Today's Book of Poetry

Today's book of poetry:
Metanoia. Sharon McCartney. Biblioasis. Windsor, Ontario. 2016.

Metanoia - "change in one's way of life resulting from penitence or spiritual conversion."

Metanoia is a book length poem where Sharon McCartney lets all of her ya-yas out. These meditations are robust and fearless and not without humour.

Metanoia is a consciously streamed commentary on what the heart wants and what it is willing to settle for. Love in uncompromising but loneliness is a compromise waiting to happen.

from Metanoia

The banker snored outrageously and twitched in his sleep.

I could not sleep beside him.

This became an issue.

That last night, I snuck off to the spare bedroom,

hoping for an hour or two.

At 5 A.M., I heard him downstairs, loading

his vehicle, the door slamming, his shoes,

angry. He tromped upstairs, perched on the edge

of the bed in the dark, saying, darkly,

"I didn't want to leave without saying goodbye."

No, I thought, you didn't want to leave without hurting me.

...

McCartney's confessions can sound braggart cold but she is always on the precise pulse of where the skin tears.

Fearing too much Tennessee Ernie Ford in her future, the speaker in Metanoia finds any advice from her parent past antithetical, she wants to break free of all expectations and attempts to, only to crash and break again and again on the sharp shores of her own preconceptions of love, lust, desire and hope.

from Metanoia

I strung the fat man along;

I thought I was sparing him.

A lie. I was sparing myself.

Because I waited too long to speak,

I became revulsed.

The last time we had sex, I said to myself,

"This is the last time."

I did not say that to him.

...

Perhaps we are all mercenaries of love destined to karma payment for our sins and misdemeanours. Sharon McCartney has left Today's book of poetry wanting more with Metanoia, not because of any lack, quite the contrary, Today's book of poetry could read this sort of unselfish wisdom all day long.

McCartney sounds/feels so true that you feel terrible empathy for her unwanted lovers as well as her own unsatisfied angst rattling around in her big dreamy head. At the same time the poems excite the reader with their candor because whenever McCartney rattles her own cage lust hits a target.

from Metanoia

What I felt so many years ago in the grade 9 English classroom,

how I lost my sense of membrane, of containment, my self

leaching into the Bermuda lawn beyond the sliding glass door,

into the eucalyptus, the succulents, the birds of paradise

...

Our morning read was taken over by an enthusiastic Kathryn, our Jr. Editor. She insisted that Metanoia needed a woman's voice and she was the one to provide it - she was right. Kathryn read the heart right out of these poems and into the room.

Sharon McCartney has shared an emotional pilgrimage with carnal candor and a hopeful heart. Today's book of poetry is always going to have all sorts of time for anything this dynamic and emotionally honest. That's how revelations happen.

Sharon McCartney

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sharon McCartney is the author of Hard Ass (2013, Palimpsest Press), For and Against (2010, Goose Lane Editions), The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder (2007, Nightwood Editions), Karenin Sings the Blues (2003, Goose Lane Editions), and Under the Abdominal Wall (1999, Anvil Press). Her poems have been included in the 2012 and 2013 editions of The Best Canadian Poetry in English. In 2008, she received the Acorn/Plantos People’s Prize for poetry. She lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick, where she works as a legal editor.

BLURBS

“So much is revealed in so few words … It’s a book that feels light, but its delivery is heavy, and worthy of contemplation … McCartney is merciless in exposing vulnerability, but also builds an intimacy integral to Metanoia‘s achievement.”

—Quill & Quire

“Sharon McCartney is something else, a poet with a personal vision who, in work after work, digs deeper into the exposed tissue of her own soul.”

—Numéro Cinq

“McCartney’s poetic voice is direct, confessional, and, at times, philosophical, examining the nuances of family dynamics, romance, friendship, and illness. These lyric narratives are structured in single-stanza bursts of emotion and infused with plenty of raw vulnerability … These poems explore a romance with directness and emotional punch.”

—Jennifer LoveGrove, Quill and Quire

“No unnecessary word, no dull word, no stock imagery, every new insight or description at once astonishing and just, everything at once new and yet polished, diamond hard. Her language is brilliant, sensuous, startling, sometimes relaxed and cajoling, sometimes savage.”

—M. Travis Lane, The Antigonish Review

“You don’t read these poems, you feel them: Hammer in the head, shod foot on the throat, stiletto in the heart. It’s those combos of wild, piercing insights (or unusual but poignant images); yep, that’s what makes it good for you–or kills you, laughing.”

—George Elliott Clarke

“Darkly obsessive, For and Against documents the rolling flux of life–the raw wounds of relationships in moments that are, in turn, anguished, edgy, droll, and affectionate. McCartney’s poems are an extreme sport–one well worth playing.”

—Jeanette Lynes, author of The New Blue Distance

“McCartney has shown a delightful felicity in previous books with stapling phrases into the memory. For and Againstexpands this strength with different material, and it’s a testament to her talent that rawness isn’t diminished by an attention to fluency.”

—Brian Palmu

“With her unflinching eye and masterful yet never flamboyant command of language, McCartney consistently distinguishes herself from her literary contemporaries.”

—The Oxonian Review

biblioasis.com

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Today's book of poetry:
To Greet Yourself Arriving. Michael Fraser. Tightrope Books. Toronto, Ontario. 2016.

Michael Fraser's To Greet Yourself Arriving works a bit like hot magma, lava. Left undisturbed it forms a thick and eventually rock solid black crust, any disturbance at all and you soon see it is red hot, in transition, and capable of scorching any surface on earth.

These poems are celebratory odes to a pantheon of black heroes throughout history. They also work as a syllabus to an endless litany of injustice. George Elliott Clarke, our poet laureate, wrote, "Fraser gives us characters who, even if tortured by their experience of "race" and/or racism, win through to a stardom that edges into heroism."

And Today's book of poetry must admit to a clinical weakness. Pretty much any poem that mentions Miles Davis is going to hit a weak spot in my anatomy. Michael Fraser knows the way straight to my heart.

Miles Davis

The day I met Miles Davis,

he poured gold tunes

out box speakers

and sailed ahead

out over coffee table plains

and climbed the foothill couch.

Each note carried its own light.

His trumpet called from the walls

and the ceiling was

a swollen cloud.

I was flung into brass moods,

my fingers pulsed to

the walking bag's groove.

I became a yard bird

with blues for sale,

a young rebel soul

counting the air-blast hang time,

all the hazed rhythms

taking a new wave elevator

to warm sound shallows.

Transfixed, I grabbed

onto the aural sculpture.

Water refused to go

down the drain,

time spiralled 'Round Midnight,

the air lit itself

and glowed like a June day.

It glossed Miles' Italian suit.

My eyes rode the album cover

with coolness coiling itself

into my bones.

...

Michael Fraser adeptly moves through a complicated cast of characters from the Cuban singer Celia Cruz, the Queen of Salsa, the Central Park Five, Gordon Parks, P.K. Subban, Miles Davis and so on. This is distinguished company by any standard but Fraser immortalizes them all once again with his passionate and all too reasonable To Greet Yourself Arriving.

The Lynched

The veins of these trees

know the night's flavour

as it climbs and

washes each leaf

in summer's moon shade.

The aging bark listens

and peers through time

back to laughing crowds

with their army of words.

How the boy swung

over the loose voices.

How flies chewed his face.

Morning brings its scavenger tide,

an establishment of worms and beetles

crawl from the dangling tongue,

sound of something feasting

from the inside out.

How a man suffocates in air.

How a man breaks down

in the deadfall earth.

...

Many heroes, big and small, famous and unknown hurdle through Fraser's book and towards eternity and all that judging. By the time eternity arrives perhaps none of this will need explaining -- but the stories of these brave, brave, brave and beautiful men and women will always need to be told.

Fraser never lets anger get in the way of his retelling although you can feel it under the smoldering crust. To Greet Yourself Arriving is going to be a guilty pleasure by association for many readers. Someone is responsible for the horrible hellish rain of racism that continues unabated today. The poems in Fraser's To Greet Yourself Arriving stand fiercely on their own as poems, tight and clear and clean, but as a chorus this book raises itself to a beautiful black sound.

Michaëlle Jean

Mountain hinges cracked and

snapped earth in a fly's wing beat.

Screams percolated up dusted rock

and waved galvanized roofs.

Everything was veined in stone.

The living stood at the rubble's end,

listened to the wounded sear in the

Caribbean's unforgiving heat.

My birth country stumbled against its

history. Flat bodies peppered streets.

Survivors cursed the ground's blowtorch.

There was never enough of it--

time. We jumped planes and cranked

our world's cupboards while doctors

severed limbs freeing wounded scores.

It was always more than we could take,

but we continued for those slipperless

street girls, each one reflected in me.

...

Today's book of poetry is happy to find hope in poetry and astonishingly enough Fraser is up to the task, he is able to pull that off in the middle of all that sad history. Fraser's heroes remind us of the deeds in the very worst of human folly, all those terrible things our brothers and sisters have had to endure at our hands, and then in the same poems Fraser allows us to celebrate the absolute best in human achievement - in spite of the barriers,

To Greet Yourself Arriving is one hell of a kick in the poetry pants.

Michael Fraser

Photo: Krystyna Wesolowska

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Fraser is a Toronto high school teacher, poet, and writer. He has been published in various national and international journals and anthologies, including The Best Canadian Poetry in English, 2013. His manuscript, The Serenity of Stone, won the 2007 Canadian Aid Literary Award Contest and was published in 2008 by Bookland Press. He won FreeFall‘s 2014 and 2015 poetry contests and is the creator and former director of the Plasticine Poetry Series.

Michael Fraser

Spring Poetry Salon @ Urban Gallery

May 31, 2014

video: Brenda Clews

tightropebooks.com

504

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, Sincerely. David Hernandez. Pitt Poetry Series. University of Pittsburgh Press. Pittsburgh, PA. 2016.

Dear, Sincerely is a monster book of poems. David Hernandez is a monster poet. These love letters are giant poems cutting a big path right into your central nervous system, once there they'll reset the jig.

Hernandez doesn't care about you, he will happily make you laugh or cry on whim with his wicked wit.

Last night, reading Dear, Sincerely in bed, I startled K with a rather loud and sudden expletive that I won't repeat here. It was in reaction to Hernandez and it was my most genuine form of applause. I only shout out loud when startled into it by fear or fierce admiration.

Dear Death

Cool cloak. So goth. I dig how the pleats

ripple like pond water when you move,

and the hood shadows the absence of your face.

Sweet scythe, too. The craftsmanship

of the wooden handle, how smooth the slow

curve. I had to look it up -- it's called

the snath (rhymes with wrath), or snathe

(rhymes with bathe). I prefer the latter, the long

a. Snath sounds like an infectious disease

I might've caught if my mother wasn't there

to steer me from the gutter, from large

puddles marbled green, mosquitoes

scribbling above. How many times

do mosquitoes do your dirty work anyway?

Versus fleas? Versus gunpowder?

How bone-tired were you in Tohoku?

The previous year in Haiti? Have you ever felt

the sepia wind of remorse? I have 77 more

questions for you, give or take, you're often

in my thoughts. Yesterday, while grinding

coffee beans. While cleaning the lint trap.

Dicing cilantro. Buying ink cartridges.

Clipping my beard. I could go on and on,

you're that legendary in my head.

It works this way: I'm running the knife

across the cutting board, the cilantro

breaks into confetti, I remember my mother

scattering the herb over a Chilean dish, then

her voice on Monday, "numbness in my leg,"

"congestive heart failure," and it fails,

my mind fast-forwards to when it fails,

I can't help it, you grip her IV'd hand, pull her

over, and it is done, her silence begins

blowing through in waves, icing the room--

the thought seized me so completely, the knife

hovered still above the wooden board.

Seriously though, cool cloak. Sick black

fabric. I heard if you turn it inside out,

the whole world's embroidered on the lining.

...

Dear, Sincerely is a solid stream of great ideas rendered poetic. David Hernandez is the guy you want to be standing next to when perspective is required. Hernandez is quite happy to entertain us, get us licking our lips with excitement, but the hammer is always there, even if we don't see it drop. Hernandez is willing to amuse in order to give full range to his wicked knowledge of how hearts work, he knows all those minuscule compromises that get us through the day.

Our morning read in the Today's book of poetry offices was a sparkling affair, this morning the enthusiasm was contagious. Like most very good poetry, Dear, Sincerely was even better when read aloud.

Sincerely, the Sky

Yes, I see you down there

looking up into my vastness.

What are you hoping

to find on my vacant face,

there within the margins

of telephone wires?

You should know I am only

bright blue now because of physics:

molecules break and scatter

my light from the sun

more than any other color.

You know my variations--

azure at noon, navy by midnight.

How often I find you

then on your patio, pajamaed

and distressed, head thrown

back so your eyes can pick apart

not the darker version of myself

but the carousel of stars.

To you I am merely background.

You barely hear my voice.

Remember I am most vibrant

when air breaks my light.

Do something with your brokenness.

...

Today's book of poetry just realized that we have to break our three poem limit. I've discussed it with our seniour editor Max and he agreed. Our reasoning is simple, I could not not let you see these particular poems. That's how much we adore David Hernandez. We're convinced these poems will make you yell out loud with happy sounds.

We Would Never Sleep

We the people, we the one

times 320 million, I'm rounding up, there's really

too many grass blades to count,

wheat plants to tally, just see

the whole field swaying from here to that shy

blue mountain. Swaying

as in rocking, but also the other

definition of the verb: we sway, we influence,

we impress. Unless we're asleep,

the field's asleep, more a postcard

than a real field, portrait of the people

unmoved. You know that shooting last week?

I will admit the number dead

was too low to startle me

if you admit you felt the same,

and the person standing by you

agrees, and the person beside that person.

It has to be in double digits,

don't you think? To really

shake up your afternoon? I'm troubled by

how untroubled I felt, my mind's humdrum

regarding the total coffins, five still

even if you don't. I'm angry

I'm getting used to it, the daily

gunned down, pop-pop on Wednesday,

Thursday's spent casings

pinging on the sidewalk. It all sounds

so industrial, there's nothing metal

that won't make a noise, I'm thinking every gun

should come with a microphone,

each street with loudspeakers

to broadcast their banging.

We would never sleep, the field

always awake, acres of swaying

up to that shy blue mountain, no wonder

why it cowers on the horizon, I mean

look at us, look with the mountain's eyes,

we the people

putting holes in the people.

...

Character, that's the word I've been searching for. These poems have character in buckets, they have it in spades, in droves. These poems John Wayne right into a room, they Mae West sashay around like they own the place, they run the place from the start and drag you in, "Dear Reader" they say, "get comfy."

Mayfly

I died. I was

born the day before,

floated up inside

a globe of air

to the water's

wobbling roof.

I molted, opened

ghostly wings,

was soon

airborne

with my brothers,

one dot

on the stippled cloud,

We mobbed

above the river,

we eddied,

desire rousing

in each of us.

Every time

a mate arrived,

she left latched

onto another.

So went the minutes,

the river scrolling

endlessly. By dusk,

while the sky's

lush blue

drained out

quicker,

I felt my life

ending. It could

not have been

any fuller.

...

You all know Today's book of poetry likes a little optimism, we like hope, and bless David Hernanadez's cotton socks, he gives us some of that too.

The whole reason I started Today's book of poetry was to share books I admired and Dear, Sincerely is mother lode stuff. Poetry like this is the entire reason for the existence of Today's book of poetry. I'm telling you that David Hernandez is the real deal, he takes instant residency on the Today's book of poetry honour roll.

We loved this stuff all the way.

