the name of recovery; an open window on a stormy day somewhere in the middle of this country. This book is filled with a man’s truth and, while it isn’t always pretty, that truth never apologizes.—Carrie Rudzinski, author of The Shotgun Speaks and The History of Silence

Here, now, in 2015, there is an eye on race, southern culture, and the relationship between the two that is as focused as I remember it being. That eye is large, and general. Wil Gibson’s Harvest the Dirtis specific, and on the street. But no less large. Harvest the Dirt is proof that country music doesn’t need a fiddle, a pedal steel, or even sounds at all. All country music needs is a heart breaking or a heart trying to mend, and a bent ear. Enjoy the listen.—Justin Wells, singer / songwriter

Full of should-have-saids and self portraits, Wil Gibson’s newest collection gives a vivid look at the life he has lead. It is harsh. It is visceral. Most importantly, it is truth. Harvest the Dirt captures the purest of moments and the most honest of self-reflections through remembrances and images of an universal truth about the America we live in. It is an insightful read of contemporary poetry in an unrestricted and accessible tongue.—Katrina K. Guarascio, Swimming with Elephants Publications

Wil Gibson

"Stories"

(NPS 2015)

video: Button Poetry

greatweatherformedia.com

448

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:
You Can't Be Serious. Ronald Wallace. Parallel Press. University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries. Madison, Wisconsin. 2015.

When I first read You Can't Be Serious back in December I avoided reading the Author's Note at the beginning of the book. When I'm reading for the blog I always avoid introductions, notes or any other sort of preamble to the poems. Today's book of poetry is never looking for prior context. (Of course we always read these notes afterward).

So, I liked these poems a lot before I realized that the poems in You Can't Be Serious are all constructed in such a way that "the last words of each line of each poem, read vertically top to bottom, form a haiku by a classic Japanese master."

It's brilliant stuff.

When I read You Can't Be Serious again last night it was like each poem was a main course, the haiku an illuminating dessert. This is the cue for Wallace to take a big bow.

The Wisdom of the Old

after Basho

I thought when I got old that I'd be wise. Wearing

my vast learning lightly I'd find myself a

source of wisdom for others. If you looked in the paper,

you'd find me quoted on most any subject, the robe

of knowledge trailing from my shoulders. Even

my enemies would marvel at my sagacity. If

you had an insoluble problem, I'd solve it. It

would be a no-brainer. I'd be the sage who gets

to explain everything. Turns out, I was all wet.

The older I get the less I know. Here I am picking

through the alleyways of my memory looking for flowers

and finding only trash, a panhandler who, in

better days, had what passed for a brain, but now is the

wacky preacher who won't come in out of the rain.

...

Ronald Wallace is a "Wascally Wabbit" by every stretch of the imagination and as coy as he is clever. These poems roll off the tongue like you'd written them yourself, they go down as naturally as a drink of water. These poems are ripe with moments that are familiar to us all.

Our morning read was a scream. Milo, our head tech, read the poems and the Kathryn, our new intern, read the haiku. The rest of us leisured at their feet as though we were in front of a warming fire in the hearth on a snowy night. It was morning bliss.

You Can't Be Serious

after Basho

A writer who can deal with murder, barbarity, horror--with

"tragic elements"--is the greater artist, said the young

Anthony Trollope, than the writer of the mundane. This leaves

me out. "The mild walks of everyday life" are what I

gravitate to. The neighbor's sudden dementia--would

that count as horror? Could barbarity be something like

mistakenly digging up my wife's favorite lemon verbena? To

poison the pesky chipmunks, to do my best to wipe

them out--would that be considered murder? I far and away

prefer the milder walks of the lesser art--the stroll in the

happy diurnal, the observable day-to-day. Tears

are plentiful enough in this life without me putting in

my own two cents. Tragically unambitious, I'm your

chronicler of the commonplace, a ramble in Trollope's eyes.

...

Today's book of poetry admires You Can't Be Serious very much. As much as Wallace proclaims the anti-Trollope stance and trolls the quiet conventional corners, he has no problem at all taking on the big subjects like abortion, gay rights, politics, sexism, religion and so on.

The fact is You Can't Be Serious can be very serious indeed while remaining entirely Basho/Issa tongue in cheek. Serious as a heart attack, serious as two grasshoppers can get. That's when you know there is a master at work.

Bully for You, Mitt Romney

after Issa

We held the gay boy down and cut his hair. Hey,

it was fifty years ago, and we didn't know, you

know, that he was gay. It was just a prank. There

is nothing more to it. He's dead by now, anyway. do

you think I'd do that today? We'll of course not!

Look at this smile. You can see it wouldn't swat

a flea. Let's have some other questions. Marriage? The

union of one man, one woman. We don't want to fly

in the face of sacred conventions. Abortion? It wrings

my heart to see an innocent fetus murdered, his

teenage mother bereft. Let's leave it in God's hands.

The elderly, the indigent? Give them work! If they're on

the dole, they'll never be useful. The gay boy? On bended

knee he came on to us. We gave him a knee.

...

It's a dreary grey Wednesday here in our nation's capital, spring is trying to come through the clouds and there may even be a bit of sun on the horizon. It doesn't matter, You Can't Be Serious has already made our day.

Ronald Wallace

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ron Wallace is the author of twenty previous books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction and criticism. He co-directs the creative writing program at the UW-Madison, and serves as editor of the UW Press Poetry Series which he founded in 1985.

He is currently Halls-Bascom Professor of English and Felix Pollak Professor of Poetry and the recipient of three distinguished teaching awards, and prizes from his previous poetry collections from The Council for Wisconsin Writers, The Society of Midland Authors, and the Wisconsin Library Association. In 2005 he was awarded the first George Garrett Prize of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs for his service to writers and writing.

Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, he has been a Wisconsin resident since 1972, dividing his time between Madison and a forty-acre farm in Richland County’s Bear Valley.

parallelpress.library.wisc.edu

448

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:
Realignment. Ruth Roach Pierson. Palimpsest Press. Windsor, Ontario. 2015.

Sometimes when I read a poem I just have to slap the book down on the table and shout out "DAMN!" with a big, old Pat Carter exclamation mark. Once in a while a poem just hits all the amusement buttons I have. Ruth Roach Pierson peppers Realignment with just such marvels.

Agapanthus Blue Triumphator

With a name like that I could do almost anything

Loose my chastity to three men in one night

Write a new and better poem about a red wheelbarrow

Makes three beds and not sleep in a single one

Play Kris Kringle at the annual Christmas party

Win a hissing contest with my bad-tempered cat

Deliver a treatise on sin to His Holiness

Successfully sue the CEOs of Goldman Sachs

Peel back the layers of an onion without shedding a tear

Become president of the Brotherhood of Inveterate Curmudgeons

Build a chain of dungeons for those guilty of grammatical and

syntactical errors

Solve the case of who killed red robin

Learn the difference between a gong and a bell, a tongue and a clapper

...

Today's book of poetry has to admit we stumbled once or twice in the thicker passages but Realignment often just wants to see the look of surprise on your face. Pierson waxes eloquent with a vocabulary that surpasses our current standards by a country mile - but we like to be challenged and we like to learn, Today's book of poetry also likes to be amazed.

Pierson echoes Thomas Wolfe You Can't Go Home Again sentiment again and again, but then like good ol' Tom, like the rest of us, she tries it, again and again. That's the kind of animals we are. Resolution is a disconnected metaphor that we work and knead until it fits our current desire, fits into the confine of our need.

Omnium-Gatherum

I have only what I remember, Merwin writes, resigned not to a dearth

but an omnium-gatherum of memories--whether amorphous and

unloosed from time or firmly grounded and undimmed as though

he's again playing, in the re-entered past, the protagonist in the theatre

of life.

From time to time mine ambush me as I walk down the street in full

daylight. Some delight, others devastate, breaking through the frozen

crust to re-inflame buried pain. Still others flit past my inner eye like

short-lived visual migraines. Odd fragments seek me out in dreams,

like last night's. I held a younger

woman in my arms and told her I had paid a terrible price for not

having children, but she, with her two, should go on and fulfill her

ambition. We found ourselves inside a house under renovation. Behind

a demolished wall, a laundry had been discovered that easily could,

we conjectured, be joined

to the kitchen. Outside there were explosions in the night sky, fireworks

in celebration of a Russian holiday, the face of a Czar shattering into

icy glitter. And all the while the woman from next door was setting out,

onto her front porch as on a stage, three bottles of pink-tinted water.

...

Milo had a few hop, skip and jump moments at this morning's read with some of the German text in Realignment, but wouldn't you know it, Kathryn, our new intern, speaks German. She lived in Berlin for a year and although she is just telling us that now we are not nearly as surprised by this information as Milo appears to be. Admiration and translation ensued.

The rest of us each picked a favourite and read in turn. I was torn between the tender and touching "So" where the young girls are lithe and beautiful, a story "Overheard in All That Jazz Cafe" and "Herat Carpets" where a carpet tells a disjointed story of a marriage that probably never was and a future cut in two -- but I went for "Innocence" because that's the sort of lost Peter Pan I am.

Innocence

The cabin's screened-in porch

was where we slept, dropping

off only after much

whispering and listening

to the cries of the mountain lion

sounding, in our imaginations,

like a woman being murdered

somewhere deep in the woods.

We'd hoist ourselves

onto World War II

army cots, wriggling our bodies

deep inside surplus GI

sleeping bags, khaki, down filled

and gaze out across the river

at the not-yet clear-

cut mountainside illumined by moonlight

or by flashes of sheet lightning

from a distant storm.

But the sound filling those nights

more than any other, the sound

that eased our sleep persuading us

all was as it should be

in the world beyond the porch

was the paused, then deepened

growl of nighttime trucks transporting

peacetime cargo over Snoqualmie Pass

shifting down and down again

with the steepening of the climb.

...

Today's book of poetry has had a temporary Realignment, I'm still sore in certain places but comforted in the important ones.

Ruth Roach Pierson

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ruth Roach Pierson has published three poetry collections: Where No Window Was, 2002, Aide-Mémoire, which was a Governor General Literary Award for Poetry finalist in 2008, and CONTRARY in 2011. In 2014 Guernica Editions published an anthology of film poems she edited entitled I Found It at the Movies. Aperture, her chapbook of poems written in response to the photography of Josef Sudek, was also released in 2014. Realignment, her fourth poetry collection, was launched by Palimpsest Press in 2015.

