Today's Book of Poetry

Today's book of poetry:
Tiger Heron. Robin Becker. Pitt Poetry Series. University of Pittsburgh Press. Pittsburgh, PA. 2014.

Today's book of poetry is heartened by the moments of quiet celebrations Robin Becker finds again and again in Tiger Heron. It is hard to deal with aging, the dead and the dying but Becker takes it head on and renders some peace out of the harrowing process.

Tiger Heron covers some big ground in short order. There are Yiddish lamentations to consider, unwanted dogs roaming the pages, an unwieldy horse sculpture being dismantled for transport and a Civil War re-enactment with cross-dressing scouts and friends, that is just the tip of the perverbial ice-berg.

Late June Owl

They say it's a bad

summer for ticks, a good summer

for day lilies

(Quality control likes

to measure and evaluate

with continuous monitoring)

They say my friend

has a few weeks, maybe a month

but you never know

As the raptor people know

how to keep the orphaned

screech owl before release

may his keepers

open the airy nets of their patience

when he tries them

They say the screech owl's trill

has more than four

individual calls per second

They say they can

barely hear his voice, more like wind

than words

They say the owlet will leave

the open cage when fully flighted

and capable of hunting

They say the dying

will sometimes wait until everyone

has left the room

...

Becker laments ecological with eloquence and subtle power in poems about mushrooms and flying squirrels and these are poems worth knowing. Becker is laying some very deep tracks with Tiger Heron, and once you've read it you realize that the biggest strength is consistency, making you laugh or cry is easy but having these poems roll across the page as steady as cars on a train makes you take notice. These poems are big and strong, solid like they were built of iron. You can almost hear them rumble.

Becker is full of surprises, she is quite happy to make you smile before she drops the hammer. She does not lack for humour.

The Weight

for Jill Morgan

If some true measure of my mother's

sorrow lay in each ounce of vermeil and gold,

then I could, bracelet by bracelet,

account for years of sadness.

and so I took the box

to the floor, to hold and smell

each piece, invoking the plate glass jeweler's

windows and then the jolt of possession

when my father pointed to a ring or

necklace pinned to a velvety cushion.

Sometimes, aboard a cruise ship, he'd get the urge;

sometimes, flushed, after winning at the track.

She never went for the most expensive

things like some girls do, he said after she died.

I sat there, cupping in my palms the stories,

my hands sinking with the weight.

...

It's easy to get weighed down with family melancholia but Becker deftly avoids that trap by never becoming sentimental. And besides, there are scuba diving in the Dominican Republic poems one minute and a climb towards a mountain summit poem the next, lovers get left behind or they leave.

It's all in the same fine tone as Becker sifts through our emotional dance in her search to give it words.

Today's book of poetry is convinced Becker is doing an exceptional job. The best poems make the personal universal, speak to us all, we think Becker nails it.

Threesome Interval

That summer my cooking exceeded

all expectations.

I excelled in tagine of chicken with olives

and a curried Thai soup.

We biked to yoga at six a.m.,

biked home virtuous

and clarified. Was it the Prozac? The new

puppy glorious in red curls?

Your new man, the Scrabble champ? Even

the wild blueberries astonished.

In Shelburne Falls, from the viewing platform

we admired the glacial potholes

ground from granite by snowmelt and gyrating

stone. Swirls marbled

the rock with a natural patina. We kept

our composure,

despite hundred of millions of years

whirlpooling abrasion.

Arriving at the Walt Whitman party, in great spirits,

I wondered: might we try a trip to Rome?

At the tag sale, he found a first edition

of Frost, and you snagged

a Henckels knife. We didn't deserve such

good luck, but luck found us anyway.

...

Robin Becker knew long before the experts, long before they made it public, luck accounts for a big slice of the pie. We are all one second, one false move away, from a new and different life. We are riding a narrow and precarious ledge.

Tiger Heron made for a spirited read this morning here at Today's book of poetry. Milo, our head tech laughed and then he cried. Kathryn, our new intern, cried and then she laughed. Robin Becker made them do that.

Robin Becker

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robin Becker, Liberal Arts Research Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the Pennsylvania State University, is the author of seven poetry collections, includingDomain of Perfect Affection, The Horse Fair, Giacometti’s Dog, and All-American Girl, winner of the Lambda Literary Award. In 2002 the Frick Art and Historical Center in Pittsburgh published Venetian Blue, a limited-edition chapbook of Becker’s art poems. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Bunting Institute, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2000 she received the George W. Atherton III Award for Excellence in Teaching from Penn State, and from 2010 to 2011 she served as the Penn State Laureate. For the Women’s Review of Books, Becker edits poetry and writes a column on poetry called “Field Notes.”

BLURBS“Becker's Tiger Heron, rich with animal life from the flying squirrel and prairie dog to inhabitants of the coral reefs of the Caribbean, expresses outrage and grief over the ongoing destruction of these ecosystems. A moving poem deals with homophobia, another celebrates Yiddish, ‘a mongrel, Middle High German.’ These vivid, self-confident lyrics ranging from villanelle to couplet deserve close reading.”
—Maxine Kumin, Pulitzer Prize winner

Robin Becker looks straight at the failures of our human species, yet never loses her compassion or reduces the complexities and paradoxes to easy conclusions. Deftly, precisely, these poems express their wisdom in lines that surprise and delight. They are clear as open windows through which we see our lives.”

—Ellen Bass, author of The Human Line

“Robin Becker’s poems have the limpid clarity of an early Flemish painting, the crisp details always fusing into a larger illumination. Complicated loss, unsparing truth, animal grace, small comforts—her deft and daring language yields them all up fresh, the paint still wet.”

—Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home

“The surprise of this book is that the poems are actually stories—about devotion and death and decay—but somehow they’re not sad stories. Because in all of them, Robin Becker reaches into the shadowy corners of love and pulls out feelings I didn’t even know I wanted named. I didn’t know you could sneak so much life into poems about death.”

—Sarah Koenig, producer, This American Life

Robin Becker

"Solar," a poem by Robin Becker, 2010-11 Penn State laureate

Video: Penn State University

upress.pitt.edu

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

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Today's book of poetry:
The Gross & Fine Geography/New & Selected Poems. Stephen Bett. Salmon Poetry. Cliffs of Moher, County Clare. Ireland. 2015.

"At 180 pages and in the fluorescent coat of many colours - in this corner, author of 20 books and counting - Stephen Bett, linguistic gymnast and parable prognosticator."

This is heavyweight stuff. Bett comes out of his corner swinging. These poems are the onslaught of a simply unrelenting force.

You can't pin Bett down because he comes at you from all angles. These poems start on a terrain that might have employed the beautiful ramblings of an Allen Ginsberg but before you blink the carved in stone and coming straight ahead voice of Today's book of poetry hero Saint Raymond of Carver.

Preparation for a Gift

How true it is that we need to be
close to the brink of language when
we speak now. I recall saying to you
at the time I read them
how acute John Ashbery's remarks on
Pollack were. That the 'excitement'

lies with the 'very real possibility'
of the work coming to nothing (the 'random
splashes of a careless housepainter').
I watched on film how he would

tack his unstretched canvas on the ground
and walk around it choosing from various
cans of paint; not systemically, it seemed,
and certainly not according to the fixed laws
of ritual -- or even chance (that being an art
both the body and will surely deny). But simply
because a particular color was at hand

to what he was doing; whereupon the
success or failure must lie right
at the heart of his having chosen
to do it that way at all. It cannot be
done over. And seeing that, he must have had
a tremendous faith in his materials to go a-
long with his own equally determined and supple
contortions. I mean the ability of the paint to
fall where it will find least resistance, and of
the canvas to absorb it there. (I wanted to call
such faith "ambition," and -- if it could be
divested of the vulgarity of systems --
relate it to a program for language.
Then I'd offer it to you
in place of tedious conversation;
difficult to rely on, perhaps,
but significant in its intractable resolve.

...

Of course Today's book of poetry is working with a limited palette of descriptors. Of course Bett is nothing like Ginsberg or Carver except when he is. "Preparation for a Gift" pretty much says it all about Stephen Bett's intentions. This poem starts off The Gross & Fine Geography/New &Selected Poems, a statement of purpose writ large. Then Bett puts his foot down and steamrolls us through thirty-one years with his gargantuan and generous voice.

Bett is never confined to one particular style or form. His engine runs on whatever fuel is handy.

The Gross & Fine Geography

The gross & fine geography
of our hearts

Big sweep
tight corners

I reach
for you

For you

Geographies
that desire

...

Bett knows how to be a sweetheart and a lovely jazz rat, his tribute to Bobo Stenson touched our hearts here at Today's book of poetry. We'd like Bett to know that today was a Dexter Gordon day in the Today's book of poetry offices. Any collection of poetry that contains poems about/to Pat Metheny or Bill Frisell is going to win hearts and save lives at Today's book of poetry.

The Gross & Fine Geography is a book worthy of all your attention. Bett has published a zillion books in that under the radar style so many Canadian poets have been forced to embrace but this book should address that. Bett burns with the best.

Back Principles (58):
more than life itself

Your breath like some
kind of long
remembered
wind on his
face

Shake him closer
than ever

The christ love
& buddha love
are one

Get him there

You say to him
I love you more
than life itself

It is miracle
enough

The Divine lives
here, call it
what you will

Though we are in-
credibly small
the path just
got shorter
by two
breaths

...

Grace, music and beauty along with a few moments of quiet desperation, The Gross & Fine Geography changes gears more than a few times and it is an exciting ride all the way through this rambling taster from Bett's previous 19 books. Today's book of poetry is convinced it is a menu you will enjoy.

Stephen Bett

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Bett is a widely and internationally published Canadian poet. His earlier work is known for its sassy, edgy, hip… caustic wit―indeed, for the askance look of the serious satirist… skewering what he calls the ‘vapid monoculture’ of our times. His more recent books have been called an incredible accomplishment for their authentic minimalist subtlety. Many are tightly sequenced book-length ‘serial’ poems, which allow for a rich echoing of cadence and image, building a wonderfully subtle, nuanced music. Bett follows in the avant tradition of Don Allen’s New American Poets. Hence the mandate for Simon Fraser University’s “Contemporary Literature Collection” to purchase and archive his “personal papers” for scholarly use. He is recently retired after a 31-year teaching career largely at Langara College in Vancouver, and now lives with his wife Katie in Victoria, BC.

www.stephenbett.com

salmonpoetry.com

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DISCLAIMERS

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

Today's book of poetry:
Thrillows & Despairos. Chris Chamber. A Buckrider Book, Wolsak & Wynn. Hamilton, Ontario. 2015.

Reading Chris Chambers Thrillows & Despairos reminds me of how much I love Toronto. Today's book of poetry lived in Scarborough for about ten minutes when I was very young. Back in the late 70's Today's book of poetry lived in Oakville, Port Credit and finally Etobicoke, 2 Royal York Road. Our apartment was right on Lake Ontario and we faced the water, I was living with a woman named Blanche Dubois at the time.

Toronto was the BIG SMOKE to me and when I met up with my poet friends it felt electric to be attached to something so big. The poets I knew then are not names that you would know, but I did meet the iconic Stuart Ross back then, sandwich boards and all.

All of that to say that Chambers''Kieslowski's Toronto' had me shouting loud enough to cause a stir here in the office. The beautiful trick is that Chambers makes the city he loves universal.

May 1st

The night after chicken korma and aloo gobi

at the Red Rose, I was informed my stomach

made noises never before heard. "Incomprehensible

to some," I trilled, "last night I was dreaming in Hindi!"

And the thrillows sang on behind the blinds.

"Are those sparrows, Bird Poet?" I was asked.

"Despairos?" I said,

"Why despairo?

Those are young enthusiastic children

of jaded homebody parents."

They were not the nagging jay who joined us last week:

so handsome and angry and mean,

his voice a fork on a plate, the screech of a taxi brake.

My second sighting he buzzed an old sleep-drunk squirrel

clambering down the trunk of the maple out front.

Welcome back forsythia -- welcome thrillows and

despairos, pigeons, wood doves, squeaky bikes,

bikes whose seats need raising. Welcome crowded bike posts:

now we'll lock a block away.

Welcome needy grass, magnolia litter.

Welcome squirrels. Welcome jay.

...

Today's book of poetry is big on joy and Thrillows & Despairos offers us up more than the usual helping. These poems are as easy to put on as flannel pajamas and often just as comforting.

If you get the lucky chance to read Chris Chambers'Thrillows & Despairos you'll see immediately both the quiet charm and resolute heart in these poems. There's no warm-up period, just like in Chambers excellent Lake Where No One Swims (Pedlar Press, 1999), you get to dive in because it is so welcoming, the poetry, not the lake. Chambers welcomes the reader with witty reason, common sense disguised in poem.

Chambers opens the door wide with his easily accessible and entirely charming style, he does this so you'll be paying close attention when he drops a bombshell on you.

Ventilator

20th Century driving home drunk from your dead-end job to your

dead-end house

hitting SEEK under mauve chemical skies while the Fanta sun sinks

behind pre-sold pre-sod Major Mack subdivisions.

20th Century your lawns are tan, thirsting for rain, and there's nothing

on television.

20th Century all your melodies were written 28 years ago, your songs

are anemic,

thirsting for rain, they bring only pain with each tired refrain.

20th Century your wife left you long before you even met her -- she was gone,

and you have taken it out on every woman ever since.

Will you make it in to work tomorrow with your bloodshot eyes and your

Advil buzz?

Will anyone notice? Will they get on better without you?

"Whatcha gonna do about it? Whatcha gon uh DO?"

Now you are naked on the Internet, you have waited 40 minutes just to see

yourself flesh out -- but it is not your body and it's not your face either.

Tomorrow you will wear yesterday's socks. You're all talk, 20th Century,

foxing nobody.

You are "dreaming you are the pure products of America

going crazy." Look at yourself. "Stretched out

in room ten oh nine with a smile on your face and tarot in your eyes."

Y'are a terrified 36-year-old tired beyond the twilight of youth and any cliche.

20th Century, your heart is fluttering like the wings of a small bird,

your heart is racing like the heart of a small bird, while you cling

to your nest; to a torn and frayed dream of nostalgia --

You Are Poetry, 20th Century?

Lead foot on accelerator

breathing oxygen through a ventilator suit --

looking down from the moon -- waning 20th Century -- our one

lonesome moon,

did you really think fashion was just perspective?

That all you learned from technology has taught you nothing, albeit painstakingly;

has restricted the circulation of blood to the heart, actually?

What exactly do you see from up there, 20th Century?

Do you expect us to believe you will ever return;

that your soul might survive and your bones not cinder up

on re-entry;

that you might walk down the streets of your hometown an exile

in the pale green light breathing etherized pale green air?

Have you had one original thought in your life, 20th Century? One?

You are a footnote.

Y'are a three-line item buried deep in the library's sub-basement:

"Your face swollen like a purple cabbage: 'Oh I had a bad fall.'

What kind of staircase could do that?

Tell us whose fist it was, Twentieth Century, don't lie to us."

...

Today's book of poetry comes away from Chris Chambers'Thrillows & Despairos with nothing but admiration. It's full to bursting with "I should have thought of that" moments. This is a book you'll want to buy multiple copies of because you will want to put it into as many hands as possible. This is poetry that will change minds -- you know the type who always says "I don't get poetry." They will not only "get" Chambers but Today's book of poetry is certain they will become poetry fans, how can they not be tickled by the human scale Chambers brings to every poem.

This morning's reading made for a grand scale memorable moment, Milo, our head tech, and Kathryn, our new intern, announced that they were moving in together. Actually what they did was to pass out gorgeous hand printed cards inviting us to come and see their new "shared" poetry collection bookcase. They were both moon-faced and useless this morning.

So, Today's book of poetry invited a dear old friend, the ghost of Toronto poet Martin Singleton (among Singleton's publications Difficult Magic was published by Wolsak & Wynn back in 1984, Range of Motion, 1989). Martin and I were friends all those years ago and I used to love to hear him read poetry. I have a tape recording of a reading he did here in Ottawa at Paul King's Food For Thought Books. Paul and Martin are both too long gone but were happy to show up for this morning's reading. Martin loved Toronto almost as much as Chambers and Paul King loved poetry. Martin told me he'd been a big fan of Chambers ever since The Lake Where No One Swims. So has Today's book of poetry.