David Hernandez

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Hernandez’s most recent book of poetry, Hoodwinked, won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. His other books include Always Danger and A House Waiting for Music. He is also the author of two YA novels, No More Us for You and Suckerpunch. David teaches creative writing at California State University, Long Beach.

BLURBS

“Do not let the fact that David Hernandez is one of the funniest poets at work today mislead you into thinking ‘comic’ poets can’t also be learned, wise, socially aware, and capable of deep pathos. Hernandez possesses all these qualities—in abundance. His new book is nothing short of dazzling.”
—David Wojahn

“Hernandez is a poet writing to us from poetry’s epicenter—where music invents itself, and the psyche and the sensory world are one. These poems speak with such intimate authenticity that the reader and the words are never separated by more than a breath—and yet they’re overheard, perhaps not really meant for readers at all, which lends them their uncanniness. These are major, important poems.”
—Laura Kasischke

upress.pitt.edu

505

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:
Tancho. J. David Cummings. The Ashland Poetry Press. Ashland, Ohio. 2014.

Today's book of poetry agrees with Elizabeth Biller Chapman when she evokes Yeats "terrible beauty" in describing these hauntingly beautiful poems by J. David Cummings.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki are sometimes fading memories for the consciousness of the contemporary world. Cummings brings our very recent past to the forefront by putting us there. Cummings puts us at ground zero in 1945 Japan in order that we may better understand, remember.

Were He a Boy, Sleeping

At first you don't see him,

and you don't see the slender trees outside,

the close-in-brush, the overturned wood crates

buried in the wide rectangle of afternoon light--

too bright a brilliance, sharpened

in the black frame of house timbers,

all of it defining a passage not there before.

But gradually your eye adjusts, the glare softens,

and you begin to make out interior shapes:

intact cedar beams, the remnants

of a sliding door, a slight clutter of debris...

you see him last.

He lies flat

on his stomach, head turned from the light,

the side of his face resting on the floor,

left arm bent just in front, and his bare legs

stretched out straight, feet in extension,

the tops of his toes touching wood, pointed

perfectly, like one diving into water. He seems

a youth of ten or eleven. He seems to be sleeping,

and the light dapples him.

There are butterflies

warming in broken sunlight--

wake up, child, wake up.

...

Canadian Saint Al of Purdy tackled some of this same murky water with his arresting Hiroshima Poems (The Crossing Press, 1972). John Hershey's Hiroshima (Alfred a. Knopf, Inc., 1946) tells the stories of several survivors in both harrowing and haunting terms. J. David Cummings

Tancho bravely enters the same horrible and sacred ground. Tancho shows compassion and respect as he makes his ghostly traverse.

These poems are a damnation against and a treatise on our infinite human capacity to inflict pain on our brothers and sisters.

The Gift of Memory and Forgetting

Looking back all these years later, how easy

to remember the gift: the children of the park,

playing at their invented games, the bounty

of paper cranes, those colors indeed a music,

and the bell's deep sounding that led me

from station to station, as if I were

once more in the church of my childhood,

and too the savvy pigeons, chased and lifting,

just out of reach of the smallest ones

still a bit unsteady as they run,

and their parents gathering them in

for picture taking, smoothing those bright energies

for that moment of stilled time, then

letting them go again.

--Why remember grief,

what can it redeem?

I came to believe in a fierce remembering,

thinking that if hibakusha were invited

into the mind each day and seen as they are--

scar and anguished soul and us--

then, I thought, every obscenity of war,

would come flooding in and for a day,

that day, war would die.

In time, I perceived the error: to live

so deep in the past, August sixth cast

across the waking hours, hibakusha dreams

defining the night, our children bent

to those sorrows,

the present, the future stolen--

there's no healing there, no safety

Year after year, word by word

Hiroshima evaporated into the silence.

People got on with their lives, children dreamed,

and I thought, This is how it happens.

All the words of remorse and remembrance,

the screams that lies beneath,

will have no suasion.

I want for some other way of memory,

one that hold a bit of forgetting, a bit of hope.

I suppose the Park is a good remembering, the bell is,

each year the offered poem--

never enough, Koji-san, never...

The bell stands silent--

in the grass crickets quiet--

summer evening, late.

...

Today's book of poetry believes that J. David Cummings believes in redemption through remembrance. It is essential not to forget our victories or the costs, the moral failures history disguises as war. Tancho serves to remind us of how easily we forget, Tancho is a tender epitaph to the ghosts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There are no small lives in J. David Cummings poetry and no small deaths, you can feel their weight, the heft of every lost soul.

Grus japonensis

In Japan she is called tancho,

a word that means red crown and crane.

Her crown is more skull cap than crown,

but in the north sea island winter

dull red brightens at mating time,

and then she's the most graceful mistress

of the pas de deux. And she is

neither solitary nor many,

though time was she lived everywhere

among then, even as they warred.

Whatever struggle had been their lives,

they had always believed in her;

but then they lost their faith, and she

was hunted for her flesh and feathers.

The eating made them no less fierce;

the lavish feathers no more artful.

What had changed in them that they should

exchange the dream of peace for gain,

these malign one hundred years since?

...

Today's book of poetry thought Tancho crawled overs some dark territory with much grace. Cummings reminds us of the terrible costs of imagining we are Gods and reigning/raining fire on the world. We need reminding of the horror lest we repeat it.

J. David Cummings

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

J. David Cummings was employed as a theoretical physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for more than ten years. He resigned his position in 1973 out of the conviction that he could no longer work in nuclear weapons development, and never returned to defense work or physics research. In the early 90s he traveled to Japan, which afforded him the opportunity to visit the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park. Later, meditating on his experience at the Park, and in response to the controversy over a planned Smithsonian Institution exhibit commemorating the 50th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he began the nearly two-decade project of writing the poems that culminated in his book, TANCHO (Ashland Poetry Press, 2014).

BLURBS

Tancho is a book that needed to be written and needs to be read. Its account of terrible beauty is itself beautiful, speaking of "hope and despair, the promise of each to other." Nagasaki, Hiroshima, "ruined human beings," a peace park, a sounding bell, a thousand paper cranes. Does the arc of history bend toward hope? One of the many haunting poems in this book describes the body of a boy in one of Yamahata-san's photographs of Nagasaki after the bomb, and concludes with a haiku:

There are butterflies
warming in broken sunlight
wake up, child, wake up.

Perhaps we all humanity are that child.
—Alicia Ostriker, final judge of the Richard Snyder Publication Prize

Perhaps we can never take adequate spiritual and moral measure of the first use of atomic weapons at the end of World War II, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't keep trying. J. David Cummings' TANCHO is a book of what he calls 'fierce remembering,' and I would add that these poems are also a fierce imagining of that world-historical event and its long aftermath. A former nuclear scientist himself, Cummings journeys to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in both Japanese and English poetic forms, he takes us with him in a sustained meditation on the most bewildering of human sufferings. Like Sadako-san's colorful, folded paper cranes, these poems present us with a deeply moving and much-needed prayer for peace.
—Fred Marchant

"This impressive and moving collection rings with the 'terrible beauty' Yeats wrote about. David CummingsTancho is a work of conscience whose language, like the red-crown crane of the title, flies through the darkest night, with the wind of grace at its back."
—Elizabeth Biller Chapman, author of Light Thickens(Ashland Poetry Press)

"These are careful poems, full of care. These poems remind us how (and why) we must observe devastations from which we might otherwise turn away. These are graceful poems, full of grace. I am grateful for the scope of their vision."
—Camille Dungy, author of Smith Blue (Southern Illinois University Press)

ashlandpoetrypress.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:
Absolute Solitude. Dulce Maria Loynaz. Translated from the Spanish by James O'Connor. Archipelago Books. Brooklyn, New York. 2016.

Screen-shot-2015-07-30-at-6.18.04-PM-275×300

"The world gave me many things, but the only thing I ever kept was absolute solitude."

- Dulce Maria Loynaz

Dulce Maria Loynaz (1902-1997) published her first book in Cuba in 1938. She was popular in Spain in the 1950s. She was not popular with the Castro government, she refused to join the communist party, her books were taken out of libraries and effectively censored and as a result she was no longer published, she retired to her home in Havana, in seclusion.

In 1992 Dulce Maria Loynaz was awarded the Premio Miguel de Cervantes - the biggest prize for literature in the Spanish speaking world. Her work was allowed to be published in Cuba again.

Absolute Solitude represents the prose poetry of Loynaz, previously unseen and unavailable in English. This poetry is entirely contemporary, modern and vibrant.

LVIII

I am bent over your image like the woman I saw this afternoon

washing her clothes in the river.

On my knees for hours, hunched over the black river of your

absence.

...

Absolute Solitude presents as one poem with a myriad of numbered verses and voices. The most constant lament is about loss, of love, security, future. But Loynaz is never whining, these poems are always an accurate measure of intense keening.

Dulce Maria Loynaz is a one line master:

"As passionate and delirious as an ugly woman's love."

Or two line:

"There is still one difference left between us. You have a tenderness grown weary and I have a

weariness grown tender."

Loynaz distills it all down with "words that could fill this silence." She mourns and moans for her solitude, even when it is self imposed. Her laments attempt to fill the space left by loss and the absence of love.

XXI

The pebble is the pebble, and the star is the star. But when I take

the pebble in my hand and squeeze it, when I fling it to the ground

and pick it up again, when I pass it back and forth between my

fingers...The star is the star, but the pebble is mine. And I love it!

...

Today's book of poetry is excited by the pure and elegant artistry of Dulce Maria Loynaz. James O'Connor has seemingly seamlessly translated these powerful little prose poems, they gleam and punch.

Today's book of poetry is also excited to introduce you to the newest member of our staff, Odin. Odin has been brought in to deal with some minor security issues and any heavy lifting. Odin writes poetry but has only every shown me one of his poems. He keeps to himself, doesn't say much, but our office already feels warmer. Odin has been given a free pass not to participate in the morning read unless he's ready.

But the rest of the gang tore up Absolute Solitude. Kathryn, our Jr. Editor reads and speaks Spanish so she read the poems in the original. Milo, our head tech, has taught himself to speak Kathryn (they are so cute together you want to eat ice-cream), so he followed her with the English.

But back to the poems where Loynaz celebrated solitude.

XLIV

Fugitive wayward shadows of familiar but distant shapes I no
longer remember often appear on this bare whitewashed wall that is
my life.
Wandering shadows projected by something I have never looked
for, that go so quickly as they come, disappearing without regret, fear
or desire.

...

These poems have fought off age, indifference, political scrutiny and sanction, they have fought off time to remain fresh and full of playful magic. Dulce Maria Loynaz has all the solitude she could ever use now - I'm sure she won't mind that some of us are just discovering this charming Cuban poet.

Dulce Maria Loynaz

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dulce María Loynaz (1902-1997) is one of Cuba’s most celebrated poets. Her first book, Verses 1920-1938, was published in Cuba in 1938, but her novel and subsequent books of poetry were published in Spain in the 1950’s, where she achieved great success. After the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Loynaz did not go into exile. She chose to remain in Cuba, but when she refused to join the Communist Party, her books were removed from Cuba’s public libraries and she herself was ostracized. In less than a year, Loynaz went from a widely published poet in Spain to a forbidden poet in Cuba. For the next thirty years, she lived in seclusion in her Havana home, unpublished and virtually forgotten. Loynaz was a 90-year-old widow when Spain’s Royal Spanish Academy unexpectedly awarded her the 1992 Premio Miguel de Cervantes, the highest literary accolade in the Spanish language. After the prize, Cuba finally published Loynaz’s novel, Garden, her Complete Poems, and her essays. She died five years later.

James O'Connor

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

James O’Connor is a poet, playwright, and translator. He lived in Cuba from 1999-2000 and his translations of Loynaz have been published in literary magazines in both the United States and the United Kingdom. In 2007, Against Heaven, his translations of Loynaz’s poems in both verse and prose, was published in the U.K. by Carcanet Press and was shortlisted for the 2009 Popescu Award for Poetry in Translation. He lives in New York City with his two daughters.

BLURBS

Dulce María, the gentle ivory-tower woman cut in a light feminine form between the gothic and the overreal...Brief as well as delicate, her tenuous Cuban word that would never allow itself to be cut in half, like paper of fossilized silk...a phosphorescent reality of her own incredibly human poetry, her fresh language, tender, weightless, rich in abandon, in feeling, the mystic irony on the lined paper of her everyday notebook like roses shrouded in the common.
— Juan Ramón Jiménez

A cosmos of paradoxes, of encounters and failed encounters, of reality made into literature and literature seeped into reality.
— Esperanza Lara Velázquez

That equilibrium between fortitude and tenderness—the strong and the sensible—never denies its feminine cast; just like it was never hidden in the life of Dulce Mariá Loynaz.
— César López

If a picture is worth a thousand words a line from Loynaz is worth many times more.
— Joseph Spuckler

The poems are intensely personal, and yet encompass universal themes: the agonies of love, the pleasures and terrors of solitude, wrestling with the divine. I was reminded, at different times, of Rumi, Emily Dickinson, Leonard Cohen, and Gabriela Mistral; while I often find contemporary prose poems difficult—too obscure, I suppose—these I found to be transporting.
— Carolyn O

archipelagobooks.org

507

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:
Ceremony of Touching. Karen Shklanka. Coteau Books. Regina, Saskatchewan. 2016.

Today's book of poetry had the distinct pleasure of writing about Karen Shklanka's first book of poetry Sumac's Red Arms back in November of last year. Sumac's Red Arms was one hell of a debut. You can see that here:

http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.ca/2015/11/sumacs-red-arms-karen-shklanka-coteau.html

Ceremony of Touching picks up the torch with aplomb. Shklanka writes with such open emotion and accessibility that she reveals the inner workings of things. Even things we don't want to know.

In one part of this world Shklanka is a physician, in another a dancer, she is a lover and a historian, and she is constantly reporting from her post as a poet. It must get terribly crowded in Karen Shklanka's noggin' but then aren't we all fractured pieces trying to be whole? Shklanka is a quick study in the fabrication of the glue that holds those pieces together.

One by One

At random times, when I am

wiping the dog's muddy paws, opening a biography

of Lord Byron, or undressing

for my husband, their faces

come to me.

Evelyn, who baked two

apricot loaves at a time -

one for me - even after I

diagnosed her diabetes.

Albert, who brought me camellias

every spring, his wife's favourites.

His blue eyes filled and he blinked

each time he passed the pink flowers

to me, their stems wrapped in wet

paper towels and foil, the way

Edith used to.

Eleanor, unpacked from the ambulance,

rattled out on a stretcher. I'd just arrived

to do morning rounds. I recognized her,

even swaddled in white blankets, strapped

down, her smile twisted, eyes wide.

In the office, her loud voice made me smile.

Down with a stroke,

the ambulance attendant told me.

A dangerous new blood thinner

available, but only in the city.

No family to decide. Time

is brain. A four-hour window of chance

to give the medication. Too late

and the stroked-out tissue

softens and bleeds. There's time, I said,

called neurologist, the helicopter,

didn't tell them right off

she was a smoker, refused to take

Coumadin for her TIA's. To get your way,

sometimes it helps to smile as you talk.

As they wheeled her out of the hospital for transfer,

I took her hand, said, I'll see you

when you get back; it will be alright.

Years ago, when a patient died,

I went down to the river at night,

my husky howling into the wind

with me. Now, sometimes I cry,

sometimes I don't.

Nobody told me I would

remember the face of

each of my patients who died.

I wish I could remember every face

in detail, every voice, and listen

to their words. So

that I could read each name,

bring them to me. Hold them

for a moment.

