Today's Book of Poetry

Today's book of poetry:
Between Lives. Nilofar Shidmehr. Oolichan Books. Fernie, British Columbia. 2014.

Women are marching all over the world today and Today's book of poetry salutes each and every one of them.

Nilofar Shidmehr is an Iranian-Canadian poet with a considerable voice to add to the choir.

Between Lives a second book of poetry from Nilofar Shidmehr could find purchase on any number of different poetry shelves. This book could easily be considered a book of feminist poetry and thoroughly at home in Women's Studies, just as easily Between Lives could be on a Diaspora Poets shelf.

Nilofar Shidmehr seems fearless when she reveals the true life of women in the Iran of her youth. Shidmehr's poems are heavy with a flaming authenticity, crystal clear in focus and heartbreaking when you feel the crippling burden of gender.

Alive

Under the knife blade

my mother's broken hand in a sling,

purple peels fall

over the face of the counter.

Her swollen cheek is marked

by a bruise, the shape of an eggplant,.

She tilts over to check if the meat

is soft. The oil leaps up, scalds.

She pulls back, leans on a crutch hidden

under the torn wing of her white chador.

I see the scratches on her neck

as she turns her head. The wooden spatula

slips from her fingers onto the floor.

She bends to pick it up, but I reach out first,

snap up the spatula, flinging it into the basin.

Do you know who are you cooking for?

I yell at my mother, shoving her aside,

taking her place at the stove.

He loves his Baademjaan, deep-fried,

she whispers, with tears in her charcoal eyes.

The stew simmers slowly.

But I turn my head away and hold

onto the image from the week past

swirling around, again, in my head --

Feet tangled in the hem of her chador;

my father, leaning over the banister,

slips his hands back in his pockets,

watching as she rolls down the stairs, still alive.

...

Shidmehr brings us moments of gentle humour, uninhibited passion and matrimonial bliss as well as some of the other kind. But in Between Lives the real focus is elsewhere. Between Lives opens up the tribulations of giving up your culture, your home, your past, the place of your birth and jumping into an entirely different life in another land. We are reminded that the cultural shock and toll is only a small part of the immigrant/refugee story. Most of us will never experience that sort of isolation, that split from family, history and those left behind.

Make no mistake, Today's book of poetry was blown away time and time again by the candor in Nilofar Shidmehr's remarkable poems. Shidmehr reveals more than we expect and to marvelous effect, she goes beyond lifting the veil, we get a look beyond the proverbial chador and right into the mind's eye of a woman facing enormous struggles who is both observant and outraged.

Racing Back to the Time When My Daughter Was Born

I am at the gym on Life Fitness,

my daughter's arrival from Iran

only six days away --

my girl who arrived

in this world twenty-three years ago.

When I start exercising, my heart

rate is at 100: the same as

a hundred-year-old's

working to her maximum capacity.

On the chart, I look at the rate

for young hearts like my Saaghar's: 160.

And then I think about my own heart,

about how it's going to race

the moment when Saaghar will emerge

from Customs -- dragging a bag

and looking for the woman

from who she had emerged --

an umbilical cord dragging

behind her -- a cord

that had to be cut

for her life to go on.

I continue to go on running

on Life Fitness and my heart beat

picks up, echoing in my mind

hers from more than two decades ago,

coming through the stethoscope at my gynecologist's:

it sounded as if I had a horse inside me,

galloping full force ahead in my veins,

the rhythm of her hooves ringing

in the curves of my skin.

That sound sewed me to Saaghar,

despite an unwanted pregnancy

because of a slight displacement

of the diaphragm my gynecologist had placed

one day after our wedding -- the same trusted woman

gynecologists who had also confirmed

the existence of a hymen without which

there could be no marriage.

Another doctor, however,

Mr. Aaryaanpour, had arrived at the delivery room

after ten hours of excruciating pain,

because he had decided to ignore

nine phone calls from the head-midwife, begging him

to leave the gambling party he was at

and immediately attend to his patient

whose cervix was not opening enough

for the baby to come out.

He was the one who cut me open

and delivered that beating heart inside me,

who then transformed to a bruised

black-haired baby.

My husband had forced me to change

that once-trusted-woman-gynecologist

in the seventh month, because she had suggested a C-section,

and gave her professional opinion

that I was not a good candidate for natural delivery.

My sister-in-law, Ashraf, had insisted

that a woman who did not experience pain

at childbirth could not be a good mother.

Her words became the seeds

of a small dispute which grew

larger every day and after nine months

was delivered in the shape of a premature divorce.

Ashraf then said that a bad mother

is not entitled to the custody

of her brother's child and had to, without delay,

be separated from the newborn.

From my husband's mouth, her words

were thrown at me like stones.

The blows were so severe that I cannot

even remember how with my remaining

strength, I managed to pull myself out from that hold

of pain and escape, so today, on February 13, 2013,

more than twenty years later,

I am in Vancouver on Life Fitness

running again with all my strength

to get me heart beat closer

to my daughter's: to 160.

The chart on the machine informs me

that the more people age, the more

their heart rate and the age match up:

this is good news for me, I'd imagine,

my daughter's heart and mine

perhaps are closer now compared

to the time she was yet undelivered--

at that time no matter how much my heart

beat fast, it could not even get close

to the dust rising from the hooves

of that horse that I imagined

was inside me, galloping forward.

But now that there is a hope, an opportunity,

an opening, I smile at my pulsating

image in the glass;

now that her heart has slowed down

and mine is speeding up;

now that she is about to arrive

at the place where I live.

Still I have to run faster

our hearts are twenty points apart --

I have to run faster

even though I have raced

for many years to meet

the moment when she will arrive

again, like a newborn, in my arms.

...

This morning's read was another spirited adventure. I had called our researcher Otis into the office this morning to translate the few lines of Farsi in Shidmehr's text. It's good to have a cat like Otis on staff, he speaks Farsi, Italian, Russian, at least one kind of Chinese but I can't remember if it is Mandarin or Cantonese, French and so on. Otis informed me this morning that he was heading to Sicily for a couple of months and he was doing it Wednesday. Today's book of poetry will be sad to see him go and jealous for his adventure.

More importantly Otis was able to impart some context on Iran and knowing what Otis knows it was reassuring when he sized up his reading of Between Lives and declared that Shidmehr was not only the real deal in every way but a very brave real deal. Today's book of poetry had no doubts but it is always nice to get things confirmed by a pro.

This Drunken Russian Man Intends on Peeing,

opens his fly,

bravely and pulls

his small change out

as if yanking something as precious

as an American Dollar.

Facing a wall as high as Tsarist Russia

before Communism, he releases himself,

humming an old heroic song,

while fissures on the wall,

now fresh and satiated, sing along

to a melody that scores

the sudden collapse of the Tsardom.

Shaken, I stand there too,

as I eye the man,

and wish I could be like him--

fly foolish

before everything falls apart,

singing along,

with, I, too, could display

my crack so openly.

...

Today's book of poetry marvelled at how Shidmehr was able to handle the difficult elephants in her complicated life with such charm and aplomb. Shidmehr, as a woman, as a feminist or as an immigrant, does not need the approval of men like me. But men like me sure hope the rest of you get a chance to read Between Lives. Dignity comes at a mighty stiff price for some people. Nilofar Shidmehr has turned hers into poetry that is smart and confident, she has turned it into hope.

Nilofar Shidmehr

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nilofar Shidmehr is an Iranian-Canadian poet, writer and a scholar of arts-based qualitative research focused on poetic inquiry. Her first book of poetry in English Shirin and Salt Man was nominated for a BC Book Prize in 2009 and her first book of poetry in Farsi Two Nilofars: Before and After Migration has received worldwide recognition among the expatriate Iranian community. Nilofar is a cultural and educational activist and a part of the Iranian women’s movement.

Nilofar earned a PhD in education and an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia. Her next scholarly project is to investigate how the lyrical and performative modes of inquiry can be included in discourse analysis, literary criticism, and critical reading and writing practices to integrate and advance literacy. Her next creative project is to write a collection of short stories about the lives of Iranians in Iran and Canada. She lives in Yaletown with her husband.

BLURBS

"The voice of Nilofar Shidmehr's poetry moves restlessly between two imagined lives: one, a life rooted in the past and in Iran, a life of strict gendered expectations but also of continuity and familiarity; the other, a life in Canada, relatively uncompromised by gender segregation, but yet still troubled by the pain of exile and others' prejudice. These poems speak plainly of mothers, of daughters, of lovers, but always beneath each simple story is the pulse of an intelligent, sensuous desire. These poems are feminist, moist, fragrant! Each word bursts, ripe in the mouth, like pomegranate."
- Sonnet L'Abbé (Canadian Poet and Critic, Winner of Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award, 2000)

"In this stirring collection Between Lives, Shidmehr's direct voice and unflinching gaze put her among such great activist poets as Martin Espada, Dionne Brand, and Pablo Neruda. With a clear gaze and arresting imagery. Shidmeher brings to light the violence and injustice of women's lives in Iran and in the diaspora. Fully wrought and deeply personal, this is a necessary book by an accomplished writer.
~Elizabeth Bachinsky, nominee for Governor General's Award for English-language poetry

"These poems are the untold stories of contemporary Persian women's lives, lives portrayed with intimacy and lyricism, despite their subjugation. These are poetics meditations that only a poet simultaneously intimate with a place, and exiled from it, can offer. In this book, men and women are like 'fire and cotton,' and must be kept apart; they are 'flammable with the slightest spark.' Nilofer Shidmehr's poems burn with a fierce, haunting fire.

- Rachel Rose, Winner, Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry 2013

oolichan.com

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Today's book of poetry:
Conditionals. Pete Gibbon. bird, buried | press. Peterborough, Ontario. 2016.

Conditionals really only suffers from one minor flaw - it is not long enough. Today's book of poetry was up for more of this smart stuff. Today's book of poetry felt strangely at home in Pete Gibbon world even though I've never been to Korea or Australia. We liked every poem in this too short collection from bird, buried | press.

Gibbon runs us through his adventures working and travelling abroad, laments relationships and pines for his next sip. The important thing is that these narrative and somewhat confessional poems work. You feel an easy connection to these poems, Gibbon allows for easy access.

Crust Of Wanderlust

Sunglasses were invented for years like these.

Trying to be Aussie, walk to beach barefoot;

by the end, a bloody heel.

In New South Wales most ideas for poems are nightmares. Travel stories make

terrible poetry; expats, terrible love.

As a stagehand I learn shoptalk, but never use it.

Packing trucks American is half-full.

No that Yanks are lazy, but semis, like anything else in Australia, are larger.

After New South Wales, I wash the sunlight off my feet. When you pack road cases

wheels-to-god they mean bottoms up.

Salt water, sunscreen. Never feeling clean. Making sure your knapsack is shut.

What makes me miss my friends the most: sitting on a patio, drinking beer.

And they, back home, doing the same.

...

Pete Gibbon is closely associated with a small cadre of young poets that at one time all resided in Ottawa. They've scattered but the group included Justin Million, Jeff Blackman, Cameron Anstee, Bardia Sinaee & Ben Ladouceur among others. Today's book of poetry is convinced that future conversations about poetry in Canada will include a number of these names.

And of this group Gibbon may be the most easily accessible. His poems are unadorned and entertaining, non-sequined but rock solid.

Seoul

The young women are closing curtains.

Senior couples utter nonsense.

Ajoshis are sore balls

smoking cigarettes

long & thin.

Six foot tall folk statues of penises with penises

for arms, penis arms with penises... all these penises

guard old Seoul.

Statistics disclose 41 Koreans kills themselves

every day. Parents mourn

their country's dwindling birth rate.

Vagabondage (n): Wanderlust's tired

crippled cousin.

Maybe I've become complacent

or my shoes have almost worn out.

Codes lapse

in the time it takes to replace buildings

or print maps.

Maybe things are changing in Korea

but I've only lived in Seoul.

...

Our morning reading included readings from Pete Gibbon's dandy little Apt. 9 Press chapbook Eating Thistles (2010). Milo, our head tech, has been going to the stacks and bringing back whatever he can find on the poet of the day. So this morning when Milo came into the office with Gibbon's earlier work Today's book of poetry was tickled. There is nothing as helpful as perspective.

Today's book of poetry is convinced these two chapbooks are warning shots across the bow of bigger things to come.

Today's book of poetry also wanted to comment briefly about bird, buried | press, in good old Peterborough. Today's book of poetry grew up in Peterborough, mostly, and has never seen a Peterborough chapbook that looked quite this good. If this is the standard bird, buried | press intends to maintain it means Peterborough finally has a small press of distinction.

Conditionals

if I am aged a full 30 years

why do I get sad on days off & cry watching The Avengers

if a sci-fi actor watches their own movies

why don't they go mad from the dreams

if my parents are hiding grant rejections from us when we visit

are they leaving drafts of their wedding speech around, including an acrostic

of your name

if I refer to you as my forever-person

am I being politically correct

or am I pretty sure we'll be together my whole life

did I use "pretty sure"

because I'm scared to death

or I know life is mutable

if I swallowed vinegar

would I be clean inside & never drink again

if we have the same rash

can I scratch yours & be satisfied?

...

Today's book of poetry is convinced that Gibbon has a big book or two in his future. Conditionals should confirm that for anyone lucky enough to get their hands on a copy.

Pete Gibbon

(with Dingo)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Pete Gibbon is a Canadian poet. His last chapbook, Eating Thistles was published by Apt. 9 Press (Ottawa) 1n 2010. Since 2010, he has lived in South Korea, Australia and Toronto. He is also the author of an ongoing limited series of graphic fiction about the life of Canadian author Marian Engel with friend/poet/illustrator Tanya Decarie.

https://birdburiedpress.wordpress.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:
Immortality. Alan Feldman. University of Wisconsin Press. Madison, Wisconsin. 2015.
Winner of the Four Lakes Prize in Poetry

Alan Feldman reads like the gentlest of men but that doesn't stop him from taking you to the deep end of the pool. Immortality is an emotional assault without aggression or violence.

Alan Feldman reads like the wisest of men. These poems have that uncanny warmth you feel around a stranger whom you know is going to become a friend.

Alan Feldman reads like a poet bursting at the seams with loving reason and even seasoned hope.

The Afterlife

There's a lot of light in her apartment,

falling on the rented hospital bed.

I've been told the dying like to be held,

so, though we're just friends, I make myself

hold her hand, as if the conversation is final,

matters more than others, though most have mattered.

She's seen a couple of rabbis, who were helpful.

It seems there are Jewish angels. (Why argue?)

And she likes the story I brought her,

"The Death of Ivan Ilych," how before the end

he learns so much nobody knows about,

except the reader.

"So many faces," she says of the people who came

for the songfest yesterday evening, over a hundred

crowded into this little place. "Each face a flower.

Each face..." and here she pauses

(the medicines are affecting her word retrieval?)