BLURB

“For the fortunate reader of Ruth Roach Pierson’s book, her “realignments” are all enlargements – of working vocabulary, as words such as “brindled,” “mazard,” “umbrageous,” and “mephitic” take on new and surprising poetic power; of voice, as Pierson’s muscular syntax reflects the movements of an agile and capacious mind; of experience itself, as her Whitman-like catalogues embrace a dazzling breadth of times, places, and things; and – most especially, for this reader – of spirit, as objects resonate with human meaning through Pierson’s dynamic metaphors. Look and marvel, for instance, at how a simple piano stool in the title poem becomes an image for the winding realignments of felt life, enlarging our grasp on that turning, precarious world through which she guides us so expertly in this superb collection.”

— John Reibetanz

palimpsestpress.ca

450

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 Work Finished Here: Rewriting Andy Warhol.
Liz Worth. Book Thug. Toronto, Ontario. 2015.

NoWorkFinishedHere_LizWorth_highres_9781771661645 (2)

Today's book of poetry is slightly confused, I don't know what to explain first, my technique for choosing today's poems or Liz Worth's technique for writing them.

Let's start with Liz Worth and her astonishing second book of poems No Work Finished Here: Rewriting Andy Warhol. Worth has taken the 1968 Andy Warhol novel A Novel and eviscerated it. Within a self-imposed set of boundaries Worth tackles each page to tear away what isn't needed and to savour the juicy morsels, rendering them down to inexplicably fine poems.

You are here

I didn't do a thing last night

felt like a ghost

just staying up and all that, just talking

car noises in the background.

Some of my throat is gone.

Need some Obertrols--blue ones, blasting

oh, the orange ones are divine.

Is there ANY place we can keep calling

voice on the other end

know where we can get some.

This number in front of us--sister would know us.

We should start for the park. Takes forever.

Asleep on the bus, too gorgeous.

It's all right--fantastic baby,

you definitely are here.

...

And we are there. Boom. Worth plants us in the Factory with these poems that are a remixing distillation of Warhol's novel. But they are so much more. These poems are electric. No Work Finished Here is simply a towering achievement. Page after page after page of this opus burns. It's a bit like going for that blue flame, dipping your fingers in lighter fluid and catching lit matches. Whooosh.

Today's book of poetry was completely gob-smacked by No Work Finished Here and so was everyone in the office. Our morning read hasn't had quite that smirky smack in the head edge since we last read Susan Musgrave, another great Canadian poet who can burn.

Push to tell

Kill me

in a fake voice,

disguising the real day.

Make them believe

we're stars,

unbearable to live with.

They hate me

for being what I am and

all your friends

get so mad at you.

Why should we wait here

like this, with doubt;

come and talk to me,

push to tell

how we are.

...

Andy Warhol was one interesting cat and Today's book of poetry is slightly ashamed to say we've never read A Novel. We sure want to now.

Today's book of poetry isn't able to tell you anything about Andy Warhol or the Factory that you don't already know -- but Liz Worth sure can. No Work Finished Here opens up the Factory like it was a can of tuna and Worth was the can opener, she just rips the top off of that thing. Then she reaches in a plucks out the best of what she needs, hammers them into gems.

And that would be enough. Worth does more than that. She bridges the gap from the Factory to us, the reader and then tells us how we are.

Values

I wanna tell you something

very secret:

my voice

is turned up

to drown out

all possible

conversation.

Background obstructs

those people

in the other room

with their fucking values.

Their tactics

have led

to nothing.

Aren't you going

to fuck

for five minutes

with me?

On tape?

In the elevator,

pressing that button,

there's time for

charity, falsity.

...

So since Today's book of poetry pretty much loved every poem in No Work Finished Here (and that never happens, seriously), today's poems were chosen at random and with confidence.

If you want to know exactly how we made our random choices please send two Crying Charlies and a buck-fifty to Today's book of poetry with your enquiry. You know the address.

No Work Finished Here: Rewriting Andy Warhol is one big thick lovely tome, coming in at over 450 pages, and for this reader it is a high water mark for Canada's most adventurous small press, Toronto's Book Thug.

Saying wow isn't saying enough, as far as Today's book of poetry is concerned No Work Finished Here gains immediate entry into that lovely pantheon of absolutely essential Canadian poetry classics.

Liz Worth

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Liz Worth is a Toronto-based author. Her first book, Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punkin Toronto and Beyond, was the first to give an in-depth account of Toronto’s early punk scene. She has also released a poetry collection called Amphetamine Heart and a novel called PostApoc. You can reach her at www.lizworth.com, on Facebook (www.facebook.com/lizworthbooks), or Twitter @LizWorthXO.

BLURBS

“Liz Worth’s collection of poems is a testament to both her artistry and daily discipline. In an age of diminished attention, her perseverance in daily poem—making by mining the same source over and over reminds us that artists can be a model of life without distraction-how to go deeper and deeper until you find yourself looking back at you.”

— Heath Allen, composer of Andy, A popera

“What if you tore apart the city’s tenderloin; if you seized its ephemera and — before burning all the sweet voodoo — collected the best, and most brilliant cuts? This is Liz Worth’s stylish master-nightmare, No Work Finished Here. This is ‘the start of something true.'”

— Lynn Crosbie, author of Where Did You Sleep Last Night

Liz Worth

Mike Geffner Presents The Inspired Word

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

116 MacDougal Street Bar/Lounge

Manhattan

Video: InspiredWordNYC

bookthug.ca

451

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:
Tender Data. Monica McClure. Birds, LLC. Austin, Minneapolis, New York, Raleigh. 2015.

Because we haven't had a "list" poem in a while and because you all know how much Today's book of poetry loves a good list poem, we are going to start off today with a hummer.

Monica McClure is a poetry assassin of the highest order. Her aim is perfect and she is packing some serious heat. There is very little tender in Tender Data but it is all heart.

Monica McClure

Monica, vain as two crystals in a window

Monica, proportionate face like a student drawing

Monica, passable body like a non-celebrity

Monica, competing affects getting crossed

Monica, languid like a tranquilizer napping in the sun

Monica, sensitive like an artist coming to terms with failure

Monica, signing over her paltry assets

Monica, sleazy like the nouveau riche

Monica, watching herself while watching you

Monica, like a summer in the shade of a factory

Monica, editorial like the ego ideal and like the ideal ego

Monica, effusive like alka seltzer

Monica, blushing like purple areola

Monica, disarming like a borderline

Monica, free as a stolen mink

Monica, steadfast as scotch from an Islay faraway

Monica, lost like a puppy in an undertow

Monica, like lambs in a cavern

Monica, like grey birds aerial diving

Monica, broken like tea leaves in the hand of Jack the Ripper

Monica, in love for the empire and courtly manners

Monica, menstruating with endless iron

Monica, like a truck full of hoop skirts

Monica, sculptural with Debuffet's dirty pick

Monica, saintly fallopian tubes butterflying

Monica, easy like a promise to make

Monica, sluggish as the mind in conversation with itself

Monica, kissing deep a plum cooled on mint

...

Today's book of poetry had to read Tender Data over several sessions simply because the book got too hot to handle. These pages burn. McClure absolutely never lets up on the gas.

McClure is fresh, these poems as crisp as new snow, and at the same time these poems know things that only a certain kind of experience reveals. McClure sounds like she's read everything you've read and then a lot you haven't. How did she get so wise?

Then we have to deal with the title poem, her opus, "Tender Data", Oh my, oh my. What wondrous thing is this? Monica McClure's long poem "Tender Data" is surgery with an emotional laser and she lays it all open.

"You don't have the guts for me

Why people do evil is

the only question worth asking"

Think Hunter S. Thompson and Erica Jong having a love child devoted to poetry and writing a new feminist manifesto for a new order. No prisoners taken here. McClure isn't afraid of anyone or anything.

Today's book of poetry would absolutely love to show you the entire poem but the length of the poem precludes inclusion. But take our word for it - McClure is staking out territory with fierce intent.

Mammary

The Chateau Marmont in winter

is like a beautiful woman in the morning

on the second day of her period

It's a body rejecting its implants

Lindsay Lohan is walking around

like she owes the place

sliding into the darkest seat

with two lesbian truckers

I'm sipping an Italian aperitif

and feeling exuberant

like it's the 20th century

and a love sick Breton is whispering

messages on my answering machine

in an empty antechamber

while I check my powder on my iPhone

When I lost my academic job

I became an unskilled sex worker

and got pregnant out of professional frustration

My mother drove me to a midwife

in the first light of morning

Lazy Susans on the table spin me

another cold highball

...

Today's book of poetry regular morning read was a fiasco. The women in our office insisted they do all the reading this morning. Kathryn, our new intern, must have used the word "empowering" at least seven times. She gave all us men the stink-eye more than once.

Tender Data is powerful stuff and it is gloriously relentless. McClure struts with her time on stage because she can and we all reap the rewards.

White Girl Wasted

There's nothing inherently noble about work

At New York Dolls I could choose to sit

and let men buy my drinks

instead of hauling ice buckets

of champagne across the mainstage floor

I didn't make money when I got drunk

instead of getting men drunk

but I was not cold or sober either

My heels dangled from the bar stool

as I watched the engorged breasts of girls

tremble in the arcade-like wavelengths

weightless and bovine

A happy couple stumbled in and soon

the wife was throwing up

in our dressing room

We held her hair back

careful not to drop ashes

in her shiny blowout

I was Kathy Acker in the 80s

doing nothing exceptional yet everything

in a corset without muscles

Her husband had paid for two hours upstairs

and was up to his watches in flesh

You girls are mistaken I said

to seduce this stupid city

Then I went home no richer or poorer

than when I showed up

I wish I could get shit-faced wasted

on my own dime

and have someone I trust carry

me screaming and drooling into a taxi

I think of the words of Anastasia

the fat ballerina of the Bolshoi

"I'm going to fuck the shit out of this world."

Goodnight swans on your lakes of vodka

...

Today's book of poetry puts Monica McClure at the top of whatever list I'm making today, she should be on the top of whatever list you are making. Tender Data will make you love poetry in whole new way.

Monica McClure

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Monica McClure is a write and performer living in New York City. Previously, her poetry has been published in the chapbooks, Mood Swing (Snacks Press, 2013) and Mala (Poor Claudia, 2014).