Winter Poem

In my dream it is as cold as it is in reality tonight.

The wind sears everything but us.

We're in someone's car, driving home across Bloor Street. Westbound.

The bars approaching our neighbourhood vaguely lit.

Cigarette smoke and steamed windows dilute their lights.

Then...ahead...where we live...and beyond...

only darkness. A black that is terrifying the imagination, the subconscious;

our house, our secrets, our streets, our homes appear powerless,

zapped of the current we so take for granted.

It's a blackout familiar in ways to last summer's,

but at minus 30C portends a disaster.

We drive away.

We drive in.

Check the fuel on the gauge.

We have heat here, Here.

Will this car save us? Distract us?

Should we pick up the hatless -- the shivering?

Should we...wake up?

The alarm plays the 7 o'clock news

and we turn in to each other, warm skin happy to find

warm skin in a warm flannel-sheet bed.

We hold each other for quite a while - then you get up,

then I get up: Happy Friday!

The sun is up, the days are getting longer,

it remains minus 30C.

The light is brightening the top floor

of the ugly pirate radio apartments at Dovercourt & Bloor: this morning

they're positively radiant in their white and off-white plainness...

Through the kitchen window, around the smoke from the tops of the houses

across the alley, and about a mile away between us

it's light.

Beautiful light. To the west -- black in my dream -- beautiful light.

Heat is pumping, pumping out of Mr. Chong's rads now.

The freezing day the beautiful day is beginning.

...

Today's book of poetry read Thrillows & Despairos like I was eating fine chocolates, what tasty bon-bon is next? Perfect chocolate covering each time, plethora of delight and wit inside, always comforting, always a surprise.

Chris Chambers

Photo: Paul Barker

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Chambers is the author of Lake Where No One Swims and Wild Mouse (with Derek McCormack), which was nominated for the Toronto Book Award. These poems have appeared in Taddle Creek, Jacket, This Magazine, The Literary Review of Canada and were awarded the K. M. Hunter Artist Award.

BLURB

“Every time you reach your hand into the gut of Chris Chambers’ new book, you pull out something writhing, surprising and fresh. But also rare – rare in that poems so damn wit-filled and well-crafted can also be so deeply human and moving: just check out the magnificent centrepiece ‘Kieślowski’s Toronto.’ Chambers insists that every poem needs a bassist – his is equal parts Flea and Jaco Pastorius.”
– STUART ROSS, author of You Exist. Details Follow.

Chris Chambers

reading the poem 'May 1st"

Video: Wolsak & Wynn

wolsakandwynn.ca

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DISCLAIMERS

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

Today's book of poetry:
Blue Angels. Peter Huggins. River City Publishing. Montgomery, Alabama. 2001.

Today's book of poetry is going back in time today. River City Publishing from Montgomery, Alabama, sent us a herd of beautiful hardcover poetry titles and even though some of them were published a few years ago they are all new to me and I suspect they will be new to most of you as well.

Peter Huggins'Blue Angels is packed to the rafters with Angels of every colour. There are also a few ghosts that need tending to in these continuously surprising and entertaining poems. Blue Angels feels as southern as the beautifully melodious voice of Shelby Foote. This isn't the south of the "stars and bars", although that's in here too, but this is the south where William Faulkner's home haunts the memory, where going home again to that old house Thomas Wolfe lived in might have you remembering his line “I have to see a thing a thousand times before I see it once.”

Randall Jarrell is one of the first poets I can remember reading, his poem, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" still rattles around in the cage that passes for my head and I read that poem over forty years ago. So it was a multi-faceted pleasure/surprise to come across him roaming around in Peter Huggins Blue Angels.

For the Woman Who Struck
Randall Jarrell

It must have been an ordinary fall day
For her. She hung
On the line to dry in that warm,

Apple-scented air. Humming Telemann,
She swept the leaves off her porch,
Knowing she'd have to sweep it again

Before her day was through. No matter.
Her maple would be in glory soon.
She had the pleasure of its change.

What were a few leaves to her.
She had to pick up her son at school,
Then go to the grocery on the way home.

Traffic was heavy on the Chapel Hill
By-pass. She never saw the elegant-
Looking man who lunged into the road.

In all that noise she heard
The terrible thud of his body
Striking her car. She didn't want to,

But she screamed at him,
Lying on the road like the last
Prim leaf on her sugar maple.

...

I hear Auden. I hear France. I hear you dancing in your underpants. Today's book of poetry felt very much at home in Huggins world. These poems are all built like old houses designed for the long haul, built to last.

A horse in a swimming pool is an image that is almost surreal except that now, in the Internet Age, we can all watch video of bears, moose or monkeys in someones backyard pool at whim. Huggins gives us more than any video, he gives us a moment of horse-thought and then his understanding and gentle compassion. Today's book of poetry is a big fan of kindness and that is a feeling that prevails in Blue Angels. Poems celebrating kindness are thin on the ground these days but they are always welcome here.

Standing Mortality

A bad thunderstorm
Spooked my neighbor's
Horse last night.
This morning my neighbor
Found her in his swimming pool.
She looked surprised to be there.

Her tail floated behind her
Like a bed of kelp. When
I asked him how he was going
To get her out,
He walked into the pool,
Put blinders and a bridled on her,

Then led her up the steps
Of the shallow end.
She bunched the muscles
In her back and flicked her tail.
I wondered at the fear
That drove her into the pool.

I wondered at my neighbor's
Easy acceptance
Of her fear and her calm
As he led her back
To her stall in the barn.

I wondered that I thought
She looked like a prisoner
Going to execution,
With the hope and serene
Trust of the faithful.

...

Today's book of poetry was up in the air about today's third poem. Two worthy contenders. One, a poem about a child's bedtime monsters and the other about the needs of the dead. There was much discussion at this morning's read. Milo, our head tech, read both poems to us, twice. Then Kathryn, our new intern, read them again. One of the things Today's book of poetry liked about the poems in Blue Angels was their elasticity, their ability to stretch in several directions at once. In the end our morning reading circle settled on 'monsters' - because who doesn't like those.

Monster Story

As soon as I tell my nephew
He doesn't have to worry about
Water buffalo men in Louisiana,
I know I'm in trouble.
He asks me if he has to worry
About them in Mississippi
Or in North Carolina. I tell him
He doesn't have to worry about them
At all. They don't exist, I say.

He doesn't believe me and I know
I've made a monster to trouble
His sleep. My uncle made
One to trouble my sleep when he said
I shouldn't go swimming at night.
The alligators, he said, would mistake
Me for a fish and eat me.

Try listening to that story
When you're five years old, lying
Flat on the floor, and you think
Water's sucking the pilings
Of your house out from under you.
Go swimming during the day or night
Without thinking your body's not
A sweet morsel of trout or bass
To a hungry jaw-heavy alligator.

Try not to think of white knights
Galloping through your uncle's bloodstream.
They are too late to save him.
Dragons, breathing fire
Into the sweet tissue of his lungs,
Take him down to pure clean bone.

...

Reading Peter Huggins's Blue Angels is a journey to Alabama, a meditation on living well, musings on vapour trails and some good hard lessons on how to be a good person. In Today's book of poetry world that is a full dance card.

Peter Huggins has published five books of poetry. Before Blue Angels there was Hard Facts. Since publishing Blue Angels Huggins has followed with Necessary Acts, South and Audubon's Engraver.

Peter Huggins

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Huggins is the author of five books of poems, Audubon's Engraver (Solomon & George Publishers, 2015), South (Solomon & George Publishers, 2013), Necessary Acts, Blue Angels, (both from River City Publishing, 2004 and 2001), and Hard Facts (Livingston Press, 1998). South was shortlisted in 2014 for the International Rubery Book Award. He has published over 300 poems in many journals and magazines, and was awarded a literature fellowship in poetry from the Alabama State Council on the Arts in 2006.In the Company of Owls, a middle grade novel, appeared from NewSouth/Junebug Books in 2008. In addition, he has published a picture book, Trosclair and the Alligator (Star Bright Books, 2006), which has appeared on the PBS show Between the Lions, received a Mom's Choice Award, and been selected as a best book by the Bank Street College of Education and by the CCBC at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He teaches in the English Department at Auburn University, and he and his wife live in Auburn, Alabama.

BLURBS

"These poems variously marvel at, meditate on, and grieve over significant moments in life. In clear, straightforward, but often surprising lines, Peter Huggins offers his take on a world in which loss and salvation are next-door neighbors, and angels turn up in the strangest places."

- Jennifer Horne

"Peter Huggins is a rarity - a poet who writes with the clarity of a silver bell. The poems of his new collection allow the reader to see through their surfaces, to go beyond the simplicities, the sweetness and light, to the dark matter of the mind and heart. This book demonstrates a generosity of spirit hardly to be found in today's serious poetry."

- Thomas Rabbitt

rivercitypublishing.com

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DISCLAIMERS

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

Today's book of poetry:
New & Selected Poems. W. H. New. Oolichan Books. Fergie, British Columbia. 2015.

New & Selected Poems by the distinguished W.H. (Bill) New is the book of poetry everyone in Canada should take to the cottage for the summer. This is stuff you want to go back and browse like a catalogue full of goodies.

In it you will find highlights from these fine books:

Science Lessons - 1996

Raucous - 1999

Riverbrook and Ocean - 2002

Night Room - 2003

Underwood Log - 2004

Touching Ecuador - 2006

Along a Snake Fence Riding - 2007

The Rope-makers Tale - 2009

YVR - 2011

Our guy Bill has been nominated for the Governor Generals Award and that doesn't happen by accident. Today's book of poetry enjoys New's easy calm with language regardless of the form he employs. Stylistically New ranges far and wide but his rational eagle eye is always in focus and the result is poetry that is always sharp.

That and he can be so humanely tender without making us cringe.

Chemistry

One, Lorna, even to mention her name

causes him to change colour, fires him

into blurted declarations of like. She acts:

he reacts, red and blue as litmus paper

and just as wet. He grins a lot, gawkily,

picks berries with her if he can, flirts

at the edge of touch and gesture,

flushes if others overhear.

In his dream, words like care and kissing

come to him articulate and whole;

awake, he needs a catalyst to say them,

mixes them up, lingers awkwardly till she

places a ripe raspberry on her tongue

and shares with him her taste for bittersweet.

...

Today's book of poetry has told you before how much we love W.H. Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts" so when W.H. New takes a crack at Icarus in his poem "21. Safety" we were all ears. And New does not disappoint. He has 'the Knowledge'. New has an old cab driver's understanding of the ins and outs of things, the quickest way to get from one place to another with the smallest fuss.

21. Safety

Icarus as a boy played with army

trucks, not frisbees, played cops-&-

robbers, marbles in a ring, not hop-

scotch, kites, addy-addy-I-

over: he watched the ground, held fast

to things -- water, earth -- turning away

from dangerous fire & insubstantial air.

You'd have forecast for him an ordinary job --

something that kept his hands occupied,

farm irrigation, yard work in the maze,

something that gave him the lie of the land, But he held

fast because of the gnawing away: it was always

there, & the first leap up he was vulnerable --

monster on one side, father on the other,

alternating tales of damnation &

derring-do -- inexorably, flame drew him,

& air appeared to hold him up: what

the old stories never tell is whether

he regretted choosing, or lived finally

only at the point of falling, knowing at last the difference

between fear and safety, tumbling into the sea.

...

Today's book of poetry is convinced of the deep and generous heart at the centre of W.H. New's New and Selected Poems. Robert Kroetsch has called New "the flaneur" and he is right on. These observational poems all point in one direction and we here at Today's book of poetry believe that direction is hope - we took an office survey at this morning's reading.

Darwin's Tulip

she talks of things she no longer sees,

fine print,

petitpoint,

thin lines--

listening,

you watch her lift fog from the river,

one hand brushing away the blur

presence: the scent of

roses in an empty room, the way

bedclothes fold against

bare skin

listening for what the ear cannot

tell you: the rumpled sea, the halfmoon

shoot of a Darwin's tulip, the first

drawing a line in air, water, sand:

this far and--

oh--

where did it go--

the river, the wind--

...

"I Want To Talk About You" is blaring from one corner of our office to the other on this rather spectacular sunny spring morning here in the nation's capital. We have deep, deep respect for Saint John of Coltrane. One of the best things about running your own operation is having control of the music situation. Of course I usually let the minions have their way -- but I do remind them from time to time of the classics.

Books like W.H. New's New & Selected Poems makes our job a cinch.

W.H. (Bill) New

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

W. H. (Bill) New retired in 2003 as University Killam Professor at the University of British Columbia. A native of Vancouver, he earned an M.A. in Canadian Literature from UBC in 1963. In 1966 he was awarded his PhD from the University of Leeds, where he specialized in the English-language literatures of the Commonwealth. He then returned to the University of B.C. to set up a Commonwealth/ Postcolonial Literatures program.

Honoured by the Killam Research and Teaching Prizes (1988, 1996), the Gabrielle Roy Award (1988), the Jacob Biely Prize (1995), the Association of Canadian Studies Award of Merit (2000), and the CUFA Award for Career Achievement (2001), he was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 1986. In 2004 he was awarded the Governor General’s International Award for Canadian Studies and the Lorne Pierce Medal for his contributions to critical and creative writing. He has taught or lectured in Australia, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, New Zealand, Spain, the UK, and the USA. In 2002, The University of Toronto Press published his Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. It has been praised in Canada and the UK for its innovative perspective and described in France as indispensable. In 2006 he was awarded the Order of Canada. Recently he received the 20th Annual George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award.

oolichan.com

468

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:
Almost Nothing To Be Scared Of. David Clewell. University of Wisconsin Press. Madison, Wisconsin. 2016.

Winner of the Four Lakes Prize in Poetry

"We were overwhelmingly underdogs."

- Yogi Berra

Whether David Clewell is "Trying on Hats With Rahsaan Roland Kirk" or talking politics with a bartender who wants to talk baseball we here at Today's book of poetry want to hear it. Clewell's Almost Nothing To Be Scared Of is one remarkable tablet of tales.

David Clewell writes poems of every length, from two liners that are precise as lasers, to monsters that crawl over page after page. These are beautiful monsters. Clewell has just the right voice to glue Today's book of poetry to our seat. These poems pulsate with stories we need to hear.

When I Called the National Security Agency to Complain

About the Indiscriminate Collection of Private Citizens'

Telephone Records, I Was Put on Hold for a Suspiciously

Long Time

Your call is very important to us. All your calls, as you must know,

are very important to us. This particular call may be monitored

for quality-control purposes or for no good reason we can think of.

Just because we can. Because these days, you never know.

People remain on the line until we've made a proper threat

assessment. Calls will be answered strictly in order of priority.

If you've got nothing to hide, you've got absolutely nothing.

to fear. This is still America last time we checked,

and we're doing everything in our power to keep it that way.

No one's ever guilty of anything as long as they can prove otherwise,

so please remain on the line. this country's storied history is one

of human ingenuity: we've always made it up as we go along.

Right now we're flying by the seat of our Patriot-Act balloon-pants,

but hey, at least we're still here, and we're especially glad

that you're part of this too, so please remain on the line.

That your Walgreens prescriptions have been ready for days

is not a threat, although they might reduce your mounting anxiety.

That you haven't spoken to your mother in weeks doesn't much

concern us either, but you don't want to hear the trash she's talking.

And frankly, we didn't realize anyone was still giving money to

Greenpeace. We're long past caring about that -- go save the whales,

but you could have sprung for much better seats down at the stadium.

Please remain on the line. Due to the extraordinarily high volume

of calls nationwide, your estimated wait time would be

just a wilder, more worthless guess than usual on our part. Someone

surely will be with you, though, sooner or later. So listen carefully

for a voice on the line or a knock on the door or even someone

bumping into the rearranged furniture in your dark living room.