"so full of memories."

It all makes a strange image in my head:

faces that aren't faces, but wide open,

as if she's discovering that she's lived

everything they have -- centuries

more than she thought.

"Our life in others," I remind her,

citing Pasternak, "that is our immortality."

But she knows that doesn't go far enough.

I'm glad she's thinking of her own afterlife,

since not being alive is, apparently, unthinkable

on the brink of it happening, a kind of shallowness

to imagine it's merely like going to sleep,

though lately her dreams have been so vivid:

an all-night argument with her sister about a dog,

over what color it should be, white or black.

Outside the weather appears to be changeable,

I'm dying to go out there, on the small terrace.

"Go out on the terrace," she says, "before you leave.

The view is wonderful."

...

Reading Immortality reminds Today's book of poetry of what it is we truly love about poetry. We like to be moved by words. We like our heart to pound in our chest when we read something we have just discovered but know to be true.

These smart, smart poems avoid any melodrama or fuss, emotional or otherwise, with intelligent humour and a sensitive dash of pathos. Whatever the emotional temperature called for, Feldman knows how to dial it in.

Feldman starts his conversation with the reader with his rejection of a suggested mantra, a plea from a friend to "drop the personal." Today's book of poetry is familiar with that strident battle cry and is pleased to report that Feldman went the other way.

These are deeply personal poems full of universal good intent, maybe even a moral imperative. Today's book of poetry is never sure of anything but we're pretty certain about Feldman's Immortality.

Watch Battery

Who knows if my father ever thought

what Montaigne's father did: That every city

should have a place where people in need

could go to meet. How somewhere

a man is starving, and another with a surplus

would grieve if he only knew, and offer the man

a modest but reasonable living. That giving man

could have been my father. Not grieving, perhaps,

but regretful he couldn't be of more help --

a man you could trust to fix things.

Like the man who helped the watchmaker

fix my watch. How, when he couldn't decide

how to loosen the clasp that holds in the battery,

itself no bigger than a small coin,

without breaking it, he turned to someone

more experienced -- a Dutchman, actually,

who seemed happy to demonstrate this very skill,

and upload it to YouTube. Demonstrate it

with a camera in his lap, so we could see his two hands

familiarly, competently, and rapidly

opening the watch to replace the battery,

the way a father would automatically retie his son's shoes.

And there was also his calm voice with its accent,

like the woodcarver's in Pinnocchio,

telling the confused and despairing who were ready

to lose patience and snap the band holding the battery

and ruin the watch -- the watch that could keep running --

how to prolong its life by exercising patience,

the very quality my dad had in abundance,

that quality I always loved him for, of solving the problem

without getting exasperated. Though it's unfair

he didn't have parents like that himself.

Or that -- when the amount of pain rose to be greater

than any pleasure he'd be able to feel --

the little watch-sized defibrillator near his heart

wouldn't simply stop, and let him go.

...

Feldman's Immortality has travel poems for those that need to go somewhere and political poems for people who need to politicize. There's a great kick at Walter Cronkite's can in a sailboat poem tart as the lemon and gin in a sunset cocktail.

This morning's reading was attended by our bon ami Alexandre whose enthusiasm and energy gave us all a lift. Immortality read like the best parts of a story you've been waiting to hear. Odin, our quiet right hand man, made it clear he liked these poems and then he gave the room a solid once over, looked everyone in the eye. Kathryn and Milo both read with warmth and grace, just like the poems asked for.

In November

When my daughter calls

and I can hear her baby

crying in the back seat

and she asks, "Dad, would you mind if I stop by

for a quick diaper change and feeding?" --

I'm so glad I picked up the phone,

glad I hadn't set off on my walk,

and quite soon I see her car rolling into the driveway,

and the baby is stretching open her little mouth

and wailing, as babies do --

so enraged not to be able to speak,

not even to be able to think this or that is wrong

except that the whole universe is wrong.

And when they're settled in the little bedroom off the kitchen,

and the baby is suckling noisily,

and then, contented once more,

rolling both eyes, not always in the same direction --

mother and baby in the bedroom

where my daughter herself was once diapered and fed --

I feel so thankful for never having strayed very far

into the wide world, never having served

in the foreign wars of my time, and grief for fathers

who do, the ones swaddled in flags --

maybe because yesterday was Veterans Day,

and though she says she's never done this before,

my daughter tells me she called up a soldier's family she knew

just to say she'd been thinking of them, just hoping

the war we have now will end soon.

And the thin November light is straining through the window curtains

we've never changed,

and I feel thankful for my years right here in this house

the way I imagine a tree might feel thankful

if it were given an opportunity to roam around the world--

how it might say, "So good of you, but no thank you,

where would the birds be without me here? --

the ones that fly back unpredictably

to perch in my thinning hair,

this and every November."

...

Ronald Wallace and the University of Wisconsin Press consistently send Today's book of poetry crackerjack fare. Alan Feldman is a new discovery for Today's book of poetry and already we are a devoted admirer.

Alan Feldman

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alan Feldman is the author of several collections of poetry, including Immortality (2015), winner of the Four Lakes Prize; A Sail to Great Island (2004), winner of Pollak Prize for Poetry; and The Happy Genius (1978), winner of the annual George Elliston Book Award for the best collection published by a small, U.S. non-profit press. His work has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, and Kenyon Review, among many other magazines, and included in The Best American Poetry anthology in 2001 and 2011. Feldman's recent work appears in Hanging Loose, Cimarron Review, upstreet, Southern Review, Yale Review, Salamander, Southwest Review, Cincinnati Review, Catamaran, Worcester Review, and online in Boston Poetry Magazine and Cortland Review. His poem "A Man and A Woman" was featured in Tony Hoagland's 2013 article for Harper's, "Twenty Little Poems That Could Save America."

Feldman was a professor and chair of English at Framingham State University, and for 22 years taught the advanced creative writing class at Harvard University's Radcliffe Seminars. He offers free, drop-in poetry workshops at the Framingham (MA) public library near his home, and in the summer at the Wellfleet library.

BLURBS

“Alan Feldman is our greatest American poet of the household and family, as a loving, growing, struggling, and essential institution. He manifests the kind of love we rarely see in our poetry, and this familial love pours into the world around him. I am personally thankful every time I read an Alan Feldman poem, and Immortality, the book you are holding in your hands right now, makes us understand that immortality lies all about us, in everything we experience as a human being.”
— Bill Zavatsky, author of Where X Marks the Spot

“A richly engaged, near flawless collection. Like those magic mineral waters pumped from deep in the earth, Feldman’s poems can cure emotional arthritis and ventilate the soul. Better poems than these cannot be written in this confiding, intelligent humanist mode.”
— Tony Hoagland, author of Twenty Poems That Could Save America and Sweet Ruin

“These poems enact with grace and intelligence the process by which one comes to possess the life one is actually living. This is an enlarging journey that no reader of poetry will want to miss, offering the pleasures of discovery every step of the way.”
— Carl Dennis, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Practical Gods

“Alan Feldman’s poems offer the companionship of a witty, thoughtful, sometimes bewildered friend testing his life in language; telling it all. This is a heartening, deeply satisfying collection from a seasoned poet at the top of his game.”
— Linda V. Bamber, author of Taking What I Like

Alan Feldman

reading In November

Video: Nan Hass Feldman

uwpress.wisc.edu

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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:
Resisting Arrest, poems to stretch the sky. Edited by Tony Medina. Jacar Press. Durham, North Carolina. 2016.

The anthology Resisting Arrest, poems to stretch the sky is not Black Lives Matter but Today's book of poetry is convinced it may be the most authentic volume that voices the same concerns. The last thing in the world Today's book of poetry wants to do is to 60-year-old-white-mansplain the races issues of the day so I will try to tell you about why these poems matter.

Sometimes the truth is a hard read but these poems propel the reader into a small part of the reality over 40,000,000 Black Americans, over 1,000,000 Black Canadians face daily, systemic racism.

Resisting Arrest reads like poetry as indictment of a broken society.

How We Could Have Lived or Died This Way

Not songs of loyalty alone are these,

But songs of insurrection also,

For I am the sworn poet of every dauntless rebel the world over.

Walt Whitman

I see the dark-skinned bodies falling in the street as their ancestors fell

before the whip and steel, the last blood pooling, the last breath spitting.

I see the immigrant street vendor flashing his wallet to the cops,

shot so many times there are bullet holes in the soles of his feet.

I see the deaf woodcarver and his pocketknife, crossing the street

in front of a cop who yells, then fires. I see the drug raid, the wrong

door kicked in, the minister's heart seizing up. I see the man hawking

a fistful of cigarettes, the cop's chokehold that makes his wheezing

lungs stop wheezing forever. I am in the crowd, at the window,

kneeling beside the body left on the asphalt for hours, covered in a sheet.

I see the suicides: the conga player handcuffed for drumming on the subway,

hanged in the jail cell with his hands cuffed behind him; the suspect leaking

blood from his chest in the back seat of the squad car; the 300-pound boy

said to stampede barehanded into the bullets drilling his forehead.

I see the coroner nodding, the words he types in his report burrowing

into the skin like more bullets. I see the government investigations stacking,

words buzzing on the page, then suffocated as bees suffocate in a jar. I see

the next Black man, fleeing as the fugitive slave once fled the slave-catcher,

shot in the back for a broken tail light. I see the cop handcuff the corpse.

I see the rebels marching, hands upraised before the riot squads,

face in bandannas against the tear gas, and I walk beside them unseen.

I see the poets, who will write the songs of insurrection generations unborn

will read or hear a century from now, words that make them wonder

how we could have lived or died this way, how the descendants of slaves

still fled and the descendants of slave-catchers still shot them, how we awoke

every morning without the blood of the dead sweating from every pore.

- Martin Espada

...

Today's book of poetry fears my lack of proper perspective from the ivory tower of my entitlement but two years ago I did a reading in Bryn Mawr, just outside of Philadelphia, with Lamont B. Steptoe. Lamont is a Vietnam veteran, a poet, publisher, journalist and so on, his books include Kitchens of the Master (Iniquity Press/Vendetta Books) and Uncle's South Sea China Blue Nightmare (Plan B Press, 2013). I can't quote from our conversation that evening except to say that it was a privilege to meet the man. I was able to find the following quote from Lamont during an interview he did with Jordan Green for the American Poets Interview Series:

"I'm an endangered species in American society. I feel like a Jew in Berlin

in 1939. I grew up in the 50's when there was hope, when people thought

that with integration we would overcome segregation, that integration

would solve the problem. But that's not what happened."

How to Not Get Killed by the NYPD.

When you see the pitch-perfect black 4-door shaded windows roll

up on you, don't grip your wheel. Casually look over your shoulder

as a shaded window slips down. Don't think drive-by. Don't remember

history. It's only the police. Keep your hands on the wheel. In plain

view. It's the police. Keep your hands on the wheel. The light will turn

in your favor. Don't drive off. Keep your hands on the wheel. Wait,

with your left foot pressed hard on the clutch, right foot pressed lightly

on the brake. Hands on the wheel. Raise an eyebrow when the police

officer raises a question: what's the speed limit in New York City? Note:

the correct answer is 30, no matter the street, no matter the avenue.,

no matter the faster moving highway traffic, the answer is 30 30.

Don't ask him to clarify. Don't smile. You are anxious. You will smile.

Don't explain when asked why you're smiling. Don't explain

your explanation when asked why you're explaining. Don't say:

we're blocking the road. Don't say: we're triple-parked.

Don't ask them to clarify the infraction. You are the infraction.

Don't remove your hands for the wheel. Accept

that you were pulled over. Accept the fact of the two fingers patting

the badge. Accept the hostile forehead, the condescension of the mouth.

Accept the fact of the wheel, troubling your hands. Accept their power.

Nod.

when they repeat: we could give you a summons. Over & over & over

they will repeat this. Summons. Summons. Summons. We could

give you --.

The light will turn yellow. Red. Don't read the lights as a sign. The light

will turn green again. Don't let them see your jaw set in irritation. Accept

their power. Don't remember the history of police brutality in

New York. Keep.

your hands in plain view. They shoot you in New York. 41 times.

4 times. In your grandmother's bathroom, they will shoot you. In front

of your house, they will call you burglar and shoot you. Don't remember

any of this. Don't ask them questions. Don't nod your head. Keep

Your hands

on the wheel. Don't smile. Don't smile. Don't smile. Keep your hands

on the wheel. There is a right answer to their questions: yes, yes, yes, yes,

yes, yes, yes, you have the power, you have the power, you have the

power, you

have -- Keep your hands on the wheel. Drive off before they arrest you

for sitting too long at a green light. Avoid looking in your rearview

mirror.

They will not drive off before you. They will haunt you in the daylight.

In their smoke-black 4-door (illegally) tinted windows, they mean

to haunt.

- Metta Sáma

...

Resisting Arrest is hot to the touch and hard to read. There is no arguing the unassailable truths in these poems, they shower down like a hard rain. These poems are gut-punch certain and so damned sad that you want to turn back time.

Editor Tony Medina has done an extraordinary thing here, he has brought articulate and impassioned reason and wrapped it in "a terrible beauty", Medina has amassed "Hearts with one purpose alone."

Red Summer, 2015

1
The year
is 2015
Nine holy martyrs are shot
by a man with a scheme
He was nurtured and
weaned on
a textbook of lies
in which slavers and
killers reigned
supreme
Jefferson Davis
Nathan Bedford Forrest
and Robert E. Lee.

2
The devil entered
Vesey's church
disguised as a youth
But the children of god
recognized a hoof
could smell his soot
but clung to their vow
not to give strangers
the sinner's boot

3
They invited him in
to join them in prayer
and so powerful was their
prayer with its African roots
after Daniel Roof completed
his assignment from hell
He said their prayer
almost got to me
almost turned me
said he
Almost bought
the devil to the mourner's
bench
His mind full of bile
he came to defile
A mother played dead
in the blood of her child.

4
a child was shot down
while holding a toy
The police asked questions
but nobody was blamed
The stars in his eyes went
dim in the day
he lay on the pavement
where children played games

5
A man was shot in the
back
while running away
The shooter took aim
as though he were game
the demons are partying
with their buddies, the
fiends, and having a good
time
drinking bad whiskey
and drinking bad wine

6
Red Summer
the year is
2015
For making ends meet
by selling cigs loose
or making a lane change
they will give you the noose
His neck was crushed
in the back of a van
he got "the wild ride"
he could breathe no more
They found her dead on
the jailhouse floor
A grand jury looked
and issued a tome
They blessed the killers
and allowed them to roam.
Go and kill again the
suburbs said,
we got
your back when you shoot
a black in the back

7
When Dorsey got news
that both wife and child were
dead
that's our mood
in this summer of dread
The spirit was his guide
when he wrote that great song
but who is the god
who will take our hand
and who is the god
who will lead us on?