BLURB

McClure may be the poster-girl for a new generation of poets: irreverent, well-read, sexy, even dirty, snarky, but ultimately fighting an earnest battle against reductiveness and easy answers to the complex problems of the Internet age: "Every citizen of this world is on trial/ I'm learning to speak legalese/ as I stroll through civil law like/ a gamine through a sample sale."

- Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR

Word Warriors: Monica McClure

Video: The Huffington Post

birdsllc.com

452

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:
Martha. Leslie Allison. Ugly Duckling Presse. Brooklyn, New York. 2015

When I tell you that in part, Martha is a sex fantasy for lesbians you are going to start thinking one thing. Well, think another, because Martha is a ghost story. No, a feminist knee-slap, laugh out loud kitchen party, if it were Martha Stewart's kitchen and she were surrounded by sex-slave minions.

This is a carnival ride with illustrations by Molly Schaeffer that will remind Canadian readers of Joe Rosenblatt style drawings of flying labia, multitude of them arranges into bouquets, mental bromides, dashing off of the pages.

Today's book of poetry believes two important things are happening at the same time in Leslie Allison's highly entertaining Martha. There is the pink-toned-pink-lipped-Divine-over-the-hill and bonkers comic romp that is Martha. And at the same time it is clear that Allison is being serious as a heart attack with every word.

There are no titles per se in Martha and it is unlikely my choices of text fall into Leslie Allison's original design so please know the fault is mine, not Allison's. Today's book of poetry thought that every line in this punk steamroller of a chapbook was cherse. And ghosts.

- - -

Dear Diary:

do you remember when I arrived?

back then the images were like straight out of Moby-Dick

noble and naval, ropes, wood

cold steam lilting truth from room to room

and now

well, my vagina

has nerve damage

and it's all

I can think about

in the drawing room

I see Kate

names are not ever real words

but Kate is a word

Madeline's palatial shudder creates a vortex that sucks me

under like riptide

and dark moisturized genderless Kate

is endless

forever trailed by Ghengis Khan

who puffs himself up and

sheds in her shadow

Martha's skin is neon moire

her oily hands are dishrags

even still portions of her always appear to be moving

she appliques a life-size two dimensional version

of every object in the house

onto that very object

an applique of a curtain

on a curtain,

a chair on a chair

so the palace is a quilt

Martha's own body is concealed

behind an applique of herself

this house may be the house

in which she lives

marbled curls and peels

distortion

she fingers literally everything

this may be the definition of 'crafts'

...

Martha has our heroine joining Martha Stewart's fictional nun's-habit-wearing-harem in an oddly fantastic Martha Stewart world of delicate debauchery.

Leslie Allison's Martha sure roiled up some reaction at this morning's read. Milo made great comic strides riffing through this ghost love story full of passion but then every once in a while he would bounce awkward over some of the more overt and ribald sexuality that prance over these pages like a Madeleine Schubert driven Pegasus. Kathryn, our new intern, punctuated Milo's red cheeked silences by pointing out that women's sexuality has been thoroughly colonized by the oppressive nature of the male gaze and that books like Martha undermine the dominant male role in our deeply polarized and protestant society.

Oh that Kathryn.

- - -

Actually that's the only face she has

and she puts it on every morning

flipping through profile pages

the usual suspects drum out their wares in waves

do you even know what is interesting about that?

I sure don't

to be fair, I know nothing if I'm not high

I just wait for Martha to feed me mashed potatoes

with her little fingers and I suck them until she tells me to stop

but Madeline, she chants a little song in my ear

when Martha goes out of town:

we built this temple

not let's burn it to the fucking ground

how I wish she meant this

flower

When I went into Martha's room last night

to ask if I was allowed to change out of my habit

one of the interns was stoking the embers in the fireplace

one was burrowing her face in Martha's immaculate bush

and one was singing the day's numbers:

Martha Stewart Living

Omni

Omnimedia Inc Inc Inc!

Novemmmmmmmber Twenty-Two, Two Thousand and

Thirteen

3.44 + .04

(1.18%)

open o PEN open 3.41

hiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh 3.45

l-ah-ooow 3.36

volume ume ume volUME 135,119

average volume 305,000

maaaaaaaarket cap 323.5 miiiiiillllllllllllllioooooooooon

"Maybe now isn't a good time," I said quietly

and exited habited.

...

Leslie Allison is doing at least three things in the absolutely delightful romp Martha. Today's book of poetry wishes we were better equipped to tell you exactly what they are. We aren't.

So we'll stick to what we know and why we do like Martha. How could you not? Martha vibrates with a boisterous brio, it almost hums in your hands as you read it.

- - -

Dear Diary:

I can hear Kate's blood through vines overheard, I can hear the

moon in the bed.

Three bodies are masts and the dog ate through the crotch of three

pairs of my underwear.

The moon smokes through Kate. Did she call them panties?

Three masts are smoke on the dog.

that night, I saw myself

walking through the desert

I was hanging there, being mildly amused

cheeks warming up, crotch turning violet

the disembodied eyes in front of me

their waves growing darker and darker blue

I think it stopped being consensual when Martha got in there

up to her elbow

her ruched gloves stretched taut

she said she needed a wet brush for the waves

more like a give to it

more like a torn wake

...

Today's book of poetry would give away almost all the Crying Charlie's in our possession to see the look on Martha S's face as she read this fawning and fabulous fantasy ode. We would hope she'd keep it next to her pillow.

Leslie Allison's first chapbook is a stunner.

Leslie Allison

Photo: Mekko Harjo

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Leslie Allison is a writer and performer. She composes choral music for performance collaborations with Francis Weiss Rabkin. Her dance and poetry criticism can be found in HTML Giant and The Brooklyn Rail, and her band Cross released its debut album, It's Curtains, earlier this year. Martha (Spring 2015, Ugly Duckling Press) is her first chapbook.

BLURB

If you hear yourself morosely whispering I’d really hoped there’d be more stoner girls slaying the ghosts of the patriarchy here just as you are stepping out of the shower on a dark wintry morning, cheer up, help is at hand! Here, in this little book, Martha Stewart has joined up with a wave or weave of beautiful peonies opening our decorous and sullen heart-minds into the pure pleasures of an altered universe: plural, funny, sexy, bright and animate. Leslie Allison has made a new room for poetry, a hologram of a corner shimmering where no corner exists. Enter, bring a towel, or not!

- Ann Lauterbach

uglyducklingpresse.org

453

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:
Tatterdemalion. Jennifer Londry. Chaudiere Books. Ottawa, Ontario. 2015

"Hindsight is a temporary virgin a has-been"

Second guessing the timetable

"I ain't no killer, but I could be."

Dueling musicians

Oh, hello. It seems you've stumbled into the Today's book of poetry offices just as I was making a list of the lines I wanted to steal from Jennifer Londry's very fine Tatterdemalion. It was going to be a long list.

Or how about that killer title, I'm in love with what is a new word for me, Tatterdemalion, to be "ragged or disreputable in appearance" says Merriam-Webster.

Londry's second book of poems comes to us in seven sections but her voice doesn't waver much. Too bold, brave and brash to be bitter but there are some sad miles on this road.

Three awful days without god

The asphalt aquarium of my innocence wobbled

and became unhinged.

Crouched in the garage

I read the label on a box of toddler-carbs--

folic acid, zinc oxide, vodka, niacin, riboflavin, carbon monoxide.

My mouth tastes like the morning after, plan B.

My hair is an auburn mess

twisting and turning inside my smallclothes.

They caught me running uphill on a one-way street

naked in a new pair of shoes

attempting to outrun the mundane.

...

Londry is an admirer of Ann Sexton and it shows like red lipstick on a collar. Today's book of poetry has long been an ardent admirer of Sexton.

We sent Milo to the Today's book of poetry bookshelves and he came back with Sexton's The Death Notebooks, Words For Dr. Y., Live or Die, The Book of Folly, All My Pretty Ones along with a Selected and a Collected Ann Sexton. We included the reading of a few Sexton poems along with Londry's for this morning's read. Didn't take long for us to remember why we call her Saint Ann of Sexton.

It doesn't take long once you've opened the cover of Tatterdemalion to see that Londry has the same razor edge sharp that she admires in Sexton. Some of these poems would be willing to cut you.

Ramble

I am the driver behind the wheel.

Keep going, she says, out-manoeuvre this array of facades--

clown face storefronts with down-up circular penny staircases

from Plenty's fallen pocket.

Snapshots of dead relatives scotch-taped to the hooch-man's window.

3, 9, 7

suddenly, the world rights itself.

Green lights twitch everywhere.

...

Today's book of poetry is particularly pleased to be writing about a title from a local Ottawa publisher. Chaudiere Books is the hard work of Rob McLennan and Christine McNair. Chaudiere Books are producing top flight beautiful books and Today's book of poetry is proud to brag local.

Jennfier Londry's Tatterdemalion has pace. These poems never dwaddle. Most of them are whippet thin and greyhound strong, it's all muscle and lung.

Who shan't escape

A pale witness picks up a cigarette and lights its final inhale.

Quitters live in a wasteland.

Sway and stoop.

Cemetery gate is open, nothing gets in.

Not even the twice dead.

The man who choked on a rat snake

the man who messed with Eden.

Like a shotgun awaits a prayer

it will take years for the city to mend.

...

Tatterdemalion bristles, this is fierce poetry, full of desperate situations and dire consequence. You might even think that some of these poems are salvos aimed at redemption but Today's book of poetry thinks Londry is working towards a higher purpose.

These poems want those red lips, that gin and that blue sky.

Jennifer Londry

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jennifer Londry is the author of two previous books of poetry: Life and Death in Cheap Motels, which was adapted for stage, and After the Words, which was nominated for a Saskatchewan Book Award. A featured reader at the 2009 Kingston Writers’ Festival and at the 2011 Sweetwater 905 in Northern BC, she has also facilitated and organized a literary event for Alzheimer’s Awareness. Jen has taught creative writing and recently was a judge for Words from the Street, a creative writing competition, which gives a voice to the downtrodden, in association with The Toronto Writers’ Collective. She is also a contributor to the anthologies: A Crystal through which Love Passes, Glosas for P.K. Page (Buschek Books, 2013), Where the nights Are twice As long, Love Letters of Canadian Poets (Goose Lane Editions, 2015), and has work forthcoming in the Alzheimer’s anthology, A Rewording Life, editor Diane Schoemperlen, creator Sheryl Gordon. Currently Jen is collaborating with the documentary filmmaker Sarah Turnbull at the Carleton School of Journalism and Communications to produce a mental health video.