And that's no lie, nor is it a threat. Consider it a promise, made

right here in America, where Security is our middle name,

and right now you need to remain on the line more than ever before.

The only thing we can never know for certain is tomorrow's weather.

There's no percentage in it for us, anyway--there's no stopping it

before it happens, ever. That's how weather is. It isn't ricin or

anthrax or fertilizer bombs. You can gather all the best intelligence

in the world, but if it rains, you're still going to get wet.

So please remain on the line, where it's always nice and dry.

We know where you live. We know how you live. It's almost as if,

oddly enough, you're a friend, but still we have no idea why

some outmoded notion of privacy is so damn important to you,

someone with nothing to hide. Nothing to be afraid of.

That's the reason every one of your calls is so very important to us.

If you want to be a dog with a bone, then you can count on us to be

the bigger, many-headed dog you'll never piss with, and rest assured

we've got a few bones of our own that we're not about to let go of.

Please remain on the line, even though we know already, word

for indignant, self-righteous word, what you're going to say,

and all because last night you felt strangely compelled to run it by

your old college professor of creative writing, who couldn't imagine

anything so important that you had to call him at 2 in the morning,

especially when, truth be told, it wasn't really much of a poem

he ended up only pretending to listen to, anyway.

...

Today's book of poetry loves Clewell's hammer. "When I Called..." isn't a list poem exactly but is a choice entertainment of political satire and mirth. Clewell gives us a master class is paying attention because nothing seems to escape his bemused intellect. He has a kind eye and a predatory heart.

Clewell is joined in Almost Nothing To Be Scared Of by a large coterie of pals, they show up on almost every page and bring something to the party. Here are just a few of the gang that drop in: Philip K. Dick, Frank Stafford, Walt Whitman, Thomas Pynchon, Don Delillo, Roger Paterson, the infectious silly 60's song "Itsy Bitsy Tweeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini," Ammon Shea, some Jevovah's Witnesses, Charlie the Tuna, Buddy Holly, more than one UFO (as you will shortly see), Lee Harvey Oswald and JFK, Jack Ruby, Donald Finkel (more on him in a minute), old Cadillacs, Plato, Debbie Fuller, Shakespeare and believe me when I tell you that this list just scratches the surface.

We pay attention to our fan mail and we've had some complaints about Today's book of poetry being a sucker for any poetry that mentioned, smelled of, tasted like, jazz. So as much as we loved Clewell's excellent Charlie Parker, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Ben Cartwright (Bonaza hat), Dizzie Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins and Saint John of Coltrane poems, we won't mention them here.

I'm Sorry There Are No More Flying Saucers

These days everything is a UFO instead:

military stealthy planes and flying triangles, satellites

and meteorites, suborbital space debris, the planet Venus

and Chinese lanterns attached to a horde of helium balloons--

hell, sometimes even my unlikely Uncle Bud,

lit up and soaring after a few too many again, until finally

he's recognized by someone who will see him the long way home.

It used to be when you said flying saucer,

you meant a nuts-and-bolts machine that had come to Earth

from somewhere else, and Bud never would have been confused

for anything like that--he's been down-to-Earth forever,

as homegrown as they come. And there's no way he'd ever be

onboard for even a minute with beings whose brightest idea

was invariably some version of Take me to your leader, which

always led to Bud shaking his head. He knew a bad idea

when he heard it, and he wasn't about to believe

this flying saucer business had anything to do with

the likelihood of intelligent life anywhere else in the universe.

...

Today's book of poetry loved how thick some of these poems were, like an extra warm quilt. We're convinced. Clewell is a poet we greatly admire -- and never more than when we read his tribute poem to Donald Finkel. Today's book of poetry has long admired Donald Finkel. We checked the stacks and Milo, our head tech, came back with A Mote In Heaven's Eye and the book length long poem Answer Back, but Finkel published at least 14 books of poetry and they are well worth checking out.

Too Far This Time

Never trust a poet at the wheel.

- Martin Amis, The Information

for Donald Finkel (1929-2008)

You were at your very best on foot,

never missing a step as you kept walking, always

thinking on your feet, your hands completely free

to animate the words you coaxed out of one more day's thin air.

A born pedestrian on the move.

If there was anywhere

we had to go that wasn't walking distance, I was the one

who said I'll drive. You'd be relieved again, a natural

riding shotgun. And so we made it every time:

to Santoro's or the races or hot jazz or Pizza-a-Go-Go,

to another far-flung poetry reading at Why-Do-They-Want-Us-U.

But most of all, I see you walking through your life

to the north through the woods near Holy Smoke, Vermont.

To the south in the hills above San Miguel, and still farther south

in Antarctica, where you carried the geologists' ice-cold water

just for the chance to write postcards from the South Pole.

Even that far away from the rest of the world, you weren't

about to drive. You knew better back East, too--your phantom

Bronx, where you first learned what it meant to walk.

I'll see you forever walking in St. Louis, this town

that somehow passed for your idea of the Wild West:

the U. City Loop at high noon, gunsmoke along the River Despair,

and your last-stand routine: Lafayette Park, visiting Willie,

the swan that lived there for as long as he could--strangely

gentle, you said. For a swan. You couldn't believe

your luck: this unlikely friendship. But it was something

more than that, my odd-duck, rare-bird friend.

***********

Finkel-at-the-Wheel-of-the-VW-Van was already

the stuff of local legend. Forgive me when I say I'm glad

that was a legend mostly before my own St. Louis time.

Thirty years ago, when you first walked into my apartment,

Woody Guthrie's Car Song was spinning out its final notes.

You stood there at attention, laughing: Did I just hear

my national anthem? You had to cue it up once more:

Take me riding in the car, car. Take me riding

in the car, car. You and me and Woody, raucous all together.

We talked into the dark, luxurious part of morning--then

one last chorus: I'm a-gonna take you home again,

I'm a-gonna take you home again. Riding in my car,

with the lone-but-gigantic exception of those 1,600 miles

to Mexico, summer 1995. You insisted on the driver's seat:

I know exactly how to get there, man. Connie--regardless

of your mode of locomotion, your unwavering compass, love

of your life--was stubbornly back-seat driving up front.

And in the true back seat, where I hadn't been much

since Jersey childhood, I hunkered down with Patricia,

the love of mine. Fearing for ours, although we couldn't say so.

Each night's hotel was a sanctuary with a bed

we never wanted to get out of the next morning. To be driven

stir-crazy again in Spanish: Alto, Don, alto. But once you got going,

it was always hard for you to stop.

***********

I wish I could have driven you to the Great Beyond

and back--especially back. It's always seemed to be a place

more out-of-the-way than it probably is. And I

wouldn't have known exactly how to get there.

I wish I could have heard you say It wasn't really all

that great, man.

You've gone too far this time, old friend.

Beyond where I can pick you up and steer you home

alive again. And here I am, driving myself a little nutty

thinking of your so irretrievably departed. I'm driving myself

talking for us both. and it's just not the same.

...

Today's morning reading was one hell of an affair and a very spirited reading. We invited every character that David Clewell mentioned or referenced in Almost Nothing To Be Scared Of. They all showed up. Shakespeare was resplendent. JFK, Oswald and Jack Ruby sat in a corner chatting amiably enough and they all took their turns when called on. Walt Whitman and Miles Davis kind of took hold of the proceedings, reading and laughing and assigning poems to the others. They cracked us up when they took turns telling jokes. It was a long reading because David Clewell has plenty to say.

Today's book of poetry is certain Almost Nothing To Be Scared Of is worth every second you can devote to it.

David Clewell

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Clewell is the author of a dozen books of poetry, including Taken Somehow by Surprise, The Low End of Higher Things, Now We’re Getting Somewhere, Jack Ruby’s America, and Blessings in Disguise. He is a former poet laureate of Missouri and also formerly a circus laborer, professional weight-guesser, and professional wrestler. He currently labors as a professor of English and director of the Creative Writing Program at Webster University in Saint Louis.

BLURB

“Clewell’s lanky, chatty, extravagant, gimlet-eyed poems would make Ulysses ask to be tied to the mast again, they’re that seductive. This collection not only provides a place to catch our breath—it administers CPR to any disheartened reader.”

- Ron Koertge

David Clewell

Missouri poet-laureate David Clewell, Webster University professor of English, reads from his collection of poems.

Video: Webster University

uwpress.wisc.edu

469

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:
Creeks of the Upper South. Amy Wright & William Wright. Jacar Press & Unicorn Press. Durham, North Carolina. 2016.

Collaborations in poetry can be damned hard work. Creeks of the Upper South is a call and response collaborative book of poems from Amy Wright and William Wright and it is seamless.

Today's book of poetry has attempted different types of collaborative poetry with mixed results. It's hard enough to find someone you agree with on anything let alone finding someone to share a page with. It is deep, murky water and there are dangers everywhere. All of that to say that Today's book of poetry marveled at the synchronicity in every danced step between Wright and Wright.

Memory and Prophecy

What She Remembers:

That in the summer of her seventh year,

storms slanted in and engorged the rivers

and creeks until all waters buckled high,

shattered the levies and bit to the quicks of berms:

houses that did not kneel and drift away moldered.

They moved the whole town eight miles north.

That in her ninth year she came back to the creek

then in drought and walked barefoot

the dry bed's limb-trash and alabaster--

That something in the slim sun-spears made

her look up into the unshackling of April

and witness a horse skeleton, brown-white

as the soles of her feet and silty hands.

She looked long at how vines twined its brisket,

at the strange philodendron head, drained

of flesh, brainless and almost comical in

its stillness, staid and smiling long with gothic

joy at the sheer oddness of how the Earth had reined it.

That the winter of her thirteenth year

in the frigid mineral-scent of dusk, the Harman

boy breathed warmth on the small hairs of her neck,

the whiskey on his child's breath, how they leaned

into one another in the blindness and purity

of the killed grass beside the creek, the water frozen

pure to the floor, where stunned curves

of minnows flashed tinny and motionless

under the stars' arc-light.

That the thaw snapped and pocked the air like gunshots

so that in the first hint of spring the Harman brother

slew the boy she kissed and dragged his kin down into the gorge.

What She Cannot Foresee:

That centuries the white window of the moon will open,

house roofs will crumble as the horse bones gripped

in the long-fallen oak will fall themselves, then grind

down with years, fold as dust and meld with the specks

kept there of the murdered boy, millennia-old, both

now in the earth proper, slack and laggard slow.

...

Now if that isn't gothic/romantic enough for you I'll eat my shorts. Wright/Wright take you down to the water to see if you'll float. They make you walk barefoot .through the millennial ooze, the silt of their ancestors. This is captivating stuff, you open the cover to this little gem and you are instantly under the spell cast by Wright/Wright.

Wright x2 have a biologist, historian, anthropologist, geologist and a bevy of scientists on their research team and along with their own gothic charm it makes for a riveting crossing of all this stormy water, the Wrights have roiled up the water and we are in for an emotional voyage. Their rich lingo sings of a particular notion of the South, I can see Carson McCullers and William Faulkner at the edge of one of these coulees, Flannery O'Conner is probably somewhere nearby.

Sanguinaria

In the chill before Easter, it was dusk again,

and my mother and I walked the berm, out past

the corn, The night's door warped: the sky

broken from its hinge swung down

low to us, low enough that the smell of rain

steeped our hair. Behind the springhouse,

we stopped to watch a possum crawl

over a years-old midden

with such reckless fear that she took a spade to its skull.

How can I justify a fear that blooms in the gut

and stings like thistle? Such creatures follow

me in my sleep, the ones harmless but foul,

the ones that must haunt: blowfly, centipede,

wolf spider, the bubbling muck of toads.

We trudged into watercress, across the field,

she in her country gown, a ghost before me--

down to the hemlocks and galax

when rain fell sudden, and the wind

pierced the thicket and drowned our scalps.

There is no such thing as empathy.

The storm drove through, just north

of us, a great spectral womb broken, ripped.

Our footfalls hugged the creekside's silence,

its washed-out susurrus, its sealed mouth.

There with her in that violet cold, all the blood

that ran through that shadow. All the bloodroot

we smashed through, the bloodwort, puccoon root,

into slanted fields two

farms over, up from the rushing creek curve

where heaped stones were draped with lichen.

The moon smeared behind clouds, a runnel

of milk. Why does the sight

of lanterns dawdling in a far pasture

ignite the heart with a joy and sorrow that, upon sleep,

the mind lumbers with false memories of farmhouses,

days and days of threshing grass, the chirr

and grind of crickets in the core of a summer long dead?

The rain fell hard: we quickened through briars, up

to the backdoor, the red light that framed it.

She said nothing. I witnessed her face

turning in the window--a shivering

leaf that withered, that would not release.

...

These poems have a cumulative effect on the sodden reader. Wright & Wright know their business and their business is to write emotionally haunting and visually stunning poems that get under your skin like a poetry tick.

Today's book of poetry has long admired the voice of Shelby Foote. Foote was a historian and novelist and he had a voice of such gravitas and humour, warmth and wit, that I could happily of sat and listened to him read a phone book. Shelby Foote reading Creeks of the Upper South is an entertainment I would pay almost anything for. He'd ride over these poems with the perfect verbal caress. These are poems that should be read aloud.

Understory

And now we will witness the unseen flames:

cardinal shit, apple maggots, fishbone thistle, squama

and fauna scales, keratinous flakes flecking ground;

sporiferous trees (ambassadorial as they kneel);

hyssop, sometimes odoriferous; dried blood on bard,

dropwort, smartweed and sweetleaf; outhouses

still standing in a crush of woods (redolent of peaches);

early-century crates breaking under the weight of wild squash;

crimson minnows courting a swale (painterly over chalk-white silt

and rocks stroked with moss so green it hurts to look);

woad and its micro-cache of bluest rivers; witloof chicory

(good in salads); distant farmhouse windows on winter nights

shining like citrine stricken with sun; the yucca's

blades curdled over with cream-flowers a few April days;

jars of milk; smells of leaf-fire; poxy bogs

emeralded with mosquito eggs; itchweed, abelia,

and spittlebugs with their soapy secretions;

the half-buried bones of horses, their skulls

ghastly and beautiful; musket balls buried (for good);

possum oak and possums themselves (drooling

and conspiratorial in suburban sheds);

ivory nuts and ivy-tods; the helix-lattices of lichen;

gypsum and hagberry; the toothless kin-gone elderly

who grin at the edges of cracked doors (kind or wary);

snakeskins, fraxinella (burning bush); understory

flames; diatomoceous earth; the waxy cartilaginous

bulbs or rocky shoal spider litlies; cutworms that gnaw

on vegetable seedlings so that they fall like small timbers;

capillary mattings (wicking water from reservoirs);

wild decay (never gothic) and wildest revival (never lofty).

...

Amy Wright and William Wright have done something remarkable. It is not just that they have become one voice for the purposes of Creeks of the Upper South, but that they have become a choir, in unison, with resolve.

Amy Wright

William Wright

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Amy Wright has authored two poetry collections and five chapbooks. The Nonfiction Editor of Zone 3 Press, Coordinator of Creative Writing and Associate Professor at Austin Peay State University, she has been awarded a Peter Taylor Fellowship for the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop, an Individual Artist’s Fellowship from the Tennessee Arts Commission, and a fellowship to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. You may find some of her work online at: awrightawright.com.

William Wright is author of four books of poetry, most recently Tree Heresies and Night Field Anecdote, as well as four chapbooks. He is editor of eleven editions, including all volumes ofThe Southern Poetry Anthology series (Texas Review Press), two texts centered on Gerard Manley Hopkins (Clemson University Press, forthcoming, 2016), and Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry (USC Press, forthcoming, 2016). He is assistant editor of Shenandoah.

BLURBS

“The poems in Creeks of the Upper South rely on call and response—both within individual poems and from poem to poem—which seems fitting, given the collaborative nature of the collection. At times, the voices and personal narratives are alive and burgeoning, and at the same time fragile. Other times, primal and colloquial language fuses into a lexicon of ecological anxieties and understandings. This collection calls us to take off our boots, roll up our britches, and follow the creeks and voices meandering and forking through these poems. We can’t help but respond.”