...

Who among us hasn't wished to hold someone long past holding? Ceremony of Touching explores many of the ways we come together to interact, love and hurt one another, all those juicy moments that make us human.

One section of Ceremony of Touching is a series of poems called Flight Log. These poems create a fictional logbook for the flight of the Enola Gay on that fated day over Hiroshima. These short poems are sparse, almost code, and almost perfect. Shklanka has just the right balance of function and gravitas. These little bullets are impressive.

Shklanka's curiosity does not let us down, these poems have laser guided vigor, whimsy when called for.

Trying Not To Remember the Woman in the ER

White needles, hoarfrost on the Douglas fir.

I can't leave my boyfriend, she says. Women use

what their partners do. I still want

to be a social drinker, she says.

All the new science is about immortality.

When's the point of no return,

journeying from bottoms up? It's snowing

at the bottom of the mountain,

not the top. When you're walking downward

inside a cloud, at what exact moment

does the snow start to form?

We say that hearts beat, but they don't.

They open and contract, open and contract.

...

This mornings read of Today's book of poetry went surgically smooth, everyone got out with only the smallest of scars and those were all neatly stitched.

Shklanda isn't afraid of shining the light on her own imperfections, these poems have the weight of truth about them. Every dilemma does not have an immediate solution, or a solution at all, but these are the moments we have to live through, Ceremony of Touching gives voice to keen observations of our stumble.

Antidote II

A raven drops a chestnut into the middle of the afternoon,

flies back to the lamp-post, waits for the lights to change.

I am down to the last two patients of the day.

A woman with lung cancer whose father recently died

of the same. She inherited the smoking,

or the radon in the basement.

She asks me to tell her

whether she needs more chemotherapy.

The wife of a man with Alzheimer's. He needs diapers,

runs away and is returned home by police

once a week. She should let him go

into extended care. At least I will try

to convince her of that.

Cars will crunch the raven's chestnut into a smear.

The raven will eat when the light changes.

...

That's two for two. Two books, Sumac's Red Arms and Ceremony of Touching, two books that Today's book of poetry thinks you should read. Karen Shklanka writes fine poems and Today's book of poetry can't wait to see what comes next.

Karen Shklanka

(photo: Tatiana Balashova)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Karen Shklanka is a poet, family physician and an Argentine Tango dancer. Her first book of poetry, Sumac’s Red Arms, published by Coteau Books in 2009, was nominated for aForeWord Review’s Book of the Year award. In 2012 she was long-listed for the CBC Poetry Prize (for “Flight Log” – included in this collection). Her poetry has been included in the Planet Earth Poetry Anthology and the 2004 chapbook anthology, Letters We Never Sent, edited by Patrick Lane. She was four times a finalist in ARC magazine’s international poem contest, and has been published in numerous other literary periodicals, most recently in CV2 and Room.

Born in Toronto, Karen Shklanka spent 14 years practicing rural and emergency medicine in small and medium-sized Canadian communities. She has an MFA in creative writing from UBC and currently works as a hospital-based Addiction and Pain medicine consultant in Vancouver, and as a Clinical Assistant Professor at UBC.

coteaubooks.com

508

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:
Necessary Acts. Peter Huggins. River City Publishing. Montgomery, Alabama. 2004.

If you follow Today's book of poetry you'll remember Peter Huggins, back in May of this year we took a look at Huggins excellent second book of poetry Blue Angels (River City Publishing, 2001). You can see that here:

http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.ca/2016/05/blue-angels-peter-huggins-river-city.html

We've made a promise to our publishers that we will happily read all of the books of poetry they send our way regardless of when they were published. Although we do try to post blogs about recently published books first we believe all books of poetry are new until the reader opens them.

So today we're going to take a shot at Huggins third book of poems, 2004's Necessary Acts. Necessary Acts seemed a necessary inclusion. Huggins is one polished poet, we've become very fond of the way he works through a poem. These poems feel as fresh as new snow, clean too. Huggins writes with focused breadth. His poems free range from the deaths of little white rabbits to the unfortunate chain saw skills of grandfather and the readers feels that given time Huggins would artfully encompass the universe and render it in terms we could understand.

My Grandfather's Chain Saw

My grandfather thought flesh was like air,

Nothing sharp could hurt it. Or maybe

He was just careless, he dropped his tools--

Hammer or saw, level or plane--

Wherever he was and spent half his time

Looking for them under boards, in cabinets,

By sawhorses or on stairs. The right tool,

Never at hand, was always out of reach.

His chain saw, though, he found without trouble.

Eager for wood, it gobbled up limb,

Branch and trunk. Nothing slowed its drive

As it chewed the ring and middle fingers

Of his left hand, dusted the half-cut

Hickory with his blood, gave his flesh and bone

To the blue air, and left a space in hand

And hickory he never touched or cut again.

...

Today's book of poetry is convinced that Peter Huggins is building a poetry mansion and each of the poems from Blue Angels and Necessary Acts are a solid, beautiful and necessary stone, one after the other like a master mason. It's like Huggins is preparing meals for a poetry feast. If one succulent treat doesn't do the trick, turn the page, Necessary Acts will rumble out another Cordon Bleu plate.

Necessary Acts was one of those books that Today's book of poetry wanted to slow down, read more slowly to get all that gravy.

The Man Who Thought He Was Dead

My friend Rick and I

Were fishing in my boat

On Logan Martin Lake

When it started to rain.

We went ashore and got under

A sweet gum. I thought the lightning,

When it hit the sweet gum,

Cut Rick's face off.

I heard Rick's voice.

His hands and then someone else's

Worked my chest like a pump.

I guess I was dead.

I didn't mind.

I was having a good time,

Floating around the ambulance,

Watching the paramedics

Try to shock me into life.

I felt good. I

Didn't want them to help me.

I wanted them to leave me dead.

Then I saw my body jump.

Sucked

Into myself, I

Woke up in the hospital

With a terrible headache.

Rick said it's strange

The same thing that killed me

Brought me back to life.

I told Rick

I'm damned if I know

What to make of being dead,

Or what to do with my life.

...

Today's morning read was a serious affair. All of our readers were on the same reverent page, they'd all read Blue Angels so they had a good idea of what was coming. Huggins aren't necessarily solemn but they sure do carry some weight.

Necessary Acts is Huggins third book of poetry, his fifth and most recent books of poems is Audubon's Engraver (Solomon & George Publishers, 2015) and Today's book of poetry feels confident they are Huggins gold, he doesn't seem to mine anything else.

Killing White Rabbits at Tulane Medical School

Not with poison or guns or traps.

A wrench, something to grip and swing,

To heft like an axe and bring down

With one sharp blow. In a white coat

I held the rabbits over the sink

While they yellowed their fur. Bob hit

The rabbits on the backs of their heads,

Then cut their throats, drained their blood,

Opened their chests and clipped

Their aortas with stainless steel scissors.

I wrapped the bodies in brown paper,

Put them in the freezer,

Cleaned the wooden dissecting board,

Watched the white aortas bubbling

In the medium I'd prepared earlier

That morning. All day I hoped

Our results tallied with yesterday's

And the days' before. Repeatable, confirmed.

Some days we used guinea pigs.

Bob kept them in his coat pocket

Until he was ready for them. They cried out

When he grabbed their hind legs

And flicked their bodies against the sink.

I wrapped the guineas in white paper

And stacked them in the freezer

Beside the rabbits. On Fridays

The guineas and rabbits were incinerated,

And I got paid. That job prepared me

For life and for work and I'm grateful.

...

Peter Huggins has quickly become a crowd/fan favourite here in our office. Now if we can only get our hands on his other books...

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). Audubon's Engraver was shortlisted in 2016 for the International Rubery Book Award, and South was shortlisted for that same award in 2014. 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 has recently retired from teaching in the English Department at Auburn University where he served for thirty-one years, and he and his wife live in Auburn, Alabama.

BLURBS

"Necessary Acts is ripe with characters, from Dante to Sherlock Holmes to Elvis -- and ripe with poetical occasions, from a persona poem that converys the indignation of the animals Noah left behind to a narrative poem that recalls killing white rabbits at Tulane Medical School. Peter Huggins is unstoppable."

- Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Tender Hooks

"Peter Huggins is a rarity - a poet who writes with the clarity of a silver bell."

- Thomas Rabbitt, author of Prepositional Heaven

rivercitypublishing.com

509

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:
Ex-Ville. Rhona McAdam. Oolichan Books. Fernie, British Columbia. 2014.

How about this? Rhona McAdam writes with quiet distinction. What I mean is that extraordinary events full of miraculous people are not her terrain. Instead McAdam's poems trace, with elegance, the small movements and moments of our real lives in real time.

What a convoluted attempt to intone what McAdam handles with ease - the straight forward goods.

Sleep

We court it with deep breaths:

quietly at first, so it will not hear us

and startle.

But then as we circle the darkness

where it may be hiding, we begin to forget

and from far down in our throats, songs escape

through creaking doors, our guttural

wood-cutting songs, our sea-lion songs,

our songs of the heron, night-fishing

interrupted, whose singing can wake the dead.

We cannot hear the sound of those songs.

They stop us remembering

how we called up sleep, we once-young, once-dreamers.

We are too tired to remember how to sleep,

how to find our way in

to what takes us safely to morning.

When morning comes we are still in the forest

with burning eyes, looking for shadows

to step into, a mossy bank where we can set down

our mind full of burdens and be still,

take a long silent breath

the length of a moon's arc, and be still.

...

Today's book of poetry has been here before. Back in March of 2015 we looked at McAdam's Cartography (Oolichan Books, 2006). You can see that here:

http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.ca/2015/03/cartography-rhona-mcadam-oolichan-books.html

Not much has changed. Today's book of poetry is still enamored by McAdam's gentle certainty. And then again in the eight years between Cartography and Ex-Ville we bet that a lot has changed for McAdam. She has seen more of the world, and it has seen her, the poems in Ex-Ville come from a voice of experience.

McAdam sees the frayed edges of the world, it's in these narratives, in her voice - but she remains an optimist, you can hear that too.

Today's book of poetry feels at home in McAdam world.

Greyhound

What is this but a race

against comfort. The question

is not when to sleep

but how small

can you become, just where

is your soft forgiving self, and can it

accommodate an armrest, the ridge

of a windowsill, another armrest.

Will your knees endure, your neck?

The viewing screens

stay blank, their content too long

ago contested. The audio is mute.

Entertainment is officially

dead on this bus.

The air twists with illicit smoke

and the driver's heavy reprimand

fills a silence lanced

with the tinning beat

of inadequate headphones.

Full moon watches

over my shoulder. Big headphones guy

pulls his hoodie over baseball cap;

drug dealer's got a big gold ring

on every finger, one eye open, one

closed hand on his suitcase.

Junkie girl stays locked

in the washroom for another hour.

Young runaway wraps himself

in a sleeping bag and bangs

the seat rest when he turns. Old guy

snores and stinks in the seat ahead of me.

Through this choppy night

every town that wakes us

has a Walmart, Tim Hortons,

a Shell and McDonalds

guarding its flank, heralded

by a shock of streetlights.

At every stop the driver bangs

the microphone to life.

He's a long way from home,

his accent undefiled.

At every stop the girl with AIDS

shuffles from the back and down the steps

for a smoke, hoarding its crushed remains.

At every stop the young men

follow her, shivering in their caps

and gleaming sneakers, they all blow smoke

at the oblong windows of every station,

watching the driver's weary loadings

and unloadings.

When we make the last stop

before dawn, everyone descends

then boards again, rustling sandwiches,

cracking cokes and iced tea. Drug dealer

hauls his case back on board,

knocks back burger after burger,

his iPhone finally mute. The runaway

peels back the plastic from his breakfast,

a pale cross-section of bleached bread,

pink strata of luncheon meat.

Mountains loom, showing their

snowing teeth as light cracks the summits.

We follow its spill down the hill into morning,

all the night road's bleary citizens

gathered in this battered ship.

...

Today's book of poetry has been on that bus, more than once.

Whether it is on a bus, in a tired airport or a European city we've longed to see Rhona McAdam makes us feel a little less like a stranger in a strange land.

This morning's reading was interrupted by the sounds of construction next door. The guy on the gas-powered radial stone saw had it timed perfectly. Whenever one of us started to read a poem he'd whip into a stone cutting frenzy with his diamond tipped monster. Of course it was all coincidence, he couldn't see into our offices and from an earlier conversation I'm pretty sure he's a poetry fan.

Once we got over the noise outside Ex-Ville gave us a damned good morning read.

Furlough

The soldier joins our flight in Dallas:

twitchy, red-eyed, pungent,

his stories sandstorms

of words accelerating

during take-off, then levelling

to a steady hum of detail,

two days and sixteen drinks

out of the desert.

Six years in to a four year tour of active duty.

Seen it all at 24. Infinite the things he'll do

in two years' time when he's pretty sure

they can't call him back again... but rules

change, he knows, in times of war.

He's done with Bosnia, Afghanistan.

Passed over for promotion every time.

Peacekeeping now, a guard at Abu Ghraib. Their hands

are tied; they can't do a thing. Prisoners

spitting in his face. Do we know how hot

the desert gets? 140 in summer, no lie.

He used to love the beach, now he craves rain,

snow, silence. Or not silence, but the sounds

of Bellingham, the streets he grew up on,

homeless with his mother from the age of two.

The army seemed like heaven the way they explained it.

A free education. Maybe med school. Now he'd like

to go back to that recruiting office.

Take his gun apart, and clean it, piece by piece.

Eye to eye with the recruiter. Do we want to read

his novel? He wrote it nights, on guard at Abu Gharib.

Maybe he'll be a writer after this. He has a girl

back home; she's always asking him

for money. Maybe this time he'll end it. Not yet

but in two weeks, before he gets back on that plane.

The flight attendant slips him

another drink in spite of his uniform.

Because of it. He drains it

for the guys he left behind.

A drink for each of them

while he's out. He promised.

One more down. 133 to go.

...

We think Rhona McAdam must be one hell of a listener. Ears wide open. The more we read of Rhona McAdam's fine poetry the more we like it. There's a fierce clarity to her compassion and we always have room for that.

Rhona McAdam

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rhona McAdam was born in Duncan—a great-granddaughter of the town's namesake—and grew up on Vancouver Island. She lives in Victoria, BC. She has post-graduate degrees in communications planning, adult education and library and information science, and has worked in Canada, England and throughout Europe. Her poetry has been published in Canada, the US, Ireland and England and has been praised for her unique and engaging voice, her clarity, and her ability to balance the ethereal with the real. She has a gift for creating vivid landscapes, both actual and emotional.

Rhona McAdams

Winter Poets

Video: Times Colonist

oolichan.com

510

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:
roly poly/bicho bola. Victoria Estol. Translated by Seth Michelson. Toad Press. La Verne, California. 2014.

roly poly/bicho bola is exactly the tonic that Today's book of poetry needed. The air is cooling and the skies turning grey here in the nation's capital, winter is approaching, so what better than a chapbook that heats things up.

Victoria Estol is a quick slap up the side our complacent heads. These little ditties crack like a wisecracker cracks gum, a short tack of sound like the thwack of a silencer on a pistol.

Estol is bold and brash and brazen and we couldn't be happier. roly poly/bicho bola is chapbook short and the poems are sometimes only two lines long but this stuff has a sizzle all its own.

dramatic arts

A new couple sits down up front. The work begins. They're close, almost

hand in hand. She laughs when there's no reason to. Her Poodle laughter in-

vades the piece. He grows increasingly uncomfortable with each outburst.