BLURBS
"With capricious locution and charged language, Tatterdemalion fires the belly like spiked punch. Londry's poetry is fierce, full-tilt, and darkly unexpected--she thrives in the off-kilter corners of the dystopian human condition. Kick off your shoes. You're in for a wild night."
- Sandra Ridley

"In Tatterdemalion, Jennifer Londry weaves her dusky art at its best. A jagged, intense, down-the-rabbit-hole collection where leisure suits, dismembered limbs, the minaturized world of dollhouses and asphalt aquariums mingle into poems with a dark, folk-tale vibe. Immersive, beautiful tatters."
- Jeanette Lynes

"The poet write perceptive lines I savour like hard candy on the tongue."
- Shelley A. Leedahl

chaudierebooks.com

454

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:
Sideshow Concessions. Lucas Crawford. Snare/Invisible Publishing. Halifax & Toronto. Canada. 2015.

WINNER OF THE 2015 ROBERT KROETSCH AWARD FOR INNOVATIVE POETRY

Lucas Crawford's first book of poetry, Sideshow Concessions, is a stunner. We meet a bearded lady and the world's fattest man, both of them hungry for love and wedged into a prosaic poetic style that frequently finds itself confessional and disarming. These disarming poems can also be as dangerous as having identity being both a weapon and a curse.

Crawford is ploughing some tough earth with this gender politic poetry but Today's book of poetry has never cared much about plumbing. We are interested in poems smart enough to take us places we haven't been, fill our heads with wonder and if we are lucky - to fill our hearts with the same.

Our concern has always been whether or not the poetry pot boils, whether or not the poetry cooks. Lucas Crawford can flat out burn.

Scar Tissue Looks Good

On Pomquet Beach

for B.

I can only go in up to my nipples, I warn;

they're freshly lanced, still leaking.

Campfires here witness the stealth sex

of people passing through

on their way to the Cabot Trail. But it's in the plain sight

of hot daylight that we two transgender guys disrobe

to air out wounds and wind tales.

His nipples are like scar tissue;

he moved too much, too fast, post-surgery.

(Rum-clumsy is a stranger's bathroom, I once

watched my lover dot her chest with cover-up.

dabbing red pre-pimples mid-party. The world's

strangest bingo that in this moment strikes me as

charmingly Martian.)

A shallow pool holds a hot population of jellyfish,

which we sit down to meet. One is inside out but

what can we do? They've got no brains--they're like amoebas.

A baby almost shimmies up my shorts and five big ones

are pinned down dry on the shore by three rocks each.

Later I read that jellyfish never die; they death-defy

by morphing back into cystic blobs and starting over.

Before we shake out sand and drive back, I march in once

more with keen cold feet since the last dip

ought to be deepest.

We'll slip into the poetry reading late,

Scottish-sunburned, smelling

of salty pina coladas and few could guess why we're in

stitches.

I'll take off for Montreal,

meet a Westerner named Laura

who tells me she spent a day in Antigonish

and got a ticket

for parking in the priest's spot

in an otherwise empty lot.

She asks: How could you stand living in a wee town

where nothing interesting ever happens?

...

If you want a real slap and tickle you have to read Crawford's poem "Canadian Literature Premises" with your tongue firmly in cheek, or elsewhere. If you are at any sort of loss for a good title or even a good premise for a poem - this one supplies ample material while gently sticking a knife in the side of Canadian Lit.

Crawford isn't much for sacred cows.

Sideshow Concessions has it share of sad humour and unnamed demons but Today's book of poetry sees Crawford's book as a daring shot across the bow, a confident declaration of arrival.

My Last Meal

A cup of orange juice squeezed

between the retired pope's thighs.

A gallon of diet orange soda pop

because (aspartame haters be damned)

I'll burp my goodbyes.

I'll gnaw of Lloyd Robertson's kidneys, I will.

Chase them with a guava milkshake and

that assassin some would call a pink anti-depressant pill.

An enema (from) an enemy.

Another too-whipped bowl of organic cream.

Anything but another cauliflower-as-pizza-crust meme.

A Ziplock of frozen tuna tartare

to ice my burning hip.

Eggs cooked to 63 degrees,

atop ropy cheap beef cheeks.

More cheese

Mom's tuna noodle bake

Jamon iberico and

champagne (no fakes)

More gristle

More salt

No sweat

No wake

...

Lucas Crawford's blunt and beautiful assessment of us all is at times haunting and almost always hopeful. There is ample ground for frustration and anger and that plays out as well - but Today's book of poetry sees Sideshow Concessions as both a healing and a learning tool and we don't often get to say that.

When Today's book of poetry mentioned earlier that Crawford could "burn" my choice of words was both a theft and a tribute to what I love best. If you are lucky enough to have seen the insanely good Bertrand Tavernier film Round Midnight you'll know that the main character, Dale Turner, is played by the sublime saxaphone player Dexter Gordon. Dale Turner had his own lexicon and when he refers to someone having the craft, the voice, the tone - he says that they can "burn".

My Fattest Aunt

went through our back deck, but just one leg's worth.

This leg dangled in the deck's dark underbelly,

where the black cat would go in a thunderstorm,

where only the bug-brave would hide

when others were seeking.

The rest of her was left on deck,

applying the pressure of her pounds

to a ring around her thigh.

Later it was bruised first-degree purple,

shame-shade of a varicose vein gone feral.

The toes that led the leg's way through the wood

did not reach the ground. They sought earth,

craved gravity to help bear the load. My mother,

like an adrenalized logger

who deadlifts a timbered trunk from a toe,

tore the siding off the deck, crawled under, and built a

tower of stones

under my aunt's foot, bringing her down to earth

by raising the earth up to meet her.

My fattest aunt is at odds with her world.

She taught me lessons:

How to love imported salami bought on credit.

How to deal with adults throwing tantrums.

That fat falls but floats.

One day, she'll push herself

up through the soil

as a cat's cradle of roots.

No, it won't be soon,

and I can't tell you how I know.

...

Sideshow Concessions was the 2015 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry winner. My startlingly brilliant young niece Hillary once told me that her favourite poet was Karen Solie and wouldn't you know it, she was the judge for the 2015 contest. Here is what she had to say about Lucas Crawford's poetry:

"Sideshow Concessions is fresh, honest, heartbreaking, and funny, with turns of phrase

equally intelligent and moving."

Today's book of poetry couldn't have said it better.

Lucas Crawford

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lucas Crawford is the Ruth Wynn Woodward Endowment Lecturer at Simon Fraser University, where he teaches in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. His poetry has appeared in Room, Rampike, PRISM International,The Antigonish Review, SubTerrain online, Other Voices, and The Nashwaak Review, as well as the anthology Between: New Gay Poetry. Crawford’s poems won the the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia’s Atlantic Writing Competition and are currently nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He’s based in Vancouver.

invisiblepublishing.com

455

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:
check engine. rhinoceros. tungsten. Michael e. Casteels. Puddles of Sky Press. Kingston, Ontario. 2015.

Back on November 19, 2013 Today's book of poetry took a look at Michael e. Casteels chapbook The Robot Dreams. You can see that here:

http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.ca/2013/11/the-robot-dreams-michael-e-casteels.html

We liked it a lot.

check engine. rhinoceros. tungsten. is the second chapbook by Kingston area poet Michael e. Casteels that Today's book of poetry wants you readers to make time for.

Today's book of poetry would be lying if we were to say that we knew for certain exactly what Casteels is up to, precisely - but when you are having this much fun you don't question the driver. As he did in The Robot Dreams - check engine. rhinoceros. tungsten. is packed with poems that intrigue and entertain and you can't ask more from a book of poems.

Everyone in the office had a different take on what it is that makes these poems work. Milo, our head technician, believed it was Casteels' Dexterity Gordon act and his fondness for robots. Kathryn, our new intern, felt that Casteels' warm heart surfaced in every poem, even those with robots that would walk us to the end of time.

The Robot Rides A Bus

While crossing the street, a robot is hit by a bus. Small parts

of the robot roll down a hill, frayed wires spark, lights flash.

The bus driver kneels beside the robot and cries, "If I had

been a surgeon, you might have been repaired. If I were a

priest you'd be blessed." The robot attempts to raise an arm

but there is only the grinding of gears, the leaking of oil.

The robot tries to speak but its voice is garbled and growing

faint. Its many lights flicker and dim as silence envelops the

scene. A robot lies in the street. A crowd is gathered. The

driver, still on his knees, cradles the robot's dented head.

The crowd closes in and hoists the robot to its shoulders. In

a short procession they enter the bus. The driver wipes his

eyes with a heavy sleeve, and follows. The door closes. The

bus starts, lurches into gear, and continues down the rolling

hills, towards a lake that is always in the distance.

...

Funnily enough there was a feature on CBC News, The National, last night and they posited whether or not artificial intelligence was about to surpass and take over the monkey/man period of domination. Real Arnold/Terminator stuff.

In other parts of the world and in the poems of Michael e. Casteels sky divers land on trampolines after falling from the heavens and Jack London's ghost stubs his toe.

check engine. rhinoceros. tungsten. reads like a pillow book of short dreams that is inhabited with Casteels quick wit and an alacrity for juxtapositions that could only come from a devotee of the great Stuart Ross.

Life In The Afterlife

It's not all that different:

The sun shines, clouds

get in the way, rain falls.

Wind is still invisible.

I live in an apartment

that is never clean,

commute to work, complain

about taxes and heating bills.

I set my alarm clock.

I sleep. I dream.

I dream that I am alive.

I wake up and wipe

the sweat from my brow.

...

check engine. rhinoceros. tungsten. is but one of a baker's dozen of chapbooks published by Casteels and his Kingston small press Puddles of Sky. Today's book of poetry wants to see a publisher of reason get Casteels between the covers. You shouldn't have to believe me to know how good these poems really are.

Totally Compulsive Behaviour

I'd bitten my fingernails

right down to the skin,

so I chewed off each fingers

and gnawed away the palm of my hand.

Then I devoured both forearms.

I couldn't reach my elbows,

so I flexed my body backwards

and pointed my toes.

I'll admit it was snakelike,

the way my jaw unhinged,

the way my feet entered my gullet

and I worked my way upward,

swallowing my knees, then my torso.

When I felt my teeth gripping

the back of my skull

I knew I'd gone too far.

My mouth was full of my own hair

and then my entire head.

I peeked out from behind my teeth

as I closed my mouth

like a single, giant, eyelid.

...