— Adam Vines

“Creeks of the Upper South is collaborative poetry at flood-surge. It is a braided stream, the skitter-flight of water-fowl, a storm event of vowels, childhood as rocky shoals, cutbank in language’s flow. Amy Wright and William Wright walk back the postmodern idea that word and place, signifier and signified, can’t roil the same deep channel.”

— John Lane

jacarpress.com

unicorn-press.org

470

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 Silence of Doorways. Sharon Venezio. Moon Tide Press. Irvine, California. 2013.

Sharon Venezio can burn. The Silence of Doorways bursts at its binding with brilliant barbs and bromides. Today's book of poetry has a weak spot for certain automobiles and car-think so when Venezio gave us a kiss/hug tribute to her '76 Chevy Nova we were prisoners of love.

Venezio just doesn't let off of the gas. No book is solid gold and this one isn't either, but pound for pound Venezio is a stone cold killer poet, she has all the goods. Today's book of poetry was touched by the quiet tenderness woven in and out of these poems. We were also heartened by the heat tempered terror Venezio was able to access by snapping her wise fingers.

Psychology 402: Brain and Behavior

When I discover I have to dissect a sheep's brain,

I go down the hall to Animal Behavior and plead my case,

but it's too late. I'll have to pry my way through

the four ventricles, push pins into gray matter and breathe

formaldehyde through a useless white mask.

I hold the brain in my awful hands, make an incision

at the base of the cerebellum, place a red pin

into the pineal gland, a green pin into the amygdala:

here's where it feels joy, here's where it feels fear,

here's where it remembers the beautiful dying stars.

...

Once again Today's book of poetry feels hoisted by my own petard. There are way more than three poems Today's book of poetry feels necessary to bring to this party.

Whether Sharon Venezio is talking about family and how much fun that love/hate fiasco can be or the larger political/human issues like genocide and murder and mayhem, her strop sharpened pen nails it to the page like she was using a hammer.

She could even be in a bar.

From a Bar in Elizabeth, New Jersey

have to pretend

i am someone else

someone who smiles

while she pours drinks

tilts the bottle just right

so the liquor flirts

with the air

on the way into the glass

a foot and a half of formica

defines our role

all night they mine

my face for a clue

think i am someone

they can love

slur their dedications

in half-light

by midnight

cocaine's stimming

bird mouth

whoops at winter sky

through open door

this helps them

pretend they are

someone else

forget the snow

piling up on hoods

of cars forget the children

sheeted in beds

sleep wrapped around

their bright bodies

...

Did I just read that? Yes, I did. The Silence of Doorways rears up and slaps the reader in the head every once in a while. It's like Venezio reaches right up off of the page with an attention-slap.

Today's jazz allusion is that you think you are reading Dexter Gordon, all tight and whispery, controlled and precise and beautiful and then Ornette Coleman sneaks in the back door and blows that shit up! Of course Venezio isn't talking jazz, she's too busy explaining how the world's heart works, Today's book of poetry just threw that allusion in there because we know how much some of you love jazzthink.

Our regular morning read was an enthusiastic romp. Most of Venezio's poems are relatively short and as we went around the room the poems blasted out from each successive Today's book of poetry staffer as though we were gunslingers in a circle and showing off our draw.

Family Album

Here a cigarette dangles between her thin fingers;

she sleeps through conversation and ash.

Here she closes her eyes and the sea stops moving.

And here she is boneyard of unspoken words,

salt in the quiet throat of her marriage.

Here she is the green whiff of childhood.

Here she is sparrowed at the edge of the earth,

exiled in her dying skin. Here, like sorrow,

she is liquid in the bones.

And here is the day she will be gone, her eyes resting

no longer upon the tulips, their white

petals, like teeth, fall to the ground.

Here she is hair, and nail, and noise in the brain.

And here, dear body, be still. Time is the only lover

that will touch her now.

...

The Silence of Doorways is quiet thunder. Sharon Venezio is a quiet poet assassin. So much is on offer in these rumbling pages that it reads like a bigger book. Today's book of poetry likes when a poet can make us smile, cry, nod our head in familiar recognition, shake our head in awe. Venezio fills the card.

Sharon Venezio

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sharon Venezio recieved an MA in creative writing from San Francisco State University. Her poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Chaparral, Midway Journal, Reed, Transfer, Two Hawks Quarterly and elsewhere. She is co-director of the Valley Contemporary Poets and works as a behavior analyst in Los Angeles. The Silence of Doorways is her first full-length collection.

BLURBS

What appeals to me most about these surpassingly lovely poems is the way they combine a trace-like calm with a sense of unease, and a luminous clarity with a feeling of deep abiding mystery. And when she's really on her game, Sharon Venezio--one of the best darn lyric poets to have wandered into L.A. in many a year--can make the ephemeral seem tangible and the mundane transcendent. Few could draw forth such elevated notes as these from a five-hundred dollar '76 Chevy Nova: "It was more beautiful/ than salt air,/ ocean, wing.// It was passage,/ shift, spark.// The bone dry/ squeaky waste land/ where life began."

- Suzanne Lummis

In this impressive debut collection, Sharon Venezio photographs the stopped fragments of memory in order to restore the self to a dynamic flux of lived experience--"the wild dishevelment of being, that fierce blue drowning"--a kaleidoscopic portrait that refuses the social mediated subject position and the hunted vulnerability fixed by a male scope. In a daring act of rescue and art making, Venezio seeks the frameless frame, one that comprehends without limiting, shelters without walling in the silence.

- Chad Sweeney

These completely engaging and unselfconscious poems are attentive to memory's various gifts and terrors, and its impact on both the outer and inner life. Witness her history with family, birds, a 1976 Chevy Nova, the breathing of a sleeping lover, the presence of insects and wild animals--Venezio captures all of it with her inner camera and presents to us her long-awaited fruits of "the burden of memory." From fiery, heart-stopping meditations on a childhood and elegies to joyous still lifes and portraits, she works by hand a personal museum with perfect words arranged just so. Poets and everybody, listen when she says, "if you want to avoid annihilation, open your mouth and sing" and get ready to be sung to in this marvelous first collection.

- Roxanne Beth Johnson

Portraits & Landscapes, the poetry of Sharon Venezio

Video: Brian Newberry

moontidepress.com

471

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:
Dear Leader. Damian Rogers. Coach House Press. Toronto, Ontario. 2015.

Today's book of poetry would by lying if we pretended to know exactly what Damian Rogers is going on about with every page in Dear Leader. But Dear Reader, what fine, fine music. Rogers can cook.

Dear Leader is hot to the touch when you pick it up because it is so beautifully crammed with electric images and incandescent moments of truth that they rumble up on one another and create sparks, they make heat like an engine. Today's book of poetry has been down this road before, back on March 6, 2015, we looked at Damian's book Paper Radio.

You can see that here:

http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.ca/2015/03/paper-radio-damian-rogers-misfit.html

Today's book of poetry was a big, big fan of Paper Radio, everyone on our staff simply loved it -- so Dear Leader really doesn't come as a surprise but it certainly is grand, it certainly is welcome.

List poems come and go but Rogers nailed Today's book of poetry to our seat when we read this beauty.

Poets in the Public Domain

Found delirious on the streets of Baltimore. Died days later.

Shipwreck at the age of 40.

Typhoid fever. 44.

Orphaned at 14, dead from tuberculosis at 25.

Lost at 27 on a French hospital ship anchored in the Aegean Sea.

Sister stabbed mother to death in a fit of anxiety.

Drowned at the age of 30.

Worked at the post office until death at 37.

Died of fever in Greece on way to war.

Went down sailing at age 29.

Died of pneumonia while commanding a hospital in Boulogne.

Stabbed to death in bar fight.

Killed in action one week before war ended.

Asylum.

Drank to death.

Jumped off an ocean liner.

Overdosed on sleeping pills.

Drowned swimming in Lake St. Clair in August.

Sick with Grave's Disease for many years. Died of breast cancer.

Small pox.

Swallowed by a sudden storm after seeing Doppelganger.

...

Damian Rogers has a bit of the Midas touch because these poems are golden. Rogers is a poet you could easily follow into the dark reassured by her certain footsteps and that incandescent thing that she seems to know.

Sun Ra. Damian Rogers dedicates a poem to Sun Ra in Dear Leader! I'm listening to him now as I type this, we all know that Sun Ra and his Arkestra will be blowing wild at the end of the world but only Rogers is singing about it. Whew.

Our three poem limit here at Today's book of poetry is being bent today to allow for the following two poems to be seen together.

Good Day Villanelle

You ran naked out the door.

The neighbours laughed; I chased you down.

I hardly see you anymore.

I know you're busy.

Did I tell you when you were little how

you ran naked out the door?

You got halfway down the street

before I caught you in my arms.

I hardly see you anymore.

I think I told you this before:

I was giving you a bath and then

you ran naked out the door.

It happened fast.

The neighbours laughed.

I hardly see you anymore.

You have to watch a baby close.

I remember once -

You ran naked out the door.

I hardly see you anymore.

...

Bad Day Villanelle

I swallowed something hard and dark.

It wasn't food. It moves around.

The doctor wants to cut it out.

I feel it now it's on my hip.

It's very painful when it shifts.

I swallowed something hard and dark.

I'm telling you

it's money that

the doctor wants. To cut it out

will save my life.

I need your help.

I swallowed something hard and dark.

He ran my body through five tests.

Then the doctor told me straight.

I'll died if they don't cut it out.

I'm telling you it has to go.

There is no medicine that works

on something quite this hard and dark.

The only road is cut it out.

...

In Dear Leader Baudelaire measures what counts and Yoko Ono may indeed by a witchy wonder. In Damian Rogers' world Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright's coat can reign in reason. These poems move from the personal to the universal and back again in the blink of an eye, in the space between two lines.

Today's book of poetry thinks that Dear Leader is full of kaleidoscope poems, multi-faceted and full of light.

Dear Leader

As you know, I did not join the Hole in the Universe Gang

or follow Father Yod of the ridiculous robes. I flowed

through my crises beautiful as a bruise, and alone. A man I loved

drove his motorcycle off the fat lip of Big Sur into glittering

oblivion. A new nation of Penelopes practiced the art of the loom,

planting a never-finished forest in which wildflowers bloomed

on the backs of jean jackets and hand-sewn throw pillows,

while I waited for you to choose me. The waitress at the health

food restaurant was a lemon-scented sun to my Death Valley

moon. I swooned as out the window your dark cluster rose

in the sky. How glorious was your shining forth from the horizon

when you detonated the Two Lands with your terrible rays!

I starved till my bones shone, and your voice rang in my ear.

...

Dear Leader felt like a robust visit from a rock star poet pillager priestess. Damian Rogers drank everything in our office and then shot out the lights when she left! We should be so lucky.

Today's book of poetry felt shaken and just the right amount of stirred.

Damian Rogers

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Originally from the Detroit area, Damian Rogers now lives in Toronto where she works as the poetry editor of both House of Anansi Press and The Walrus, and as the creative director of Poetry in Voice, a national recitation contest for Canadian high-school students. Her first book of poems, Paper Radio, was nominated for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award.

BLURBS

‘Multi-vectored, Rogers's poems hum with life and tension, their speaker poised as mother, seer, reporter and daughter. They speak of loss and cold realities (misplaced charms of luck, a tour of an assisted-living facility, coins thrown into Niagara Falls). They also interweave dreams and visions: "O Lion, I am / an old handmaiden; I will not lay the pretty baby in the lap / of the imposter." Simple but evocative, at once strange and plain, Rogers's poems of address ricochet off the familiar "Dear Reader" or Dickinson's "Dear Master" ... Rogers's poems provide instructions for what to leave, what to take and what to fight. They act as selvage between the vast mother-ocean — the mem of memory — and the fabric we make of the uncertain in-between.’
— Hoa Nguyen, The Boston Review

‘How can we live with the kind of pain that worsens each day? Dear Leader explains through bold endurance, enumerated blessings and the artistic imagination. By pasting stark truths over, or under, images of strange, compelling beauty, Rogers creates a collage, a simulation of the human heart under assault, bleeding but unbroken. Part Orpheus, part pop-heroine who can “paint the daytime black,” all, an original act of aesthetic violence and pure, dauntless, love.’
— Lynn Crosbie

Damian Rogers

Reading from Dear Leader

at the AWP, Minneapolis, 2015

Video: Tim Kahl

chbooks.com

472

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 Saddest Place on Earth. Kathryn Mockler. Punchy Poetry. DC Books. Montreal, Quebec. 2012.

Today's book of poetry had the opportunity to meet Kathryn Mockler last year when she read in Ottawa. We've also had the pleasure of reading her recent The Purpose Pitch (Mansfield Press, 2015) which we would highly recommend.

Today we look at 2012's The Saddest Place on Earth. As it turns out The Saddest Place on Earth is a Chinese restuarant in a suburban mall. Mockler seems to have accessed some plane of special knowledge because she is deciphering some very important code here. The poems in this book are from the "cruel to be kind" school of poetics and Mockler is a stern principal.

These poems give the feeling you are one step away from something like happiness, and always one step away from disaster.

Lucky

The lucky rapist had only twenty-five cents in his bank

account. He was worried because his utility bill was

going through. He could have paid in installments,

but he knew himself well enough to know he'd never

remember to make those payments on time. So he

set up automatic withdrawal. It was the teller who

had suggested it, and at the time he thought it was

a good idea. But he didn't take into account that he

was living beyond his means and had been for some

time now. He didn't take into account that when he

wanted something he would just go out and buy it

no matter the cost, no matter the state of his financial

situation. It is this personality trait that makes him

a rapist. It is the fact that he has not yet been caught

that makes him lucky.

...

Every page is a new delightful terror, a horrific tickle. We get to hear about Buddha joining Weight Watchers, God and the Devil sharing the same guest table at a wedding as dates of mutual friends and so on. Today's book of poetry just loved Kathryn Mockler's earnest whimsy.

Mockler makes the reader feel like an intimate insider to her slick reason and gymnastic logic.

The Captains

The captains of the ships are letting us sink.

It's death by corporation.

Don't be so melodramatic.

What do you think it is?

I think it's a case of -- once you look forward,

you can never look back.

That's what I said.

Yes, but the difference between us is that

you care and I don't.

...

Snakes, pigeons and the ghost of Vanna White, God on Oprah and fat policeman racing bottle caps with dogs, suicidal bankers and laundromat dogs, they are all packed into the pages of The Saddest Place on Earth and damn it if you don't feel a little Carson McCullers sorrow sneaking into the corners. Mockler has no qualms about playing with your emotional resources. She has some slick tools at the ends of her remarkable fingers.

Mockler is pointing her fingers, taking names.

Subway

If one person jumps in front

of the subway it makes it

inconvenient for everyone

else. It makes it inconvenient

if you're late for work and

your boss is a dick who

drinks vodka from noon until

three from a Styrofoam cup

that seconds as a semen

deposit. But no one mentions

it because it's inconvenient.

...

The Saddest Place on Earth is a loaded gun. The Saddest Place on Earth is a love story full of doomed characters. The Saddest Place on Earth is an apology.

The Saddest Place on Earth is a lit fuse, a hot package, the real deal.

Today's book of poetry wants you to go out now and find this witty pistol -- let us know when you are packing.

Kathryn Lockler

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kathryn Mockler is author of the poetry book Onion Man (Tightrope Books, 2011). Her writing has appeared in such venues as Joyland, The Antigonish Review, Rattle Poetry, CellStories, PIF,The Puritan, La Petite Zine, nthposition, and This Magazine, The Capilano Review,Descant, and The Windsor Review. In 2005, she attended the Canadian Film Centre's Writers' Lab and wrote two short films for the NBC/Universal Short Dramatic Film Program. Her films have been broadcast on TMN, Movieola, and Bravo and have been screened at festivals such as the Washington Project for the Arts Experimental Media Series, Toronto International Film Festival, Palm Springs International Festival, Worldfest, Cinequest, and EMAE. Currently, she teaches creative writing at the University of Western Ontario and is the co-editor of the UWO online journal The Rusty Toque.The Saddest Place on Earth is her second complete collection of poems.