8
"Don't you get weary"
Martin said when he
spoke of his dream
His words have kept us
from drowning in screams
in this bloody summer
of 2015
Where killers and murderers
reign supreme and
demons are partying with their
buddies the fiends, and having
a good time
drinking cheap whiskey
and drinking Ripple

9
You brought down the flag
you all joined hands and
cried
but you still have
highways and buildings
honoring those who
committed high crimes
Who didn't want people to
be free
Jefferson Davis
Nathan Bedford Forrest
and Robert E. Lee.

- Ishmael Reed

...

Today's morning read was a somber and serious affair. Sometimes all you have to offer, as a reader, is respect. We read the poems in Resisting Arrest, poems to stretch the sky and then Kathryn, our Jr. Editor, suggested that as measure of that respect we include all of the poets from the anthology in today's blog.

Lamont B. Steptoe does not appear in this blog but we met him through our great friend Frank "Chui" Fitzgerald and thought our Philadelphia conversation added some perspective. Today's book of poetry takes our hat off to Lamont.

Here are the voices you'll get to hear in Resisting Arrest:

Jane Alberdeston Coralin
Abdul Ali
Lauren K. Alleyne
T.J. Anderson III
Jabari Asim
b: william bearhart
Zeina Hashem Beck
Tara Betts
Roger Bonair-Agard
Derrick Weston Brown
Jericho Brown
Mahogany L. Browne
Ana Castillo
Ching-In Chen
James Cherry
Kwame Dawes
Joel Dias-Porter
LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs
Mark Doty
Michell L.H. Douglas
Rita Dove
Cornelius Eady
Kelly Norman Ellis
Martin Espada
Adam Falkner
Malcolm Friend
Ross Gay
Maria Mazziotti Gillan
Brian Gilmore
Keith Gilyard
Veronica Golos
Jaki Shelton Green
Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Minal Hajratwala
Joy Harjo
Niki Herd
Everett Hoagland
Rashidah Ismaili
Esther Iverem
Reuben Jackson
Patricia Spears Jones
Quincy Scott Jones
Allison Joseph
Douglas Kearney
Ruth Ellen Kocher
Yusef Komunyakaa
Nile Lansana
Raina J. Leon
Kenji C. Liu
Haki R. Madhubuti
devorah major
Jamaal May
Tony Medina
Kamilah Aisha Moon
Thylias Moss
Ricardo Nazario y Colon
Marilyn Nelson
Rae Paris
Boa Phi
Khadijah Queen
Camille Rankine
Ishmael Reed
Tennessee Reed
Kim Roberts
Metta Sama
Sonia Sanchez
Jon Sands
Danny Simmons
Marilyn Singer
giovanni singleton
Lynne Thompson
Venus Thrah
Askia M. Toure'
Quincy Troupe
Frank X Walker
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
Afaa Michael Weaver
Marvin K. White
Phillip B. Williams
L. Lamar Wilson

This choir of poets will bring down the house. Their harmonies so beautiful and complex you can almost stop believing that they are screaming for their lives.

BLACK LIVES MATTER. Damned right they do.

Jacar Press may have produced the most important book of poetry you'll see this year.

...

jacarpress.com

546

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:
Passport. Angela Hibbs. DC Books. New Writer's Series. Montreal, Quebec. 2006.

Today's book of poetry has been out of the office for the last few days attending to family business in Peterborough. Had we known then what we know now we could have dropped in on Angela Hibbs. Peterborough is quickly getting a reputation as a place where poets are setting up shop.

Passport was published ten years ago but the poetry hasn't aged a day. Today's book of poetry is embarrassed to admit that Passport is our introduction to Hibbs, and it has only recently come to our attention.

Passport is one hell of a debut book of poetry. I was totally committed after reading the first poem. The second poem was better than the first, the third poem better than the second. That went on for several sensational pages. This woman can burn.

Hibbs does exactly what I want to see, she grabs you by the scruff of the neck and says "Here, eat this!" It's not arrogance when every damned poem backs it up. This book is a full course meal.

New Body

For Reuben

I covet my time.

I unplug

the phone.

Arrange the pink pillows

artfully on couch and bed,

cashmere sweater

& velvet

panties,

paint toenails red,

check spine visibility

in the wall mirror,

stare at the digital time display,

stand on feet

then head,

feel the blood

move. I am a Chevette

in a Cadillac body; I

stumble around

a hotel suite

in a town where I have

an apartment; I

sip vodka through ice.

Nobody impresses me.

I draw straight lines

with magazine spines

to guide me.

There is a lot to be done

by Wednesday.

The days are not long

enough for all I have

to say to myself.

...

Hibbs employs a Newfoundland sensibility of humorous certainty as she explores the tension wires on which we suspend our relationships. This is compelling and clever stuff driven by characters that are as bold as brass.

Dear Maria Callas,

Born Kalogeropoulos

With your birth name I invoke you.

Listening to you sing La mamma morta,

the recording sounds

like it always has.

Your mother said she wouldn't

give you the lice off her head.

With a note you could break

all the windows in the hall.

You could throb your heart

at a frequency that would explode mine,

like glass.

Though it is not.

...

This morning's read had some serious spirit to it. Kathryn, our Jr. Editor, felt a particular connections to Hibbs and proceeded to run the show. Kathryn gave each poem a quick silent read and then told us which of us was to read that poem. It was an office first and it worked.

We can thank Hibbs for that. Hibbs poems roll off of the page, roll off of your tongue, run roughshod given half a chance.

Egyptology

A discreet incision near the hipbone,

for evisceration, replacing

only the dehydrated heart; they liquefied

the brain with palm wine, poured it out.

Unearthed, a mummy's skin,

slightly orange

perfectly intact.

My mother announces

cremation is not for her; she speaks

now for a time when she won't.

She says she may need her body

in the afterlife.

I put dibs on her birthstone ring.

When my uncle Thom died

the mortician put so much make-up

on him, he left this life a stranger.

I thought we were in the wrong room,

I wiped some of the paint off

with a Kleenex; he was perfumed.

I must mummify my mother:

touch each organ.

Palm wine to wash the stomach cavity,

aromatic plants to dry,

fill with myrrh or perfumed sawdust. Carefully

replace her heart.

...

Angela Hibbs first book is a highly polished, fully achieved, emotional corkscrew. These intelligent poems crack the whip.

Since publishing Passport in 2006 Hibbs has published Wanton (Insomniac Press, 2010) and Sin Eater (ARP Books, 2014). Passport is sterling stuff, Today's book of poetry can only imagine the other two are killers.

Angela Hibbs

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Angela Hibbs is the author of three poetry collections, Passport (DC Books, 2006) Wanton (Insomniac Press, 2009) and Sin Eater (ARP Books, 2014). She holds a MA creative writing from Concordia University. Her work appeared in the Poetry Is Public Is Poetry installation at the Toronto Reference Library. She was awarded the 2010 Joseph S. Stauffer Prize.

BLURB

"In this auspicious debut collection, Angela Hibbs writes with tender insight and passionate care. These are poems which incant the sensuous particulars of place and, proceeding with the sensibility

that poetry is always for real, insist upon boring through walls and, then, beneath the skin."

- David McGimpsey

Angela Hibbs

The Hearthside Hearings Present: Angela Hibbs July 2010 pt1

video: viporinatree

dcbooks.ca

547

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 last white house at the end of the row of white houses. Michael E. Casteels. Invisible Publishing. Halifax & Picton, Nova Scotia. 2016.

Today's book of poetry went back to the stacks today to see what we could find on Michael E. Casteels. Turns out we had more than we remembered, less than we want. Casteels has published more than a dozen chapbooks and we were only able to turn up three of them. The Robot Dreams (Puddles of Sky Press, 2013), solar-powered light bulb and the lake's achy tooth (Apt 9 Press, 2015)

and check engine. rhinoceros. tungsten (Puddles of Sky Press, 2015).

Today's book of poetry has written about both The Robot Dreams and check engine. rhinoceros. tungsten. and you can check those out here:

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

http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.ca/2016/04/check-engine-rhinoceros-tungsten.html

It was easy to like those chapbooks but now, with considerable glee, we present the last white house at the end of the row of white houses and Today's book of poetry couldn't be happier to see Casteels with a trade collection. And this one is a corker.

Casteels seems to have a mastery of a certain kind of romantic ennui, these poems are loving but gently sad.

Universe Composed Of Mostly Nothing,

New Study Indicates

Suddenly we're weightless,

columns of light

slice through us

and a gentle breeze

blows us further apart.

For a while we drift,

waving farewell to our hands,

whispering goodbye

with lips already distant

to ear that were barely even here.

...

We were pretty happy here in the Today's book of poetry offices when Casteels book arrived, it's great to see him get the opportunity to let the ya-ya's out, to canter, skip, sprint and cavort. The last white house at the end of the row of white houses gives Casteels a platform to spread his considerable wings. And we loved the title of this book, a big old juicy long-assed title.

Casteels mixes clinical detail of the day to day with an imagined reality that lives just beneath our skin and just beyond our grasp. The result is a strangely familiar poetic that can be both consternating and comforting depending on whether Casteels is slamming on the brakes or hammering down on the gas.

The Map

Somebody dropped a map on the sidewalk downtown

and no one stopped to pick it up. Now it's dark, the

streets are empty, and the map is alone. It shivers as the

fingers of a heavy breeze grab the edge of a page and

start pulling. The map spreads out in all directions. It

crawls over fire hydrants and parked cars, mailboxes,

phone booths. It climbs up lampposts and stop signs. It

smothers building and bridges. The map unfolds until

it blankets the entire city at a ration of one-to-one.

The next morning, no one is late for work. Their keys

are right where they left them. No one misplaces a wallet

or searches for a missing sock. The lost dog arrives at

the front door and barks to be let in. No one stops to

ask for directions. No one honks a horn or slams on

their brakes. Everything inhabits its own space and

everything feels right at home. But the map, now one

with its city, longs for a pocket to nestle in. It wants to be

folded and pressed against another map, a map of some

foreign city whose streets are beautifully unknown.

...

Today's book of poetry was impressed with the straight out punching power in The last white house at the end of the row of white houses. Casteels is a Sugar Ray Leonard poet. These poems come at you from every direction but the power behind the punch is always right on target.

Milo, our head tech, took over our morning read today, he's been a Casteels fan ever since The Robot Dreams got stuck in his noggin. Milo said that he found Casteels poems "twist like real life, tease like dreams." We liked that.

The Red Light

I'm already late and speeding,

praying the light doesn't change.

It does and I stop.

I tap my fingers against the wheel,

twist dials on the dash. In the rear-view mirror

I examine the spaces between my teeth.

The light hasn't changed.

I rummage through the glovebox,

remembering the spearmint gum.

I count spare change in the ashtray.

Minutes pass. I consult the

owner's manual. I read it

cover to cover and still

the light remains. At sundown

I begin to worry. I take only

short sips from my water bottle.

I flick the high beams off and on,

signalling in Morse code. It's getting late.

Radio hosts abandon the airwaves.

I watch the moon drift overhead.

Night after night

the moon wanes

until crescent, and then

into nothing. I've been

counting the days on my

fingers and toes. Seasons

shift and skew. I engage the

wipers when it rains, crank the

defrost when it snows.

On humid summer evenings

I roll down the window

and let me arm dangle.

A faint breeze stirs my thought

and I wonder about Goldie.

Is she swimming in circles

or just floating in the archway

of that tiny plastic castle? I hope the water

is fresh, that her bowl is clean, I hope she wants

for nothing. And sitting here, bathed in the glow

of this godforsaken light, I wonder

if she'd even remember me.

...

Obviously we here at Today's book of poetry are big admirers of Michael E. Casteels, his third appearance on our page puts him in the rarefied atmosphere of our repeat customers, our favourites. The last white house at the end of the row of white houses will present Casteels to a much wider audience and we here at Today's book of poetry know they are in for a treat.

Michael E. Casteels

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael e. Casteels is the author of over a dozen chapbooks of poetry. In 2012, he was nominated for The Premier’s Awards for Excellence in the Arts, an emerging artist award. He lives in Kingston, where he runs Puddles of Sky Press.

BLURBS
“Have you seen Michael e. Casteel’s first full-length book of poems? It’s here, in front of your face. It begins with a wolf at the door and ends by waving farewell to our hands. Inside you’ll find everything you need: robots, a possum’s sneeze, and coffins filled with jelly donuts. The Last White House at the End of the Row of White Houses is one of the most exciting debuts to appear in Canadian poetry. Brilliant, strange, beautiful and encouraging, Casteel’s poetry is a repair kit for the human spirit.”

— Jason Heroux, Hard Work Cheering Up Sad Machines

“Worlds of invention, humour, insight and the energy that is language. Michael e. Casteels’s first full-length collection is rich with empathy for robots and the sea, and the brilliant, delicate, outrageous leaps the mind makes when given words and our lives.”

— Gary Barwin, Moon Baboon Canoe

Michael E. Casteels

"Particles"

video: Small Books, Big Country

invisiblepublishing.com

548

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:
Lady Crawford. Julie Cameron Gray. Palimpsest Press. Windsor, Ontario. 2016.

Julie Cameron Gray can burn with the best of them. These wicked smart poems get to the edge of sophistication without Today's book of poetry feeling a plebeian kink in the neck. Gray is a post-modern feminist to our way of thinking and determined to reveal some chinks in that old patriarchal order. She has to open up her heart to do it.

Gray never allows Lady Crawford to become any sort of strident dialectic tract all weighed down with agenda. These poems offer all the variety of subject, tone and result that you can ask for from a book of poetry. Today's book of poetry sees that Gray has some serious chops and it's all tempered with a reasonable sense of humour. Humourless poetry will be the death of us all.

A Classic Pack of Camel Cigarettes

Some days it feels like nothing

will ever change in this town,

other days it's a landscape

like the front of a classic pack

of camel cigarettes, exotic black

angles under a different sun.

We hunt for specifics, anything

overlooked in the ashed-out

twilight to claim our own:

bottle cap, earring, a piece

of blue glass worn opaque

by the beach, the novelty of egrets

mating in the green garden

your neighbour made after his wife

died in a five-car pileup.

Each spring as he turns the earth

he recalls the state trooper awkward

at his front door, describing

interstate constellations of car

parts scattered like satellites

that got lost on their way home.

...

Today's book of poetry has all sorts of reactions to poems but my lovely wife K is a little more direct and forthcoming. Today's book of poetry usually reads Today's title the night before, in bed. Today's book of poetry has always read the title at least once by this point in our process. So last night, I tried a couple of Julie Cameron Gray recipes on K.

As it turns out K was reading Plutocrats by Chrystia Freeland and she offered up a trade. She'd listen to as much poetry as I wanted if I promised to read Plutocrats. Well a nod's as good as a wink to a blind horse. Fair enough. Of course K never knows what is coming. In general I only read her the very best or the very worst of my nightly poetry feed.