I got Salvador Dali/Francisco De Goya chills when I read "Totally Compulsive Behaviour", even more when I typed the sucker out.

The gentle humour Casteels employs both enhances and disguises the subversive nature of check engine. rhinoceros. tungsten.

Casteels more than adequately sums up his own clever devices in his poem "Remember A Bird" when he says:

"the dog is staring. Can you hear it?

It's like silence or that other thing, when tomorrow

inexplicably shifts today into yesterday, the sound

your shadow makes walking the dog's shadow."

Michael e. Casteels

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael e. Casteels has self-published over a dozen chapbooks of poetry and artwork. He has work forthcoming in Arc Poetry Magazine, and Filling Station. In 2012 he was nominated for the emerging artist award in The Premier's Awards for Excellence in the Arts. He lives in Kingston, Ontario where he run Puddles of Sky Press.

Michael e. Casteels

reads a Soduko poem

April 1, 2014

at TEXTual ARTivity

Video: Kelly Keeler

puddlesofskypress.com

456

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:
Lost & Found. David Lanier. The Texas Review Press. Huntsville, Texas. 2013.
Winner of the 2012 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize

David Lanier's slim collection Lost & Found punches way above its weight. By the time you are finished you'll think you've had a much bigger meal.

The first thing Today's book of poetry noticed about Lanier's writing is the easy and warm charm that resides underneath all of these pages. Lanier seems to go about his business without any bells or whistles at all, he keeps his pencils sharp and gets the details right. The result is that these poems feel like important conversations you've had with someone you trust.

The Upright

The older it got, the more it refused

to stay in tune for long. One note,

not-quite-right, a second that--insistently,

defiantly--plinked a little flat. Another

that might, in the middle of a scale,

suddenly squeak an octave or two

higher than it should.

He tried to keep the changes to himself,

blushed at every surprising warble

in his usually faultless playing,

chocked back the giggle in one chord

of "Lead on, O King Eternal."

But one day, when he thought no one

was listening, he began to draw them

out--all the wild, crooked sounds--

fitting his fingers around each one,

hammering them repeatedly. Then he

waited, dreading repercussions, and

when none came, smiled and started again.

Alone in the hot pour

of an August afternoon, he grew even bolder,

began to fashion his own cacophonies,

accessorized Bach with noise

that surely would make the master frown.

Hidden here, within reach, were half-wrong

arpeggios he hurled like expletives

off mirror and mantel in the parlor.

He leaned his teenage body in,

hands learning to unzip

black keys, to dig into ivory

underthings. And then he stopped:

his mother at the door, the lock

sharply unlocked, the stiff

wooden stool beneath him

twisting a painful quarter-turn.

In the hallway she looked up,

called out, "Play me

something pretty." And before him,

wide grin of the keyboard, his

fingers poised on its lip.

...

Lanier is a small town boy and you can hear that in these poems. But with relatively few steps, there are only eighteen poems in Lost & Found, the mature and articulate man appears amidst the strata of a considered life.

While We Wait For The Demerol To Work

The slow prayer of a sculling boat

is drifting forward on its own,

against the Potomac's urging,

oars uplifted. From your window

I watch it tug open

can almost count the knots

along the arms of rowers

who hold back just

a moment longer. How they must

ache to start again

the linked dip and pull, soft stroke

across the water's smooth brow.

...

Today's book of poetry had our regular morning read today, you know the rules, everyone who attends has to read. But we had another unexpected guest this morning. Just as we were starting, our old friend, the ghost of John Steinbeck, waltzed tall into the room as though he owned it. John announced that he loved a good narrative poem and had heard we had some going around, then he reminded us that "unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard." That could be our motto.

Steinbeck took a seat in the corner, lit up a smoke like nobodies business and we just let him. It reminded us of our childhood and he is John friggin Steinbeck's ghost.

At the end of a very inspired reading Steinbeck rose, thanked us for the excellent poems and company and then vanished just like he'd arrived. It was clear he liked the clean, crisp and knowing poems of Lanier.

Milo, our head tech, and Kathryn, our new intern, both headed to the shelves to pull down some of
Steinbeck. I started them off easy and pointed to Cannery Row and Of Mice and Men. By tomorrow they will both be onto East of Eden.

Bright Leaf

Entering, my grandfather bowed
his head, the barn's opening
so low I could hook my fingers
on top of the doorjamb and lean
just my face into a sweet blast
of nightshade, the air even hotter
and drier than the dog day afternoon.

The beam of the flashlight
bounced off the flue's
blue-white jets, then jerked
upwards in short, bright arcs
as he moved toward the inner
ladder, began the slow, careful climb.

High above him, thermometers
suspended strategically from rafter
and beam told how far
to raise or lower the flame, how long
it took to turn green into gold.

I watched until his boots rose
unto the vaulted ceiling, lifted
past rack after crisscrossed rack
of leaves that quivered in his wake
like giant saffron moths
nesting side by side
on thin wooden poles, wings
folding behind them in their sleep.

...

Today's book of poetry found that David Lanier's Lost & Found had moments of ample grace and that is a big ask from any book of poetry, and a big reward.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DAVID LANIER, who currently resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico, lived for many years in Washington, D.C., where he was on the faculty of the Georgetown University School of Medicine. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Poet Lore, Southern Poetry Review, Marlboro Review, Louisville Review, and several other small magazines.

BLURB

“The seemingly simple and direct diction of these exquisitely crafted poems belies the wisdom, insight, and epiphanies looming beneath their crystalline surfaces.”

— Larry D. Thomas, Final Judge

http://texasreviewpress.org/

457

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:
Country of Ghost. Gaylord Brewer. Red Hen Press. Pasadena, California. 2015.

"The earth is mostly just a boneyard. But pretty in the sunlight."

- Larry McMurtry

And so begins Gaylord Brewer's hypnotic litany Country of Ghost. It is not a small accident that Brewer begins with a quote from one of America's least appreciated boneyard specialists. McMurtry has put down his own trail of ghosts in his fine body of work. Showed some pretty fine sunlight as well.

Brewer follows suit.

Becoming Ghost

As you withdraw from the beloved ones,

first in mind, then abused beast of the body

following, you will find speech no longer

plausible. Suggestive turns of hip or shoulder

suffice. The night as long surmised

requires no further recompense. The sweat

of your face, your wetted hair nothing more

than a fevered baptism of exchange.

Fly, wraith. Your secrets mean nothing

to anyone now. Fly to a moon-washed city

of dust and stone. To the cemetery

locked to you, the church undiscovered,

shuttered houses murmuring as you pass.

Ghost breathes on for awhile, sorry nostalgia--

so breathe. If the heart still struggles,

you may share too that fading urgency.

Where were you going? Where you have

arrived of course. Recognize this place

and, perhaps, weep or smile at the knowledge

you pursued. The loneliness found instead,

its barbarism and solace. There, seeker--

crevasse, mountain, flickering shore.

Dark turn of wing. The bridge where you

pause, a last bittersweet time, as you cross.

...

Death does not come easy, not even to a Ghost.

Ghost is like the rest of us, longing for love, wanting to be able to play jazz piano, wanting to absolve grief. It's all in here, the aching human need to belong, the bittersweet tragedy of loss.

Brewer knocks 'em down like pins at the end of an alley where he know all the grooves.

Ghost Considers the Altered Nature

of His Sleep and a Consummation to Be Wished

But not sleep as you may recall suspended hours,

not dream as dream per se, pitiless collage

of exactly what you deserved--deserved or not.

Any bed a benign bed now, good enough for Ghost.

The clocks count, wind rises, again it's late.

Lay the burden of thy body down, close eyes

to a story of forgetting, what passed, what never was.

Inhale the night and its useless truth,

no harm now. Here, say, a red canvas, a staircase

descending. There, a piano in a library of babel once

revered as wisdom, the slight hands of a woman

raising a dead man's song from the keys,

lamentation and joy learned by rote. Too,

a bridge, thighs of brick and steel impassive

in the river's filthy, freezing current, body toll rising.

And there: Your wife in her soft coat, waiting

and anxious in the new snow that hides the road.

In other words, Ghost, same ole razzmatazz

of mortal coil, nightly nonsense. What else

distracts during the long darkness that has returned?

Look; She steps forward, the mark of her boots

a white trail announcing her closer, closer still.

Hair wild in her eyes and her face flush and cold. But

she is smiling, she is glowing, ice bows bare limbs

where she passes and the morning light dazzles.

...

Country of Ghost is every country. It's where you live. It's where I live. Ghosts are everywhere. This particular ghost is a Rahsaan Roland Kirk ghost. Always more than one instrument at hand, although sometimes he will play two just for the hell of it, sometimes three, absolutely for the hellish joy of it. Brewer is singing in the dark corners. Sometimes illuminations comes from the most unlikely sources.

We here at the Today's book of poetry offices almost expected a return of the ghost of John Steinbeck,

or perhaps another ghost. No such luck. Gaylord Brewer had the center of the floor today for the morning read. Milo, our head tech, did his usual excellent job. Kathryn, our new intern, read them like she owned them, and so on. As we worked around the room Today's book of poetry realized how sturdy Brewer had built his Ghost, all haunting and hardy.

Ghost Reconsiders the Romance

of the Piano Player

During your life, Ghost, you longed

for the skill, cool and unannounced:

at evening's end, when that moment

arrived, or as surprise life-of-the-party

to those who'd known you forever,

Ghost nonchalantly on the stool, without

preamble tickling a jazzy improv

or just pounding out three blunt-force

minutes of unbridled rock'n'roll

'til you bust the damn thing or burn it.

But now, as you've surrendered

beloved biblioteque where you passed

so many peaceful hours, reclined

on cushions beneath enormous beams

centuries old in their silence, or touching

frayed volumes, opening a cover,

turning a yellowed page to inhale

the musk of its quiet history, as you've

surrendered these pleasures to the pasty

young man arrived without request

as the Bechstein in the window, who taps on

morning and night--a tortured Chopin,

lurching Beethoven to make you glad

for the master's deafness, worst of all

the droning tinker, tinker, tinker

of the mule at the wheel, round and round--

your only recompense, Ghost, is pride

you never took a lesson, practiced only

the muted score of the earth, only,

say, an art of listening, rather than

shitting one's endless noise into every

passing ear that didn't ask for it. Sorry,

all this racket makes a ghost testy,

who just wanted to step out of the rain

without assault of genius--blank-eyed,

slack-jawed, idiot savant light on the savant.