BLURBS

“Mockler’s skill with language and narrative beat lends itself well to these unapologetic poems. At times I found myself groaning out loud, or shaking my head to get a grip on what I had just read. There is heart and terrific depth in this work.”

- Canadian Poetries

At times, the starkness and simplicity of the poems is poignant. In “Air Vents,” Mockler wrestles with a sadly all too familiar social and political theme. The poem reads, “I think about the shooting / because all shootings / are one shooting. I think / about all the places to / hide to avoid bullets: air / vents, storage lockers, / somewhere normal.” The idea that “all shootings are one shooting” shows the absurdity of mass shootings being labeled with dates, names, and places, and instead, focuses on the loss that affects all. There is also the idea of helplessness, which is a common theme throughout the poems, and the idea of places where one can hide—which, as it turns out—aren’t many and aren’t all that feasible.

- Heavy Feather

dcbooks.ca

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DISCLAIMERS

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

Today's book of poetry:
Shiftless. Janet Fraser. Guernica Editions. Essential Poetry Series 216. Toronto - Buffalo - Lancaster (UK). 2014.

There is a stream of down-home consciousness, laissez faire that Today's book of poetry likes about Janet Fraser's poems in Shiftless. These poems are like conversations Fraser is allowing us to overhear, the conversations that usually go on behind curtained windows. Fraser will have none of that, she's kicking against the pricks with a public voice.

Shiftless could have been written by a character from an Alistair MacLeod story. That's some solid.

Two Sisters

On the terrace

of the Restaurant Fournaise,

one hatted lady,

one flower-crowned girl.

Red and blue colour blocks

foreground green strokes.

Local models, not related,

for Renoir's Two Sisters.

She sent me that print

when we were freshly married.

I hung it by the picture window

of my garden room,

the one I retreated to nights

my husband stayed out.

(I didn't know her man

was a runabout too.)

As I grew up Renoir goddesses

fearlessly stared down at me.

Their rosy flesh, lustrous tresses,

corseted abundant dresses,

brightened the silent rooms

of three melancholy femmes.

(Two sisters and their mother

waiting for life to begin.)

Today my sister and I

don't speak of Art, or Mom,

a shy, gaunt artist who retired

after we were born, choosing

not to be a hobbyist,

settling for the Renoirs

that lived in our house --

the framed lush ladies.

Sis, good with her hands,

teaches school crafts

but is unwilling to take her

own oils into the light.

Her house is crammed with

Mom's discarded paintings,

all the tasteful fabrics

and porcelain she craves.

She lives with her daughter

in a mauve Victorian cottage.

Summers I visit her statuary

and formal gardens.

We sit on her polished verandah,

admire golden wire birdcages,

talk flatly for a bit

about our lives' surfaces.

...

Janet Fraser illustrates the matter-of-factness of our grind towards that endless dirt nap but she does so with considerable aplomb. We want to listen to her talk. You get the feeling Fraser is a poet who you could sit with at the kitchen table and share conversation and a sip.

Only a woman could have written these poems. That doesn't mean they are for women, just saying a man couldn't have come up with this stuff.

Today's book of poetry was intrigued by the title which is taken from a quote at the start of Fraser's Shiftless:

"It was my goal always to be shiftless

I saw the merit in that."

- Raymond Carver, "Shiftless"

There is nothing shiftless about Shiftless, sly and wise yes.

The Laws of Science

Memory wants rain.

- Elisabeth Harvor

The trauma preacher

says fundamentally

hurt is one side

of a see-saw

we can pull down,

then push up the other side.

Thank our lucky stars

that can be seen

if we squint long

and hard enough.

Recall junior high

science and physics

of bullying, our pull towards

boys and girls

who mock and curse us.

They create an opposite

and equal reaction

in the service

of a balanced operation.

With joy cost accounting

and sorrow gratitude,

because a girl learns

to love the dad who incests

her on her birthday

while the helium balloons

float graciously to the ceiling.

A teenage boy kills

himself, manifesting

a destiny determined

by age six.

Insults fuel us

like the fire

that dries up the rain,

floods the darkness.

Forget about death.

It's all good,

so get used to it.

...

"It all good, / so get used to it." Killer.

Today's book of poetry has been away for a few days. We found ourselves in the middle of Pigeon Lake on a houseboat. We couldn't bring the entire staff for our weekend houseboat adventure but we did invite our head tech Milo and our new intern Kathryn, They now share a roof and a poetry bookcase. While on our Kawartha Lakes adventure we promoted Kathryn from new intern to a full time position with pay and everything. We will be expecting great things from her in the future.

We read Janet Fraser's Shiftless, to each other, taking turns at the wheel and navigating and turns reading. Milo and Kathryn turn almost everything into a loving coo at this point but they read with heated emotion and considerable insight.

Fraser's poems came off our lips like stories we already knew, their familiarity both a surprise and a comfort.

from Domestic Drama: Eight Prose Poems

7. The Mall

In Scarborough my life ground on from one spanking to

the next. Always at the strip mall where grim Mom quick as

shit pulled down my pants and smacked my puddle cheeks.

At four I asked my mother not to spank me anymore,

'cause it hurt my feelings, and she stopped, making me

promise to be good until we got home, when she could lock

her bedroom door. I ran away from home to the Golden

Mile mall where Mom found me on the mechanical pony

trotting and begging passersby for dimes. On junior-high

weeknights I took off smoking to the Halifax Shopping

Centre where I sucked on hard candies and relaxed at the

Eaton's makeup counters and teen magazine racks until

nine when the lights were dimmed and all the mall rats

bum-rushed into the night.

...

Shiftless by Janet Fraser feels like comfort foot when that's exactly what you need. Solid poems in a world that is anything but.

Janet Fraser

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Janet Fraser was born in her mother’s ancestral home, Saint John, and returned over 40 years later. In the meantime, she lived for long stretches in Halifax, Toronto, and St. John’s. Her first poetry collection Long Girl Leaning into the Wind was shortlisted for the Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award. She teaches part-time at UNB’s College of Extended Learning.

BLURBS

With a painterly hand, Janet Fraser offers deft family portraits of men and women past, and sketches of the painful present. We enter a poetic gallery of rogues and misfits, sons and lovers, matriarchs and loving aunts – some comic, some tragic, all touching. The imagery of painting enters many poems, as when Fraser describes two sisters who “talk flatly for a bit / about our lives’ surfaces.” But the poems themselves delve deep into the core of human relationships, and especially in the “Self Portrait” section, a skilful run of prose poems situates the poet herself in the turmoils, loves and disappointments she has drawn.

- Maureen Hynes

Memory is imagination in this well-peopled collection where character sketches, condensed biographies and shards of autobiography mingle. By turns pious, bohemian, antique, contemporary, confessional, tight-lipped, compassionate and vituperative, these are poems full of longing and regret, a secretive village of black-painted houses with white lace curtains drawn.
- Patrick Warner

guernicaeditions.com

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DISCLAIMERS

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

Today's book of poetry:
A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent. Stuart Ross.
A Buckrider Book. Wolsak and Wynn. Hamilton, Ontario. 2016.

These are my words.

They existed before I was born

but not in this order.

David W. McFadden

"My Words/Hamilton"

Those of you who read Today's book of poetry with any regularity will already know that Stuart Ross and I are the closest of friends. We've been friends since before most of you were born.

So please take that into consideration.

Now please forget what I just told you -- so that I can categorically tell you without pretense or prejudice, how truly splendid a pleasure bomb Stuart Ross has bestowed on us with A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent.

For many of us Stuart Ross has been the most original and imaginative voice in Canadian poetry for some time. His wit and ironic palette are second to none. And now he's gone and done it, Ross has added two new twists to his considerable canon. Access to his massive and generous heart and a concerted effort to tie into a more direct narrative.

The results are stunning. Today's book of poetry is convinced A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent is not only Ross' best book, and that is saying something, but one of the very best I have read in years.

Pompano

And my mother is on the balcony

and my father is making cheese sandwiches

and my mother is writing a letter

that my father will discover

two months later in their bedroom

in Toronto, the morning

we're to bury her

she writes that

she is on the balcony

and he is making cheese sandwiches

and she says she feels treasured

and if ever there are grandkids

tell them she'd've loved them

and in five years my brother

dies in my sobbing father's arms

and my father one year after

and I cannot find the letter

my mother wrote in Pompano

but I remember the word treasured

it's how she felt, she said

and palm trees sway in the hot breeze

and butterflies called daggerwings drift past

and sand skinks swim through millions of grains of sand

and I - I am a pompano

I am this fish and I search

for that letter in my mother's hand

beyond the Atlantic coast

...

Make no mistakes, this is still a Stuart Ross book full of unexpected magic and rubix cube logic leaps of faith. There are poems Today's book of poetry see as political and powerful and brilliant beside intensely personal laments of grief and quiet moments of joyous relief and celebration. Ross has it all packed in here.

Today's book of poetry sees A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent as far more deeply personally revealing than any of Ross' previous work, there are poems about all of Ross' family, the living and the dead, and a tenderness that will shake your opened heart. And there are also the usual myriad of resplendent guests popping out of Ross' generous compendium like popcorn.

Virginia Woolf, David W. McFadden, Ron Padgett, Stephen Crane, Boris Spassky, Mark Laba and his entire family, Kurosawa and Dagwood Bumstead too, they are all in here and that is just scratching the surface.

Mentioning Sir David W. of McFadden makes Today's book of poetry think that A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent started one afternoon forty years ago or so when Ross skipped school, spent the afternoon in a library and discovered SAINT DAVID M and A Knight in Dried Plums.

Make Big Monkey Writing Poems

Big Monkey watches over me

as the blistering clouds bang

against my window and I dream

of you again and you are alive.

We are in a snow fort on my lawn

on Pannahill Road and we pretend

we are soaring through space.

The rumble of a 1967 Valiant

station wagon passing by

my driveway is the roar

of a meteor hurtling toward

earth and narrowly missing our

craft. We know now that

everyone will die except us,

because we are in space. Except

our ship has turned into a womb,

its hot, sticky walls pressing

against us until we can barely

move our arms. We are crushed

together like conjoined twins,

and because you are dead, I

wonder if I too am now dead

and I call out to Big Monkey

but he is bent over my desk,

rolling a sheet of yellow paper

through the platen of my

1952 Underwood, so intent

he cannot see us in the TV set,

our palms against the screen

from inside, and vertical hold

starts slipping.

...

This morning's reading of A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent in the Today's book of poetry offices was fire-cracking-tear-jerking-awe inspiring-explosion stuff. About a dozen guests piled through the doors first thing this morning. Both Milo, our head tech, and Kathryn, our new Jr. Editor, invited friends and family because they both adore Mr. Ross. They have collected almost everything of the mountain he has published. The reading was a dazzle as people took turns flashing it all out into the open like fireworks. There was real snap, crackle and pop.

Stuart Ross has done something marvelous in this astonishing book by giving us almost full access. Today's book of poetry is enthused by Aaron Tucker's suggestion that this become a poetry franchise, Tucker suggests A Sparrow Still Come Down Resplendent, Keepin it Resplendent, The Sparrow Re-Returns and so on. We love this idea. Ross' fertile home planet has sent us a gem.

The Hanging

My grandfather yells his Polish English

as my pyjama top swings

from the banister above

and his sewing machine

is silent in his dark room

and my mother puts her hand

on the back of my head,

tells me, "He saw the pyjama

and thought it was you,

that you had hanged yourself,"

and I went to my room,

gazed out at the snow

blanketing the Nefskys' roof

and pictured myself hanging

my pyjama sleeve tight

around my throat,

my grandfather pushing my feet aside

as he lumbers up the stairs

to eat his lumpy porridge.

...

Today's book of poetry loves the three poems I selected for today but there is so much more going on in A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent.

Today's book of poetry rarely makes requests but we are making one today, a social experiment if you will. Today's book of poetry would like each of you readers to repost this blog today, just flip that sucker over. Why? Because Stuart Ross is an unsung Canadian marvel as rare as hen's teeth, because Stuart Ross, in A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent has exposed an emotional bridge into Ross world that allows the reader to walk in with ease, once there the dancing starts.

I love Stuart Ross like a brother and have admired both him and his work all these long years. When you read A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent you are going to want to join my club.

Stuart Ross

Photo: Laurie Siblock

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stuart Ross is the author of fifteen books of fiction, poetry and essays. His many dozens of chapbooks include Nice Haircut, Fiddlehead(Puddles of Sky Press); A Pretty Good Year (Nose in Book Publishing) and In In My Dream (BookThug). Stuart is a member of the improvisational noise trio Donkey Lopez, whose CDs include Juan Lonely Night and Working Class Burro. He is a founding member of the Meet the Presses collective and has his own imprint, a stuart ross book, at Mansfield Press. Stuart lives in Cobourg, Ontario, and blogs at bloggamooga.blogspot.ca.

BLURBS

"Stuart Ross uses humour as a subversive weapon."

- Barbara Carey, The Toronto Star

"Ross's book is, among other things, a quite polemic in defense of the miscellaneous, swimming againt the stream and against streamlining."

- Alessandro Porco, Northern Poetry Review

"What I personally found myself most drawn to, however, were the poems (and there are many) where the imagistic bravado and willingness to play are married to a deep sense of martality and quiet grace. It takes a special sort of poet to make a reader feel profound empathy for the shattered dreams of a young hamburger, as he does...I Cut My Finger is a strange, beguilling and beautiful book."

- Nick Thran, Poetryreviews.ca

Stuart Ross

Reads three Cobourg Poems

Video: Wally Keeler

wolsakandwynn.ca

475

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:
Radio Silence. Philip Schaefer & Jeff Whitney. Black Lawrence Press. Pittsburgh, PA. 2016.

Winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition.

Startling good poetry. Somehow Philip Schaefer and Jeff Whitney have morphed themselves into a single entity with one marvelous fearsome voice. Radio Silence crackles with intelligent energy all the way through.

Schaefer and Whitney do not reveal their seamless technique and it is impossible to decipher where one voice stops and another starts. These guys didn't edit Radio Silence, they invisibly mended it.

Road Mapped

There is the giving and the taking and the taking

back. There is the day and the day is a woman

who loves you. There's a boy with a thumb

no bigger than the moon. There are rabid dogs

in packs of three, a moment to call it poverty, a dead

dust bowl idea of wealth, a dead child in a posthole,

delicious intent turned sour, a country going west.

There are buffalo who stagger boulder-like

in the dark. A coyote who has not eaten, a small

steady biting at her center. There is the bell

in a town no one rings, a statue's weeping,

and there is the weeping of those who visit her,

arms extended, supplicant as grass. There is

the marching of soldiers into villages

and the shrieking of ballistics in the night.

The dullness of blood and a trunk of dolls

lodged in the branches of a tree. There is the robe

his mother wore, pink with one yellow flower,

ribboning like the flag of a ruined country.

There is the sighing of holy men who do not pray

for the end of suffering but for the end of our willingness

to accept it. The ungulate that offers its neck to the river.

Candle flames ghosting around in the ungentle air.

That painting of the boy rowing out to an anchored galleon.

There is his happiness in going and his dread

and both are small spiders that live in the catacombs

of his nights. There are the people who could not resist

the sweetness of falling, the bridge with Plexiglas

and the bridges without. There is a woman

staring in the distance at a carnival, a mother

with dull insidious fruits clumped in a sack

near her heart. There are the sad notes of the mandolin,

the old hurts we remember wrong, all trembling, all curling

like smoke. Made from flaring ghosts. Whistled thin.

...

The poems in Radio Silence are all highly polished and full of sharp edges. You will want to pick them up and turn them around in your hands but inevitably you will get nicked. There's no getting away from Schaefer and Whitney without some blood letting.

"ribboning like the flag of a ruined country"

That's not a line of poetry! That's a novel, and a damned good one. These guys have salted every poem in Radio Silence with charms like this.

Vivisecting

The first out is the heart, small

gourd pulled from a wet pocket

of the body promised heaven

whose soul would come back

in a swell of insects or dry season

rain, who would become

for a night the moon's dull glow.