I don't touch my partner. I like to look without being touched. He makes

a couple

attempts

but I pull away.

False applause.

The lights come on. The guy wants to ditch the laughing girl. Their

gestures are proof of it.

In the hallway, while they comment on the show's good and bad,

I drift past the guy and goose him. I look coyly at him and head to the

bathroom.

I drop my panties, knowing he's sure to come.

...

Victoria Estol writes with a sexual candor and energy that raises the readers pulse. Seth Michelson's translation warms right up to Estol's passion and bravado.

One thing Estol makes clear in these poems is that she sets her own agenda. The women in these poems are empowered - they react to men if they choose, but never for them.

flesh and fingernail

i become again the cell that gave me life

i walk past the packets of sweetener you're not using

and lodge myself under the nail of your ring finger

i chew through your flesh, worm

carve your bone, termite

swim in your contradictory blood

against the current

i traverse you hippopotamus neck

scale your trachea

cut your vocal cords so you'll stop your speaking

arrive at your inner ear

scratch

slash your tympanic membrane

i fall in a crouch to the table and retake my seat

perch on my elbows on cold marble

and smile at you while i plot my coup.

You say, Your silence makes me nervous.
I look for my panties and leave.

...

Kathryn, our Jr. Editor, tried some reverse translating at our morning read today. She took roly poly/bicho bola to her desk for an hour or so and came back with flames coming out of her nostrils. She gave us her version of roly poly/bicho bola in Spanish and it sounded beautiful - but to our dull ears only as beautiful as birdsong. But after her swinging Espanol treat Kathryn turned around and hoodwinked us all with a knowing reading of it all in English. Bless her cotton socks.

The staff of Today's book of poetry were in total agreement, roly poly/bicho bola rocked.

Airport

The bloodstain remains in the bathroom carpet. A watchful owl,

motionless, reminding them daily when they wake of what happened.

From intense red it fades to dry brown.

She'd once tried to clean it. Dropped to her knees and scrubbed it

till her bones ached, but failed.

Now she's heading to New York. In her carry-on she takes the book

by Carver that he'd gifted to her.

There's no dedication.

They did everything possible to avoid leaving tracks in each other's

lives, Like

two expert assassins, they erased every footprint, set the runways ablaze.

He turned 45 degrees left. Found cloudless skies for his journey.

She'll never again wear high heels.

...

After reading roly poly/bicho bola Today's book of poetry really has only one response - we want more. A full length collection from this Uruguayan gunslinger is in order. Her aim is true.

Victoria Estol

(Today's book of poetry believes this is a photo

of the poet Victoria Estol, our apologies if we

got it wrong.)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Victoria Estol was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1983. Her poetry has earned a commendation from National Pablo Neruda Competition for Young Poets, and it is featured in the anthologies Cualquiercosario (2013), co-edited between Uruguay (Yaugurú) and Spain (Libros de la imperdible), and Fixture (2014), co-edited by the Argentine publishers Chuy and Malaletra. Her poetry also has appeared in a diversity of international journals. Bicho Bola (Yaugurú, 2013) is her first full-length book of poetry.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Seth Michelson is the author of Eyes Like Broken Windows (Press 53, 2012), as well as the chapbooks House in a Hurricane (Big Table, 2010), Kaddish for My Unborn Son (Pudding House, 2009), and Maestro of Brutal Splendor (Jeanne Duvall, 2005). His translation of El Ghetto(Sudamericana, 2003), by the internationally acclaimed Argentine poet Tamara Kamenszain, appears as The Ghetto (Point of Contact, 2011). He teaches the poetry of the Americas at Washington and Lee University, and he welcomes contact through his website.

toadpress.blogspot.ca

511

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 Blue Hour. Jennifer Whitaker. University of Wisconsin Press. Madison, Wisconsin. 2016.

Winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry

Jennifer Whitaker credits the seventeenth century poet Gianbattista Basile's Pentamerone as a big influence on these poems. She doffs her hat to Frannie Lindsay, Christine Garren, Karyna McGlynn and Brian Teare's collection The Room Where I Was Born.

Jennifer Whitaker may have been influenced by these writers, we will take her word for it, she might want to include the poetry Gods though, they have shone down on her. Whitaker makes it all her own despite whatever influence trails in these vapours.

The Blue Hour is incendiary, these poems are white hot and unless handled with care - they will burn you.

Habit

When I followed him to the river, I narrowed myself

to a needle's point -- the morning clear,

the cicadas' swelling hum a comfort.

Lures spread out carnival-bright on newspaper,

those feathers trembling. The day's catch usual:

fish too tiny left on the banks, a snake flayed open to the light.

The field beyond the river: the cattails bending

with the wind, those daffodils' pursed lips.

When rocks bit the backs of my knees,

the haze of insects crowding around us,

my skirt pushed back like a gasp and the water

the water a stagnant slash across the land

I didn't fight. I was older then. I wasn't scared;

I was tired. -- Back at home, I brushed my hair,

put on my clean dress.

...

Brutish and wickedly candid, Whitaker makes us believe these are fairy tales, and they are, of the grimiest sort. The Blue Hours pour gasoline over a number of sad ballets and Jennifer Whitaker keeps throwing in the match.

These are horrifying poems laced with chilling beauty and delicately tender observation. Whitaker infuses these poems with a weary sense of danger and foreboding. Not even death will reconcile or console the demons left by this litany of orchestrated sexual violence.

Blue Hour

The whole world swells

underneath the house;

old newspapers bloat

in their plastic skins,

a black heat damps

like the inside of a mouth.

I quit the whine that sent me here,

I crouch in the bright six o'clock dark

like a cave cricket, in its fear

and ricochet frenzy blind

and springing toward that which frightens,

that which could easily be you --

...

Today's book of poetry didn't know where to scream when I read some of these poems but I couldn't turn away either. Poems this highly charged should come with an early warning system. Poems this highly charged are as rare as hen's teeth.

Kathryn, our Jr. Editor, was stranded on the distraught/angry/seething train after reading The Blue Hour so she excused herself from the morning read. She sat beside Milo and didn't say a word. There were no smiles in our office as we solemnly read through Whitaker's violations. I think the men felt guilty for being men, the women, some sort of kindred and justified outrage. Everyone agreed the poems were Sterling.

I let things cool for a while after the reading, filled the office with some quiet Chet Baker on the box, later on some Billie. There's a reverent quiet now, except for the music.

Jennifer Whitaker's The Blue Hours left marks.

Father as Distant Boat

Far across the lake, on the other shore, the family takes off their hats,

loosens their neckties, unbraids their hair. There is a man and a woman,

a girl and small dog with soft ears. They board you

through the mist and stink of weeds. You pitch wildly.

Not until the shore's too far gone will they realize

the wood underfoot is rotten soft. Delicately,

like a slowly flooding room, it will dawn

on them: no one ever survives you. At sunset

they'll leap from your edges like flames.

...

Today's book of poetry wants to celebrate The Blue Room because this book is an achievement. What a horrible, horrible world we inhabit that these evil fairy tales might be true. Jennifer Whitaker takes us where no one wants to go and tries to bring us out clean on the other side, but great books leave a residue that stays with you forever.

Sublime and violent, and oh, what a cost to be wise.

Jennifer Whitaker

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jennifer Whitaker is the director of the University Writing Center at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and assistant poetry editor for storySouth. This is her first book.

BLURBS

“Whitaker’s debut collection wrenchingly captures an abusive parent-child relationship in a hardscrabble, desolate environment where, for instance, feral kittens fight off flies. . . . And though what follows is hard-bitten and relentless, with the sure knowledge that every twinkling gift has its price, Whitaker writes with a richness and variety that offers sustained reading throughout.”
—Library Journal

“The Blue Hour casts a blue spell, using the tropes and gestures of traditional fairy tales—riddles, disguises, wishes, shape-shifting, entrapment, escape, and transformation—to trace a daughter’s experience of incestuous abuse. With language as sonically and somatically intricate as the subject she narrates, Whitaker looks unflinchingly at an ancient taboo and the infinite hour of its endurance.”
—Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Vanitas, Rough

“Whitaker’s skills with sentence and sound, with spare yet suggestive language, with telling juxtapositions, with metaphor and misdirection, make the unbearable bearable just long enough that it can be seen, contained, and transcended. These are riveting poems, hard won, from a poet of exceptional talent.”
—Jim Peterson, author of Original Face

“Chronicles a daughter in danger, a girl trapped in the dark underbelly of fairy tales. Predators—fathers, wolves, witches and their ghosts—drag us into the dark forest of sadism with no prince or woodsman in sight. Whitaker is a fearless poet whose subject is fear.”
—Denise Duhamel, Brittingham Prize judge

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Today's book of poetry:
Take This Stallion. Anais Duplan. Brooklyn Arts Press. Brooklyn, New York. 2016.

Anais Duplan has a big voice and Take This Stallion is loud. Duplan is marvellously excessive in her exasperations, take this title: "An Account Of A Child Born Alive Without A Brain And The Observables In It Upon Dissection."

Duplan would also have us believe that her dog is God. Today's book of poetry followed along with rapt and somewhat nervous attention.

A Fledgling Is A Young Bird

That Has Its Feathers

And Is Learning To Fly

[1]

S-H-E-D-E-V-I-L,

I, on the other hand,

make sure to wash my mouth

whenever I say something slippery. I am washing

right now, ma cherie, with a pen

in my left hand and my page on the rim of the sink

and my right hand is reaching toward you,

you in the mirror, to pull your hair out.

[2]

The terror of having to realize the unrealizable: I am a baby

on the kitchen counter, one of many. My mother continues

to unload us from a crate. The counter is littered with knives.

No one is hurt except all of us are hurt and yearning

to sleep. It is cold. Keep this in mind, it is cold.

My mother, the woman, she is wearing a chain

of children's molars. A man wearing the same chain

appears in the doorway and begins to eat us one by one.

[3]

My mother in a blue apron. It is springtime inside

and outside the kitchen. I hear the dog screech from the yard,

his "body" is caught under the lawnmower

my father is driving. I tell my mother to get off

the machine, to let this one live, but he doesn't listen,

he takes off his apron and steps outside,

sees the dog screeching and by now, it is still springtime.

[4]

You are in control. The day is yellow

in the sense that the grasses are dying. There are animals

dying every minute, waiting, even after their deaths,

to be adopted. Pick up the phone. Pick up the baby

and set it in a meadow. Wait for a bird to settle

on its head and take a photo. Mail the photo to your mother.

Write to her, write, Just this once, just this once,

would you please come to my recital. I promise I will do better

than Jenny. Take the baby back into your hands

and promise me.

[5]

What makes us go all the way to the bottom. The brother had severed

one of his fingers attempting to slice a fig. The mother took him

to the emergency room but only the brother returned. Since then,

I have had to be the woman of the house. I am proud to say

that the brother's fingers have grown six inches since I took over and the father

is very well near portly. I promise to fill them up. I say this every time

I pass the emergency room on the way to bed.

[6]

At least we have our authenticity. This is the last time

I'll ever lend my skin to a man who tells me he'll give it

right back. Keep this in mind: it is cold and my eyes

are too bloated for my head. I have had to squeeze them dry

at day's end. I do this in the bathroom, where a lady is safe

to take her apron off and her eyes out.

[7]

I say to Michael, I say, Michael,

why don't you go out and find yourself a woman. I say,

Michael, any lady would be lucky to let you have her. I say, Take

this cake and take it into your arms and find a woman.

[8]

You are in control. Take this stallion and ride it

to your demise. (Read: the sunset, behind the stars,

the green green garden.) Compare my flesh to yours. Look at my hair:

my neck hair and my toe hair. (Read: I am a woman and a woman

is a woman.) My unconscious is under siege,

Papa Bear. Take up your arms

and throw them around me. Bring a bouquet,

bring your big cowboy hat. Show me how to kill a horse.

...

It's clear Anais Duplan is comfortable going all back-beat to the regular rhythms of things but this doesn't stop her from finding a big, deep groove. Take This Stallion isn't an easy get - the reader has to take a minute to find firm footing because this is surprisingly new ground. Anais Duplan is teaching us her new vernacular and it is splendid.

Why Would You Ever Go

To A Pool Party Anway

Anais, you needn't cry

like a baby seal. You needn't wear

your hair long, just to divert

the passing sailors--

O what flag waves outside the windows

of all fledgling girls

when they detect

what lives

between their legs.

John Paul once said to me,

O Anais, o Anais, what lives between your legs,

and I opened up to him, put his hand inside me

and said, This is the fiery throat of God -- be careful.

You may find you are no longer every-

thing you had been

before you arrived.

II.

He said, she said, we wrote of a great awakening.

Instead of death we only moaned

every time the sun did wane and how

it waned every morning. Today could be

the day that does not end

in your death-

ly embrace.

...

A lot of fun at this morning's read. Take This Stallion lent itself to a dramatic show.

Not sure how Anais Duplan has done it but Take This Stallion feels like a strange familiar. I know I have never been here before and some of the language is foreign but these poems ring the ears off of my inner reader. I'm happy/sated, deja-vued and curious for more.

I Felt Like A Traffic Light

As Soon As I Got Inside You

This is how to be honest:

I learned it on the subway: look

me in the eyes and tell me

I'm not beautiful. Sometimes

it's best just to drop out tune down

let go so ever so deep. So deep

was her throat and how the gods

did sing, how the dog doth sing,

Happy birthday, darling. And thank you, too.

II.

I met a girl named Martha

with eyes as big as Arizona,

relative to other states.

Martha, I promise to change

your bandages forever 'n'ever,

and if the doctors should ever say,

O Anais, Martha will not survive

without your limbs, I would

tear them off one-by-one.

III.

Lift me up --

I am looking at the neighbor's wife,

I am looking at the neighbor's wife

and wond'ring where she buys her things.

Lower me down, just below your eye-

level and tell me about the time

your mother made you wear clothes you didn't want to wear.

IV.

Never forget to greet the doctor in the room,

I know it was your birthday but I never got

the prescription you wrote me.

Dancing is not permitted in certain towns and that's ok

for some. Don't stop get it get it get it get it get it get it

before it gets you.

As soon as you walked into the room

all the flowers said O hell yes.

My life is a ballad, it goes: O

ooooo! I can't breathe

when you hold me so

cold. Get paid get paid

tomorrow. Wake up get

paid tomorrow. You deserve

everything you get.

You don't know nothing and you never did, silly bill.

I don't have a gun but maybe one day I will.

...

It can't just be me. There are a strokes worth of vicarious thrills both carnal and poetic in this rambunctious first book of poems. Today's book of poetry will happily champion Take This Stallion until Anais Duplan gives us some more sugar.

Anais Duplan

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Anaïs Duplan was born in Jacmel, Haiti. She is the director of a performance collective called The Spacesuits and of The Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program in Iowa City. Her poems and essays have appeared in Birdfeast, Hyperallergic, The Journal, [PANK], and other publications. She is an MFA candidate at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

BLURBS

“I have never before read a book like Anaïs Duplan’s Take This Stallion. Her major talent is recognizing the self in the other, making for poems that flow forward in a tone of oneness—is oneness a tone?—poems that make evident an ever-expanding world by opening themselves up into that world. This debut does what poets in their fifth or sixth collections are still trying to figure: it balances the intellect, image, music, and emotion in ways so unfamiliar that a blurb couldn’t possible characterize the work.”