I'm sure you can guess which I thought Gray had to offer - but in this case the guarantee comes from higher up the food chain, K loved it.

Lineage: Hugh and Margaret Crawford (1195 -1265)

This is what I know: The Chief of Clan Crawford was like every

other father. Ambition bred not in the bone but in the fervent dinner

conversations with his wife, suggesting that things would be better

if the Norse would bugger off already. He baited and led them until

October, when the fall shores gave way to storms and their ships were

no match for the rough seas of Scotland. To the confused Norsemen

dying on the shore, arrows were a kind of weather.

...

Julie Cameron Gray published her first volume of poetry, Tangle (Thightrope Books, 2013) a few years ago and Today's book of poetry has yet to see it but we are assured by our reading of Lady Crawford, this is fine poetry by any standard and all full of future.

Gray has that ability to make her intimacy and knowledge yours. The reader can feel certain beats of Julie Cameron Gray's generous and challenging heart.

Fight or Flight

In some countries, a daughter

is fear made flesh.

Once there was movie about college girls

clad in bikinis and pink ski

masks, clutching berettas

in Florida's manic orange juice sun.

Soon, all the men are dead

and the girls, sexual as overkill,

drive off in a Lamborghini.

Not unlike the onna-bugeisha--

Samurai women wielding a naginata,

defending their homes and children

and honour from marauders

while their husbands were away at war.

Young girls taught

the loft of a sword so long

it pulled horsemen from the air

and thrashed them to roses.

...

As good as Today's book of poetry demands you believe Lady Crawford is we are convinced this meal is just beginning. Julie Cameron Gray will burn down the house before she is through.

Julie Cameron Gray

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Julie Cameron Gray is originally from Sudbury, Ontario. She is the author of Tangle (Tightrope Books, 2013), and has previously published in The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, Event, and in Best Canadian Poetry 2011(Tightrope Books, 2011). She currently lives in Toronto.

BLURB
"An impressive transformation has occurred from Tangle. Cameron Gray's debut, to Lady Crawford:
writing out the small familiar tragedy of we live, we sorrow, this wrecking ball of a book smashes myths of femininity. It is as if this poet woke from the slumber of a young woman's dreams and, seeing how all the dreams were broken, set about describing her experience of the broken castle as more than lies -- as cultural reconstruction. Among many other feats, this beautiful poetry of impassioned reason ironizes the lives of famous women as heart broken. Reading it, our hearts are broken as our hearts were, once, already.
- Shane Neilson

Julie Cameron Gray

Lady Crawford - Performance Art

video: Julie Cameron Gray

palimpsestpress.ca

549

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:
On Not Losing My Father's Ashes in the Flood. Richard Harrison. Buckrider Books. Wolsak & Wynn. Hamilton, Ontario. 2016.

Micheline Maylor recently referred to Richard Harrison as the best narrative poet in Canada. Those could be fighting words in some circles because it is a pretty big declaration. Today's book of poetry certainly thinks that Richard Harrison's On Not Losing My Father's Ashes in the Flood certainly bolsters his case.

Richard Harrison is a masterful story teller and as a result you could be forgiven for assuming these are spontaneous histories, lovingly improvised stories for the fire or late at night in bed, but Harrison's work is anything other than off the cuff. These gentle and compassionate poems are made of interlocking puzzle pieces so meticulously set into place and rendered that the seams become invisible. The puzzle becomes a painting and the painting is the poem.

Now is the Winter

With the last ounces of his grace, my father

stands up from his wheelchair, turns toward

the bed as though the floor is ice;

he tilts his spine, knees bent, and waits to shift

his weight to mine; I lay him on the blanket

and kiss his lips. We talk of Shakespeare

who carried him line by line through tropic wars

to the final surgery on his failing hips.

Now is the winter of our discontent,

he recites from those pages of his brain

no disease has yet erased,

the words the prayer of one

who has no god to hear his cries, his powers spent.

When he asks, I promise to be with him when he dies,

and winter stirs in the broken fingers

of my hand that long ago healed winter cold

into mended bone. My father sleeps as the land sleeps --

and I am taught that nothing is immortal

and awake forever. Outside, the heroes, green,

and knowing only what they see,

take their sticks and pucks and

lean into their shots

while the mid-winter's night

dreams water turned to stone beneath their feet.

...

Today's book of poetry first met Richard Harrison in Peterborough back in 1978 or 1979. Our impression then was that he was a true gentleman with manners beyond his years and we all know how hard they are to find. Almost as hard to find as a poet who has stayed the course all these years. Richard Harrison had a brilliant mind when I first met him thirty-eight years ago and he has spent the intervening years honing his considerable craft. Practice and experience.

You see it in every poem in On Not Losing My Father's Ashes in the Flood, practice and experience. Today's book of poetry recently looked at the Alan Feldman's Immortality and feels Harrison can claim some of that same rarefied air. Bless the cotton socks of the poets who tell stories with experienced wisdom, razor honed craft and hearts as big as locomotives.

Maybe I forgot to mention that Harrison usually leads with his heart. Most men wouldn't dare and Harrison makes it look easy.

Found Poem

On a line from Margaret Laurence's The Diviners

At my feet, at a bus stop, a bumblebee and a honeybee

are stinging each other to death. At first I think it's two bees mating,

something I had seen only once: not every bee

has a queen surrounded by a hundred thousand female eunuchs

in the monarchy of a hive; the Bombini, bumblebees,

never gave up motherhood to that degree, and plenty of them pair up

to breed like you and I have done in a selfishness so great

it created more of our own.

Once, in the hot first days of autumn,

out on the soccer pitch, I heard two Bombi fucking in the grass,

buzzing as they did it, and I was afraid for them,

being out on the field where he had come to trample and kick.

So I tried to pick them up as one rich flooding coil

singing the mellifluous bumbling aria of nature and sex.

But they broke away from each other, the one flew off,

while the other let me take it out of bounds and play --

and that was it --

a coitus interrupted, yes.

but a gene code preserved that would otherwise be lost beneath a pair of cleats.

And isn't it odd that it is not odd to talk of living things this way? These days

every object is a kind of page,

every life a kind of writing.

I feel comforted, thinking of the unfathomable mystery at the heart of the bee

as piece of paper in a bottle, and on that paper, nothing more than one

among an infinite arrangement

of words.

The bee is a sentence, a line from a song.

But I know my kind.

Someone arriving after me to wait for the bus

would step on these two insects at war. So I pick them up,

and put them on the lawn away from human feet

so they can settle it in the grass undisturbed.

And I recall the fossil I saw as a child of

two dinosaurs that died together, struggling in the mud,

the carnivore with its arm down the other's throat all the way to its stomach,

the plant eater with its teeth sunk in the predator's shoulder all the way to

the bone,

a poem composed in flesh,

preserved in stone

that waited 200 million years for its readers.

...

Our morning read was a little different this morning. I'm hoping Richard doesn't mind but Today's book of poetry called in some old favours, made a few bribes and called on some old Peterborough friends. Richard and I used to be loosely connected in a coven of misspent youth and poetry so I called in some old Peterborough Poets. Of course we already had our Sr. Editor Max, I let him out of his strongbox this morning and made him put on pants and we decided to put on a show for the youngins.

I met Max in Peterborough almost forty years ago and he was terror. I was also able to round up Riley Tench and Ian David Arlett and get them into the office this morning -- please don't ask what sort of voodoo was required to accomplish this.

We each took our enthusiastic turns with pleasure, we were all proud of our old friend and the morning wine didn't hurt either. Happy to do Richard's bidding, we bounced these poems off of the walls. My old tricks no longer have much affect on the Today's book of poetry staff but when Max, Arlett and Tench were through the effect was jaw-dropped silence. You'd have thought Marcel Marceau was on stage. I think GOB STRUCK is the word.

Confessional Poem

Yesterday I wrote a confessional poem,

but my wife, who always reads me first, said it was just a journal entry.

It's been years since I was that far from a poem and thought I was that close,

but I trust her.

Today, before class, a student was zipping through a Rubik's Cube,

knuckling the box into panels of many colours, then a couplet,

then one then many again.

Within two minutes, without looking, he was done.

I asked him to do it over so we could all watch, and, having watched,

have something with which to begin the writing of the day.

I wrote that the planes of the cube going in and out of order

as the student twisted the game were like the drafts of a poem,

sometimes deliberately torquing towards the opposite of the desired end

because the poem is a way we give in to a logic that lives within us

but is not our own.

I was thinking of that poem I couldn't write,

an apology I wish I'd made years ago,

and carry with me even though two things are true:

the person I would have apologized to is dead now,

and what I want to apologize for is speaking badly of them

thought it was only to my wife and so they never knew.

The poem was like having an argument with someone in a dream,

then going up to them in daylight wanting to make amends.

Last time I did that,

the other person reminded me

that I had done nothing.

But I apologized anyway

because they had done nothing

to deserve what I did not do.

...

It's an honour to tell you how much Today's book of poetry enjoyed our old friend's book. Today's book of poetry still can't tell you whether Micheline Maylor was wrong or right and we see quite a bit of poetry here in the Today's book of poetry offices. We've admired Richard Harrison's poetry since before most of you were born and On Not Losing My Father's Ashes in the Flood confirms what we already knew, Richard Harrison writes beautiful poetry.

Richard Harrison

Photo: Keeghan Rouleau

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richard Harrison’s first comic book was a Marvel Tales collection of Spider-Man’s first battle with the Hulk, Thor vs. Sandu, the Human Torch vs. the Sub-Mariner and a scary cautionary tale told by the Wasp to a kid in the hospital, “Somewhere Waits a Wobbo.” Four fantasies for a quarter: it was a steal. He’s been reading ever since. Richard is a nationally recognized poet (Hero of the Play, Big Breath of a Wish), editor and essayist on topics ranging from philosophy to prayer, literary criticism to mathematics, and poetry to hockey – as well as his work on superheroes. A professor at Calgary’s Mount Royal University, he teaches English, Creative Writing, and courses in comics (with Lee Easton) and the graphic novel.

Richard Harrison

School of Thought - 2016

Video: ciswf

wolsakandwynn.ca

550

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:
Love is a very long word. Majlinda Bashllari. Guernica Editions. Essential Poets 233. Toronto - Buffalo - Lancaster (U.K.). 2016.

What joy. Majlinda Bashllari's Love is a very long word was such a pleasure to read that it snapped me out of a poetry funk. Today's book of poetry had been wallowing in a deep trough of poetic despair and displeasure as a couple of books I'd set aside with pleasure soured when I returned. It happens from time to time. Not so with Love is a very long word.

These poems are immediately accessible and still full of mystery. There's passion from a woman's point of view, escape stories, poems about family and so on. The subject matter is far less important than the way Bashllari wraps you around her fingers and has her way with you. The reader is happy inside these poems because Bashllari knows the secret languages of intimacy.

Cropped Images

There's nothing on the first pages of this family photo album.

Neither pictures nor paintings of the great grandparents who

were supposed to be shown here. They didn't know anything

about photography. They used each other's eyes to record

their memories.

Light is absorbed into these black empty spots and cannot

get reflected back. They're all soldiers of the same blood and

flesh army, dead or alive, silent and often forgotten. From

time to time we make a stop at these imaginary graves

wondering which one of us resembles them.

Here comes another generation: the recently departed

grandparents, uncles, aunts, rich and poor cousins, with their

own stories frozen in celluloid.

Once the daylight touches their eyes, faces start to revive.

They sigh, smile and look for their dearest ones in the crowd.

What happened to you, they say, what happened to me ... that

day, that night, that moment ... They get sad and stare: Please,

send us back, we want to be somnambulists. Don't wake us up.

I skip pages, coming close to the living empire: adults with

our own children, who know little about growing up.

We are not done with our time yet. There are battles to win,

at least arguments. We take pictures of every event, happy

pictures if possible. Although not sure we are happy, we need

to leave physical evidence of supposed happiness behind.

Somehow we remain idealists who love everything material.

Faces, gestures often surrounded by suspicious blurs taken

between invisible moments. Unnoticed moments, like

heartbeats; once important but never to be displayed again,

powerless to weaken our unique talent for pretending.

...

Love is a very long word is Majlinda Bashllari's first book of poetry in English. Let me repeat that astonishing remark. Love is a very long word is Majlinda Bashllari's first book of poetry in English. But ten years ago Bashllari published Një udhë për në shtëpi (A road to home) (Morava, 2007), in Tirana, Albania.

It's beyond astonishing that Bashllari is now writing poems in English as though she invented the language. Love is a very long word is nuanced and considered poetry that feels like a conversation in that dream you can't forget.

Borrowed

Mira wanted him, and when nobody was around,
she trembled and whispered gibberish mostly
and begged him to touch her.
It was not her fault she never knew the taste
of being loved. With one leg shorter than the other,
she's always been invisible to men.
Turning forty wouldn't make her any prettier,
she knew that.

He was her brother's best friend,
who else would treat her right ...
The man got straight to the point:
--Girl, you're like my sister, this may kill us both ...
--Nobody will know, she murmured,
looking at her good leg.
Then he held her gently in his arms,
kissed her on the neck, thinking of the money
he'd borrowed from her brother ...
She blushed, burst into tears
and he couldn't tell what was uglier,
her face or his performance.
Between her thighs, he forgot everything:
his wife, the loan, the lousy life.

Later, in bed alone, she cried,
as she pictured him leaving,
limping on his healthy legs.

...

The Today's book of poetry minions were in fine form today once I got them inside from shovelling. In the last seventy-two hours Ottawa has had seventeen feet of snow. That's an alternative fact. Shovelling will tire the rebelliousness right out of a pesky intern or editor.

Kathryn, our Jr. Editor, remarked on the strength of the speaker in these poems, how resilient. Milo felt that there was a low hum of resigned melancholy under the poems. Today's book of poetry agreed with both of my loyal staff -- but we'd tell the reader to look around for the hope in these poems. We're convinced Majlinda Bashllari is an optimist, too experienced to have any notion of unbroken happiness, but full of hope in the face of reason.

Natural Woman Made In The Balkans

On nights that are neither moon nor wolf, I want my man
over me like a bat that holds a lit-up chandelier in his wings.

Almost blind, he tries to reach the last hearth-fire ... Why me,
I breathe in his mouth, dying to hear again that all other girls
in the town seem like sisters to him.

Quiet, but hot, blind but hungry, we both take off across the
darkness. On nights that are neither of wolf nor moon.

When he falls asleep, I uncover the sweaty hair from my eye
and watch beyond his shoulder, to make sure no sisters come
out of the dark.

...

Today's book of poetry liked every single thing about this powerhouse. Today's book of poetry liked Majlinda Bashllari's Love is a very long word so much that we now want to learn Albanian and find a copy of Një udhë për në shtëpi (A road to home). It must be a stunner, this one certainly is.