Then the doctor, half-clothed,

holds up the dark glob shining

to bring on the ten thousand

stars like the blinking eyes of gods.

This is the madness we dance for

hoping life fire to learn

the world the way a sloth learns

a tree's particular curve,

to come apart piece by

bloodied piece knowing nothing

goes back, to call home

the difficult weather, the severed

soul, the ball-to-glove thud

of figs in summer falling

each morning to mulch.

...

Milo, our head tech, and Kathryn, our new Jr. Editor, led our morning read. Now they are huddled up in the corner of the office trying to decipher where Schaefer ends and Whitney starts, vice versa and so on. Like trying to find the zipper on an apple -- it's not there.

Today's book of poetry never tires of poetry as smart as this, Radio Silence is full of urgent poems that are in no hurry. These poems are as carefully laid out as the mosaic tiles that tell the sad history of the story of the world. Some books take more out of you than they give, this isn't one of them. Radio Silence starts rewarding the reader on the first page and leaves us wanting more on the last.

Not sure how to tell you that these poems are of a particular order. Today's book of poetry wants to belong to that club.

Grief

Call it a snake curling between the chords

of a piano in your ribs, a snail that shimmies

across the sharp part of a blade.

Call it simple. Call it a woman

you've never met.

A house is always old

and there are many species of dark.

Call it a house or many species of dark,

a desperate watermelon salesman

burning his last field while miles away

children play the game of the lost dead

astronaut. they wander into the orchard

and retrieve the farthest fruit

then practice the difficult art

of coming home.

Call it gun metal rusting in the fences

like the wind's diamond tooth

while we have nothing to do but look,

let the hours stake out our bones, admire

what has learned to last.

* *

Last night wild dogs made fireworks

of the farmhouse chickens. A screaming

mural impressed against the picket fence.

We sleep through everything until we don't.

Today the sun is an artist gluing mountains

in crimson blues, splitting faces

of the corner drunks, pulling orange trees

from the pockets of the dead.

* *

There are words we can never say.

We have our tongues until

they're gone. Somewhere far

a gunshot, a crow,

a field of lightning writhing

to tell us we are wrong.

...

Philip Schaefer and Jeff Whitney must resemble the Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear characters in the Farrelly Brothers' movie "Stuck On You," conjoined twins stuck together at the hip. I bet right now they are flipping immaculate burgers at some back road diner and writing magnificent poems on their breaks.

First-rate. Five star.

Philip Schaefer

Jeff Whitney

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

PHILIP SCHAEFER is the author of three chapbooks. [Hideous] Miraculous is available from BOAAT Press, whileRadio Silence (forthcoming 2016 from Black Lawrence Press) and Smokes Tones (available from Phantom Books) were co-written with poet Jeff Whitney. Individual work is out or due out in Thrush, Vinyl, The Cincinnati Review, Forklift Ohio, DIAGRAM, Sonora Review, H_NGM_N, Guernica and Hayden’s Ferryamong others. He tends bar at a craft distillery in Missoula, where he received his MFA from the University of Montana.

JEFF WHITNEY is the author of The Tree With Lights In It (Thrush Press, 2015) as well as two other chapbooks. His poems have appeared in journals such as Beloit, Blackbird, Cream City Review, Narrative, Poetry Northwest, Salt Hill, and Verse Daily. He lives in Portland, where he teaches English.

BLURBS
Philip Schaefer and Jeff Whitney have closed their eyes and listened: weathers, dance halls, bright-and-darkening towns…the blaze of certain silences, “flaring ghosts.” Radio Silence is an exquisite dream of transport.
—Joanna Klink, author of Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy and Raptus

In these collaborative emergency poems, Philip Schaefer and Jeff Whitney remind us that silence doesn’t need to be disconcerting, even “in the chop of a storm/only the future saw coming.” But Radio Silence doesn’t fill in the gaps in transmission. Instead it attends to what emerges from those gaps when one really listens: Silence becomes noise; noise becomes music; music becomes a message—an old friend saying the perfect next thing. “There is the giving and the taking and the taking/back,” but what’s more there is what’s left over in the wake of disappearance, the afterglow of vanishment, the haunted present moment. These poems crackle with the notion that we are never alone, if we can only allow ourselves to pay attention (and participate!) with imagination and faith, in awe of the darkness and light that surrounds us.
—Matt Hart, author of Debacle Debacle and Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless

blacklaurencepress.com

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DISCLAIMERS

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

Today's book of poetry:
All The Gold Hurts My Mouth. Katherine Leyton. Icehouse Poetry. Goose Lane Editions. Fredericton, New Brunswick. 2016.

Today's book of poetry figures Katherine Leyton must have been getting more than a tan at Al Purdy's old Ameliasburgh home. These poems are rockets. As the first resident of the Writer-in-Residence program at the Al & Eurithe Purdy A-Frame, in the summer of 2014, Leyton must have been swatting mosquitoes and a quiet summer illusions with equal fervor.

Old Al would have been thrilled to death to know that someone was putting his digs to good use. I met him once or twice and am certain he would have heartily endorsed these poems.

Richard Gere's Grand Piano

Here. This is it:

you're a waitress.

You bring people French toast

and bacon. You can't pay the Hydro bill.

I used to think of you as somebody

grand, like one of those pianos Edward

fucked Vivian on in Pretty Woman.

Maybe you are.

Maybe your greatest talent

is gleaming in empty foyers.

...

Leyton has a monster sense of humour and we certainly appreciate that around here, funny is good. The best kind of funny is true, Leyton nails that no problem. But funny is just the tasting menu, something to get your blood running for the real meal. Leyton's All The Gold Hurts My Mouth has a level of sexual tension boiling over the pages that is both erotic and political.

Leyton seems to be sussing out the transitory nature of power and where it is rooted. She tackles the big three: LOVE SEX DEATH.

Al Purdy would approve, let us remember his own Sex & Death (McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1973). Al knew then that there is nothing new under the sun and Leyton knows it now but it is the dance that sustains us and Katherine Leyton knows how to kick up the heels.

Small City

When I lived there I roamed shopping malls

on lunch break. They advertised Katy Perry

was coming. I sat in Starbucks obsessing.

The university kids couldn't tell

but the men on their computers could.

I puppeted my arms for them, my mouth.

One followed me home through a snowstorm.

A snowstorm won't stop me!

It was a declaration of psychopathy, like my moving

was a declaration of psychopathy. And that word

declaration, an icicle glinting in the infrequent sun,

on one of those days I felt we were living

in a farmhouse,

dinner fresh from the oven,

snow a violence spun for us,

like fate was a thing we would die doing.

...

Kathryn, our new Jr. Editor, said that she had a new heroine when she walked into this morning's reading. That sent Milo, our senior tech, in a curious spin, had him sitting in the corner for the rest of the morning pouring over All The Gold Hurts My Mouth as though it were the Rosetta Stone.

The reading itself was great, Kathryn took the reins and held the floor. There were no objections.

There is a small army of excellent young Canadian poets publishing at present, Katherine Leyton steps up onto the same inspiring mantel as those like Eva H.D., Kayla Czaga and Suzannah Showler. These ladies are tearing it up.

Today's book of poetry does not fear for the future of Canadian poetry.

Witness

I see this lady going door-to-door

with an armful of pamphlets.

I'd like to be that sure of anything.

At a funeral

my mother took me aside,

"I believe when I die I'm going up there."

She pointed to the stucco ceiling of the funeral home,

her other hand clutching a dry brownie

wrapped in a white doily.

"And all the people I love..."

she said it pleading-like, self-mocking,

too intelligent for God, like the rest of us.

As if I wouldn't want her to have that.

I want her to have that.

I sat next to a bouquet

on the car ride home,

its sick-sweet smell

like the thinning perms

that bobbed in the sparse pews.

I didn't know what to do

when they bowed their heads.

I kept my eyes on the bald minister,

who looked like 80's Florida,

and while everyone around me broke

down, I was on a plane to Miami.

...

Today's book of poetry won't be the only reader waiting on Katherine Leyton's second book.

Katherine Leyton

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Katherine Leyton was the inaugural Writer-in-Residence at the Al & Eurithe Purdy A-Frame in the summer of 2014. Her poetry and non-fiction have appeared in numerous publications, including the Malahat Review, Hazlitt,the Globe and Mail, and the Edinburgh Review. She is also the founder of the highly unorthodox video poetry blog, HowPedestrian.ca. A native of Toronto, Leyton has lived in Rome, Montreal, Edinburgh, and Forlì.

BLURBS

"In this fierce debut, Leyton explores women as palaces and grand pianos, gleaming objects admired and shattered. Through her lyrically exuberent voice, whirring with musicality and subversive jabs, art becomes a looking glass. Just as 'women hum to drown their hunger,' these poems bring the salve of self-creation to their reader."

- Cassidy McFadzean, author of Hacker Packer

"Leyton's voice is both enigmatic and unabashed, delving into the mysteries of selfhood while offering a vivid meditation on what it means to be a woman alive today. A fearless, urgent, and beautifully wrought debut."

- Kerry-Lee Powell, author of Inheritance

Katherine Leyton

"Avertisements"

Video: Howpedestrian

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DISCLAIMERS

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

Today's book of poetry:
The Lost Child - Ozark Poems. Wesley McNair. David R. Godine Publisher. Jaffrey, New Hampshire. 2014.

Winner of the 2015 PEN New England Award for Literary Excellence in Poetry

Wesley McNair's opus is both tribute and lament. These poems sprawl across every sense you have with operatic flourish. This is narrative poetry writ large and Today's book of poetry can't get enough.

McNair's mother is reaching the end of her mortal coil and it isn't pretty. The scenes these poems illuminate are often small in scale but McNair is epic in scope, he sees the whole picture as it is happening and puts the essentials down in such a way that we cannot resist moving forward, the poems themselves compel us.

When She Wouldn't

When her recorded voice on the phone

said who she was again and again to the piles

of newspapers and magazines and the clothes

in the chairs and the bags of unopened mail

and garbage and piles of unwashed dishes.

When she could no longer walk

through the stench of it, in her don't-need-nobody-

to-help me way of walking, with her head

bent down to her knees as if she were searching

for a dime that had rolled into a crack

on the floor, though it was impossible to see

the floor. When the pain in her foot she disclosed

to no one was so bad she could not stand

at her refrigerator packed with food and sniff

to find what was edible. When she could hardly

even sit as she loved to sit, all night

on the toilet, with the old rinsed diapers

hanging nearby on the curtainless bar

of the shower stall, and the shoes lined u

in the tub, falling asleep and waking up

while she cut out newspaper clippings

and listened to the late-night talk

on her crackling radio about alien landings

and why the government had denied them.

When she drew the soapy rag across the agonizing

ache of her foot trying over and over to wash

the black from her big toe and could not

because it was gangrene.

When at last they came to carry my mother

out of the wilderness of that house

and she lay thin and frail and disoriented

between bouts of tests and x-rays,

and I came to find her in the white bed

of her white room among nurses who brushed

her hair while she looked up at them and smiled

with her yellow upper plate that seemed to hold

her face together, dazed and disbelieving,

as if she were in heaven,

then turned, still smiling, to the door

where her stout, bestroked younger brother

teetered into the room on his cane, all the way

from Missouri with her elderly sister

and her bald-headed baby brother,

whom she despised. When he smiled back

and dipped his bald head down to kiss her,

and her sister and her other brother hugged her

with serious expressions, and her childish

astonishment slowly changed

to suspicion and the old wildness returned

to her eye because she began to see

this was not what she wanted at all,

I sitting down by her good ear holding her hand

to talk to her about going into the home

that was not her home, her baby brother winking,

the others nodding and saying, Listen to Wesley.

When it became clear to her that we were not

her people, the ones she had left behind

in her house, on the radio, in the newspaper

clippings, in the bags of unopened mail,

in her mind, and she turned her face away

so I could see the print of red on her cheek

as if she had been slapped hard.

When the three of them began to implore

their older sister saying, Ruth, Ruth,

and We come out here for your own good,

and That time rolls around for all of us,

getting frustrated and mad because they meant,

but did not know they meant, themselves too.

When the gray sister, the angriest of them,

finally said through her pleated lips

and lower plate, You was always

the stubborn one, we ain't here to poison you,

turn around and say something.

When she wouldn't.

...

Epic in scope, that's the ticket. These may be small stories of almost too intimate detail but they are wonders to behold. These poems take up the whole page just like the works of Hieronymus Bosch if they were edited by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. There is a lot going on.

There is so much going on in these poems we are unsure of where to look but McNair holds his gaze and does not back down from his mother's gangrenous toes or anything else. The Lost Child - Ozark Poems is full of tender sadness and impending doom, all of it swinging from a family tree filled with broken fruit.

Her Secret

Why her husband must spread his things over every

table, counter-top, and chair, just like his mother Ruth,

Dolly no longer asks, knowing he will only answer as if

speaking to someone in his head who's keeping track

of all the ways she misunderstands him and wants

to hear over and over that he's sick and tired,

though that's just what he is, and how, anyway,

can she resent him for that? -- so sick he has pill vials

for his bad circulation, bad heart, and nerve disorder

scattered around the kitchen sink, so tired

after staying up all night at his computer feeding

medication to the stinging in his legs, he crashes

for one whole day into the next. "Thurman?" she asks,

coming home from work to find him lying on their bed

in his underpants, still as the dead, his radio on

to tape the talk shows he's missing, and then the old

thought that he really is dead comes into her mind

all over again, so strong this time she can't

get rid of it, even after she sees him with her

own eyes just above the partition in the kitchen

making coffee in the way he's invented, boiling

his grounds, them putting in more grounds and a raw

egg, his bald head going back and forth under

the fluorescent light like the image of his continuous

obsession, which she can't escape and can never enter,

though now it's her own obsession that troubles her.

Stupid is her word for it, the same word he always

uses for the crazy things she gets into her head,

and it was stupid, still thinking Thurman was dead

though he was right there in front of her, and then,

when she tries to make herself stop, her heart stops

pounding until she can hardly breathe. "It is nothing

more than simple anger," the pastor tells Dolly

after the service at the church in Seymour

she attends each Sunday with the other women

who live nearby, and he recalls with a frown

of disappointment the anger he discovered in her heart

during their talk a year ago. How, she wonders,

could she have forgotten that after she wiped away

her tears in the earlier conversation about Thurman's

leaving things he wouldn't let her touch on every

surface in the house, even the couch and chairs,

the pastor made her see the malice she had carried

so deep inside not even she understood that all

this time she had been gradually filling the spare room

and the closed-in porch with her own discards,

broken figurines, old mops and mop pails and Christmas

decorations, out of a secret revenge. "And now,"

the pastor shakes his head, "this thought about your

husband, whom you have pledged to honor, lying

in his underpants, dead, the day before your fortieth

anniversary." When Dolly returns home at last

and opens the door to find the two pairs of sneakers

next to the recliner with the ankle brace in it,

and old videos on top of the half-read magazines

and newspapers by the TV, and the bathrobe and shirts

and pants folded over the backs of chairs, she does not

feel, as she sometimes has, that she might suffocate,

but instead, a relief that Thurman hasn't risen yet.

He won't mind, she thinks, that she's used one

of his sticky notes when he has read the words

she writes on it, I still love you, meaning how sorry

she is for blaming him behind his back to the pastor,

and for the secret anger she has kept so long

in her heart, yet because, unlike most things

in that house, it is hers alone, Dolly continues

to ponder the anger and keep it, even after Thurman

takes the note from the screen of his computer

with a smile, and gets his camera out to take

the anniversary photo he takes each year for his emails

of her holding plastic flowers, irritated with her

because she never could pose right, then sitting down

among the wires and the stacks of CDs and computer

paper to photoshop it, going over and over her teeth

and eyes to whiten them and taking all the wrinkles out

of her face until she looks like an old baby. "Oh

this is nice," Dolly says when he brings the picture

to her, sitting on her small rocker in the only

uncluttered corner of the house, and she almost

means it, she has become so calm in her pondering

as she looks out the window and through the other

window of the closed-in porch, where a flock

of the migrating birds she loves linger for a time

under the roof of her feeder, and in an unaccountable

moment, lift their wings all together and fly away.