- Jericho Brown

“For all the ways we pad our language with qualifier, with apology, with hedge, Anaïs Duplan is antidote. Her poems are talkative, inappropriate, obsessive, and sexy. They put everything on the table and if there’s no table, she erects one: of the mechanic’s lobby, of men selling peanuts at her door, of the George Washington Bridge underpass, of the ocean. Sometimes the poems hang the air with obsession like tangential rope. like snake. Sometimes they pick up their skirts and dust the ground. Duplan’s work is at once this methodical, and this unhinged. She confirms a fear that drones and Kim Kardashian have more to do with our therapy sessions than we wish. And then at times, she puts all that away, and the poems wash out their mouths. This first collection is, after all, of this world. And though it might be haunted by a voice that says “Don’t be too cocky,” on nearly every page it talks back. Heroic, inspired, and smart: these poems are on their own two feet, saying “I’m always cocky.””
- francine j. harris

“Take This Stallion is the sound of a generation finding its voice; it is a sound of a generation that has more rapidly than any since the generation that came of age in the 1960’s turned the world on its head, both exposing the faithlessness of the generations before it, and reifying the promises those generations made. Listen: “When she was lost to them/ they took to striking/ each other over the head with empty fists,/ striking until blood ran freely in the city/ ditches. All of this sounding like horses thundering/ into each other, peeling themselves/ off of each other, and thundering/ again. The whole city, this sound.”In Take This Stallion, the whole city is made new, and the maker who re-makes it is new, and the songs they sing as they work are the new songs.”

- Shane McCrae

Anais Duplan at SPECTRA

Video: Therese Guise

brooklynartspress.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 Largeness of Rescue. Eva Tihanyi. Inanna Publications & Education Inc. Toronto, Ontario. 2016

Eva Tihanyi won us over pretty early into her excellent The Largeness of Rescue. Tihanyi is so eloquently reasonable that we started to hope she could explain everything.

Then we read "Bridge" which was written in memory of Dorothy Farmiloe and recognized immediately that we were on terra firma. Today's book of poetry has long admired Dorothy Farmiloe and so we went to the stacks this morning and were able to retrieve three chapbooks and one trade volume of poems. Poems for Apartment Dwellers (Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1970), Winter Orange Mood (Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1972) and Blue Is The Colour Of Death (Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1973), and Words For My Weeping Daughter (Penumbra Press, 1980).

Doronthy Farmiloe (1921-2015) published ten poetry books/chapbooks by our estimation, another ten or eleven published books in different fields, but has never been widely known or championed, Today's book of poetry has always thought she had the real goods and are tickled pink that Tihanyi thinks it too. Eva Tihanyi giving Dorothy Farmiloe the nod tells Today's book of poetry plenty.

Circles and Lines

July 31, 1960

Chet Baker races toward Viareggio,

the late afternoon road uncoiling

like a languid serpent, the horizon

an illusion of certainty, his quest for home

a stubborn unacknowledged longing

without end or consolation.

Needs, wants, must have a fix.

Stops at a gas station in Lucca, locks

himself in the washroom,

does not reappear.

Time passes. The attendant knocks,

then bangs, keeps banging, eventually

assumes emergency.

When the police arrive,

they find a disheveled man

standing dazed before the blood-spattered sink

syringe in hand.

It will linger for days, the stench

of Paco Rabanne cologne and week-old sweat.

Is it tragedy when you choose?

The trial eight months later

is sensational, the defendant

found guilty.

San Giorgio Penitentiary looms

at the centre of town, its medieval walls

and black windows as unrepentant

as its celebrity prisoner who, for years a vagrant

in his own life, is now jailed in it.

The second wife has been discarded,

the new mistress ensconced in the Hotel Universo,

the press duly scandalized.

Served: an Italian drama

of operatic proportions..

The world laps it up

like a thirsty dog.

Before the arrest, a triumph:

Chet Baker plays Il Bussolotto,

a grand nightclub lounge on the Tyrrhenian Sea.

The patrons anoint him their trombo d'oro, adore

the intimate coolness of his jazz worship

in the summer air.

What they don't see:

how at the end of the night

he tosses his horn on the piano

rushes out for the next fix.

How in the morning

the sun falls in

through the sea-facing picture window,

alights on the tarnished horn, such sad beauty.

Art is not a closed circle

or a straight line.

The heart embraces its craving, the blood rises,

a great irrational wave washing over

the unsuspecting bones, and all is deluged

in its red tidings, the secret song divulged,

its rhythm, rhythm, rhythm

beating some time into submission, beating time.

If this were true, it couldn't be said.

And to hold it: impossible

as a signature on water.

Church bells and lone trumpet --

the sounds of Lucca that summer

as the locals gather along the promenade

to hear "Someone to Watch Over Me"

in the evening stillness.

During the day Chet Baker plays chess,

waits for visits from his mistress

who waits for his release.

Even the air waits.

And every night the sound

of the brooding trumpet, tendrils of melody

curling and winding, climbing and falling,

tender above all.

Flashback.

There is nothing as seductive as genius.

Women will endure almost anything for it, the lure

of greatness, the shiny hook

upon which adulation squirms.

The young man in the jeans and white T-shirt

has it, the chiseled dark glamour,

the allure of those

who resist being loved.

The woman are many and various,

the trumpet's charismatic notes

sliding into their ears like promiscuous tongues.

Chet Baker looks down while he plays,

speaks little, smiles less.

He is a Gabriel for sinners,

a corrupt angel resisting rescue.

But they all try to save him, the women.

They try.

.After prison Chet Baker is Chet Baker.

No closed circle, no straight line.

The mistress eventually becomes the wife,

bears him three children.

Many years from now at his funeral

a vase of white roses

will suddenly and inexplicably shatter,

strewing flowers and broken glass

as her feet.

...

As most of you faithful readers already know - a good jazz poem will sucker punch Today's book of poetry every time. And "Circles and Lines" is a doozey.

Write about Saint Chet of Baker or Lady Sir Charlie Parker and you will get our full attention. Write about them well and you end up on this blog, were it possible we'd throw throw garlands at your feet.

If it were only Dorothy Farmiloe and jazz Today's book of poetry would be happy enough but there is so much more of value going on in The Largeness of Rescue. Tihanyi is trying to figure out that most difficult thing - how to be a good person. Today's book of poetry comes away from The Largeness of Rescue thinking that Tihanyi wants us to celebrate as much as we can, whatever small victories we inhabit, Tihanyi's poems suggest we celebrate them. This is good advice.

Precept

To focus on not focusing:

sometimes this is the answer,

sometimes not.

Remember: all that is placed in water

either sinks or floats.

You are your own forest,

and all the green shimmering

and all the darkness.

What gathers in the margins

of your invisible life

is depleted and replenished

as time, in its alternating current

of hope and hopelessness

moves you.

Look it in the eye:

the horror and the wonder

that is transience.

Where there is fear,

celebration cannot enter.

...

Eva Tihnayi describes love as the cat in her poem "The Schrodinger Principle". Today's book of poetry has always assumed that the practical lesson to be learned from the Schrodinger Principle is that life doesn't exist until you actively engage in it. You have to open the box, you have to jump into love, before you'll have any idea of what it is or where it will go. Of course Today's book of poetry is frequently wrong.

There was some head shaking around our sceptical office this morning but Today's book of poetry is with Tihanyi when she says "but I will always side with love."

Eva Tihnayi has published eight previous poetry collections but when we checked our shelves we could only put our hands on two of them, Prophecies Near the Speed of Light (Thistledown Press, 1984) and In The Key Of Red (Inanna Publications, 2010). Those both got passed around along with the Dorothy Farmiloe at our morning read today. A few poems slipped out and that was just fine, there is nothing we like more at our morning read than variety and context.

Caregiver

A constellation of endings,

loss after loss.

You are supposed to be happy.

It is summer, after all.

Yet it is hard to watch

history repeat itself,

the same

but never the same.

And it is always personal

though from a distance

we don't admit this.

Every day

you watch over your mother.

Every day

you watch over your sister.

On your watch

love never falters.

...

Hope. Today's book of poetry always loves to see hope and are reassured by The Largeness of Rescue that hope is still a good thing. Eva Tihanyi's template for a more understanding, listening, tolerant and mentoring world is one we can all get behind.

Eva Tihanyi

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eva Tihanyi teaches at Niagara College and divides her time between Port Dalhousie (St. Catharines) and Toronto. The Largeness of Rescue is her eighth volume of poetry. She has also published a collection of short stories, Truth and Other Fictions.

BLURBS

The big theme—perhaps the only theme—is the narrative that unfolds between the bookends of our birth and our death. Each of us is born into a time and place—our present—and must answer the questions only we can answer for ourselves: Who are we? What will we do? What choices will we make? The Largeness of Rescue helps us travel along our own storyline by doing what the best art does so well: engages us with ourselves and with our world, and encourages us to slow down and consider our very humanness.

“The Largeness of Rescue is a book of both restlessness and acceptance; both a longing for clarity and a reconciliation. In this way, the poems form a moving whole, seeking resolution in the larger embrace of art.”
—Anne Michaels, Author of Fugitive Pieces and The Winter Vault

"Eva Tihanyi’s The Largeness of Rescue explores the many ways we both long for and resist rescue—rescue from ourselves, from each other, from the vagaries of the world. These poems sit poised at the cusp of a paradox, that place between “hope and hopelessness,” “horror and wonder” (“Precept”) where the personal explodes into the public realm. “I” becomes “you” becomes “we.” This is a book about borders, about “the middle place of possibility” that can move us past “carrion fear.” Tihanyi’s cycle contains both shorter lyrics and long poems, some of which explore the lives of artists and visionaries whose work sustained a precarious creativity: the Romantic poets, T.S. Eliot, and jazz trumpeter Chet Baker. Among these luminaries, also arise the poet’s peers, family, friends, fellow artists, and loves. The book reveals how, not despite, but though our common uncertainties and frailties, we hold the power to rescue. Rescue becomes not only a noun but a verb. Choosing to become rescuers (each in our own small way) is in itself a means of rescue. In the end it is the heart’s measure that proffers hope: “but always I will side with love / and always I will choose.”
—Susan McCaslin, author of Into the Mystic: My Years with Olga and The Disarmed Heart

"The Largeness of Rescue is a grave and tender collection, much preoccupied with issues of choice and destiny, and how they resonate throughout our lives. “Is it a tragedy when you choose?” she asks of the self-destructive jazz genius Chet Baker, and envisions T .S. Eliot turning his back on the “bad Russian novel” of his life to “foray into literature / on a plank of contrived neutrality / which he himself does not trust.” Most of the personae of these poems are nameless and their struggles and regrets less celebrated, but no less resonant: having been laughed at at twelve for his clumsiness, a man refuses to dance, in later years, with the wife who loves dancing, so that “Eventually / no one is dancing.” What connects them all is an awareness of life’s central paradox: we are always hoping to arrive somewhere better, even though all we have is the present moment."
—Susan Glickman, author of Safe as Houses

"With clarity and insight, Eva Tihanyi’s poetry offers both personal revelation and mature reflection on art, time and history. Serene in spirit and precise in language, The Largeness of Rescue is her finest work."
—Carole Giangrande, author of Here Comes the Dreamer and Midsummer

"Among my favorite poems in this reflective collection are those tributes Eva Tihanyi composes to the artist. There is her powerful evocation of Chet Baker and the “tendrils of melody” and charismatic notes” that emanate from his “brooding trumpet”; the complex mix of his giftedness, his inconsolability, the lure of fame and the prison of his addiction. Then too, she offers a rich portrait of T. S. Eliot, who struggled to “crack the code of his insurgent heart”; and before him, Tihanyi remembers the legacy of the Romantic Poets, the places they lived and their “allegiance to words,” which can “ignite like a tiny sun.” As she notes the particulars of all their lives, and the continuum of learning our own, Tihanyi asks that we pledge to live—to live in love—in spite of the paradoxes which fill this collection with subdued wonder."
—Carol Lipszyc, author of The Saviour Shoes and Other Stories and Singing Me Home

"Long-time readers of Eva Tihanyi’s powerful poetry have always appreciated her clarity and candor. Now, in her eighth collection, The Largeness of Rescue, we see the poet’s deep reckoning with loss, longing and mortality. Whether it’s a student crying in her office, or the slow demise of jazz genius Chet Baker, or the poets Byron, Keats, and Shelley in Italy, Tihanyi’s soulful poems show an intrimate understanding of life—and often the great human cost of art. Tihanyi offers us poetry that whispers from one heart to another."
—Bruce Hunter, author of Two O'Clock Creek, new and selected poetry and In The Bear's House

"Eva Tihanyi writes with clarity by employing powerful metaphors and epigrammatic language with an unflinching philosophical honesty to capture the conditions of our lives. If there is a dark atmosphere in some of these poems, there is also an underlying hope expressed in tender affirmation."
—Laurence Hutchman, author of Beyond Borders

“Art is not a closed circle / or a straight line.” Eva Tihanyi’s poems evoke many moments of art, from Chet Baker’s music drifting from an Italian prison to a cave artist place handprints on rock. She pieces these moments together along the curving trails of lyric and perception."
—Alice Major, author of Intersecting Sets: A Poet Looks at Science and Memory's Daughter

inanna.ca

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DISCLAIMERS

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

Today's book of poetry:
A Dog's Life. Adam Scheffler. Jacar Press. Durham, North Carolina. 2016

Adam Scheffler is singing a big, big song in A Dog's Life and it is mostly a song of joy. You'll hear a few complaints and genuine concerns along the way but that's only natural. Mostly Scheffler is aiming high, he's generous and kind.

Scheffler ruminates at length in his conversational and prosodic style and boy oh boy do we like to listen. There's nothing naive about the poems in A Dog's Life but there is a certain innocence. Adam Scheffler's innocence has some experience to it.

Years ago I published a poem that had a line in it that insisted you can't have innocence and experience too, they are two separate horses bursting out of the gate. Well, apparently I was wrong.

Woman and Dogs

My girlfriend's dog is small and fat and neurotic

and smells at night like an African meat flower.

It loves her more than some people love anyone

in a riddle of love it worries at, lying there on the floor.

As she writes it makes strange sounds:

lickings, sighings, sucking, shiftings

like the worrying-tide of the world, like the vast

dog-tide of the world in its love of the moon

and of fetching sticks. My girlfriend is very quiet

and very white like the moon, and some people think

she is cold and uncaring just like it.

But her dog knows better, it knows she is quiet

like the sun as she writes her stories

tapping them quietly with her fingers, shaping

the messages she has heard of painful warmth

and love, quietly as a tree repeating the hard message

of the sun in its devotion of leaves and listening.

I have listened carefully to the dog. I have stolen

the dog's secret about her. I have figured it out.

She is quiet and so she writes long stories

and I am loud and so I write quick poems

tiring myself out more quickly to look up at her

as lovingly and neurotically as the dog

perhaps never as lovingly as the dog

who unlike me has nothing to prove

who does not write poems except the thought-poems

of the chase, the sky, the walk, the meal.

Sick of the dog, I have had too much also of poems

petulant, filled with strange achings

I think of my navel which is too deep like a mine

I send my finger into it like a canary and feel sad

and weird and know I will die. But sometimes

she tells me she likes my chest and I take her

in my arms and feel for once superior to the dog.

Before this dog she had another dog I never met, a

golden retriever, who was not at all neurotic

who swallowed her childhood happily

like a white spiral fossil and brought it back

covered with a fine varnish fine slobber of evening

and died, and now is only a picture in a cheap frame

on the top of her desk as she writes. It makes me think

of all I can't see: the long list of books she gave me

how they existed all my life and before it

and her story right now invisible to her too

like the idea of a flower to all the roots underneath

their gossipy brags and worries: how their flowers

grow tall as the spine of a young boy, go blue

as a nun's lips in winter, unless the earth goes

upwards forever unbroken - but there she is

at least, complete: watched by the dog who is dead

watched by the dog who smells bad and is alive

watched by me, who am sick of poems and of life too maybe

but am alive and glad to look at her, at the tiny mark

on her cheek where the clamp brought her forth kicking

from the womb to sit one day quietly in the

wound and fury of writing before the three of us

who cannot help, who wait in aches and shiftings

for her to turn round and speak gently our names.