Majlinda Bashllari

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born in Albania, Majlinda Bashllari’s first poetry collection, Një udhë për në shtëpi (A road to home), was published in Tirana, Albania (Morava, 2007). Bashllari’s work has appeared in numerous Albanian art and literature magazines and in Albanian anthologies of essays and short stories. Love is a very long word is her first English-language collection of poems. She lives with her family in Toronto.

BLURB

With their cultural roots in Albania, the poems in Love is a very long word are distinct in welcome ways from almost anything else in Canadian literature. Laconic and edged with sharp wit, they engage the necessary courage and strength of character to transform the often bleak, thwarted and alienated experiences which they recount into art of the finest, most valid sort: uncompromising, imaginative, and deeply true to life.

- Allan Briesmaste

Love is a very long word - Book Trailor

Video: Guernica Editions

guernicaeditons.com

551

DISCLAIMERS

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

Today's book of poetry:
Blue Hallelujahs. Cynthia Manick. Black Lawrence Press, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 2016.

"we don't choose what haunts us"

from Mind the Gap

Today's book of poetry can tell you that these poems are declarations, prayers, confessions and pleas, all of them vividly feminine and highly charged. Cynthia Manick's Blue Hallelujahs is a strong woman's voice telling the stories of young girls, young women and old women too. These are stories that don't see the light of day often enough. Even though women read and write more poetry than men - men publish more poetry than women.

Manick wrings joy out wherever she can find it and like her grandmother's kitchen, these poems will bring you that "slow applause under the skin." Tyehimba Jess suggests that Blue Hallelujahs is necessary music for getting to the other side. Today's book of poetry certainly felt the tug.

Mind the Gap

Little E wants a smile like mine,

teeth with a gap so wide

a corn husk and tugboat

could pull through.

Or a submarine, lost sounds

and grunts. Tiny light bulbs

if you're careful or a string

of Christmas lights looped

through like garland.

Does she know how the world

works? How some of us

are born without 40 acres

and the weight of a mule

on their chest. Like my mother

and Monday mornings --

boarding the F train and two buses

with two children, her own negro

caravan. A sonata full of low-watt

clinics and hurling vowels

like swords. How I often waited

in those long-ass lines

and imagined myself a boy,

a whirlwind digging in the muck

where only muscles and gold matter.

My tongue tries to reason with her

ring against the want -- cause

we don't choose what haunts us.

When I was young I craved closed

spaces, bright veneers, the smile

of Rudy Huxtable or on bad days

Shirley Temple. No one notices

a mouth when Bojangles is dancing.

...

Today's book of poetry is uncertain of how to address the obvious so feels compelled to say it - these poems are about a young Black woman and her experience of the world and I'm an old white man, so how could I possibly relate? Is that an unreasonable question? Cynthia Manick does all the work bridging that gap by writing poems that are wide open and crystal clear. The strong women in these poems are familiars and we admire their unrelenting belief that the world is changed with every strong foot put forward.

Manick's poems are confident and certain, powerful meditations on family, gender, childhood and race. Today's book of poetry enjoyed that Manick employs an innocent sense of wonder in her voice from time to time in these excellent poems. Resilience is rare enough but adding wonder gives these poems additional charm.

Manick is comfortable with adding some smolder to her plate. These poems are cradle to the grave stories about family for good and bad, but when Manick warms the sheets that all fades to the shadows. Cynthia Manick captures the primal and caresses it with subtle sweetness.

Recipe for Consummation

Your seasoned skin --
one quart Egyptian
the shade of balsa honey,
one part Cubano
with a dash of cayenne pepper,
and one half buttered South--
is a scratch 'n sniff insert
more savory than Old Spice
or Sara Lee;
and I claw it nightly
like oranges or sand
to whispered chants
of sweet meat sweet meat
and bareback tongues
in our bedroom,
until shuck sheds
like a coiled rope
of dark stars.
I drink it down
pelvic-deep,
so that my body
remembers
the brown bounty
of your herbs and spine
in the morning.

...

Blue Hallelujahs has its share of righteous indignity, these poems are never shrill or pained but they certainly are sharp and pointed when Manick puts her foot down.

Another great morning read at the Today's book of poetry offices. The sun is shining in our town this morning which is a treat, we've had snow nineteen of the last twenty-five days. We all took turns reading Cynthia Manick's Blue Hallelujahs until there were none left to read.

When I Think of My Father

I live in constant fear of extinction,
that I'll be pulled back to muddy toes
and pear trees. Praised for wide hips
and a silent mouth that wants
to scream, echo, grunt, but can't.

Or that I'll meet a man just like my daddy,
tether my back to his name like a spine
where each cord holds large teats filled with children
and more children like little benign tumors.
And when he slips his hand under my skirt
I'll know he doesn't love me -- just the malleable
skin that's spreads north and south,
guided by his un-mutable compass.

When I think of my father I can only see
my mother at her knees, chanting he's gone
Cyn, he's gone, pairs of discarded
blue jeans on the floor, my mother
fingering the silver buckles like a totem
to lure him back --
from some other woman's scent.

She silently demands my twelve-year old
self to hold and rock her body
like a pair of marsupials -- her rooting
my chest for safety, me exposed to the cold
air of their bedroom. I try to be stone,
brine the carnage in my throat
swallow her overripe voice of muscadines.

Falling into the bodies of baggy pants
boys at corner stores -- their pockets
full of candy and cake. What they don't
give me, I steal. What I steal, I eat.
I eat to fill a gangrene hole stuffed with bills,
deeds in my father's name, blocks
of state-issued butter and cheese.

I want to take a blade and cut
the edge of this round red wound.
Have daughters born not ready
to fear, but ready to pick up a spade,
dig a ditch, and knife a man.

...

Today's book of poetry has nothing but esteem for the voice of Cynthia Manick. I wish her strength on all our daughters and sisters.

Blue Hallelujahs is Cynthia Manick's first book of poetry, it's as powerful as it is promising.

Cynthia Manick

Photo: Sue Rissberger

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A Pushcart Prize nominated poet with an MFA in Creative Writing from the New School, Cynthia Manick has received fellowships from Cave Canem, The Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts & Sciences, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Hedgebrook, and the Vermont Studio Center. She serves as East Coast Editor of the independent press Jamii Publishing and was a 2014 finalist for the New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. Her work has appeared in African American Review, Bone Bouquet, Callaloo, DMQ Review, Kweli Journal, Muzzle Magazine, Sou’wester, Pedestal Magazine, Passages North, St. Ann’s Review, and elsewhere. She currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.

BLURBS
The speaker of Cynthia Manick’s haunted debut collection admits “a love for surgery porn at 1 a.m.” And one early poem begins, “Today I am elbow deep/in some animal’s belly//pulling out the heart and stomach/for my mother’s table.” Throughout, Blue Hallelujahs approaches aspects of a woman’s development—from “feet first” Caesarean delivery to a grandmother’s admonition “to pull flesh/from the throat not the belly”—blade at the ready, moving from slaughter to surgery to a kind of deep southern haruspication. At the center of girlhood we find The Shop with its inventory of inherited hungers. “Is this what the heart eats?” Manick renders visceral a longing to avoid extinction, to escape the museum, to live fully embodying one’s identity as a woman who “knows/ how to wield a knife.”
—Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, author of Open Interval, a 2009 National Book Award Finalist

"What we remember is what we become. Rocking chairs holding mothers and "animals that root the ground for peaches, bones and stars." In Blue Hallelujahs Cynthia Manick holds fast to what brought us across. These are not the things you will hear about Black people on the nightly news. But they remain the things that lock the arms of Black people around Black people when we need what we need to keep moving on. I am so grateful to this sweet box of sacred words."
—Nikky Finney, Author of Head Off & Split, Winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Poetry

Cynthia Manick's Blue Hallelujahs bring us to a broil like Koko Taylor's "white-toothed love coils on repeat." Here, we have a gospel of womanly sharpness, a kitchen sinked and hot combed diary of the way Blues grinds into the 21st century. Gifted with the ability to smolder into surprise and swelter, Manick's reflections on discovery and loss will bring you to a "slow applause under the skin." Thank you for this bouquet of sheet music filled with church organ and pistol smoke, Ms. Manick. We gone need it to get to the other side.
—Tyehimba Jess, author of leadbelly, winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series

Hunted 2

Black Poets Speak Out

Cynthia Manick

blacklawrence.com

552

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:
Acquired Community. Jane Byers. Caitlin Press. Halfmoon Bay, British Columbia. 2016.

When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it

become less and less important whether I am afraid

- Audre Lorde

...that without tenderness, we are in hell.

-Adrienne Rich, Twenty-One Love Poems, X

Today's book of poetry had to borrow these two epigraphs from Jane Byers brilliant Acquired Community because they synthesize in such a beautifully acute fashion everything that is about to occur. Byers gives us a deeply personal and highly politicized march into her queer experience and it is riveting.

These poems are a proud parade of perseverance rendered gallant under extreme duress; not everyone gets out alive.

The Lavender Scare

According to a concerned mother of a Women's Army Corps recruit,

Fort Oglethorpe was full of homosexual sex maniacs in WWII,

"women having the appearance of perverts have been observed--

mannish haircuts, clothing, posture, stride...

seeking to date other girls, paying all the bills."

--from "Coming Out Under Fire"

Only if we were "addicted to the practice", could we be discharged in wartime.

It was a gay time, the war.

The General ignored all our signals--

we whistled that ode to secret lovers, the Hawaiian War Chant,

said, "We're going to have a gay time tonight"

or "Are you in the mood?"

The Inspector General ignored civilians

cruising servicemen along highways near bases,

the bars we frequented, men in drag, women arm in arm.

Ignored, that is, until peacetime,

when, addicts after all, we were given blue discharges.

The Lavender Scare rendered us

shunned from civilian jobs

ineligible for GI benefits,

unable to go back to small towns and family farms.

Some of us moved to D.C., L.A., SanFran,

some started homophile groups,

some men got married but fucked other men in the bushes,

some women became stone butches and never let their lovers touch them,

some of us jumped from tall buildings.

...

Jane Byers writes with such mature assurance, such a steady hand. Today's book of poetry had never read Jane Byers before but the connect was immediate, instantaneous. There is always lots and lots of room on our shelves for such impassioned and intelligent reason. There is always room at our table for this sort of company.

Byers shares with us a history, a herstory, that for the majority of Canadian and Americans will be entirely new news. For the legions of our LGBTQ sisters and brothers it is a new documentation of a sad history they are all too familiar with.

Regardless of gender or disposition Today's book of poetry defies you not to be moved by these compelling narratives. Whether singing out a questioning tune in call and response or intoning a solemn prayer Byers is captivating.

Come Out

Stylized geometry,

pink triangle shadowed by black

above purple text--

Toronto's pride theme, 1993.

Come Out, urging,

statement--

it changes through years.

Some took offense,

mostly conservative men who had a lot to lose

but no, that's too simple.

There were women too, unwilling

to lose what little they had.

I was righteous, thought I had come out.

I'd told my high school friends, my parents, my aunt by then.

I celebrated in the streets with my friends,

eight of us in solid-coloured shirts,

walked in rainbow formation,

Made the cover of Xtra.

In my naivete, I thought I was done.

Twenty years later, I'm still doing it,

the only thing i want to have come out of is my mother's womb.

Not to the kindergarten teacher, the triage nurse,

the dentist, the law clerk, the adoption worker,

or the post woman in the condo elevator

who asks, Which one of you is the mom?

then turns to press any button she can

when I say, We both are.

The agent at the ticket counter,

glances at us with a question,

I nod before he gets the chance--

no words, but he understands.

Resignation passes over his face

with a raised eyebrow as if to say,

"When did this happen?"

I feign ignorance, glance at our kids, say,

"Follow Mama while Mom gets our bags checked."

It's like breathing, not birth.

...

Sometimes, and this is one of those cases, the limited selection of three poems doesn't speak to the breadth of a book at all. Acquired Community speaks to that sense of community we find with new friends and cherished old friends, mutual understanding and respect, in the modern era this is how we build family. We acquire people less joined by blood than by bonds of empathy.

When Today's book of poetry reads about Byers being "gay-bashed" by her brother and the subsequent torment and disappointment that ensue -- our entire staff sends out an appropriate hug for Byers. As a brother who cherishes the ground his sisters walk on I've also sent out our entirely inappropriate Poetry Hit Squad searching for Byers brother. Not to worry, they only use poetry. They'll poeticize him to reason, tolerance and compassion or they'll dance him outside.

Blood Orange

Joppa, Tarocco, Cara Cara, Sanguinello.

A hybrid between mandarin and pomello,

oranges grow near the Blood River in Limpopo,

alongside the ungraded dirt road, where the runners train,

barefoot, through the bush

in the red/orange co-mingle of sunrise,

in the descending crescendo of sunset.

After she shattered the 800 metre world record in Berlin,

Caster Semenya, of Limpopo, breathtakingly butch,

was accused of being a man,

jeered by the sixth and eighth place runners.

Deep voice, chiseled deltoids and biceps,

she visited the bathroom with competitors,

to show them her labia, again and again.

Her auntie says she knows what Caster is. she changed her nappies.

Turns out how we measure gender is complex.

No menses, not a big deal,

few female athletes bleed.

There is no definitive test.

She finds out she is intersex.

Undescended testes.

Mosiac female.

Caster retains the world record that she broke that night,

after the freak-show coverage and gender verification testing.

Hormone therapy renders her armour-like chest more curved,

her cheeks less angular, attenuated her power,

until we believe she is female.

Semenya goes on to win Olympic bronze, then gold.

Forget what you know.

Limpopo is South African slang for nowhere.

Imagine the dismay when you split one in half.

Red.

No, orange.

No, red.

There will be blood.

...

Byers poems are a magnificent bridge that span the years from imperilled hostility and even imprisonment for any LGBTQ citizen, through the marching and the parades, the hidden clubs and hidden desires - right up to today and the marvelous imperfect present. Steps have been made, there has been progress, new laws, but we are all still a long way from home.

Acquired Community is not only a fine book of poetry it is a necessary piece of social history, a reminder, an entreaty. Hope.

Jane Byers

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jane Byers lives with her wife and two children in Nelson, British Columbia. She writes about human resilience in the context of raising children, lesbian and gay issues, and health and safety in the workplace. She has worked as an ergonomist and vocational rehabilitation consultant for many years and is passionate about facilitating resilience in ill and injured workers. She has had poems, essays and short fiction published in a variety of books and literary magazines in Canada, the US, and the UK, including Grain, Rattle, Descant, the Antigonish Review, the Canadian Journal of Hockey Literature, Our Times, Poetry in Transit and Best Canadian Poetry 2014. Her first book of poetry, Steeling Effects, was published by Caitlin Press in 2014. Her latest book of poetry is Acquired Community.