...

Pace and timing. Wesley McNair's The Lost Child - Ozark Poems is a brisk march that never lets up. McNair has a metronome inside his mechanism that seemingly never lets him down, it certainly punctuates these stories, pathos rains down like a forest falling.

McNair really does have a narrative gift unlike any other poet Today's book of poetry has been lucky enough to read. These poems have Ballad of the Sad Cafe holding up a corner of the card table.

Dancing in Tennessee

How was he to know, when his father left them

and his mother took him by the hand

to her clothes closet, screaming

because he did not understand how to behave

and because, alone and lost, she herself

did not understand how to behave,

that this was the room she led him to,

20B in the nursing home, where he sat

once more in the dim light among her slippers

and shoes, calling out to her, "Mama, Mama,"

though now she was right there

in her bed, half-deaf, eyes wide open

in her blindness, her teeth out,

breathing rapidly through her mouth?

How could he have known when she whipped him

as if she would never stop because his father

loved someone else, it was the shock

of this final unbelievable lovelessness

she was preparing him for? All gone, her years

afterward with the new man, and the house

and farm she helped build to replace

the hopes that she once had. Gone

to ruin, the house and the farm,

but never mind. And never mind

her lifelong anger, and all her failures

of the heart: this was not his mother.

Lying on her stroke side, her nose

a bony thing between her eyes that blinked

and blinked so he could see behind them

to her fear, she was a creature

whose body had failed, and he had no way

to reach except through her favorite song

he sang as a boy to lift the grief from her face,

and began now to sing, "The Tennessee Waltz,"

understanding at last that its tale of love stolen

and denied was the pure inescapable

story of her life -- his father the stolen

sweetheart she never forgave

or forgot. It didn't matter that she could not

see him beside her there or, struggling for air,

she was unable to eat or drink

or sing. He took her good hand in his

and rocked her and sang for them both,

his mother discovering once more in the tips

of her fingers what touch was like,

and he discovering too, while he sang on

and on, stealing her back from this moment

in the small, dim room where she lay dying,

and they danced and danced.

...

And now all you Tennessee Ernie Ford fans know what Today's book of poetry knows, Wesley McNair can cook. The poems in The Lost Child all come from one narrative, tied together with barbed wire and blue ribbon, like most family histories, moments of kindness remembered among the tatters of old frustrations and never fully sated dreams.

Love and those we love often bring out the sorrow.

Wesley McNair writes grand scale with a stethoscope planted firmly on the readers heart.

Wesley McNair

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wesley McNair is the Poet Laureate of Maine. He is the author of twenty books, including ten volumes of poetry, three books of nonfiction, and several edited anthologies.. His most recent books are The Lost Child: Ozark Poems (Godine, 2014), The Words I Chose: A Memoir of Family and Poetry(CMU, 2012) and Lovers of the Lost: New & Selected Poems (Godine, 2010).
McNair is the recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright and Guggenheim Foundations, a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in literature, two Rockefeller fellowships for creative work at the Bellagio Center in Italy, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships for Creative Writers, and in 2006 a United States Artists Fellowship of $50,000 as one of "America's finest living artists." He was recently named as the 2015 recipient of the PEN New England Award for Poetry, for his latest collection, The Lost Child: Ozark Poems. Other honors include the Robert Frost Prize; the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry (for Fire); the Devins Award for poetry; the Eunice Teitjens Prize from Poetry magazine; the Theodore Roethke prize from Poetry Northwest; the Pushcart Prize, and the Sarah Josepha Hale Medal for his "distinguished contribution to the world of letters."

He has received five honorary degrees for literary distinction.

Wesley McNair has twice been invited to read his poetry by the Library of Congress and has given readings at a wide range of colleges and universities. A television series aired over affiliates of PBS on Robert Frost for which he wrote the scripts received an Emmy Award. Featured on National Public Radio's Weekend Edition (Saturday and Sunday programs) and 22 times on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac, his work has appeared in the Pushcart Prize Annual, two editions of The Best American Poetry, and over 60 anthologies and textbooks. He has served four times on the jury for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

BLURBS

By the faculty of his attention—to people, to their talk—McNair’s compassion turns itself into art. – - Donald Hall, The Harvard Review

[He is] a master craftsman with a remarkable ear.

– Maxine Kumin,Ploughshares

He has produced one of the most individual and original bodies of work by a poet of his generation.

– Ruminator Review

godine.com

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DISCLAIMERS

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

Today's book of poetry:
The Year of Our Beautiful Exile. Monica Kidd. Gaspereau Press. Kentville, Nova Scotia. 2015.

Today's book of poetry had the pleasure of writing about Monica Kidd's Handfuls of Bone (Gaspereau Press, 1012) back in January, 2014.

http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.ca/2014/01/handfuls-of-bone-monica-kidd.html

It is our distinct pleasure to travel along with Kidd once more in The Year of Our Beautiful Exile. These punchy poems get to the point and apparently Kidd doesn't mind us tagging along.

A Makeshift Martini Shaker

It requires an attitude of the wrist.

A flick of the hair, the bearing of Buster Keaton,

a love for the way white layers on white,

the way a word can be both sour and sweet

when served with a boar's head.

The way nothing is ever

quite what it seems.

An emphatic pumpf as the line cook peeps

out the porthole of a door that swings

both ways. Feet like water on

flagstones in old Montreal.

...

Monica Kidd's curiosity would kill several cats. The Year of Our Beautiful Exile reads like an omnibus from some hip oracle priestess. We here at Today's book of poetry like how Kidd talks.

You could hand this book out at a party and every reasonable person would like it, a lot. But they'd all have different favourites. Why? Because somehow Monica Kidd writes poems that sound so true you simply think they have happened to you. This is a very good trick.

The beetles in Madeira lie much concealed until the wind

lulls and the sun shines

Of evolution and what it said about God, geneticist J.B.S.

Haldane remarked, He must have an inordinate fondness

for beetles. For remove the soil, the houses, and asphalt, the

fighter planes and pop cans, the bed sheets; remove the

entire residue of man, and the earth would remain, a husk

of twitching bug feet. Set your mind to counting and come

back when you are old, and still the number would not be

great enough to hold them.

...

Today's book of poetry just has to admit it right out front. Whatever Monica Kidd is interested in writing about - we are interested in reading.

This morning's read was a first. Our Senior Editor, Max, came out of his office for the first time in over three years, walked to the middle of the floor with his copy of The Year of Our Beautiful Exile in hands and said "I've got this."

Then with almost perfect pitch he rattled them all off, the entire book, turned on his heels and went back to his office. Milo, our head tech, said that he'd thought Max had retired. Kathryn, our Jr. Editor, asked where the door had come from and who the strange man in our office was and why had she never seen him before.

I explained to Kathryn that Max lives on a diet of dictionaries, books of style and the solo recordings of Thelonious Monk.

It is only natural that Max would admire The Year of Our Beautiful Exile, Monica Kidd has Monk like imagination, Thelonious wit. She knows what to leave in, when to let your imagination fill in the blanks.

How The Body Remembers Joy

How you snug my hip with

two girls curled into sleep, my heart

humming an old tune it once heard,

a hundred times, the heat of a body

on a sofa never closer than brass strings

strummed against the night,

prowling at the windows.

My new love affair with F#:

the way it sits cock-eared

in the drum of my chest,

its sound of feet on earth, of quiet

rooms and a blank page, turning.

How the body remembers joy.

How the clocks stop.

...

Monica Kidd writes with precision, compassion and wit and we can't get enough of that here at Today's book of poetry. We were greatly impressed with Handfuls of Bone, The Year of Our Beautiful Exile only raises our expectations. Kidd can cook with the best.

Monica Kidd

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Monica Kidd grew up on the Alberta prairies. Her previous literary works include two novels (Beatrice and The Momentum of Red), a book of non-fiction (Any Other Woman: An Uncommon Biography) and two collections of poetry (Actualities and Handfuls of Bone). Her short experimental films have shown in Atlantic Canada and in Amsterdam. She has worked as a seabird biologist and as a reporter for CBC Radio, where her news items and documentaries have won numerous awards. Kidd presently lives in Calgary, Alberta, where, as well as writing, she works as a medical doctor and tends to her young family.

gaspereau.com

479

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:
Impressions of an Expatriate: China. Peter Jelen. BareBack Press. Hamilton, Ontario. 2014.

Impressions of an Expatriate: China is one of the more interesting poetry travelogues Today's book of poetry has encountered for a while. Peter Jelen's all too short book is a celebration of his time in Shanghai, Hong Kong, China. He loved every minute of it except when he didn't.

For those of you have never lived in another culture with a different and difficult language, Jelen gets it right. He knows that the small things are often the most amazing, the little wonders often the most startling. In another incarnation Impressions of an Expatriate: China might just as easily have been titled A Study in Manners.

The Leper

She sat in a rusty wheelchair

at the end of an overpass,

no hands, no feet, no nose

a sign strung around her neck:

I'M A POOR SOUL

PLEASE GIVE ME MONEY

I unplugged my earphones

dipped into my pocket,

pulled out a couple kuai,

but then paused.

Wondered,

how did she get here?

If she has no feet,

she couldn't have walked.

If she has no hands,

she couldn't have wheeled herself.

And shit,

if she has no fingers

she couldn't have written the sign.

I kept my change,

continued on

and was later glad I had.

When I asked one of my Shanghainese co-workers,

a very sweet girl named Sunny,

about this leper at the train station,

she told me the leper had an owner

and was carried there day after day to beg.

Sunny said "Don't give her any money,

it's a business,

people buy the deformed and use them as beggars."

With the foreboding tone of fortune teller

she predicted, "You will see worse,

much worse."

She was right.

I would.

I did.

...

Jelen is not walking on the sunny side of the street, he is writing from a tradition of street-wise and unadorned poetry which is entirely suited, form meeting function. When called for we can breathe in the rancid funk from the over-ripe back alleys Jelen sojourns through.

You might get the wrong first impressions of China if you only see the unvarnished larceny Jelen gets up to. Today's book of poetry is convinced Jelen loved/loves China, but as Jelen makes clear, he is wandering a little off the regular tourist route. And we are the richer for it.

Garbage On My Head

I was strolling through the crowded

malodorous back alleys of Wuban

thoroughly enjoying

well

just being there.

It was so unlike Shanghai,

it was a place where Internet cafes

and telephone rooms were still a necessity.

It was a place without well-oiled sanitation,

where one would have to walk down the banks of the

Yangtze and dump one's own garbage still.

But some people were lazy sometimes.

Some people didn't want to walk all the way down

to the mighty river and dump their garbage.

Some people, I discovered,

dumped their garbage out of their apartment windows

and it rained down on passersby

rained down on me

fusty egg shells,

slimy rice,

oily noodles,

soggy bok choy.

I puked right then and there.

Then I drank some more

and forgot all about it

until now.

...

Peter Jelen's experience of being an expatriate in China opens up the world, Today's book of poetry has forgotten the source of the direct quote and my research staff are currently napping on the couch, the idea that you never really see your own country/society until you've lived outside of it remains true. When Jelen talks about manners, customs and practise it is the west that comes under real scrutiny.

These poems are immediate, some of them slap you up both sides of your head at the same time they are that quick. Poems like these come off of the page like Foghorn Leghorn making some big pronouncement or carnies barking for your attention -- but much like time abroad -- it's the

distillation of all that new information that provides the most interest.

Shanghai Cocaine

The best cocaine I've ever had

was in Shanghai,

not because the coke was

of exceptional quality

like a prize winning vintage wine

or something.

I just mean that knowing

I would be blindfolded

and set in front of a firing squad

with one last Camel clenched between my teeth

if I got caught with it

gave it an extra

kick.

...

Clearly Jelen is no angel and this no bible, this is a road map of note, a guidebook that happens to be a journey of poetic self discovery. Jelen understands that there is both great freedom and unseen barriers when living abroad and as readers we get to tag along without having to carry any luggage.

When I travel, or read poetry, I want to get off the main street and avoid MacDonalds. Give me a back lane and some street food. I want to hear the patois, the sound of grease hitting a skillet. Jelen delivers.

Peter Jelen

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Jelen is a Canadian writer. He has spent the last six years living and working in Japan, China, and South Korea. He is the author of Better Than God, The Cure for Consciousness, and Impressions Of An Expatriate: China.

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DISCLAIMERS

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

Today's book of poetry:
Your Daily Horoscope. Nik De Dominic. New Michigan Press. Tucson, Arizona. 2015.

Nik De Dominic has been hereby declared as Master of Horoscopology by Today's book of poetry. Your Daily Horoscope is true-that one the most thoroughly enjoyable and entertaining romps we've been on in a while.

Splendidly playful and deadly serious, Your Daily Horoscope is a first rate page turner. If these horoscopes replaced our daily grog in the newspapers the world would be a very different place.

Your Daily Horoscope [someone will send...]

Someone will send you a .gif

of a clown tying a noose

around his neck to a sapling.

He will then water the sapling.

Everywhere a .gif a gift.

...

To tell you how funny these poems are would be a bit like doing an "Ali-shuffle," brilliant mis-direction. Watch my feet while I disconnect your noggin. Nik De Dominic could be a stand-up comic with poetry punch lines. It's like he has absorbed the best of Richard Brautigan's surreal joy and stewed it up all modern and relevant.

Today's book of poetry had a few other comparisons that leap to mind, it is possible that De Dominic has studied at the church of Ron Koertge, but we'll skip the comparisons and tell you that these poems cook. Stone cold, Nik De Dominic can cook with the best.

Today's book of poetry's only complaint with this collection is that it is too short, we could have read these gems all day long.

Your Daily Horoscope [twenty years ago...]

Twenty years ago Dizzy had some racket with Impalas

and could have keys cut to VIN numbers. A perfumed

icon hanging from the rear view as we drove around

doing crimes. Now I ride the 794 to work and I think

Dizzy is dead. Everyone on this line is infirmed somehow,

walkers and wheelchairs, boils and bald, reeks of salad dressing, and I

am trying to figure out why my problem is. Big and beautiful

blonde boys bring their bibles on the bus, sit closely

together in starched white short shirt sleeves, murmur to each other

secrets of the after this. It is a bible, the thing Mormons morm from?

The strip-mall church off San Fernando, Pentecostal something or other,

is giving away food and there is a line out the door,

up both sides of the block. A little girl with black bangs hangs

in her parents' hands over a pack of pigeons, brethren grieving

over a fallen and headless brother, and she spits at them to scatter.

When I get home still afternoon we lie in bed and let the house go

from day to blue. I tell you I read today that you are everyone

in your dreams. No shit, you say, who else would you be?

...

Nik De Dominic is one Mother of Invention, these poems snap, crackle and pop like old timey flash bulbs. We had so much fun at this morning's reading that we tackled some of these poems twice. Milo, our head tech, was particularly enthralled and in his finest form.

When Today's book of poetry tells you that these poems were easy going we mean it as a compliment. They welcome you in like they were looking for you. Nik De Dominic has found a voice that sounds as natural as a siblings, rings as true as a straight shot always does. This is no small feat but from the first poem the reader is comfortable with De Dominic's cool, clear and clean voice, the cavalier comes later.

A Note For Reading Your Daily Horoscopes

The preceding horoscopes are intended for purely

entertainment purposes. I make no claims, beyond

the claims I've made above, about the possible

outcome of your life. It is important to remember

that the horoscope, like all things, is metaphor, and its

application completely subjective -- that language, too,

is dynamic. Flexible. Destabilized, even. Something

about signs and signified, yada, yada (lol, Plato).

When I say you sometimes I mean me; when I say I

sometimes I mean you. Sometimes when I say we I

mean you and I and other times I mean well, it's sort of

royal, so I mean me. But other times, I really do mean I

and I really do mean you and I really do mean me and

I really do mean we. further, for one stargazer, a new

job may mean getting fired. For another, a new job may

mean losing an uncle. For yet another, a new job may

mean, literally, a new job -- like in middle management

at a rental car agency. What I will say is this, something

good will happen for you soon. I am sure of it. So will

something terrible. That, I am also sure.