...

Today's book of poetry found a lot of joy in A Dog's Life despite the arrows of real life skewering hearts, Scheffler has created an entertaining and compassionate balance in these poems, a sense of hope.

We do hear about the irresponsible parenting skills of pandas and the inexplicably large salary of a business man from Tulsa, there are laments of different orders peppered here and there, but Scheffler never loses his focus. The dark is only ever a reminder that the blue sky is coming.

Great Grandfathers

They sit quiet in murmuring

restaurants, at family gatherings,

wearing old paisley ties and tweed,

hands folded on their laps,

ready to ask for the one thing on the menu they can order

for old age means fewer choices.

At the end of the table

they float on pillows, counting out

the abacus of their pills

for they are unhearing

though their ears are swollen up

big as cabbages in lovely whorls,

cobwebs, funnels gathering darkness.

Their boredom is loud though,

a knot we try to untie with talk.

They catch a few words, maybe,

or let them drift past like feathers,

turning their eyes inwards

to the root cellar where memories

and dreams grow twined.

...

It came as no surprise to Today's book of poetry that most of this collection had been previously published in scores of magazines and journals. Good ones. In fact it pleases Today's book of poetry to know that the editors of these publications saw what we see, Adam Scheffler writes damned good poems.

A Dog's Life comes right up to you just like a friendly dog, licks your hand, settles down at your feet and you feel reassured.

Our newest staff member Odin was particularly charmed by Scheffler's poems and made a special request that I post the following poem. Apparently Odin never met a waitress he didn't love.

Waitress

Half the men in here tonight

are in love with her,

ordering twice as much wine

as they planned,

getting quite drunk.

She's not beautiful

quite plainly dressed,

in overalls,

in her early 50's. But the men

look up and drink,

admiring her no-makeup,

her aloofness,

joking to see her smile blandly

and glide away,

making empty plates vanish

like any hope of her number.

They are in love for once

without desire, as she recites

tonight's specials

from memory, taking orders

in her head too,

forgetting nothing, leaving them all

feeling that care and

distance are what they wanted,

not love after all.

...

Today's book of poetry felt that the poems in Adam Scheffler's A Dog's Life were straight forward and true. You will feel better about the world after reading these poems. Reason and hope go a long way to beating back the darkness.

Adam Scheffler

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam Scheffler grew up in California, received his MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and is currently finishing his PhD in English at Harvard.

BLURBS

“A Dog’s Life is a delightful romp through Americana by way of ‘real’ America with sly, politically engaged poems. Though this poet issues a rallying cry against ‘siren songs of entertainment,’ his poems are completely entertaining but, at the same time, completely wise. He takes on true love, extinction, our fragile environment, war, technology, porn, aging and our fight against it, cancer, nursing homes, and death. A Dog’s Life is an enlightened look at Doritos, Carson Daly, Walmart, McDonalds, theme parks, and, of course, dogs.”
— Denise Duhamel

“The real singers – whether lamenting or praising – give us a sense of life as larger than we could have expressed before they arrived. With an explorer’s curiosity and drive, Adam Scheffler turns his poems into a treasury. He speaks of the value and wonder in small and large things, and like a dog (the dog he’d have us believe his soul is), meets the world with undisguised exuberance. These poems are spiritual in the way poetry is best suited to be: they articulate our good fortune to be alive.”
— Bob Hicok

jacarpress.com

515

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:
Mammoth. Larissa Andrusyshyn. Punchy Poetry. DC Books. Montreal, Quebec. 2010.

Back in October of last year Today's book of poetry looked at Larissa Andrusyshyn's second book of poetry, Proof (Punchy Poetry/DC Books, 2014) and you can see that here:

http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.ca/2015/10/proof-larissa-andrusyshyn-punchy.html

The first thing Today's book of poetry said in that review/blog was that we wanted to get our meaty little hands Andrusyshyn's first book, Mammoth. We did.

It is startlingly good which comes as no surprise here. Andrusyshyn's one-two punch of Mammoth and Proof is a noteworthy accomplishment and one hell of an entrance to Canadian letters.

Mammoth could be seen, in part, as a scientific report on genetics and the moody behaviour of those under a variety of microscopes. Andrusyshyn has the intricate eye of procedure that she apparently stole from some now blind scientist, she also has a streak of Darwinian glee in her anthropomorphous and delightfully necessary beasts repleat with human language and understanding.

What she does more than anything else is to write poems of such self evident truthfulness and perception that the reader willingly accepts the reason of mammoths, the contemplative nature of polar bears, the tell-tale beating of a petri-dish laboratory heart.

The Grizzly Man

Timothy is supposed to leave at the end of the season,

pack the bear-proof bins, the tent and video camera,

board a Cessna for the airport.

But he doesn't return

to the shrugging of airline employees,

the seat numbers, the exhausting trajectories

of airports and luggage that spins like cake slices

for the bored customer of windowless diners.

He stays in the grizzly maze,

the dense bramble on the nature reserve

where he hides his camp from the parks department.

The view from here is something

and the grizzly bear knows this place.

But the bear does not wish to be Timothy

and he does not think of humans

or hold up lenses to watch them with.

Days later, when the parks department finds the campsite,

they bag the evidence, shoot the bear

and collect the remains.

Someone recovers the video camera

and there are hours and hours of footage: Timothy

touching the wet muzzle of a sow, talking to the bears,

calling them by their names.

...

Today's book of poetry knows we shouldn't laugh at that story, so turn away for a moment because it makes us howl.

Larissa Andrusyshyn happily employs the scientific worlds of biology, anthropology and numerous other ologys, Andrusyshyn renders them clever tools as she navigates those belief systems for us, translates so that the terrain makes our poetry hearts race. If Mammoth weren't so damned spot on emotionally you'd almost think someone as clever as Andrusyshyn was toying with us.

Polar Bear Caught on Ice Floe Updates Status

There's a spray of water and your skin seems to detach from

your skull in temperatures like that. The wind just drives

the vapor up your nose and it's all burning and salt. In the

photograph the glacier looks like a coral reef up close, real

close so you think you see the calcium hydroxyapatite

depositing itself there in microbial stacks. On top there's me,

so you might realize this could be the last piece of ice on

earth and they you'll wonder why it's all carved out like that.,

with holes and a ledge that looks like it could just hold the

weight of a cartoon coyote for a split second before dropping

off the field of view. Below me there's the water so clear I can

see fifty feet down. Have you heard the sound of breaking

ice? It's like a giant door opening, a huge ungreased hinge

or the crack of trees before they fall and you feel like you are

about to step out into an important moment like a moon

landing or something.

...

Milo, our head tech, was tickled pink this morning when I foisted Mammoth on the staff for the morning read.

"This is that Proof poet! Right!?"

Milo could hardly contain his enthusiasm and it was infectious. This morning's reading was quick paced in a room full of smiles.

Mammoth reads smart and clean, the poems give themselves to the reader with such self-evident precision and common sense that Today's book of poetry had to look behind the covers to see if it was a trick. Andrusyshyn impressed Today's book of poetry with Proof, Mammoth confirms it, this is a poet full of golden promise.

Waiting Room

The waiting room is teeming with news

and updates, white blood cell levels

and the flight details for your friends from Winnipeg.

We visit you in shifts, in manageable numbers.

What I want to do is write something completely

giddy. Something about sea horses. Polygons,

cappuccino scum. The elbows of mediocrity.

You pull the oxygen mask away to talk

and your father frowns.

Lungs filling with blood, you are trying to remember

a recipe for bread. You stop and take breaths.

You keep repeating "three cups of flaxseed flour."

Behind the mask that fogs and clears,

your voice is a blizzard, an operatic storm.

We lean against each other motionless, someone

is writing the recipe down, because we want

to bake the bread again, because it was the bread you brought

to the last party we remember. You start again from the

beginning

and we hang like the troubled hands of murderers.

...

Mammoth isn't all sunshine and blue sky. Andrusyshyn gives us a fair share of the certainty of death at the end of the ride - but her entertaining poems make it a more worthwhile journey.

Two books in and Larissa Andrusyshyn has made a big fan out of Today's book of poetry.

Larissa Andrusyshyn

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Larissa Andrusyshyn’s first book Mammoth (DC Books 2010) was shortlisted for the QWF First Book Prize and the Kobzar Literary Award. Her poems have been shortlisted for Arc Magazine’s Poem of the Year and the Malahat Review’s Open Season Award. She works with a local non-profit to offer creative writing workshops to at-risk youth. She lives, writes and is planning her zombie apocalypse survival strategy in Montreal

dcbooks.ca

516

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:
Mirror Image. Len Gasparini. Essential Poet Series 209. Guernica Editions. Toronto - Buffalo - Lancaster(U.K.). 2014.

I first discovered Len Gasparini in 1976 when rummaging through stack of used books in a ramshackle barbershop near the Ford plant I worked at in Windsor. I was writing poems and had published in a few small magazines and journals but I was still a couple of years away from my first book.

Gasparini was a liberating and inspirational find. Here was a poet whose straight ahead no bullshit persona came jumping off of the page and grabbed me by the collar. I liked Gasparini right out of the gate and have been a big fan ever since.

Early this morning I sent Milo, our head tech, into the stacks to see what he could find by Gasparini, this is what he came back with:

21 X 3 - with Dorothy Farmiloe/Eugene McNamara, The Gryphon Press, 1967

Cutty Sark - The Quarry Press, 1970

Tunnel Bus to Detroit - Fiddlehead Poetry, 1971

Pelee Island - Thistle Printing, 1972

The Somniloquist - Fiddlehead Poetry, 1972

One Bullet Left - Alive Press, 1974

If You Love - Borealis Press, 1975

Moon Without Light - York Publishing, 1978

Breaking and Entering, New and Selected Poems - Mosaic Press/Valley Editions, 1980

Ink from an Octopus - Hounslow Press, 1989

I Once Had a Pet Praying Mantis - Mosaic Press,1995

A Canadian In Dixie - Lyrical Myrical, 2003

Leftover Love to Kill - Lyrical Myrical, 2004

Turns out this is only a portion of his output.

Today's book of poetry cannot begin to tell you how thrilled we were to see Gasparini's Mirror Image come through the door. Len Gasparini has been a big hero of ours for almost forty years. Today's book of poetry was reading poems by Gasparini before Bukowski, before Purdy, Carver, Ross, any of it. I thought Len Gasparini was the original gangster poet.

This first poem comes from a longer sequence of poems, "Memories of the Rockin' Fifties" and encapsulates the feeling I had back in the Windsor of my youth when I first picked up a copy of One Bullet Left.

from Memories of the Rockin' Fifties

for Jim Christy

How summer day in the city.

On my way to a beach party

I stopped for cigarettes at a corner store.

A 35 cent Avon paperback, The Subterraneans,

by Jack Kerouac, caught my eye.

(The title sounded like sci-fi.)

I bought the book ... read passages

to my sunbathing pals drinking contraband beer.

When the party ended, it came

as no little surprise to see the beach

hadn't moved, the lake was still there;

but this cat wasn't.

Kerouac had turned me around.

I was never altogether the same after that.

...

The poetry of Len Gasparini is often clipped so short that you don't realize you've been rabbit punched. No wasted movement. Gasparini is a romantic of an old school of take no prisoners, that might include the ghosts of Raymond Chandler and Jim Harrison, maybe even Charles the B.

Mirror Image is two books in one. The first thirty pages are poetry and the remainder is prose. Odin, our newest staff member is working over the prose right now and I don't have the heart to tell him that prose is above our pay grade. Our mandate stops with the poetry. But what fine, crisp, clean poems these are.

Endangered Species

for Patrick Lane

In a country that was founded

on the backs of fur-bearing animals

I once saw a stuffed adult cougar

at a trade show in Vancouver's BC Place.

It there is reincarnation,

metempsychosis, transmutation, or whatever,

I hope that I come back

as a cougar, Felis concolor,

solitary and nocturnal in the wilds

of northern British Columbia.

I will stalk, ambush, and stab

my sharp canines into the neck

of any motherfucking nimrod

who tries to hunt me down.

I'll eat my fill: feed my kittens:

and leave the rest for the ravens.

...

Gasparini has been publishing his honest and unfettered poetry with resolute consistency for the best part of fifty years. Today's book of poetry feels honoured to have him come through the door, for an opportunity to share his work.

Many of Gasparini's poems can be read as reportage sans resolution, these poems often raise more questions than answers. Today's book of poetry thinks Gasparini's modus operandi has always been the pulling back of the curtain to show the real world at work. That old over the rainbow trick from the Wizard of Oz.

Runaway

Alone, with nowhere to go,

she stands on the corner

of some deserted intersection

late at night, waiting

for a traffic light.

...

Today's book of poetry has admired the poetry of Len Gasparini my entire adult life and is pleased to share his work with you. You're not going to like every poem in Gasparini's vast catalogue, no poet can pass that test, but all these years on Gasparini has never let me down.

Len Gasparini

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born in Windsor, Ontario, Len Gasparini is the author of numerous books and chapbooks of poetry, five short-story collections, including The Snows of Yesteryear (2011), The Undertaker's Wife (,2007), and A Demon in My View (2003), which was translated into French as Nouvelle noirceur. He has also written two children’s books, a work of non-fiction, and a one-act play. In 1990, he was awarded the F.G. Bressani Literary Prize for poetry. In 2010, he won the NOW Open Poetry Stage event. Having lived in Montreal, Vancouver, New Orleans, and Washington State, he now divides his time between Toronto and his hometown. Mirror Image, his latest collection, combines poetry and prose.

guernicaeditons.com

517

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:
Off-Leash. Dorothy Mahoney. Palimpsest Press. Windsor, Ontario. 2016

Dorothy Mahoney's Off-Leash is an unassuming, candid, considered treatise of canine experience and wisdom, much of it from the muzzles of the beasts themselves. Mahoney has accomplished what legions of sci-fi fans, futurists and pet lovers have long imagined but yet to master - she can speak Dog.

Kitch dogs

A Rottweiler between the stoic couple

of American Gothic, lean a

Pekinese into the arms of Mona Lisa, or yet,

substitute the heads of dogs for humans, or

paint by number the large-eyed dog on velvet.

There will always be dogs playing poker,

or nodding on the dashboard

of a slow-moving Chevy, a wooden

silhouette of a dog hunches over

a patchy lawn, dogs barking Christmas carols,

the bowling sweaters my mother knit

with hunting dogs and rising pheasants,

ceramic Scotties ready to shake

salt and pepper from their heads.

...

Our newest staff member Odin was all over this book. After reading Off-Leash Odin handed it back to me with a bit of a scowl, he insisted that if I didn't write about Dorothy Mahoney's barkingly brilliant book that he would bite me. Then he growled a little bit.

Off-Leash isn't that attention loving puppy always anxious to jump up onto your lap. These are older dog poems, experienced dogs, very literate dogs. Dorothy Mahoney does that perfect thing, these poems transport the reader, however briefly, to a world where that barrier to complete understanding

between beast and biped has been rendered moot.

The reason employed by Mahoney and her canine ambassadors is unassailable.

Toto

When you're a Cairn Terrier in the witch's castle

there is much to fear:

shut in a basket,

the winged monkey told to drown you,

the mammoth guards, their marching feet,

the draw bridge closing,

the widening chasm

to jump.