BLURBS

“Byers’ poems are an important reflection on the devastation of the AIDS crisis, the ‘veiled love and lament’ of the early gay rights movement, and the memories held by queer elders.”
— Leah Horlick, author of For Your Own Goodand winner of the 2016 Dayne Ogilvie Prize

“Jane Byers’ Acquired Community fills an often overlooked niche in Canadian queer history. Written in strong, careful poetics, both personal and political, Byers gives readers a glimpse into what was possible then, what is possible now. If you care about queer lives, this is an important book to read, to enjoy!”
—Arleen Paré, author of Lake of Two Mountains (Winner of the 2014 Governor General’s Award for Poetry), and He Leaves His Face in the Funeral Car

Jane Byers

reads "Red is the Colour of Spring"

Video: Amy Bohigian's Channel

caitlin-press.com

553

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:
Life as IT. Daneen Wardrop. The Ashland Poetry Press. Ashland University. Ashland, Ohio. 2016.

Winner of the Richard Snyder Publication Prize

Buddhas and Beethovens populate these provocative prose poems like a flutter of rose petals drifting under your precarious passage. Today's book of poetry got carried away with that opening line, but the Buddhas and Beethovens part is true. They are in Life as It along with possible saints and Roy Orbison.

What turned our crank here at Today's book of poetry was Daneen Wardrop's gaze. Once she puts her eye on a subject she renders it new vision. We've all been these places before, we've all listened to Paul McCartney, but never like this. Never the old way again. We've encountered mystics before but Waldrop's modern Carmelite St. Teresa pops in and out of these texts like a Whac-a-mole.

Lie

I've read that aphasics watching a presidential debate laugh at every lie, like

snow reads a landscape. It's a watcher's game, laughter is foil crinkling. Must

I give up even my small bit of talk? (I admit it is me, despicable truth of

elegies, whom I miss). Sometimes snow finishes the punchline, I suppose our

bones sparkle inside like that. A friend once told me my mother's

stubbornness kept her alive, told me into her stethoscope. Meticulous sparks

move by standing still in the storm, they look like tell me again. They look like

tell me again, just a little at a time.

...

Life as It is a book of elegant meditations that are each as crisp as a Sonny Rollins solo, brash with subtle mystery. Wardrop brings her own sense of timing but the beat is clear.

Truth be told Today's book of poetry didn't understand every subtle or saintly clue/cue but Daneen Wardrop writes relentlessly interesting poetry. These compelling little monsters are tight, tight, tight prose poems salted up like a treat you can't stop eating.

Life as It

They say Buddha called many animals to him but not the cat. Surely the story

is lax on this one. Surely no one was watching on this one. After looking a

while at an upward spill of incense smoke the cat disappeared along a mouse-

flicking path. Some Buddhists say it's important for the breath to wander in

the belly. When I see a palette's paint wet and deep with colors I want to kiss

it. How complex what passes for ready. The breath can do what it wants.

Dragons roast meatloaves with their breaths, oxen hump in the fields, snakes

unfinish circles. The cat walks through grassblades strumming.

...

This morning's read here in the Today's book of poetry offices was organized by Kathryn, our Jr. Editor. She told us she knew exactly how these poems should be read. She had props that included a small but rotund and smiling Buddha. It bore a striking resemblance to the one from the Today's book of poetry garden (which is currently under about four feet of snow).

Daneen Wardrop's Life as It made for an energetic morning read by our cast of miscreants. These poems have their own source of power, they are internally driven, we just get to go along on the ride.

If Never the Why then at Least the How

This dawn, if a stranger stands outside our house, the panes will grow as

stamps, par avion. Windows may settle by noon, but now they wish for sex

straight out of sleep. A cupola of wild geese launches a mansion. He sleeps

turned from me, pang of light on his forehead. Too jealous for coherence, we

spoke last night in interjections, every tooled puncture of his belt slit past

what I can't accept from a silver morning, as a hand finds aqua lines tense at

the back of a knee. Then, what I can accept. The amazing thing about skin,

that it's continuous.

...

Life as It tasted fresh as new snow. It went down like the coolest, cleanest spring water. Absolutely refreshing.

Daneen Wardrop

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Daneen Wardrop has authored two books of poetry, The Odds of Being and Cyclorama, as well as several books of literary history. She is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Poetry Society of America Robert H. Winner Award. Wardrop teaches American literature at Western Michigan University.

BLURBS

Life as It proves Daneen Wardrop's mastery of voice. In these pieces, the past, present and future coalesce in bright bursts, and, through juxtaposition and accumulation, the connections become ever more compelling, and beautiful, and edgy, and interesting as they unspool. This is poetry of both narrative and musical accomplishments, and a book one won't forget.

- Laura Kasischke, author of The Infinitesimals

These poems are a diary of exquisite attention. Daneen Wardrop's mind is meditative in pacing yet poetic in the way it creates a new way of seeing. "A cupola of wild geese launches a mansion" is equally accurate and miraculous, and just one example of her gentle yet transformative focus. She's adept at mining a moment for what it naturally contains, rather than forcing it into predetermined avenues of feeling or thought. This a poet who possesses that rare human quality - a gracious consciousness.

- Bob Hick, author of Sex

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:
Selah. Nora Gould. Brick Books. London, Ontario. 2016.

There is much debate as to the actual meaning of the word Selah. Some Biblical scholars insist it is a musical notation while others suggest it means "praise" or "lift-up." Today's book of poetry is convinced that in Nora Gould world it means "sorrowful song."

Selah is one long poem made out of a myriad of poetic fragments and it is damned sad territory.

You may remember that Nora Gould's first book of poetry, I see my love more clearly from a distance (Brick Books, 2012) won the first Today's book of poetry KITTY LEWIS HAZEL MILLAR DENNIS TOURBIN POETRY PRIZE. Today's book of poetry still raves about I see my love more clearly from a distance to everyone who will listen.

Selah roams the same hard ranch country of east central Alberta but the focus has changed. Love, mutual respect and hard earned companionship have given way to a battle with her husband's recently diagnosed frontotemporal dementia. And with that diagnosis a new future replaces the old.

from Selah

He had misplaced my mouth

that night he wanted me.

Even I couldn't discern this

as because of something I did or didn't do.

This was not long before the potato pails --

everything happened before or after,

windblown around markers themselves

eluvial. I set that night aside,

next to the candles

above the pegs where we hang our jeans.

...

Today's book of poetry feels for Gould, how could you not? You can feel the sullen drift apart as tangibly as if her husband had mounted a passing ice-floe and was disappearing, sailing off to a foggy horizon.

Neither Selah nor Nora Gould descend into the full and justified gloom you might expect. But that doesn't mean these melancholy prayers and sad asides won't render you to tears.

from Selah

I am writing to you from inside this,

my confusion. You will recognize yourself.

I don't know you, who you are, how to find you,

but I am aware I'm a person while I am with you.

Please forgive all the simple declarative sentences.

I am exhausted, lonely for you. Your refusal --

I didn't know I had asked, was it something

I said? body language? -- told me what I carry,

how impossible it would be.

If you were to hold me, let me hold you --

these are two different things. Could

either of us allow either?

I miss him. That is

where I would be, where I am anyway,

not in his arms. This is not

guilt or impropriety.

Caffeine-tired, I can't sort this out

in a coffee shop

far enough from home to believe that

it is not true. Charl is himself

at the farm; he will still grab his chin

in mock consternation.

The shelf above the potato pail is

undisturbed. This is all my fault.

I will go home and Charl will be himself.

He is himself. That's the thing. He is.

I miss you. I miss

the possibility of you,

us.

I am in a hayfield, snow gathering

in folds and creases -- my coat sleeves.

...

This morning's read was a fairly sombre affair but we did Selah proud, our office is full of Nora Gould fans.

Most home health care in Canada is provided by women, as though they weren't already busy enough. Nora Gould has allowed herself full candor when it would be easier to hide every wound.

For better or worse, in sickness and in health, these are promises many of us make without ever really having to face any sort of big test. Nora Gould's Selah is one big honking final exam into a new and harsh reality.

What happens to love when the object of that love is vanishing into the ether and being replaced with an angry shadow? Most of us, regardless of what we signed up for, never have to answer these terrible questions.

from Selah

At his first appointment with the neurologist

the receptionist called me his caregiver.

I said, No, his wife.

Wearied by incremental mourning,

his withdrawal into

a culture of one,

I ache

for his songs,

his intricate drawings.

His Einstein hair, his six a.m. piano.

...

Nora Gould's Selah is a restrained and prolonged scream at the fickle nature of nature. All the future hoping and planning and dreaming in the world doesn't mean a thing when that messy bastard fate sidles in and sits down.

Gould resists all temptations to have a pity party, instead she lives this new life, perseveres. Paints the future with memories of the past.

Nora Gould

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nora Gould writes from east central Alberta where she ranches with her family. She graduated from the University of Guelph in 1984 with a degree in veterinary medicine. Her debut poetry collection, I see my love more clearly from a distance (Brick Books, 2012), was winner of the 2013 Robert Kroetsch Edmonton Book Prize and the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry (Writers Guild of Alberta); it was also shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and was a finalist in the Poetry category for the High Plains Book Awards. Selah is her second poetry collection.

BLURBS
“This poem never slips into sentimentality but it breaks the heart. The fragments are wind-scoured, they startle like a fox and coyote suddenly appearing against the snow, they leave their marks on you like hard work scars the hands. I love them.”

—Lorna Crozier

“Nora Gould’s second collection, Selah, works with presence and absence: fingertips versus touch, the burrs of a long marriage vs. the voids of dementia, a beloved’s body vs. anatomical drawings. “Breathe,” Gould advises, in a voice that is stuffed full of hand-made quilts and rusty barbed wire, “There is air in the room.” Air enough for Gould to take on birth and illness, maturity and sadness and death: “If I outlive him, when he dies / my grief will be stillborn.”

— Ariel Gordon

Nora Gould

Interview with Nora Gould at HOWL at CIUT 89.5 FM.

Video: Brick Books

brickbooks.ca

555

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:
I Mean. Kate Colby. Ugly Duckling Presse. Brooklyn, New York. 2015.

The title poem in Kate Colby's effervescent I Mean is a stunning long list poem. My favourite in quite a long while. The poem "I Mean" comes in at a staggering 60+ pages and it never drags for a second. If this poem were a train it would be on time at every station.

"I Mean" is one honking big and entertaining poem, a delight from start to finish. A feast. For dessert I Mean, the book, has four short essays that further serve Kate Colby's nefarious purposes. Colby wants us to know that she can create light. "I Mean" not only illuminates, it takes some of the weight off of the world.

Today's book of poetry read Colby's essays and you should too, as Publishers Weekly said in their review, "The essays also display an erudition that can be both heady and playful." But Today's book of poetry is going to concentrate on Colby's poem "I Mean".

from I Mean

I mean a black grid on a white field

and the fuzzy gray dots where the lines cross

that you can see but not look at

I mean "slippage"

I mean the slip-proof dots

on the baby socks

I mean things for which

names may or may not exist

I mean there are names

for what you are and for who

I mean names for things

that don't or no longer exist

I mean kicking bones

down the stairs

they're in my way

I mean in the desert

I mean everything is contained

I mean bound

I mean imminent

I mean right now

I mean immanence

...

Our kick at the can is that Colby is quite literally searching for the "what" in "what gives meaning?"

Today's book of poetry believes that naming a thing gives it meaning and Colby is naming it all.

It's hard to share the enthusiasm of a reading experience but Kate Colby's long list poem "I Mean" was fresh on every page. Apparently Colby's curiosity is as broad as her optimism.

from I Mean

I mean I want my circumference

and to eat it too

I mean to be bigger than you

I mean contain more

I mean mean more

I mean with infinite density

I mean singularity

I mean aleph-infinity

I mean on the largest scale

I mean ontogeny, phylogeny, the camera

panning out from microbe to cosmos

I mean cochlear recapitulation of seashells

I mean fractals and vice-versa.

Seaweed. Galaxies.

I mean it's a long shot

I mean what I thought was the ocean

is only my body

I mean either a vase or two faces

...

Our morning read was a lovely tag-team type affair where we just went round and round the room, each person in turn whipping off a page of "I Mean," It wasn't a race or a marathon but we all felt celebratory at the end.

Reading "I Mean" reminded Today's book of poetry of a feast he was lucky enough to attend in his youth. The first course of several was a magical steamed soup called Chawanmushi. It was like a custard in that it was solid on your spoon - but when you put it on our tongue it melted leaving both a subtle flavour and a cleansed palette. No easy trick. Kate Colby can burn with the best.

from I Mean

I mean well-named horror can

be beautiful

I mean Wilfred Owen's poems

are neither horrific nor beautiful

I mean can beauty be named

or made but not both?

I mean a name turns to stone

I mean I'm totally making this up

I mean I don't know how to be a poet

I mean I'm a rebar Medusa

I mean cursed with endless construction

I mean with the dangers of addition

I mean maybe beauty can only be made

in the mirror

I mean mugging, kissy-faced,

pluckily marching in place

in the corner

I mean facing into the corner

I mean I've talked myself into

I mean thought myself

...

Today's book of poetry was reading Don McKay's great long poem "Long Sault" (1975) yesterday and was reminded how grand the long poem can be. Today we are here to tell you that Kate Colby's I Mean is a modern epic poem. You just don't know it yet. Colby's narrative provides a kaleidoscope gaze onto your world and mine.

She never flinches.

Kate Colby

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kate Colby is author of six books, including Unbecoming Behavior (UDP, 2008), The Return of the Native (UDP, 2011) and Fruitlands (Litmus Press), which won the Norma Farber First Book Award in 2007. She is a founding board member of the Gloucester Writers Center in Massachusetts and currently lives in Providence, where she was a 2012 fellow of the Rhode Island State Council for the Arts.

Kate Colby

reading at Litmus Press Spring Book Party 6/10/11

Video: srk55krs

uglyducklingpresse.org

556

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:
Still the Animals Enter. Jane Hilberry. Red Hen Press. Pasadena, California. 2016.

Today's book of poetry thinks that Jane Hilberry is a somewhat-tormented-but-the-glass-is-half-full-anyway character. Still the Animals Enter could be seen as an occasionally bawdy bestiary but Hilberry really isn't much on moralizing.

These are narrative poems full of the everyday lives of people just like you and another person just like you. Hilberry writes about the everyman/everywoman that inhabits us all and she does so with insightful charm.

A Seat for Everyone

-for Rick Perry

And you were never a child, correct?

You never missed your father when he was on a business trip.

You walked home from school alone and maybe you were so safe you didn't even think

of safety, or maybe you were a little afraid, am I right, about the bigger boy,

who might call you names as you walked past his house? Or were you never a child?

Send them home!

Or maybe you had a mother who would have packed your lunchbox

and put you on a yellow school bus to another country, with strangers,

knowing she might not see you again. Your mother would have done that, right?