...

It's a real pleasure to be able to tell you about books like Nik De Dominic's Your Daily Horoscope.

These poems really do scamper across the desk with considerable glee and purpose. This is beautiful and audacious poetry with the grace of a cheetah - and then that bite.

Today's book of poetry flat out loved Your Daily Horoscope.

Nik De Dominic

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nik De Dominic believes in the stars. Work has appeared in Los Angeles Review, Harpur Palate, Guernica, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. He is a founding editor of The Offending Adam and a poetry editor of New Orleans Review. He lectures in The Writing Program at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles with is partner Janna and their leash aggressive dog, Dinal.

BLURBS

I want to read one of these in my newspaper daily and then when they're done to get them in my newspaper all over again from the beginning. They are keen, talky, funny, immediate, clear, kind, and more. Welcome to a beguiling set of new constellations.

- Aimee Bender

The future cannot exist without the invention of debt, debt that bonds us with time beyond the immediate. Oh, and we owe much to the prescient prestigitation of Nik De Dominic's imperative and dimension-warping poems that, time and time again, rip time a new portal. And predictably you always and already know that when you read this book you will find yourself finding yourself in those past pasts and in those future futures. And there you are being struck dumb by the brilliant anticipatory insight and elegant grace of this work -- the smart smartness, the dumbest of luck.

- Michael Martone

newmichiganpress.com

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DISCLAIMERS

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

Today's book of poetry:
Barking & Biting. Sina Queyras. Selected and with an introduction by Erin Wunker. Laurier Poetry Series. Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Waterloo, Ontario. 2016.

"I am not interested in other words for honey. I am interested in honey."

- Sina Queyras, "Water, Water Everywhere"

Queyras wants to be clear and she is. This is a straight shot across the bow, full of intent.

Today's book of poetry likes a list poem and Sina Queyras gives us a lemon-tart sparkler with "If Only." Poetry this smart is always going to turn heads and if Queyras has her way those heads will be more sympathetic, empathetic, reasonable.

If Only

If only men were more feminine. If only Judaism were

more feminine. If only industry were more feminine.

If only bridges were more feminine. If only trucks

were more feminine. If only airplanes were more

feminine. If only fruit were more feminine. If only

engines were more feminine. If only economics were

more feminine. If only test tubes were more femi-

nine. If only physicists were more feminine. If only

space were more feminine. If only Hollywood were

more feminine. If only America were more feminine.

If only farmyards were more feminine. If only the

weather were more feminine. If only Islam were more

feminine. If only engineers were more feminine. If

only city planners were more feminine. If only femi-

nists were more feminine. If only Catholicism were

more feminine. If only politicians were more femi-

nine. If only astronauts were more feminine. If only

corporations were more feminine. If only women

were more feminine. If only what was feminine were

firm. If only there were slots. If only things fit inside.

...

Barking & Biting is a tasting menu of sorts brought to you courtesy of the deft hand of Erin Wunker. Wunker's choices nip and tuck from some much longer works to bring us surprisingly self contained poetic essays on gender with both Holly Golightly and Virginia Woolf among the cast of luminaries.

And exactly as a tasting menu should, these bites leave us wanting more.

Sina Queyras writes poems that evolve in front of your eyes, they play with being short stories, novellas, epic. Queyras has much to say about gender in these poems and her articulate charms add gravitas but never vitriol.

From Meanwhile, elsewhere, otherwise

"Some other poets and the puddle"

'When for no reason I could discover, every-

thing suddenly became unreal.'

Virginia Woolf

She didn't notice the puddle. She was busy unravel-

ling the pavement. She clip-clopped past. She had

serious business. The words in her head were pleas-

ing her. She liked the sun. The smell of meat sizzling

called out to her. Language needed to be parted,

ordered. The children irritated her as they played in the

puddle. They were noisy. It was not her business.

There were no books in the playground, but there

were shapes to things. Sentences combusted. No

one recognizes. The words in her head grew cold.

They needed a rest. Her feet had an idea. She

thought they meant business. She saw herself in

everything and everything was good.

She saw the puddle as pewter. She swallowed it sweet

as figs. She saw it nestled in the cleavage of plum

girls. She held them over her head and cracked their

legs.

She saw the universe in the puddle. She saw a slide

show of organic compounds. She saw the key and

the key fit. She saw the genital-less amoeba as a

hero. She put her ear to the puddle but she was no

naive child; she was listening for the rumble of

trucks, not the sweet musing of water beetles.

She waited until winter and when the puddle froze

over, she glided across it. She sat in the summer heat

and was content. She lifted the puddle and slid it

down her arm like pancake. She invited a girl gang

over and drank it. She had no puddles on her street.

She had no street. She leapt over the puddle on

horseback in pursuit. She saw streams of Nazis skim-

ming book black across the surface. She thought she

heard the apostles and so kneeled down to pee. She

dove in, scraping her nose. She had her father drain

all the puddles in the village. She splashed. She leapt

and bombed it with rocks. She floated and toppled

heads of Barbie dolls. She walked around. Then she

walked around again. She heard men flinging mud

and arranged a blanket of oak leaves across the

surface. She did a cartwheel. She knit a scarf out of

the letters R and E which she wound round and

round and round.

...

Queyras comes up with a phrase that Today's book of poetry has never encountered before when she says that "Lyric Conceptualism's goal is to create openings rather than closures." This quote from the Sira Queyras poem Afterward: Lyric Conceptualism, A Manifesto in Progress is a succinct summation of the idea of these poems. But it doesn't quite address the feeling that they create, this feels like a conversation that all are welcomed to listen to. As robustly feminist as Queyras can quite rightly be, there is no matriarchal man-bashing, compassionate intelligence reigns here.

Kathleen, our Jr. Editor, took control of this morning's reading and made sure to include everyone. Sina Queyras sailed around the room and over our heads like a wise hot-air balloon.

Proverbs of Hell

The body sublime, the heart SUV.

Fuel your plow with the blood of war.

Drive your car on the bones of the dead.

The road of CO2S leads to rising seas.

He who is preoccupied with the afterlife pisses on the present.

So the price of oil goes, so goes the number of wars.

A fool sees product; a wise man sees shade.

He who sullies the earth sullies himself; he who dulls the sun

dulls his senses.

The future is the reversal of destruction.

Even a bee's too busy.

Profits are measure by the dollar, but read profit cannot be

measured.

A wholesome food comes in fewer than sixteen pieces from

seven states.

Prisons are built with the bricks of luxury items.

Let man wear the fell of the hemp see, woman the fleece of

cotton.

The bird a thought, the spider a path, the mind the means.

What was once proved and known is now only rarely imagined.

What was once used to imagine now operates software.

The rat, the mouse, the starling, the squirrel; the lion, the

tyger, the elephant, the whale -- only the useless, or root

less, survive, otherwise; extinction porn.

The cistern pollutes, the fountain overflows, is of no use to

itself.

Once thought filled immensity; now it purchases goods.

To speak your mind is to be unpatriotic; to be human, then,

is to be unpatriotic.

All things imagined must be images of truth; all things

created must be fragments of our imagination.

The eagle never wreaked so much havoc as when he

submitted to the whims of profit.

The eagle provides for himself, but the air provides for the

eagle.

Want in the morning. Buy at noon. Buy in the evening. Buy

in your sleep.

He who has suffered you to impose on him knows the market.

As the plow follows the markets, so the market follows itself.

The tygers of the market are no wilier than the corporate dogs.

Expect poison form the standing mind.

The coals of Wall Street, the bricks of despair, the last drop,

the last grain.

As the cat chooses the warmest place to curl her bones so the

wise man seeks home.

To create a new kind of flower is the splice of genes.

The best wine is the oldest, the best thought is the first.

Cheerfulness is the hammer of the right.

The expressway is a straight line, but the crooked road

remains the road of genius.

Where man is, nature is bereft.

Where nature is not man, is not known.

Where nature is not natural, man is not man.

As a dog returns to his vomit, so a citizen to his belief in

separation.

More is destruction.

Less is the wisdom of the future.

Abundance is all context.

The end of thought is the end of man is the end of earth.

In absentia, in absence, in obsolesce, or obnoxious.

Where nature is, man is not enough.

Enough, or too much. Too much.

Go forth and undo harm.

Go forth and do.

...

How's that for a taste of the menu. Queyras bounces around ideas like cartwheeling jackhammer.

Barking & Biting is the first poetry by Queyras that Today's book of poetry has encountered but we'll certainly be searching for her others now.

Sina Queyras

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sina Queyras is an accomplished poet and essayist. She edited the first anthology of Canadian poetry published by an American press (Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets). Between 2005 and 2007 she co-curated the path-breaking feminist Belladonna* reading series in New York and was instrumental in bringing Canadian and American poets into conversation. She has published six books of poetry and a novel, Autobiography of Childhood (2011). She received the Pat Lowther Award and a Lambda Literary Award for Lemon Hound (2006). Her most recent book of poetry is MxT (2014).

ABOUT THE EDITOR

Erin Wunker is the chair of the board of the national non-profit social justice organization Canadian Women in the Literary Arts (CWILA) and co-founder, writer, and managing editor of the feminist academic blog Hook and Eye: Fast Feminism, Slow Academe. She teaches Canadian literature and culture at Dalhousie University. Her book The Feminist Killjoy Handbook will be published in the fall of 2016.

Sina Queyras

This video is from Fred Wah's Parlimentary Poet Laureate Series.

wlupress.wlu.ca

482

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:
Disturbing the Buddha. Barry Dempster. Brick Books. London, Ontario, 2016.

Barry Dempster has been nominated for the Governor General's Award twice. Today's book of poetry tackles Dempster's latest, his fifteenth book of poetry, Disturbing the Buddha from the formidable Brick Books stable.

Dempster is no stranger to Today's book of poetry, we have several of his titles on our shelves:

Positions To Pray In, Guernica (1989)

The Unavoidable Man, Quarry Press (1990)

Letters from a Long Illness with the World, Brick Books (1993)

The Burning Alphabet, Brick Books (2005)

Love Outlandish, Brick Books (2009)

and

Invisible Dogs, Brick Books (2013)

Today's book of poetry has been following Barry Dempster for a long time. His books never fail to be good reads, this sort of intelligent diligence always delivers.

The thing with Dempster is that he has a polymorphous sense of curiosity.

Be Drunk

First sip has a way of loosening

knots, those clusters of nerves

nagging like bow ties, cutting off

my breath. After a good swallow

my legs shred some texture - hushabye.

Knuckles shoo their useless k's.

From here on in it's one grand gush -

elbows turned to slush.

Be drunk, Baudelaire proclaimed,

the poet crowning. Evening bobs

on rambunctious little waves,

the bottle cradled in my arms

a conch shell, my brain well

on its way to a saint's gibberish,

surrendering my stevedore will,

my Calvinist settle.

The second glass has a bubbly

disposition, flirty, faster

than a somersault. By the third

the couch is surfing. At four,

I'm on the floor playing Kitty-

Kitty. Can't remember five. Come

morning, daisies will be growing

from my lips, my legs squirming

two feet from my hips.

I'll be nameless, like a beast

Adam forgot to add to his scroll.

...

Disturbing the Buddha is mature, 10,000 hour work. There are no rough edges on these babies. Dempster has worked these until they are smooth to the touch.

Dempster is comfortable exploring the word of God and the water-skiing prowess of a Barbie doll, Boy George is in here, the Thompson Twins as well. Beatrix Potter too. Dempster calls on an honour roll of guests and characters to flesh out his world view and he can be both playful and serious as a heart-attack in the same poem.

Swallows

I decide to call them swallows,

liking how far out my lips go,

and then the reprieve, that o sound

an actual swallow might make

as it tightens its wings.

A swarm of them, not just a flock - lassos

flinging themselves on distance.

The last time I fell in love it truly

felt like falling. One minute I was

throwing myself at the breeze,

the next landing so hard

even bone caved in. I lay there

shattered, tacking the sky

for explanations, swallowing

endless amounts of grief. Eventually,

I couldn't tell the difference between

a bird and the word. I wanted

to call it something extravagant

like disenchantment or self-destruction,

but settled on thud instead.

...

Any poet who tips a hat to P.K. Page is going to earn points here at Today's book of poetry. Dempster brings in Mark Rothko, W.B. Yeats, Sylvia Plath, Walt Whitman, Ann Sexton, Milton, even Amy Winehouse makes one last breathless appearance. Dempster likes a crowd.

Actually Dempster deftly uses these touchstone public figures as a launching pad, as both bait and and prop. If Barry Dempster is curious about it - he will make you curious about it as well.

This morning's reading was held in our non-air-conditioned dungeon/offices. No one had their voice raise much above a whisper for fear of the heat. We kept the blinds down. It was almost liturgical. The quietly intense poems of Disturbing the Buddha are never sermonizing though, Dempster's poems find the ground between conversation and lesson and let you in.

from DISTURBING THE BUDDHA

5/ Wu-Men

The Great Way has no gate,

no buzzer, no knob, no

iron bars that only breath

can penetrate. It's an entry

wound, skin pushed to the limits,

like the Red Sea's shores. Look

at all the traffic - swallows

hugging their speed, cruise ships

shaking their Jell-O-green pools,

genies shooting

skateboard flares. One toe at a time

and you're through, propelled by

desire's tiniest thrust. One

juicy thought and your consciousness

explodes. It's where your loneliness

was already heading,

where stamps have been flying

on perforated wings. Forget

the foolishness of choice.

You haven't had an unconflicted thought

since your mother's breast morphed

into a plastic Goofy cup.

You knew then and there, fate

was an openness to

folly. the Buddha so

disturbed, his belly rolled

across the lawn like a

freshly fallen orange.

...

Disturbing the Buddha is another in a long line of very satisfying books of poetry from Barry Dempster. This is how the pros do it.

Barry Dempster

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Barry Dempster, twice nominated for the Governor General’s Award, is the author of fourteen previous collections of poetry. His collection The Burning Alphabet won the Canadian Authors’ Association Chalmers Award for Poetry in 2005. In 2010, he was a finalist for the Ontario Premier’s Award for Excellence in the Arts and in 2014 he was nominated for the Trillium Award for his novel, The Outside World. He lives in Holland Landing, Ontario.

Barry Dempster

at Words Aloud 9

Video: Words Aloud

brickbooks.ca

483

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"

Tiger Heron - Robin Becker (Pitt Poetry Series/University of Pittsburgh Press)

The Gross & Fine Geography/New & Selected Poems - Stephen Bett (Salmon Poetry)

Thrillows & Despairos - Chris Chambers (A Buckrider Book/Wosak & Wynn)

Blue Angels - Peter Huggins (River City Pubishing)

New & Selected Poems - W.H. New (Oolichan Books)

Almost Nothing To Be Scared Of - David Clewell (University of Wisconsin Press)

Creeks of the Upper South - Amy Wright & William Wright (Jacar Press & Unicorn Press)

The Silence of Doorways - Sharon Venezio (Moon Tide Press)

Dear Leader - Damian Rogers (Coach House Press)

The Saddest Place on Earth - Kathryn Mockler (Punchy Poetry/DC Books)

Shiftless - Janet Fraser (Guernica Editions)

A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent - Stuart Ross (A Buckrider Book/Wolsak and Wynn)

Radio Silence - Philip Schaefer & Jeff Whitney (Black Lawrence Press)

All The Gold Hurts My Mouth - Katherine Leyton (Icehouse Poetry/Goose Lane Editions)

The Lost Child - Ozark Poems - Wesley McNair (David R. Godine Publisher)

The Year of Our Beautiful Exile - Monica Kidd (Gaspereau Press)

Impressions of an Expatriate: China - Peter Jelen (BareBack Press)

Your Daily Horoscope - Nik De Dominic (New Michigan Press)

Barking & Biting - Sina Queyras (Wilfrid Laurier University Press)

Disturbing the Buddha - Barry Dempster (Brick Books)