There's wind, smoke, fire.

In all that is a dream:

spinning house, poppy fields,

man behind a curtain;

there's your girl lost

on a yellow road

with no one else to guide her.

...

Who hasn't worried about being drowned by winged monkeys?

Off-Leash is consistently entertaining as Mahoney susses out what is really important to our four legged friends. It turns out that our concerns are not that different.

It's a dog's life, But which dog? Today's book of poetry is pretty sure that Queen E's pooches make it through the day a little differently than Prince, the white Boxer across the street, or Bruce, his British Bulldog buddy with the football obsession and the skin condition.

Mahoney's dogs are like us, varied, complex and searching. And sometimes they just need to take a good sniff around. For some of us it's a good bone, a warm hearth and the smelly feet of the master we love. Other dogs need the space to run, to chase wind, rabbit and reason simply because they can.

Dog years

You are the reminder of my mortality,

pulling me along

as you race ahead

advancing beyond my own age

in dog years

to reach the end of your lead

to fall behind

when I have settled completely

into step with you.

That there might be others

seems startling now,

that I am the witness of your age

marking time with your name

before you...

and after...

How many of my own years have I myself forgotten

yet you marked mornings by meals and walks

when only the sun was waking.

I hurried

while you lingered wistfully

at each tree and corner watchful-

wary of what I could not see.

...

Today's book of poetry thinks these doggy tales are universal and only the best poems manage that. Dorothy Mahoney has done a remarkable job with Off-Leash, she's crossed a species language barrier and made poetry out of that. Beautiful.

Every dog owner out there should read this book. And then read it to your dog.

Dorothy Mahoney

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dorothy Mahoney is the author of two poetry collections, Through Painted Skies and Returning to the Point. Her poetry has been included in numerous anthologies, most recently appearing in Detours: An Anthology of Poets from Windsor and Essex County. Palimpsest Press released Off-Leash in 2016. A retired teacher, she resides in Windsor, Ontario.

BLURB

"Mahoney writes about dogs as if dogs matter; and the strength and tenderness of her poetry convinces us that they do. Her poems write dogs into the human psyche, into history. They invite humans to enter the canine realm. Beautifully paced, there is nothing coy or sentimental about this collection, just best words next to best words in the best order, just "a dog next to a dog next to a dog."

- Arleen Pare

Dorothy Mahoney

Black Moss Press Block

video: Black Moss

palimpsestpress.ca

518

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:
Tell - poems for a girlhood. Soraya Peerbaye. Pedlar Press. St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador. 2015.

Young men do terrible things all the time, we see it on the television news every night, we are frequently shocked by new levels of horror but ultimately we've given up the pretense of being surprised. We know evil lurks in anticipation.

But when young women do terrible things it genuinely upsets whatever karmic balance we delicately hold on to. It troubles our inner ear, makes us stumble, slur.

Soraya Peerbaye's Tell - poems for a girlhood reenvisions the horrible death of Reena Virk. Virk, a young teenage girl was murdered by a gang of peers, mostly other girls, in November of 1997 in Saanich, British Columbia.

See them say

Mistrials,

overturned verdicts.

Transcripts of earlier testimony

placed before the witness,

past and present overlaid

like vellum, the defence

cross-examining each

falsehood, each fault or failure

of memory, I was tricked, said one.

On the stand they were always

thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.

The boy who was Warren's friend,

diagnosed with post-traumatic stress

disorder; the girl who testified

to seeing Kelly and Warren

cross the bridge together,

dead at seventeen, heart failure.

Then she was only a recording,

a click, a lick of ribbon,

a hiss of white noise.

Voir-dire. See, say,

to see them say, say

what is true. Warren said

he and Kelly made a pact,

that he'd say he beat up a Native

for calling her a hootchie.

The year he recanted he traced

Metis lines in his cheekbones,

asked to be transferred

to Kwikwexwelhp Healing Village.

I remind you, witness,

that you are still under oath.

Offered a glass of water

when they wept. They drank

without thirst, without lowering their eyes.

Kelly shouted in the courtroom

at the prosecutor:

- You can say anything you want

but everything that comes out of your mouth

is going to be wrong.

- What did you say? asked the Crown.

- What is coming out of your mouth -

what you are saying -

everything that comes out of

your mouth -

...

Heather Spears tackledanced through this territory in 2000, immediately after the first trial, with Required Reading/A witness in words and drawings to the Reena Virk Trials 1998-2000 (Wolsak and Wynn, 2000). Spears' book is a serious lament and compelling read. Soraya Peerbaye is from the same school of unadorned and emotionally controlled narrative and it makes for a riveting engagement.

Peerbaye knows a metronome of reason and persistent inquiry will bring us closer to the truth than hysterical anger and rage.

Craigflower Bridge

Get up.

A bridge is wood trestle below, metal

above; a guardrail

of teal-green lattice. Hennaed patches of rust.

"I need help. I need help. I need help."

A bridge is a distance, measured in steps, in pools

of lamplight, the time it takes to cross.

In breaths. - How far did you watch her go?

- Halfway across, to where the light spreads out.

Headlights of passing cars, bright beads on a wire

that curves into darkness: Highway 1A, Gorge Road.

- Did you observe her gait as she crossed?

I thought of the gaits of Indian dance,

the little I learned, carrying

my clumsiness far into adulthood:

elephant, peacock, deer. - She was

staggering, light-headed.

A bridge is held up by belief that you will go

over to the other shore

to someone who wants you, to somewhere

safe.

...

The truth of a thing is never known the same way by two different people. Several trials and the best efforts of justice have never seen one answer, one solution, one truth. Sometimes poetry can help fill that gap and Peerbaye's intense gaze aims to do just that.

Tell - poems for a girlhood carries a quiet sense of dread, the weight of a murdered young woman and the murky dance of fractured memory.

We knew going in that Tell - poems for a girlhood was not going to have a happy ending but Peerbaye and her intelligent diligence kept us turning pages for a story we already knew. Books of poetry don't get much sadder that this one.

Curfew

Was time important to you that night?

Yes, they said.

Did you abide by a curfew? Ten o'clock,

eleven, midnight.

Who greeted you? Mothers who kissed

their daughters goodnight, mothers who checked

their daughters' breath.

Who greeted you? No mothers; girls signed their names

in the register, and women who were not their mothers

initialed the time.

How long did it last? A moment.

How long is a moment?

How long did it last? the Crown asked Warren.

- I don't know. - How long did it feel like? - Forever.

How long does it take to walk across the bridge?

How long does it take to walk home?

I'm fucked. I'm fucked for the rest of my life. Warren,

overheard crying to his father, the night of his arrest.

The tidal chart entered as an exhibit, indicating the time lapse

between high waters and low waters.

I don't remember. It was so long ago, Kelly repeated,

a monotone. Her second trial. At her third, she fell silent.

How old the Gorge, how old the middens. All carbon-14 dates

have probability errors, as atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons

changed radiocarbon amounts in the natural world.

How long the trials. Twelve years.

How long did you look back?

I remember

being fifteen, lying on my best friend's bed, listening

to Forever Young by Alphaville. How badly I wanted a boy

to slow dance that song with.

...

Soraya Peerbaye's Tell- poems for a girlhood won the 2016 Trillium Poetry Award and is nominated for the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize. That's some pretty high cotton.

The staff here at Today's book of poetry had a rather sombre reading this morning. Reverent and quiet. Not all pleasures are joys.

Soraya Peerbaye

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Soraya Peerbaye’s first collection of poetry, Poems for the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names, was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award. Her poems have appeared in Red Silk: An Anthology of South Asian Women Poets (2004), edited by Priscila Uppal and Rishma Dunlop, as well as the literary journals Other Voices, Prairie Fire and The New Quarterly; she has also contributed to the chapbook anthology Translating Horses. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Peerbaye lives in Toronto with her husband and daughter.

BLURB

Peerbaye's new work tells a haunting story of girlhood, one we wish could be untold or exchanged for one that powerfully honours the colour of our skin. Still, these poems placate our loss with their clear-eyed intelligence and depth.

- Natasha Bakht

Soraya Peerbaye

"Rainfall"

video: Q at CBC

pedlarpress.com

519

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:
Caribou Run. Richard Kelly Kemick. Icehouse Poetry. Gooselane Editions. Fredericton, New Brunswick. 2016.

Caribou Run is one of those books that the more you read the smarter you feel. Richard Kelly Kemick is 106 years old and has apparently spent every minute of that time studying biology, Latin, animal husbandry in the wild, philosophy and so on. Kemick has also apparently learned the languages of wolf and caribou as well.

Caribou Run is a bursting wonder of a thing, a mash-up of encyclopedic voracity, beautiful reason and a poetic joie de vivre.

The Love Poem as Caribou

It's hard to imagine. As doves, yes,

or even vultures. But there's nothing of a ballad

in the hard weight of antlers. You can't cut

into an ode, stripping its skin to bones cabled

with muscle, or search its creased face for something

you can almost explain. And a sonnet has never

made me see myself inadequate beneath

the bright light of evolution's long apprenticeship,

acutely aware of the many failings of my own form.

But maybe it's in how a love poem will cross

a body of water without being about to see

the other side. Or maybe it's in the deep prints

left in the drifts, that speak of how hard

it must have been to move on from here.

...

Kemick's Caribou Run is ostensibly about the Porcupine caribou herd of the western Arctic and it is one beauty a beast, obsessively and compulsively full to the brim, there is no limit to Kemick's poetic diligence. His poem about the hurricane of mosquitoes turning the sky dark will haunt me forever.

We get to know the details of the multi-chambered stomach, a sad calving ground littered with calamity and the silent cows that follow. But let's be clear, Kemick's caribou are not the miracle, the joy and wonder in Caribou Run is in the observations, not the observed.

A Thunderstorm Seven Kilometres

West of Old Crow, Yukon

Rising,the cumulonimbus swells against the stratosphere's hard shell,

spilling itself into a flattened sprawl: a cartoon piano hovering over

the freshwater flats. With increasing surface area, a negative charge colludes

with the earth's own magnetism, grafting the ground positive.

This is what most people never realize: lightning comes from below as

much as from above.

The negative sky, reacting to the positive soil, cascades step-leaders:

electric tendrils of fifty metres, unravelling for attachment, stretching

for a circuit. The ground, in slower resurrection,

grows forth splinters of light:

positive streamers, ribboning up

in search of their own electric awakening.

Once a step-leader stitches a thread of plasma

and connects

with a positive-streamer

electricity ruptures from the thick sky. It is the only time

the atmosphere touches earth.

But the flash seen, the blue-white burn of lunar ice,

is the ground channelling energy

upwards, striking the cloud

into homeostasis. The channel,

in the shape of God's basilic vein, burns six times

hotter than the sun, boiling the sky to explode

a shock wave that rips the air apart,

inflicts internal bruising on birds.

This meteorological movement, this visual presence of an

internal transfer, can, perhaps, be likened to the unexplainable

distance

of motherhood, which has within it something of a storm's great movement,

its patient pursuit of the horizon.

...

Richard Kelly Kemick reminds us of Aristotle's eternal question "do animals die or stop living?", Well, try and anthropomorphize that. Kemick does.

The office reading this morning was spirited. Last night was Halloween and as luck would have it our head-tech, Milo, brought a set of costume antlers into the office today. He insisted on wearing them all through this morning's read.

Today's book of poetry thinks that Caribou Run can run with the big boys, the big gals, it doesn't get much better than this when you're reading a book of poems. Kemick had me rethinking certainties and looking back with awe. Reason this crisp, rendered with beauty, doesn't come along all that often. Richard Kelly Kemick flat out impressed us off our feet.

Upon the Autumn Equinox,

the Tundra Takes Inventory

Moss shimmering frost, streams clinking ice.

Puzzle pieces of slush around a boulder

that's rounded like a beached whale, the defenselessness

of a weight that can't contain itself. Catkins

passed over, crimson against brambled earth.

Muskox hair blown southwest from Banks Island,

and raven feathers, iridescent with twilight.

Sockets of ground squirrel holes, corkscrewed

beneath the sedge. A tensile horizon

and starlight rolls in like an optometrist's lens.

A woodpecker's hollow well. A fox paw.

A dryas trying to hold bloom, as the Beaufort

breeze undresses its petals, erasing itself into sky.

The tall grass bends with wind, brushed

like the swath of your hair in the breath

the door made as you closed it behind you.

...

Today's book of poetry isn't much of a nature buff although I've spent my time in the woods and the wilds. I am a Canadian and I do identify with our big, beautiful country, I can rejoice in nature and am touched when a poet brings me closer to it.

Today's book of poetry may stumble onto a more intelligent book of poetry sometime soon but it is unlikely. Kemick is bursting out of the gate and onto the scene all prodigy like and fully formed. If books of poems were NHL goals Kemick would be having a Gretzky season.

Richard Kelly Kemick

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Kelly Kemick’s poetry, prose, and criticism have been published in magazines and journals across Canada and the United States, including the Fiddlehead, the New Quarterly, and Tin House (Open Bar).

He has won the poetry prizes of both Grain magazine and Echolocation. He lives in Calgary.

BLURBS
"You hear notes of McKay, Steffler, and Purdy's Baffin Island poems in this extraordinary first collection, which is marked throughout by a pulsing, joyful intelligence. Richard Kelly Kemick delivers us onto the great lone land with the precision and beauty of his lines. The book is breathtaking."
- Time Lilburn, author of Assinboia

"Caribou Run honours its titles subject by its sheer depth of research and by its willingness to explore the relationship between man and nature from numerous angles. Wisecracking, earnest, and charmingly obsessive, Kemick introduces himself here as a poet who believes in something larger than his own self, and so is a poet to watch."
- Nich Thran, author of Mayor Snow

gooselane.com

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DISCLAIMERS

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

Today's book of poetry:
The Czar. Mary Biddinger & Jay Robinson. Black Lawrence Press. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 2016.

The Czar is an elegantly seamless patchwork quilt, an on-going riff trilling electric about the fate of the modern world and all of us peasants bouncing around in it.

Who is this Czar? Mary Biddinger and Jay Robinson never say for sure but Today's book of poetry thinks it's a metaphor.

Today's book of poetry would be very curious to know the process used by Biddinger and Robinson, how to meld two poets into one, because The Czar speaks with one clear voice.

The Czar, the character, not the title, is a mitigating dictator. The Czar is looking over your shoulder as you read this.

The Czar

To those who can afford underpinnings of quality.

To those who dine on other people's roof-straw.

To those directly responsible for increased surveillance.

To those owls who know but don't consent or tell.

To those whose voting stickers never adhere.

To those princes you dealt with accordingly.

To those who doubt the true innuendos of torture.

To those directly responsible for Miley Cyrus.

To those pollsters you later seduced with mints.

To those who insist every vote should count twice.

To those who dine on salami every day for lunch.

To those faxes we sullied with biological materials.

To those who grow a beard when they shouldn't.

To those undergraduates who dine on each other.

To those walls you climbed -- naked and drunk on icing.

To those who secured the borders of my pants.

To those workers who bodyguard the potholes.

To those who cannot afford free health care.

To those directly responsible for bathing the Czar.

To those directly responsible for the Virgin Afterbirth.

To those peaches, actual peaches, not innuendos.

To those miniskirts I refused to wear in the elevator.

To those owls who occupied Wall Street.

To those directly responsible for your orgasm.

...

It has been quite some time since Today's book of poetry has come across a book so ripe with list poems and we are delighted to include this one. The Czar is peppered with them. Nicely spiced.