...

Today's book of poetry has always been an admirer of the good Ghost story. We often think of poems as short movies and with Gaylord Brewer's Country of Ghost we get the range, Ghost memoir to Ghost romance, Ghost history and Ghost comedy. A poetic film festival.

Country of Ghost can be haunting as a bad dream in search mode, it is constantly perceptive and ultimately we discover we need a Ghost to tell us what it means to be human.

Gaylord Brewer

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gaylord Brewer, a native of Louisville, Kentucky, earned a PhD from Ohio State University. He currently teaches at Middle Tennessee State University, where he founded and for twenty-one years edited the journal Poems & Plays. His most recent publication is a cookbook/memoir, The Poet's Guide to Food, Drink, & Desire (Stephen F. Austin UP, Spring 2015). He has published 900 poems in journals and anthologies, such as Best American Poetry and The Bedford Introduction to Literature.
- See more at: http://redhen.org/gaylord-brewer/#sthash.Sby72DRX.dpuf

BLURBS

Brewer writes as if a sly old god, wounded, lost and yet to renounce his magic. Ghost is a tour de force, part Caliban, part Ariel. Revenant, bored, hungry and amazed, Ghost will be with us ever hereafter.
- Robert Olmstead

In this work of haunting, the possibilities for fruitful speculation and reflection are great. Gaylord Brewers poems in Country of Ghost are, at once, whimsical and deeply affecting in their pathos. The many ghosts that inhabit these poems contend with the conundrum of regret, and desire. It takes precise, well-modulated poetry that is alive with metaphor, wicked puns, image, and acutely observed detail to achieve what Brewer does in Country of Ghost.
- Kwame Dawes

The world of feeling that Brewer so urgently describes is complicated and dynamic.
- Asheville Poetry Review

The poems are eerie, achingly honest, conversational, and beautifully, darkly funny. Even if we are tempted to turn away from the rotting, breaking, bruised, and bleeding body, we are drawn in by the human need, the fragility, the nostalgia, the bittersweet longing of the speaker and his Ghost.
- Prick of the Spindle

Brewer manages to masterfully balance the ordinary and extraordinary. The consequent contrasts and juxtapositions elevate both conditions of ordinariness into a kind of equilibrium of the sublime. A trademark Brewer poem: craft, precision, self-analysis, humor, endurance, and a razor-sharp epiphany.
- The Evansville Review

Gaylord Brewer

Meacham Conversations, 22.3.2013

Gaylord Brewer talks with Meacham director Richard Jackson about his experiences with "Ghost," how travel has influenced his writing, his work with fiction and editing, and his growth as a poet.

video: Meacham Writer's Workshop

redhen.org

458

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 Deepest Rooms. Randolph Thomas. Silverfish Review Press. Eugene, Oregon. 2015.

Winner of the 2013 Gerald Cable Book Award

Randolph Thomas won the 2013 Gerald Cable Book Award and the judge was Rodger Moody. You might remember the affection Today's book of poetry has for Rodger Moody. We looked at Moody's Self Portrait/Sixteen Sevenlings back in February of 2014 and Moody's History back in December of 2015. You can see both of those here:

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

http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.ca/2015/12/history-rodger-moody-sight-for-sight.html

So, Randolph Thomas had a bit of in before we opened The Deepest Rooms. Today's book of poetry sank into Randolph Thomas world as soon as I read the first poem. Think big couch and Old Yeller on the Sunday afternoon box. That sort of comfort, not that sort of content.

Somehow, and I suggest some dark and magical Cajun influence, the reader is immediately emotionally invested in these poems, invested in whatever it is Thomas is selling.

Bird Island Jetty, 1969

My mother warns me about the water.

It will be cold, so I should ease into it.

Only if I can feel its bite

will it cleanse me, will it reclaim me.

She pulls her cap on tight, hiding her hair

and lowers her goggles

over her eyes.

Staring down at her feet, bent over

like the small bear we watched crossing the yard

one day in the fall,

she steps across the slick, black rocks,

stops near the edge, and glances back at me.

Why should I want to be so clean,

to be reclaimed?

I search the gray goggles

for my mother's eyes,

but they are not ever a bear's.

They are plastic, fogged.

Follow, her hand, reddened by the cold,

beckons.

Crossing the rocks, I almost topple.

When we saw the bear

she had already begun to say that time, like pain,

would form crystal shadows we would have to relearn

to see.

She'd said that, like animals, we would have to break

with all we knew.

Even an animal

knows when it's time to find the warm places,

the deepest rooms of caves,

the darkest water below the freeze,

where blood can thaw and flow anew.

Her mute face to me, backside to the sea,

she climbs down out of sight,

and I feel icy water on my legs, at my groin,

goose-pimples on my arms.

Come closer, someone, maybe even the water, says.

Inching along the rocks, I come to the edge.

I stare down at the surface as her head,

capped in rubber, slips under.

I stand looking down at the green, lapping water

twenty seconds,

then a minute.

There is no sign of her.

My breath quickening,

lost to the cold, clean air,

I turn to look for the pale blue station wagon

a quarter of a mile back where we left it

after driving all night through the Carolinas,

after reaching the marshes at dawn,

the cattails tipped in frost.

...

Thomas is a first class story-teller and the panoramic scenes he sets in almost every poem take the reader to memories long forgotten, he also gives us a few new ones to ponder. We think Thomas is telling a story when he is really opening a door.

Thomas is like the rest of us, searching for redemption through understanding. Each of us is at battle with the narratives we think are playing out, as though we had a say. Ghosts and Randolph Thomas will tell us that we are in short stories with uncommitted endings, life is the big anthology. The best stories have some idea of hope in them and Thomas knows that.

Scenic Highway

When your body welcomes mine, when we

come together on the bed, the sad

nomad I was before

takes the keys from the nightstand, makes his excuses

and slips out of the bedroom.

After drinking the dregs of our wine, puffing

the last of our tamped out cigarettes

he leaves the apartment, closing the door

and zigzagging through the light rain

across the parking lot to the car.

All afternoon while we make love, he drives highways

between here and New Orleans,

past oil refineries and through towns

of shotgun houses and tall churches.

After gliding down from the gray sky, coupling love bugs

squash against the windshield.

In one town, at a busy grocery store, he stops for coffee

and watches women he's sure are as lonely as he has been

pushing their carts along the aisles, his lips buzzing

with suggestions of getting in the car with him,

running away for a while, just for fun,

nothing heavy, no strings.

Only the uniformed guard by the door

will catch his eye, then it seems everyone

is watching him.

He shrugs, pushes open the glass door, and goes out.

The day is hot and damp, but he's dry inside,

and like some of the country he's seen

in the shadows of oil refineries along Scenic Highway,

desolate and poor. How can people

find hope here? How do they

go on? He sees himself wrecking

the car, leaving it in a ditch

or driving all night, as far as night

will take him,

but before long he stops

for a few beers, sits alone

crushing the cans, leaving them

in a line on the bar.

Soon enough he'll drive back, for he must

drive back, the road

darkening and spiraling before him,

at the tail end of many dreams; he sees himself

as a man leaving, for better or worse,

a world of fantasies, of dreams,

waking from the hypnotic roads, from the tired heat

of long similar days, from the aftertaste of beer,

and coming in late, finding the doors to the building

locked, having to knock on the window

to rouse the blurry figures

tangled together on the bed.

...

Hope always comes with some cost attached and Thomas knows that too.

This mornings read was elegantly subdued. Milo, our senior tech, brought in a collection of Stanley Turrentine recordings and our entire office had a quiet, easy buzz. Turrentine blowing elegant.

Kathryn, our new intern, led the way with the reading and it was superb. Randolph Thomas' poems marched across the room like they owned it, each and every one of them built for survival.

It might be important to note that almost every poem in this superb first collection has appeared in a journal or literary magazine of some note.

The Deepest Rooms comes fully loaded, if these poems were jokes the punch lines would be killers.

If they were hockey players they'd have a wicked slap-shot.

The Course of the Telling

I returned from the war to plant spring crops,

was at work in the field when news arrived

that my brother was dead at Chattanooga.

My daughter ran from the house, found me

beside my plough, tugged my sleeve.

I was ninety-six, a year from death

when your mother heard me tell this

in the breezeway of my dog-trot house

in Franklin County, Virginia. She was

only five, and I, her father's father's

father, was feeble, she would say, with

pale, piercing eyes that frightened her.

She did not recall my brother's name,

but carried my likeness and story to you,

who used my birthdate, ten years past the death

of Jefferson, to teach your children how close

generations are, while my brother's face

was lost in history's unmarked grave.

Our stories are where we go when we die,

for a brief time resurrected by the living

--and then finally forgotten. As my story

is cut short, as it dims with the voices

that remember and tell--or do not

remember in full, but tell anyway,

vary by invention of fact--when all

of even these are gone, familiar things

I thought were lost come closer in the dark:

my brother's face, my daughter's steps, even

your mother's frightened eyes, and you--who kept

my tale alive--your name will be buried

with ours in the course of the telling, lost

in the stories that are no longer told.

...

"Our stories are where we go when we die," Today's book of poetry loves this line like no other. It rings so true I want to paint it on the front of my house. I've asked Milo if it is possible, he's looking into it.

Today's book of poetry finds it almost impossible to consider that this is a first book of poetry, The Deepest Rooms is simply too good for that.

Randolph Thomas

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Randolph Thomas is the author of the short story collection, Dispensations, recipient of the Many Voices Project Award. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Quarterly West, The Greensboro Review, Seneca Review, Witness, Louisiana Literature, and Puerto Del Sol. He teaches at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

BLURB
[The Deepest Rooms,] this accomplished first collection of poems by Randolph Thomas, announces itself in rich poetic narrative and character invention, well wed in the art of the persona, which has too often been rendered as unmasked autobiography in much of the poetry of the second decade of the twenty-first century. We can happily detect a sweet new sound in the work of Randolph Thomas, a young master in full career.

— Michael Heffernan

silverfishreviewpress.com

459

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:
Some Mornings. Nelson Ball. Mansfield Press. Toronto, Ontario. 2014.

Nelson Ball is becoming an institution here at Today's book of poetry. Some Mornings is the fourth title from the Paris, Ontario poet to grace our pages. Previously we have admired Minutiae (Apt . 9 Press), A Gathering (Book Thug), and In This Thin Rain (Mansfield Press) and you can find a link to those blogs below.