Because the world is safe for children. Or because you were never a child.

If your father didn't come home one night (no body in the rosebushes,

nothing gruesome, but say he disappeared), well, things happen.

Not every child has the luxury of a father. Or brothers.

And when you walk back into that place you call childhood,

if you had a childhood, is that the place you send these children

when you send them home? Maybe so. Maybe you send them

to a house with brick walls and a fireplace, to mother waking them for school

at the same hour every morning and dinner at six hot in the serving dishes,

the table set, a seat for everyone. Maybe you were a child.

Maybe you think you were every child.

...

Deer sneak through lovely fences, romantic characters from nature, to eat ripe apples from dangling branches -- but they also leave ticks for the family dog, ticks that will find their way to human flesh. Hilberry's universe is populated with dark surprises from the real world.

Battle hardened mice are thwarted into submission with a copy of David Copperfield, lions, tigers and bears roam at will, yet Jane Hilberry's Still the Animals Enter gets you in the familiar. When she talks family you can feel your own tree shake, hear your sisters' voices.

Ours

Each step stitches them together

as they walk the dog, each breath at night

winds them, together, into sleep's cocoon.

Even the fights, sharpening

the blades of anger and accusation:

knives side by side

in a drawer. Her clumsiness

so familiar he knows when to reach

beneath the bowl she lifts.

When he sees me,

he says a word that meant something to us,

the name of a planet. We camped by a lake

and read out loud until it was too dark to see.

It was already over then, the sky

borrowing its color from the fire,

then both out.

Still I wanted his hand, to wind his fingers

into mine.

At night he and his wife lock the doors,

extinguish the lights and turn to each other.

I am a conversation never had.

We had a time

that was ours. He held my new kitten

inside his shirt. We threaded roads to mining towns

in his truck. When he touched me,

I couldn't believe--

I couldn't believe my luck.

...

This morning's poetry reading had the Today's book of poetry offices hopping. Monday morning is usually a pretty grim affair, a kind of wine-dipped, wet cigarette affair with numerous breaks for fresh air and a nasty smoke.

Still the Animals Enter was read like the poems were all letters from a home we had somehow shared. They rolled out and into the room like they owned the place.

Squirrel with an Apple

Sitting on its haunches, its back curved, a human-like pose,

it held a green apple and ate, its mouth moving fast as a machine --

so fast I thought it must be an illusion of the flickering leaves --

its mouth in furious, impersonal motion. It looked at me as its teeth ticked

and rotated the apple slowly in its paws. I wanted to be more interested

than I was, wished for a naturalist's curiosity -- then felt consigned

to be myself. It's hard to know when to push to improve,

and when to simply say, this is what I am. I am the luckiest

in the world -- born into stability, a genteel poverty that grew

quickly into enough. I have wine with dinner. I am well loved,

well employed. And no, this is not moving toward a but,

a lyric emptiness. I have been reading Larry Levis this morning.

I know that way: the poem that always swerves towards loneliness.

One of my students wishes I were her mother. She was hurt, tortured:

scalding baths, ground glass in the applesauce. But I can't

be her mother. When the painter makes a mistake, something unsightly,

she says the remedy is to continue. To fill the hole the mother made

is a life-long, impossible task. I say this as if I knew something.

I've only learned to trust my body, which says sleep, sleep, sleep some more.

Says touch. Yellow-orange squash blossoms and the fat green

of the leaves. If there's any cure, it is color, on the slab of paper,

or sown into dirt, the sky before dark when it arrays itself

in gauzy grays, and orange traces the underside of clouds. See,

this is not longing. A deep quiet rises sometimes, when I wait

in line at the grocery, the movies. Something I can rest in,

all opinions set aside, as if they could dissolve. They don't.

They will be back. But this is real, an almost-sleepy peace,

my back straight, hands slack, among the breathing others.

...

Today's book of poetry felt the warmth pulsate when Hilberry took it to the sheets. We felt sad when called upon, but mostly Today's book of poetry felt an odd familial connection. Reading Jane Hilberry was like discovering a sibling you didn't know you had, one who had the same photo album of cherished, revered and sometimes only tolerated family mug shots.

Jane Hilberry

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jane Hilberry has written two previous books of poetry, including Body Painting, which won the Colorado Book Award and got Hilberry banned from speaking at a Colorado Springs high school. She has written a book of biography/art criticism titled The Erotic Art of Edgar Britton; edited The Burden of the Beholder: Dave Armstrong and the Art of Collage; and co-authored a little volume on email titled Get Smart: How Email Can Make or Break Your Career—and Your Organization. Her poems have appeared in The Hudson Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Women’s Review of Books, Denver Quarterly and many other journals. She was one of the first editors of the Indiana Review. In addition to teaching Creative Writing, Creativity, and Literature at Colorado College, Hilberry has also facilitated arts-based leadership development programs at The Banff Centre in Canada.

BLURBS
"In 'Possibly, this time,' Jane Hilberry makes a startling and haunting poem out of the passage of a tick through people's lives and deaths. Is this possible, you ask? Oh, yes, this and much more. 'All else, stripped back, came down to love,' she writes in another poem. Hilberry's book, Still the Animals Enter, is the record of this stripping down: its glory and its purpose, these poems."
--Jim Moore

"The poems in Still the Animals Enter evoke an embodiment both tangential and deep. They travel like a bead on a string between a charged, sublime solitude and a nuanced connection with the natural world and the 'smooth stone' of the lover's body. Hilberry has given us something necessary and rare, an adult perspective that does not lose itself in nostalgia or swerve toward loneliness but finds its way to a language of profound erotic vitality. This collection is located at a powerful edge where memory and loss are in contact with a forward-looking present tense, where longing gives way to a deep quiet 'among the breathing others,' and where the animals find their way through every barrier to enter the poem?--still, and in stillness."

--Diane Seuss

Jane Hilberry

English Professor Jane Hilberry says poetry should be wild and unpredictable. If you let it be free and don’t try to constrain it, a poem can reveal profound insights that can help spark innovation in many arenas such as business and organizational change.

Video: ColoradoCollegeWeb

redhen.org

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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:
Fredericton - The City Series: Number Two.
Rebecca Salazar, Editor. Shane Neilson, Series Editor. Frog Hollow Press. Victoria, British Columbia. 2015.

Fredericton is from Frog Hollow Press and is the second volume of this very promising series. You might remember that Today's book of poetry looked at Vancouver - The City Series: Number One back in November of 2015. Michael Prior was the editor and Vancouver cooked.

You can see Today's book of poetry's blog on Vancouver here:

http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.ca/2015/11/vancouver-city-series-number-one.html

The basic premise of this series is to take a quick look at new and emerging writers, ten from each city, each poet gets two pages to strut their stuff. Shane Neilson is the Series Editor and he is making some smart choices. Rebecca Salazar is the Editor for Fredericton and she clearly has her finger on the pulse of the place. Fredericton punches way above its weight. For such a small place, Salazar offers us up a championship menu, these poets are contenders.

Katie Fewster-Yan

A Moment On the Lips

My boyfriend holds me by my ex-lover's

genitals. The waistband of my leggings

makes my mother's nipples itch.

When I kissed its insides, curious,

the freezer split my lip, but I will bury

it with me one day in my grave.

Who needs tattoos? I'm hip-swathed

with chip packets and gum wrappers,

evangelical pamphlets and sandwhich

coupons. The liver spots that dotted

my late grandfather's IV-pierced hand

ink my midriff like a galaxy. On the subway,

the ladies I'm crammed next to look

less impressed than they should be,

dipping their hips in the Pacific I once

kissed so you might taste the sound

of whales when I returned. When I dance,

a skirt of plankton swirls around me

in a balm millennia sediment-packed

to keep my lips slick. Thanks to history,

to my best decisions cinched around me

like a child's leash. Thank you grandma

for that eight-shaped, candy-studded cake

with all those gilded chocolate dollars

on the top that I sucked clean. Now I am

spangled and frosted at the waistline.

I'm the nucleus in a probability storm

of all my charged encounters.

Go ahead. Just try to shower me.

~KATIE FEWSTER-YAN grew up in Toronto. She is currently living, writing and studying in Fredericton.

...

Katie Fewster-Yan gets the whole rollicking show started with a couple of very polished bitter-sweet narratives. Fewster-Yan's second poem "This Little Piggy" is equally sharp, pretty much cut you open on contact.

Rebecca Salazar must have done some serious homework, scouring of Fredericton streets, hanging out in all the grottoes, Fredericton is a small city of about 60,000 but these ten strong poets seem to defy the odds. There really shouldn't be this many good young poets in such a small place.

Lisa Jodoin

Snowed In

It was a breakup full of pathetic fallacy.

Every fish belly up in the tank.

Even Halfred, my favourite frog,

was a grey spectre floating

in the speckled water.

The glow-in-the-dark Jesus

I bought him from St. Joseph's Oratory

stood in the centre of the tank

glowing like toxic waste.

The furnace seized. My teeth chattered

under four thick blankets and a

monstrous sweater with a beaver

knitted on the back.

To top it off, Mary, your dearly

beloved cat, was dying.

On the last night of my visit,

after two weeks of drinking and fighting,

I got hammered and hit on your

best friend. When we were passed out,

you suffocated Mary, to save her suffering

the same slow death of us all.

We cremated her in the backyard, and

I puked beside a tree in the burnt fur smoke.

Flames were leaping out of her open mouth.

5am and a bottle of Tia Maria.

Everything as still as her wasted teeth.

~LISA JODOIN's poems have appeared in The Antigonish Review, Matrix, Prarie Fire, and in a recently released anthology of Thunder Bay, Ontario writers called Fuel. She currently live in Fredericton with two very endearing Boston Terriers.

...

Our morning read here in the Today's book of poetry offices was an entirely solo effort this morning. Freezing rain has stopped everyone in their poetic tracks and I was in the office alone today. Being alone in the office means I get to listen to music I like. Right now I'm listening to Lee Fields, "Honey Dove." Today's book of poetry read Fredericton out loud and knew Lee Fields would have appreciated it. Today's book of poetry liked Fredericton enough that we may ask if we can just call her "Fred."

If you are a fan of the big narrative lead you're in high cotton here. Maybe it is being so close to the ocean that brings out the story-teller, regardless, Salazar has rounded them up and let them loose here.

Noah Page

For Later Use

You've been collecting things for a long time:

exotic spices, herbs alien to your palate,

sinewy textures, savoury broths,

and you've been trying to build a contraption

to cook this damn recipe you haven't yet named.

You struggle to fit together the pieces,

the gears, pulleys, smothers of rope,

fuel lines, elements, and primitive spears topped with sulfur.

You thought you could work backwards from the prototype,

but now a puzzle litters your workshop floor,

and the recipe rots its constituents.

You find yourself waking up

far from where you thought you went to bed,

and if it's a room you've slept in before,

what's left at your feet seems nothing like what you gathered:

flower petals, loose bits of string, photographs of strangers,

and albums you never really understood the appeal of.

You dial a number you find amid the debris,

but the line's been disconnected.

Some days you escape your clutter,

and just wander around the neighbourhood,

determined not to hoard anything for later use,

but when you stop to make sure you're not lost,

you find your pockets full of receipts.

Maybe if you run fast enough

the world will become a gluey blob.

Maybe if you quit moving completely,

the grass won't grow either.

On days when you can't help

but wander into the pawn shop,

you always seem to find yourself asking

what the cashier would look like without her glasses on.

~NOAH PAGE is an Honours English student at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. He has published with Calliope Magazine, was a featured reader at Odd Sundays at Molly's in Fredericton, and was the recipient of the W.S. Carter Memorial Prize in 2013.

...

Today's book of poetry has nothing but applause for the Frog Hollow Press City Series project. We are hoping to see an unending list of Canadian communities included in this series over time. It is apparent that there are poetic riches in every corner of the country,

Jennifer Houle

Four O'Clock

In other news, my love, the car has started

making a sound. It has all the qualities of song.

A ticked crescendo keeps time with the crawl

of government and bank traffic, predicts a little

accident. The afternoon coagulates, dribbles

a circumference of poles. Overhead, a wedge of geese

glides south, their shadows slim kayaks on bleached cement.

No idling in the jam for them: their past is sloughed by

movements practiced as a vestal's sidelong glance.

At home, garlic from China sprouts green blades.

We can't bring ourselves to eat it: origins too remote.

Our roots are as, or more far-flung, for all we know.

Still, we got at each other like wolves.

~JENNIFER HOULE is originally from Shediac, N.B., she has published in journals including The Fiddlehead, Arc, Carousel, Dandelion, CV2, Prarie Fire, and Room. She has won the Writer's Federation of New Brunswick's 2011 Alfred G. Bailey award for best unpublished manuscript and The Antigonish Review's 2009 Great Blue Heron poetry prize.

...

As an aside Today's book of poetry wants to share a particular pleasure we had this past week. From time to time I get called in to the Art Bank to work in the frame shop and that's where I found myself a couple of days ago. One of the items I framed up was a letter from Poet/Saint Leonard Cohen that he had written from Hydra, Greece, many years ago. Wouldn't you know it, he was broke.

Today's book of poetry is hoping to return to regularly scheduled service soon.

ABOUT THE EDITOR

REBECCA SALAZAR is a poetry editor for The Fiddlehead and managing editor of Qwerty Magazine. She was recently awarded The Malahat Review's Open Season poetry prize, and her writing also appears or is forthcoming in Lemon Hound, Poetry is Dead, and CV2. She is orginally from Sudbury, Ontario.

Today's book of poetry:
The Red Files. Lisa Bird-Wilson. Nightwood Editions. Gibsons, British Columbia. 2016.

The Red Files takes its title from the federal government files on residential schools. Lisa Bird-Wilson has a new history for the Canadian people to consider and it is a scathing indictment. If sins and wrongs were arrows there aren't enough Saint Sebastians in all of Canada to absorb them.

It is now beyond any reasonable question that the Canadian residential school system was an evil forced upon First Nations. Lisa Bird-Wilson's The Red Files takes us to school.

Métis

Métis road allowance squatters

with their raw camps set up on the edge

of the exact reserve boundary, she sees them all

the time, those kids, school-less, she sees

those half-breed kids who look no different

from herself and her friends, sometimes

in spring, every single thing

they own fits in the wagon pulled

by the one sapless horse, away

for summer work, or back

from winter trapping

her mother says something nice

about the half-breed boy, the one

who comes to the house to visit

and have tea with sugar and sometimes a crust of bannock

she likes him and her mother says he is

a good boy

but then one day in the not-work or trapping season,

he disappears

him and his whole family are moved

away and other families evaporate too

in the middle of the night

shacks burnt into the dirt and raked clean

her mother helps her

understand people

can just disappear

like that

like the seasons or the wind

she says, we are all

impermanent and when the girl looks puzzled

mother says like melted candle was or snow and then

it's finished: what are you doing inside

go out and play

on the empty road, fingers of sunlight

comfort her back and her shoulder flesh;

she runs to feel her own quick breath

...