Biddinger and Robinson start this Czarfest off with a quote from old Nicholas II, and frankly, he was last real authority on the matter before Biddinger and Robinson.

"I am not yet ready to be Tsar. I know nothing of the business of ruling."

-- Nicolas II

True to form, our Czar is flawed, often unprepared. But in a world of dictators both large and small, real and imagined, it is reassuring to find a fallible fob fop Czar.

The Czar

Ironically, the Czar was a terrible student of foreign languages.

His parents complained to the principal. He called his OEUVRE

his OUVRIR. He'd spend the rest of his life attempting to open

someone or another. The Czar thought a body of work was for sex

(emphasis mine). His biggest challenge was the pluperfect. One

day he was taking a piss at work and terrified himself with the

prospect of pissing in the same pissoire for the next thirty years.

Not to mention...

The Czar recalled the word for rabbit in French, but asked for a

fish at the small game restaurant. We will not speak of the brief

tutorial regarding Belgian engineering. In Mexico, the Czar

announced himself as an organ thief, and then placed his request

for The Entertainer. He claimed Sister Carrie to be his favorite

Russian novel, the best cure for hangover to be another trip to Las

Vegas. What happens in the Czar's fancy room never stays in the

Czar's fancy room...

Once, as a sophomore in college, the Czar drove to Canada. He

took a wrong turn, ended up in Montreal instead of Windsor. Every

map looks like it's written in the Cyrillic alphabet, he said to his

roommate. But he had a bottle of Wild Irish Rose in a thermos and

one foot out the window. Both of them drunk on freedom for the

better part of a dozen hours. The Czar thought the Cyrillic alpha-

bet a soup he hadn't been served as a boy. His roommate laughed,

got left beside a sagging barn outside Ottawa...

But the Czar can roll a joint in any language. As a Czar, he could

make a priest confess. We will not speak of this, the Czar mumbles

to an otherwise preoccupied prostitute in German. We will not

speak of this...

...

The Czar gets around. This morning's read of The Czar in our office was a rollicking tic-tac-toe affair. Milo was in top form, he is our head tech. Kathryn, our Jr. Editor was equally splendid and in fine Czarina form. The big surprise was Max, our Sr. Editor and former Bolshevik. He burst out of his office all hammer and sickle eyed and ready to read. It's always a treat when Max reads, he gets his voice into every corner of the room.

The poems in The Czar have a cumulative affect on the reader and when Max started bouncing them around everything else stopped. These are wicked smart whippet poems, bounding by with such ease and handsome energy that you hardly notice the power. Biddinger and Robinson have ample reserves, their Czar has moxie.

The Czar

wonders if his mistress is taking things

seriously. A little less time as Bjork

the swan, a little more Lady Gaga

in her meat frock. Somewhere the spin

cycle stops spinning. Somebody's ears

pop. But it's another day in this empire.

Cold feet, Advil, layers. V-neck sweaters

in the top secret paper shredder. The

Czar plans a trip to Paris but forgets

to pack the trip. His mistress suggests

what she calls the Carbonite Method.

It's a fancy name for the Czar's favorite

number, the one only he was allowed

to screen print onto his baseball jersey.

Well, he's the Czar, one parent said. We

never give up, his mistress observed,

but we might go down. She was 12, and he

was a spring training enthusiast. Now

he's a baseball card of bloated stats.

His mother never realized that Duffy's

Tee House was actually a head shop.
She inquired the price of a brilliant red

hookah, wondered where the flowers
were supposed to go, while the Czar

selected a Van Halen iron-on for front,
fuzzy Courier letters to spell out CZAR

on back (ringer tee, of course, striped
sleeves). Sometimes his mistress still

wears this shirt. It used to be her sole
garment at bedtime. Now she wears it

beneath the first of two lumberjack
flannels, practically undetectable,

much like her attachment to the Czar,
which is all undershirt, zero bra.

...

The Czar is a modern construct and an intriguing everyman/everywoman, The Czar is a marvelous book. Mary Biddinger and Jay Robinson have created a thoroughly modern character to live among us.

"Somebody gets the last laugh. Somebody gets crumbs."
- The Czar

Mary Biddinger

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mary Biddinger is the author of the poetry collections Prairie Fever (Steel Toe Books, 2007), Saint Monica(Black Lawrence Press, 2011), O Holy Insurgency (Black Lawrence Press, 2013), A Sunny Place with Adequate Water (Black Lawrence Press, 2014) and Small Enterprise (Black Lawrence Press, forthcoming 2015). She is also co-editor of The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics (U Akron Press, 2011). Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Green Mountains Review, jubilat, The Laurel Review, and Pleiades, among others. She edits the Akron Series in Poetry at the University of Akron, where she is a Professor of English. Biddinger is the recipient of a 2015 NEA creative writing fellowship in poetry.

Jay Robinson

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jay Robinson is the co-author of The Czar. He teaches at Ashland University and The University of Akron. He’s also the Co-Editor-in-Chief/Reviews Editor for Barn Owl Review and helps edit The Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics. Poetry and prose has appeared in 32 Poems, The Laurel Review, Poetry, Whiskey Island, among others. The Czar, forthcoming in August 2016, is his first book.

BLURBS

As a child, my mother taught me to zigzag Z to avoid getting eaten by an alligator. Mary Biddinger and Jay Robinson employ this technique here: in the clever curve of C around the subject, in the sharp switchback tack of Z for zealous. They commit to wordplay revolution, erasing origins, replacing narrative with wit, sound, and imagery so surprising it feels, by poem’s end, perfectly natural: the thing that waited, haunting, in the swamp. I don’t know how else to explain The Czar, whose unexpected becomes so expectant with meaning. This is a brilliant collection/collaboration.

- Carol Guess, author of Doll Studies: Forensics

This exquisite, feature-length project is the comic jam. But it's no joke. You can thank Mary Biddinger and Jay Robinson later. For now, arm yourself with a few questions: What rules does this Czar follow? Which ones does he break? And just how many ways can you fold a Czar in the first place? Are you ready? The Czar demands your participation. Enter the parlor!
- Matthew Guenette, author of American Busboy

This book is not a book, it’s treatise on empire, a manifest destiny, a pack of wild peasants outside the gate, a mesmerizing tour d’effluvia in its Czar not Czar, throne not throne, overthrown mistresses, Lady Czar is no Czarina, cappuccino foam isn’t foam, revolution was a hoax, naming and renaming, unlearned cursive, unheard flute solo, empire under construction, not New York, not Sacramento, non-tabloids, non-violent non-women. Biddinger and Robinson rebuild our world and take it away piece by piece to show the conviviality of our destruction.
- Elizabeth J. Colen, author of What Weaponry

blacklawrence.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 Brief Reincarnation of a Girl. Sue Goyette. Gaspereau Press. Kentville, Nova Scotia. 2015.

It's not false modesty to claim that Today's book of poetry sometimes feels that our skill set is not sufficiently broad to do justice to some of the great books that come our way. Today's book, The Brief Reincarnation of a Girl by the sublimely talented Sue Goyette, is a case in point.

We've been down the Sue Goyette poetry road before at Today's book of poetry. You might remember we marvelled at Goyette's first book The True Names of Birds (Brick, 1998/2008) and then gushed about Ocean (Gaspereau Press, 2013) because it impressed the bejesus out of us. You can see both of those here:

http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.ca/2013/11/the-true-names-of-birds-susan-goyette.html

http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.ca/2013/06/ocean-sue-goyette.html

In The Brief Reincarnation of a Girl Goyette has suspended the exactness of events to reveal a new kind of truth, one that can only be achieved through poetry.

The girl refused to be afraid when she climbed

on high things. Her mother shaved the legs of the furniture

and, along with some cough syrup, stewed it

with a few of the girl's father's beer caps. The girl spit

a whole parade's worth of bicycle bells back at her

and pranced around in her diaper. The mother sat in the closet,

lit a candle, and located the doctor with binoculars.

The doctor, appearing in a bathrobe, urged

the mother to slap the girl with her slippers then take her

pulse. The girl had begun to growl which was upsetting

the cats. The mother upped the dosage of bottle caps

and added some baby Aspirin. The doctor suggested

more conventional medication, the girl sounded bipolar

and should be on a leash. What they didn't know

was that the girl had collected enough stickers

to reward the universe. She had a blanket and a bear.

She had resolved that when she got up from the floor

that last time, she'd be in another time zone

with better tasting furniture and a door that closed.

...

The mother sat in the closet and trained her binoculars

on the doctor's prescription pad. They were trying their hand

at automatic writing. The doctor wrote Chevrolet

and hubcaps. The mother wrote she's driving me crazy.

The doctor discussed the dosage and they both agreed,

given the century and the 24-hour drugstore, they could treat themselves

to a chocolate bar and maybe a slurpee. The mother wondered

if there was a pill for the minutes before the girl's father

got home. Are the minutes filled with knives or cement?

the doctor wanted to know. Sometimes knives and sometimes

cigarette burns. If the bath was filled, the doctor wanted

to know, would the water be hot or cold? The mother

complained that she didn't have time for a bath because her daughter

often would stand on her dresser and pronounce that she was

a burglar. Was she armed? the doctor wanted to know.

The doctor reminded the mother to put a colander against

her daughter's chest and strain her heartbeats. The mother

wondered if she was qualified to own a colander. They laughed

when they both wrote down parenting with a sad face.

The doctor urged the mother to draw happy faces instead. A whole

page of them and then to swallow four of them a day.

Maybe, the mother said jovially, one day, the father and the girl

just wouldn't come home.

...

Sue Goyette gives us ample warning, the first words we see in The Brief Reincarnation of a Girl after the title page is this prophetic line from E. M. Forster.

"Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!"

Goyette then proceeds to introduce us to the "counter-logical" poem. Sixty-one of them, untitled and unfettered by logic.

At first the reader is a little kilter-stepped by Goyette's template, you don't necessarily catch the ride on the first wave. But of course you continue because once you get your feet wet the tide and the undertow pull you from below to reveal the wonder in these waves.

The narrative in The Brief Reincarnation of a Girl is one sad canter down some pretty desperate streets. Poverty and neglect play starring roles, ignorance plays along, it is one blue, blue ballet.

Poverty was taunting the girl's father's fire. Did he want

a training bra, poverty asked and the father sizzled

in his seat. Order, the judge yelled. Did he want

some panties? The father slumped and the fire

in his crotch flared. Order, the judge yelled and the father

sat up, trying to hide the fire from the judge who had already

warned him about open flames in his courtroom. Poverty

gobbled up the father's shame for its salt. The lawyer

asked the doctor if the girl had exhibited other behaviour

that warranted increasing her dosage from a single pill

to an entire orchestra complete with the several trumpets

she had been given to drown out her own loudness.

She suffered anxiety, the doctor told the jury, as well as rage

and low self-esteem. Objection, the courtroom yelled,

to which the lawyers objected and the judge pounded

on the doctor's prescription pad for order and then called

a recess so he could take a piss and look out at the parking

lot from his office. Often, he'd been described as being

a little Zen.

...

The reader, almost by osmosis, intuitively follows Goyette and her counter-logical discourse all through this complex life and death drama of a young girl let down by all. Parents, doctors, lawyers, the well intentioned and the rest of us could not prevent the ghosting of this girl.

Sometimes there is no safety net at all and people are left to plunge into an abyss that only promises a hard end.

Today's book of poetry was touched by the narrative of these poems, it is sad moving stuff. At the same time we can't help but express our poetry fix joy at the workings of this poet. Sue Goyette writes with such intelligent confidence that the reader always wants more. The Brief Reincarnation of a Girl has all the elements of tragedy but Today's book of poetry can't read Goyette without feeling hope.

The bear carried the ghost of the girl tenderly

in her teeth and ran until walls and verdict were replaced

by trees. She stood the ghost of the girl by the river.

She kept slipping so the bear moved her to a sapling and leaned her

into it. She waited to see if the ghost would slip again

but she stayed upright, squinting at the sun. What is that?

she wanted to know. That's your sister, the bear told her gently.

I drew her wrong, the ghost dismayed. The bear shook her head,

you were close, she said, then concentrated on the task

she'd set out to do. She threw the first fish back.

Too slow, the bear explained. The sapling was carbonating

the story it was giving the ghost with tender leaves that rose

in the telling like bubbles, bursting their green into that place

where her ears would be if the ghost of the girl had ears.

The bear was patient having grown old in the winters she'd spent

with the girl and her reach was slow. The girl had often groomed

the bear and gave her words to speak, then would sing the bear

more words that were lozenges of honey the bear would gulp.

Between them, there wasn't a moment they weren't famished.

...

The bear knew the second before she caught it

that she'd found the right one. She readied herself

for the feel of it, how it might overwhelm her

but once she held the fish it was more

like a homecoming than anything. The bear reveled

in the pure moment of it, its clamour for life.

It felt like this, she told the ghost of the girl

before placing the fish in the pan where the girl's heart

had been. The fish enchanted them by swimming

in protest. The girl glided back into her voice

long enough to say oh. Oh. Love trusted the bear to pick the fish

from the pan then and return it to its river. It would be easy

and proper to say, at this point, that several seasons later,

the tree surprised the bear by flowering; its fruit a succulence

that chimed with her loss a new kind of nourishment.

...

The Brief Reincarnation of a Girl is not so much a book of individual poems and pulling them out of context as Today's book of poetry does here offers them no favours. Taken as a whole The Brief Reincarnation of a Girl has scope and depth and beautiful complexity to spare. It's an elegy and a plea.

Today's book of poetry is convinced that Sue Goyette is simply one of our very best poets.

Today's book of poetry has to say it one more time, Gaspereau Press and those masters Gary Dunfield and Andrew Steeves continue to make the most attractive books of poetry on the planet. This one is a stunner.

Sue Goyette

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sue Goyette has published four collections of poetry, The True Names of Birds, Undone, Outskirts, and Ocean, which was a finalist for the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize. She also published a novel, Lures, in 2002. She has won the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, the Atlantic Poetry Prize, the CBC Literary Prize for Poetry, the Earle Birney Prize and the Bliss Carman Award. Goyette lives in Halifax where she teaches creative writing at Dalhousie University.

gaspereau.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"

Metanoia - Sharon McCartney (Biblioasis)

To Greet Yourself Arriving - Michael Fraser (Tightrope Books)

Dear, Sincerely - David Hernandez (University of Pittsburgh Press)

Tancho - J. David Cummings (The Ashland Poetry Press)

Absolute Solitude - Dulce Maria Loynaz (Archipelago Books)

Ceremony of Touching - Karen Shklanka (Coteau Books)

Necessary Acts - Peter Huggins (River City Publishing)

Ex-Ville - Rhona McAdam (Oolichan Books)

roly poly/bicho bola - Victoria Estol (Toad Press)

The Blue Hour - Jennifer Whitaker (University of Wisconsin Press)

Take This Stallion - Anais Duplan (Brooklyn Arts Press)

The Largeness of Rescue - Eva Tihanyi (Inanna Publications)

A Dog's Life - Adam Scheffler (Jacar Press)

Mammoth - Larissa Andrusyshyn (Punchy Poetry/DC Books)

Mirror Image - Len Gasparini (Guernica Editions)

Off-Leash - Dorothy Mahoney (Palimpsest Press)

Tell - poems for a girlhood - Soraya Peerbaye (Pedlar Press)

Caribou Run - Richard Kelly Kemick (Icehouse Poetry - Gooselane Editions)

The Czar - Mary Biddinger & Jay Robinson (Black Lawrence Press)

The Brief Reincarnation of a Girl - Sue Goyette (Gaspereau Press)