Nelson Ball continues to astound with his particular type of minimalism. These poems hit the reader's ear as complete conversations, quicksilver and well-honed observations.

A Form of Grief

In memory of Barbara

and our friend bpNichol

Barbara and I

when we learned

of the death

of our friend

engaged in passionate

prolonged lovemaking

desperately

clinging to each other

asserting life

clinging to it

...

Even though Some Mornings is tinged with its share of grief, reading Nelson Ball is like fresh snow falling on Christmas Eve, it is always welcomed. These poems are so clean and crisp on the palate that they make your mouth water.

Some Mornings reminds us of how beautiful the world can be when we slow down and consider what is before us, sometimes it reminds us of how beautifully sad the world can be. There is all the beauty and sadness of the world in here.

Much like the Nobel Prize winning Master of Japanese literature Yasunari Kawabata, author of Beauty and Sadness, In The House of the Sleeping Beauties, The Master of Go, Ball, a Master himself as far as we here at Today's book of poetry are concerned, uses a very deft brush in order to say more with less. Kawabata wrote: "Put your soul in the palm of my hand for me to look at, like a crystal jewel, I'll sketch into words..." and Nelson Ball sketches with the best of them.

You Must Look Hard To See What's There

In memory of David UU (David W. Harris)

He read

a poetry manuscript

several

times

at different

times of day

in different

locations

David UU

told me

that's

what he did

now

that's what I do

...

You all know about our morning read here at the offices of Today's book of poetry. Since Nelson Ball is the poet who has appeared most often on our pages we decided to do something a little different for today's reading. For the very first time we dedicated a reading, this morning it was dedicated to Barbara Caruso. Caruso, who has passed away, was Nelson Ball's other half and continues to be both his muse and the frequent subject of his poetry.

These poems are filled with hope and kindness and that is a good rare thing.

East of Plattsville

On the regional highway east of Plattsville

is a metal fabricating plant

it used to be

a pickle factory

every time I drive past now

coming from either direction

my eyes well up

as I think of Barbara

this happens

every time

always

unexpected

until

now

...

Elegant grief and beautiful hopeful joy both abound in this tidy and robust little emotion machine. Today's book of poetry doff our collective hats once again to Nelson Ball and his ever so sublime Some Mornings. You really don't have to look any further for anything.

Nelson Ball

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nelson Ball is a poet and bookseller living in Paris, Ontario. He has worked as a labourer, chauffeur, clerk, seasonal forest ranger, record store clerk and janitor. From 1965 to 1973 he ran the legendary Weed/Flower Press, publishing mimeo editions of early books by Victor Coleman, Carol Bergé, David McFadden, bill bissett, bpNichol and many others. He is the author of 25 poetry books and chapbooks.

BLURBS

“He understands not only how to leave space for poems to breathe but also how to leave space for our brains to breathe. The rhythm of these poems are tailored to the way the contemplative mind works…”
— Mark Sampson, Free Range Reading

“He sees what we all see, the small transitory moments that make up our lives—but there is nothing ‘small’ about his conclusions or observations.”
— Michael Dennis, Today’s Book of Poetry

“From his seat at the pond’s edge, the poet learns to hear the language of its elements, and then teaches the reader to do the same.”
— Nita Pronovost, Matrix

“At his best, Ball proves that short can be eloquent, and small beautiful.”
— W. J. Keith, Canadian Book Review Annual

LINKS TO OTHER NELSON BALL BOOKS AT TODAY'S BOOK OF POETRY:

Minutiae, Apt. 9 Press: http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.ca/2014/09/minutiae-nelson-ball-apt-9-press.html

A Gathering, Book Thug: http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.ca/2014/11/a-gathering-nelson-ball-book-thug.html

In This Thin Rain, Mansfield Press: http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.ca/2013/04/in-this-thin-rain-nelson-ball.html

mansfieldpress.net

460

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:
Decline of the Animal Kingdom. Laura Clarke. ECW Press. Toronto, Ontario. 2015.

Decline of the Animal Kingdom - ECW Press

Laura Clarke is hilarious. She is hilarious in all of the right ways. Decline of the Animal Kingdom is a bestiary gone delightfully awry. These poems will bring out the animal in you.

Did You Know? Fun Facts About Mules

Mules are sterile and cannot reproduce. However they are anatomically

normal and males must be gelded.

There was a boy who fed apples to the Shetland ponies just so he could

wrap his hands around the electric fence. Kind of like when your

cousin slit his wife's throat open and locked himself in the garage with

the gas on.

Mules are a"made-to-order" breed of livestock. These fine animals can carry

you safely on a trail, pack in the high country, compete in the show ring or pull

logs and other equipment.

He didn't manage to kill either of them. And those fine black hairs will

never fully come off your grandma's hand-knit-shawl. Wet cloths don't

work. Vacuums don't work. The preciseness of your hands doesn't

work. Might as well weave them in.

Mules are popular for many reasons. Pleasure riders find that mules are

smooth to ride, sure-footed and careful.

There was a woman. No, she wasn't pretty. Pretend I'm Nick Cave

or a male poet or a female poet--there's nothing like a serial killer's

eloquent voice and moonlight and the trunk of a car and a winding

road. The sound of middle-aged neighbours arguing about terrariums

will drive you crazy in a sunlit apartment on the third floor. Sorry, him

crazy. In any season.

The mule combines the best features of both of its parents.

Do regurgitated greens strangle your appetite? Do you only eat when

you're hungry? Do you abuse laxatives two to three times a week? Do

you think the people and animals you murder in your dreams will

haunt you, not figuratively haunt your thoughts, but haunt you like

real ghosts?

From the donkey sire, the mule gets intelligence, ease of keeping, sure-footedness

and longevity. The mare usually determines the size of the mule, its length of

stride, style and conformation.

I killed my neighbour with a chainsaw in a dream. I didn't mean to.

Still, I had to gather up the body parts in my own small hands and

bury them, and that changed me, both in the dream and in real life.

...

Haunting allegory and plenty of ghosts, Decline of the Animal Kingdom is a mule-train that you want to get on. Clarke takes anthropomorphism to dazzling new places as she prances through the animal kingdom with both emotional elasticity and a certain moral flexibility.

If these aren't the questions that need to be asked they certainly are entertaining. When Today's book of poetry was re-reading these poems they still barked, growled, howled and grrrr'd with velocity the second and third time round.

Extirpation

Geography never repeats itself.

The Tasmanian tiger live-tweets its extinction

from the Hobart zoo in 1933;

aurochs fling feces with their Holocene horns

across centuries, get dirty looks from HR.

Popular opinion shifts ever-so-seismically.

Good pets with bad press are still fucked;

terms of venery mean the world to me.

Everyone stops calling -- epochs beget epochs

between Friday night plans.

I murder your white hens, eviscerate

shell and feather indiscriminately,

smear blood all over your white chicken coop.

My eyes are beady. I ate your Greek yogurt

from the communal fridge.

I net only four percent of the Who Wore It Better vote,

the wolves having accessorized the blood

more elegantly by dragging their snouts

across fresh snow. I heard it

from the school of cod I used to hang with,

saw rumour vibrate from shell to shell

among the zebra mussels.

I've only ever eaten my share and then some.

Similar to the last known passenger pigeon,

I was last sighted in a flock of regular pigeons,

fitting right in.

...

Decline of the Animal Kingdom is Laura Clarke's debut but it comes with fangs fully bared, claw's out and a hungry raptors' dark and fearless heart. The humour in these poems often comes with some blood left on the tracks.

These poems have a swagger in their brash and gleeful arrogance, Laura Clarke can burn. Today's book of poetry didn't know whether to spit or swear they made me giggle so much.

Architeuthis

When I finally saw the giant squid, I was like,

it's not that big. My dog pissed a heart shape

on the sidewalk and it was bigger than that.

I wanted the squid to go on forever, elephantine

subspherical suckers with finely serrated rings

of chitin, lively tentacles circling space and emerging

in the future, waving, eyes like soulful car tires,

ecstatic ink clouds enveloping birch trees and bridges.

Scientists brought the eye to my house

to demonstrate its close proximity in size

to a dinner plate, explaining only an extinct

aquatic reptilian predator matched the diameter

of its unblinking pupil, 9 centimetres or 3.5 inches.

Predictably, they placed it on an actual dinner platter,

and it looked right past me. In my own house.

Dear squid eye / dinner platter combo:

once my ex-boyfriend was hired to transport

plumbing supplies in Ottawa, becoming

so hopelessly lost in his oversized vehicle,

he was fired by end of day. The warehouse

was 20 minutes away, but he drove that truck

straight into the province of Quebec.

...

Today's book of poetry wants to read whatever juicy morsel Laura Clarke has planned for the future because this stuff was cherse. Clarke has announced her arrival and made an instant fan out of me.

Decline of the Animal Kingdom is excellent coming out of the gate stuff. You will never look at animals the same way again.

Laura Clarke

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Laura Clarke's work has appeared in a variety of publications including PRISM International, Grain, the National Post and the Antigonish Review. She is the 2013 winner of the Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers from the Writers' Trust of Canada. She lives in Toronto, Ontario.

BLURBS

“Clarke’s mischievous, fabulist debut collection blurs the lines between the literal and allegorical as she employs a lens of anthropomorphism, an edge of misanthropy, and the slow unravelling of personae into disparate states evoking something between grace and madness. The stark, spare language of her poetry, which utilizes a variety of forms, belies its complexity . . . Clarke’s successful balancing of calculated loathing and euphoria makes for a fierce piece of performance art.”

— Publishers Weekly, starred

“The poems in Clarke’s debut collection appear deceptively simple at first glance, with the pop sheen of YouTube videos and movie reviews, but are in fact nuanced examinations of the relationships between people and animals, domesticity and the wild.”

— National Post

Laura Clarke

2013 Poetry Winner

RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers

video: Writers Trust of Canada

ecwpress.com

461

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:
Furs Not Mine. Andrea Cohen. Four Way Books. Tribeca, New York. 2015.

Andrea Cohen just blew my mind -- as well as the doors off. Furs Not Mine hums from the beginning to the end with excellence. These poems hit you like jolts of pleasure electricity, they hit your poetry receptors like joy machines.

Whether Cohen is telling us about the nature of peaches, the childish pleasure of hiding in a cherry tree or inviting her dead mother to come dance at her side at Cohen's own wake, these beautiful monsters delighted.

Moment of Truth

A matador imagines he has

many moments of truth, those

moments before his final sword

play, before he and the bull part ways.

Then one evening, in the sky

above the arena, he sees a reddish-

yellow streak that mimics his cape,

and a cloud that mirrors

his likeness precisely. It's a momentary

distraction above the crowd

that calls for blood, as the bull

is upon him. This is the critical

moment for the toreador: seeing

the airy man he might have been.

...

Those of you who follow us here at Today's book of poetry, today is our 462nd post, know we almost always choose three poems for each blog. Furs Not Mine presented us with a dilemma, pushed that envelope, gummed up the selection process.

This is my first list for today's blog: 3,4, 19, 29, 36, 38, 39, 45, 48, 49, 51, 53, 59, 63, 73, 75, 78, 79, 85, 86, 87,88, 89. Those are the page numbers of the poems I felt it was essential to share. The numbers in bold are poems we thought were instant classics.

So after this morning's read we voted for today's poems. The problem was that everyone liked everything, Milo and Kathryn were eating this stuff up like hot-buttered popcorn. Everyone had lists that were too long.

In the end, as Editor-in-Chief and Dictator of Poetry Operations here at the Today's book of poetry complex, I went with my gut. It was a a no-lose game, Andrea Cohen is a braggart's worst enemy because she has all the tools, puts it down with understated precision.

Gravy Boat

I've got one foot

in the gravy, one

in the gravy boat.

It's the same foot.

The other one?

I cut it off.

Otherwise it would

have stood its one

foot in the grave.

I balance easily now

in the gravy boat

on my good foot.

I got the boat cheap,

when Bolivia lost its coast

and auctioned off its navy.

Where am I sailing?

Who can say?

Goodbye Bolivia, hello gravy!

...

Enchanted. That's today's word from Today's book of poetry. That's the word from me. Andrea Cohen's poetry is like spring after a hard winter. These poems will break you out of your funk, they break over the page like the sun after a long, dark night.

Smart, smart, smart.

I'm not going to say that Today's book of poetry has been reduced to mere cheerleading status by Furs Not Mine but I did break out the plaid skirts, mega-phones and pom-poms this morning.

Today's book of poetry will happily champion Furs Not Mine, an early front-runner for the prestigious KITTY LEWIS HAZEL MILLER DENNIS TOURBIN POETRY PRIZE.

Bargain

We paid him next

to nothing -- less than the little

he'd asked for -- to lead us

at dusk from the pyramids

on camels into the desert.

Such slim wages

to take us, without

complaint, all that way --

so far, without a star.

We were in the middle

of nowhere, or at its edge.

Friends, he asked, from

inside that blackness,

what will you pay me

to take you back?

...

This is some fine, fine stuff. On days like today Today's book of poetry loves his job and loves all of you.

Furs Not Mine can't come any more highly recommended.

Andrea Cohen

(Photo (c) Francesca G. Bewer)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Andrea Cohen’s poems and stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. Her previous poetry collections include The Cartographer’s Vacation, winner of the Owl Creek Poetry Prize, Long Division, and Kentucky Derby. She has received a PEN Discovery Award, Glimmer Train’s Short Fiction Award, and several residencies at The MacDowell Colony. She directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Writers House at Merrimack College.

BLURBS

"Who says true wit should be read its last rites? Andrea Cohen's deft lyric gift makes short work of that dire thought, cutting to the quick of all that casts a spell or a pall. In Furs Not Mine, she's come into her own by mastering the disarming arts of the pithy epiphany and the mordant lament, the bittersweet testament that takes but three steps from feathers to iron, the beguiling Metaphysical trope with a hard-bitten American twist. Her wily ways with the mother tongue are equal to every curve the world throws, showing over and over how the soul of wordcraft can run rings around 'the central O / of loss and going on.'"

-- David Barber

"Furs Not Mine is a book full of completely new form and tone. To call this work 'intricately crafted' is an understatement, but needs to be said. Reading these poems, one feels a little afraid to breathe, that to shift a comma or change a line break would be to blow down the cathedral that's been built out of grains of sand. This is craft, but it's also infused with mystical moments, sacred intuitions. Delicate and difficult, there are some of the most memorable poems I've ever read. Period."

-- Laura Kasischke

Andrea Cohen

reads from Furs Not Mine

Video: Merrimack College

fourwaybooks.com

462

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:
Fortunate Light. David Bergman. Body Language 09. A Midsummer Night's Press. New York, New York. 2013.

You might want to know that A Midsummer Night's Press tell us that the 'Body Language' series is "devoted to texts exploring questions of gender and sexual identity."

For our purposes here at Today's book of poetry we want you to know that David Bergman's Fortunate Light burns with the best of them. These poems are the bright kid in the class showing you how it is done. These are Orca poems, top of the food chain stuff.

Bergman is firing tender lasers.

In Nordstrom's

Anything could be written on this face --

he is that young and unmarked

by imperfection, the skin smooth, the green

eyes grass at dawn. He finds my toes

in the shoes that are too long. He brings

out a size smaller. "Walk on them," he says.

"Hows do they feel?" he asks. In the presence

of such beauty, one forgets one's age and then

grows painfully aware of it. "They look good

on you," he nods, smiling. And for the first time

I notice all his clothes are wrong,

that any clothing would be wrong on the fine

light structure of his bones that was built

only for wings. Just wings.

...

Bergman is certainly writing poems that explore his sexual identity. Beautifully gay. Fortunate Light is a boutique museum with room after room of marble David's that Michelangelo would be proud of. These poems are pretty much flawless, smooth as marble and solid as a rock.

Today's book of poetry loved the abiding tenderness in Bergman's ideals of intimacy and we loved the haughty horny virility of an older man's lusts.

But mostly Today's book of poetry greatly admired how flat out lovely Bergman's poems are. These poems are nuanced without any gilding of the lily, they are clean as glass and splendidly, intensely erotic.

The Body Remember

The body remembers what the mind forgets.

Actors know this, and when their parts require

long-forgotten rage, they make a fist

and anger arrives just as they desire.

Pianists, too, rely upon their hands

to recall a piece they haven't played for years

and marshal the keyboard under their command

before the music rises to their ears.

And lovers who have long remained apart

because of argument or circumstance,

will feel, before it builds up in their heart,

pressures along the arm, then their embrace

releases from lips an unexpected grace,

words that they'd forgotten how to start.

...

This morning's read was another barn-burner. Milo, our head tech, thought Bergman was the bee's knees. Kathryn, our new intern, thought Bergman was hilarious in all the right ways.

Bergman is clearly a man with a sophisticated palette and an unlimited literary canon on his formidable shoulders but there is never any showing off. These gems are as easy to access as opening the page and digging in, the rewards are immediate. Smart doesn't necessarily have to mean impenetrable.

The Distractions of Beauty

Right after my reading, he appeared

so I could sign his book and talk. He was

seventy-five or so, small and thin,

with a well-trimmed arc of snow-white beard.

His wife of nearly fifty years had died

a year before, he told me, and he'd been

faithful to her even to the end, but now,

now he felt he wanted to be gay.

He always knew that he was gay,

but somehow -- times were different then --

he settled for a family and got

two sons, good boys, who now lived far away.

While he spoke, I noticed another man,

twenty-five I'd guess, who smiled at me,

then turned to show his bubble butt, the kind

that begs to be pricked so you can see just how

it would explode with pleasure. He told his sons

what he was up to, and one -- the one who lived

in San Francisco -- confessed that, like his dad,

he, too, was "a little gay," but later wed.

As for the other one ... The bubble butt

clenched tight and then released his cheeks; they flexed

again and again like a pulsing sea anemone...

The brother? What of him? I made a vexed

attempt to retrieve my mind, which had gone adrift.

Well, he was much too busy to listen and put

the news away like an unwanted gift

he'd unwrap someday when he had time for it.

At last he said, "I must be boring you."

O those words stung! Callous and rude,

I'd been unbearably distracted

by an ass that had, alas, since left the room.

Forgive me, I should have known better

than let mere youth steer me blind,

for age must always go first, with beauty,

(if it comes at all) following close behind.

...

Today's book of poetry can't even begin to tell you how much we admire the chapbooks produced by A Midsummer Night's Press. These perfect-bound little pistols are pocket sized dynamos. And David Bergman's Fortunate Light punches way above its weight. This beautiful, tiny, little book is a heavy-weight champ and as tender as your favourite lover.

David Bergman

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Bergman is the author of three previous books of poetry, Heroic Measures, The Care and Treatment of Pain and Cracking the Code, which won the George Elliston Prize. His poetry has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Republic, Poetry, The Yale Review, among many other journals. He is poetry editor of The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide. He is winner of the Lambda Literary Prize as the editor of Men on Men 2000. He has published two studies, The Violet Hour: The Violet Quill and the Making of Gay Culture and Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-Representation in American Literature, which was selected as an Outstanding Book of the year by Choice and the Gustavus Myers Center for Human Rights. He is the editor most recently of Gay American Autobiography. With Katia Sainson, he translated the Selected Poems of Jean Sénac. Educated at Kenyon College and The Johns Hopkins University, where he earned a Ph.D., he is a professor of English at Towson University. He lives in Baltimore with his partner of many years, John Lessner.

David Bergman

Smartish Pace poetry reading at Fraizer's, Baltimore, MD on Feb. 27, 2009. AWP fundraiser organized by the wonderful 2009 AWP President Ron Tanner.

amidsummernightspress.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"

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Harvest the Dirt - Wil Gibson (Great Weather for MEDIA)

You Can't Be Serious - Ronald Wallace (Parallel Press/University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries)

Realignment - Ruth Roach Pierson (Palimpsest Press)

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Tender Data - Monica McClure (Birds, LLC)

Martha - Leslie Allison (Ugly Duckling Presse)

Tatterdemalion - Jennifer Londry (Chaudiere Books)

Sideshow Concessions - Lucas Crawford (Snare/Invisible Publishing)

check engine. rhinoceros. tungsten. - Michael e. Casteels (Puddles of Sky Press)

Lost & Found - David Lanier (The Texas Review Press)

Country of Ghost - Gaylord Brewer (Red Hen Press)

The Deepest Rooms - Randolph Thomas (Silverfish Review Press)

Some Mornings - Nelson Ball (Mansfield Press)

Decline of the Animal Kingdom - Laura Clarke (ECW Press)

Furs Not Mine - Andrea Cohen (Four Way Books)

Fortunate Light - David Bergman (A Midsummer Night's Press)