Lisa Bird-Wilson has miraculously avoided simple anger and instead burrowed into a deeper chasm where indifference, racism and entitlement has carved deep wounds into the indigenous psyche. These poems will make you weep regardless of the colour of your skin.

If you are First Nation the weeping could simply be memory, the scourge of residential schools cut a large uncompromising swath through generations. If you are not indigenous then there are going to be some tears of guilt. Either way these painful stories of imprisoned youth will tear you a new one.

Farm Instructor

afternoon chores and the sun

is three hours past its highest point

hot on their dark heads they seek the shade

behind the big barn, the boys

four of them including Ronny

decide to take their chance to run

and on a silent cue

they take off

across the open grass and down the slope

breaking through tree branches

shadow dappled panic

hearts beat faster than chased rabbits

skinny legs push for home

boughs cracking toward light and a chance

wordless spirited breaths follow

one another

and the farm instructor inside his home

boots off, already drunk

in his chair by the south window, dreaming

sun-warmth on his forearm and right thigh

and when he hears about the boys he releases

a heavy sigh

stiff with the beating he'll give

the one he catches first

he laces his boots and send the hand for the truck

hopes to be back before dark

it'll be Ronny who feels the rough hands

of the farm instructor

pull him easily to the ground

heavy knee on his narrow chest

the breath crushed from his lungs

as he steels himself to be beaten

like a man

...

Lisa Bird-Wilson has found the narrative tools to expose the horror and the terror inflicted upon these children and how it inevitably exploded into a casual methodology for cultural genocide. There aren't enough apologies in the world to assuage the grief inflicted on the indigenous population of Canada and these poems spell it all out.

Bird-Wilson knows she doesn't have to hammer hard, these poems can feel almost gentle when read aloud, but they carry the weight of a wronged world.

The Finest in the Dominion

Saturday is his day to take

a boy. Mostly they are all the same

to him, but this Saturday it's Kenneth,

the most recent

quiet lad to be seduced

by a promise

of driving the school bus.

Here I call him Kenneth, but to name him

is the challenge, when his has only been

a number

but I will call him Kenneth

and while we are naming, I dare you to cite

a single ten-year-old

boy any one out of hundreds

who would be able

to resist, able to measure

the price of that first joyride.

What he did was this --

offered the boy, Kenneth, the chance

to drive the big school bus.

But here's the rub:

Kenneth is his principal's reach

he's too small to touch

the pedals and the

steering wheel at once

so he sits on the headmaster's

lap. Don't think Kenneth hasn't heard

the other boys calling

him the principal's fag baby

but he, too young to really

understand those words,

went along anyway with the man

whose single-mindedness and hard

work built the school residence

to one of the finest in the dominion.

...

Our morning read was enthusiasm tempered by the guilt of the oppressor. You can't read these poems and feel the same way again. Today's book of poetry would argue that only the very best poetry has the capacity for transformation, you read it and you are a different person. Bird-Wilson has the entire template laid out. One child tells a story and then the next, one foot in front of the other, Bird-Wilson walks you through it and holds your hand.

Lisa Bird-Wilson has given voice and name to a lost generation of ghosts, both living and dead.

Today's book of poetry believes that The Red Files should be mandatory reading in every high school in Canada.

Cremation

first I stand beside your closed pine box its sharp edges

covered by a white woollen blanket

and through the shroud my fingers work

a rivet along the lid near where I imagine your hand to be --

your graceful tapered fingers

I'm aware of the funeral man waiting

ready to wheel you into the next room

it all seems to happen in stages, this death business

room to room to room -- I remember them all

we come with you so you won't have to be alone

he offers that I might want to push the button,

tells me some Hindus and Sikhs desire a funeral pyre,

take cremation as a consolation and want to participate

I tell him we're not those kind of Indians,

then allow myself to laugh but he doesn't

so I stay on my side of the glass

while your body burns I hold tight to my boys'

hands and stare straight ahead as you rise to air

and become part of the atmosphere

part of the white and yellow-centered daisies you adored

the convincing scent of the lilacs, so brief in spring

the apple tree with its small sour apples

the blossoms of the crabapple in your backyard

in the front, the giant pine that you remembered

as a seedling -- at the end these were your whole world

and I think you finally forgot about the rest of it--

the ways you'd been hurt, by men and children alike,

debts others owed you -- as you turned inward

with the preoccupation of dying

well

we leave the crematorium, your smoke

filtered through the chimneys, lit

in cold February air and perfect sky-blue sky

I imagine you now, unfettered

limbs whole again, spine straight and true,

rising to walk lightly off the boat, your hand

in the captain's, stepping down

to a place where you can dance once more

in your pretty shoes with your delicate

feet and slender legs, yes

dance on the graves of the dead bastards

the ones who have it coming because

if you don't, who will?

...

Today's book of poetry thinks that Lisa Bird-Wilson's first book of poetry is a stunner. The Red Files is an important book of poetry for Canadians, I hope they all get to read it.

Lisa Bird-Wilson

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lisa Bird-Wilson is a Cree-Metis writer from Saskatchewan whose writing has appeared in a number of literary magazines and anthologies, including Grain, Prairie Fire, The Dalhousie Review, Geist, kimiwan, cîhcêwêsin and Best Canadian Essays. She is the author of the novel Just Pretending (Coteau Books, 2013), and her debut poetry collection, The Red Files, was published by Nightwood Editions in 2016. Bird-Wilson lives in Saskatoon, SK.

BLURB

“Lisa Bird-Wilson eloquently weaves archival work and collected life stories into her debut poetry collection...vivid and visceral...This sharp collection could be used to teach the more painful elements of Canadian history - ones that our curriculum conveniently glosses over. The themes of reconcilliation, and how we continue to reconcile today, will remain with readers long after reading...Bird-Wilson’s first collection of poetry is sure to leave readers wanting more.”
~ Nashwa Khan, This Magazine (May/June 2016)

Lisa Bird-Wilson

Lit Happens w/ guest Lisa Bird-Wilson

Hosted by Saskatoon Storyteller Danica Lorer, Lit Happens is a weekly segment on Shaw TV Saskatoon focusing on the literary arts scene in Saskatchewan

Video; Shaw TV Saskatoon

nightwoodeditions.com

559

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:
Where the Terror Lies. Chantel Lavoie. Quattro Poetry. Quattro Books. Toronto, Ontario. 2012.

Chantel Lavoie must have some dark sources if her treatise on cannibalism, Chaucer and Dante is any indication, and it is. Lavoie is willing to till some stony soil; she comes away with riches.

Where the Terror Lies is partially an amalgam of children's fairy tales skewered with purpose, cautionary whimsies and folk tales that we thought we knew. Lavoie is one of those poets who is always going to poke at a sore tooth. It is also ripe with "life is like this" poems that strive for an honesty you can believe, even if it hurts.

More than you want to take

It doesn't seem like the snow is falling so much

as the earth, trees, bush and grass are rising up,

an angled world floating into white-pieced air.

You go, taking no evidence, leaving

behind a scent I don't like to replace

traces of you, here and here.

If you wanted a harder person, you

could have found someone shiny,

not one who cherishes scratches,

skin under your short sharp nails.

But I'm this sum, won.

And you must have known, after all this untouchable

time, how this reasoning engine huddles in the dirt,

hurt, every time she gets too proud.

The up and down of things. You see

through me, reader, love, and I'm caught

without the slick tricks I've picked up.

Look, what makes us tick is talk.

And the quiet snow between us falls like bullets.

And the silent snow between us falls like rain.

...

Today's book of poetry picked up a particular vibe from Where the Terror Lies that we recognize even if we can't exactly name it. These poems are bitter-sweet tumblers of lost love and broken promises that sound heart renderingly fresh and then they are stoic against evil twists of fate.

These poems work much like Kintsukuroi ("golden repairs") used to fix ancient Japanese pottery. Broken pieces of pottery are reassembled with the cracked spaces filled with gold dust. The broken pieces always remain broken and in full view but they are made beautiful by the emboldened gold dust in the broken spaces.

What was destroyed returns with a new type of beauty and strength, beautiful precisely because of its imperfection.

Kingdom

Mosquitoes are mostly dust

apparently, and return to dust

against my bloodless hand. My heart

is full of water. The sloughs are full.

And my father is here

in Saskatchewan, dying.

Which none of us believes,

although we keep travelling here

and lamenting the latest MRI,

watching him work on this farm

humming constantly

or chanting alleluias -- a habit

my son picks up, along with

"Holy Smoke" and "For Pete's sake."

The boy is four, and his brother, at eighteen

months, will not have a memory

of this or former travels West.

The younger, conceived after

the cancer struck -- our defiant

gesture against death -- has helped

advance that of my marriage.

Also, he is -- they are -- beautiful.

For the third year running there is a wet spring.

The sloughs, as I said, are full --

ducks and even muskrat

have returned from my childhood

thought not the cattails, too far gone.

The crops will be glorious. If there is no hail

or other act from the active God

to follow this fertile season.

The mosquitoes love my baby.

Bites and welts all 'round, but most for him.

They are injecting him with dust.

Have I mentioned the sloughs here this year? They're full.

Nights, my father is haunted by the past

and ghostly future. His own mistakes,

his father's, and his son's -- these he cannot

put aside. Mostly they have to do with land:

selling too cheaply, or at the wrong time.

With being cheated. With being taken in.

Though he is more horrified that he has "hurt people."

It does not matter that he is not the only one.

I ask if he fears retribution

or the possibility of ceasing.

Both.

We turn the earth, attack weeds, sow the garden

as if no one were dying, since we all are

in purest disbelief.

And I have brought two more men into the world

to feed worms and travel through the guts of a beggar.

The spade fills and empties.

Our hands fill and empty.

The brilliant sky may be full

or empty, depending

where you take your stand.

...

Chantel Lavoie has some discerning dance moves, her poem "Goliath" is a good case in point. This tale of the biblical giant comes from the perspective of his mother, who loves her gentle behemoth, worries about his army days. Lavoie has a beautiful precision with little heavyweights of perspective like "Goliath".

Lavoie isn't the least bit hesitant to step across the obvious voids and fill them in with reason. There is a hearty core of common sense inside this work.

Our morning read was a vibrant affair. Everyone here wide, wide awake from the -33 C windchill that walked them to the office. Yes, it is all scarves and rosy cheeks and eyes wide open. Kathryn, our Jr. Editor, was in particularly fine form this morning, poetry smitten and long johns with a flap.

Ancient Memory, Coleridge

The ship and the fog held me. Laudanum.

Who can say where I was

then, who now on

my quest for another guest.

I added a gloss to my loss, knowing

faced with history there are choices:

forget it or forge it.

Dreams

visions

fragments

happen.

The ship's ribs ached and the bird

beyond pain turned to jewels. And I was

alone on the sea.

It was me, and

my damning sin.

If there is a moral it is not penance

or community, but enduring the self.

Learn to drink salt.

Lick your own wounds.

...

Lavoie covers a lot of ground when she is romping around with Where the Terror Lies, all the biggies get some play, love, death, hope and despair. Today's book of poetry sees nothing but promise on these pages. This good stuff will only get better. Today's book of poetry wants to see more poetry by Chantel Lavoie.

Where the Terror Lies is a master class, surprises abound. We loved it.

Chantel Lavoie

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chantel Lavoie’s work has appeared in such journals as Books in Canada, Arc, and Contemporary Verse 2. She grew up on a grain farm in Saskatchewan, and has since lived in Guatemala (briefly), Ottawa, Toronto, and now Kingston, Ontario, where she lives with her two sons. She is an assistant professor in the English department at the Royal Military College of Canada.

quattrobooks.ca

560

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:
Hard Work Cheering Up Sad Machines. Jason Heroux. A Stuart Ross Book. Mansfield Press. Toronto, Ontario. 2016.

Today's book of poetry might just as well say it and get it out of the way. Jason Heroux has become one of our favourite poets. It's not like we didn't warn you.

Back in September of 2013 Today's book of poetry took a look at Jason Heroux's chapbook In Defense of the Attacked Center Pawn (Puddles of Sky Press, 2013) and thought it was brilliant stuff and ripe with promise. You can see that blog here:

http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.ca/2013/09/in-defense-of-attacked-center-pawn.html

Since then we've read Emergency Hallelujah (Mansfield Press, 2008) and had it scheduled for a blog, the only reason you're not reading about that now is that Hard Work Cheering Up Sad Machines came through the door and we simply couldn't resist.

Heroux's latest volume of poetry is a seriously strong statement of intent. Heroux has discovered a shady planet of surreal shadows where he writes from some dark corner to illuminate everything we know. And boy, oh boy!, does he hammer out some choice humour along the way.

Hard Work Cheering Up Sad Machines

It's easy to breathe if you're breathing

breathe all you want the air is too cold

and weak to run away

your life is a gift with your name on it

a word there's no word for

breathe all you want it's easy to breathe

if you're breathing

the air is an all-you-can-breathe buffet

it's hard work cheering up sad machines

hard work cleaning a number's cage

our heartbeats are staggered staples

holding us together

birds sing like kettles boiling song-water

your life is a gift with your name on it

and your life is a word there's no word for

breath all you want breathe all you want

...

Today's book of poetry could be easily convinced that the poet Jason Heroux is channelling the spirit and voice of the great American novelist, short story writer and cultural guru Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Heroux has a similarly morbid comic stranglehold on reality.

The dilemma for Today's book of poetry is that when it came to picking actual poems for today's blog I was stumped. Hard Work Cheering Up Sad Machines is so ripe with lovely fruit that picking which little piece of wonder to share was beyond me so we resorted to the Odin resolution. Whenever we are blocked we write down the page numbers of every poem we wish to consider, post them on a wall and then have Odin throw darts. The poems we are using today were the first three he hit out of the dozens on offer.

Heroux's epigraph at the beginning of Hard Work Cheering Up Sad Machines is from the French author and anarchist Pierre Antin-Grenier (1947-2014). Antin-Grenier was experimental and a loosely connected member of the "extrême contemporain" - a notion in continuous movement.

It's in the hollow of the
ordinary that the marvelous
most often makes its nest
-- Pierre Autin-Grenier

Today's book of poetry is convinced Heroux has lived up to the challenge; Hard Work Cheering Up Sad Machines rolls over the mundane and ordinary to punch out marvelous poetry from every unknowable landscape he encounters.

Yield

Our yield is now, this moment
is what will eventually
become of us, our only harvest
is the one we're gathering.
Water is drawn by the one
with the well. Whoever has lungs
will breathe in and out. The one
with the horse will ride into town.
Everything is nothing but horns
honking at death, and numbers
attacking numbers, apricot
jam stuck on the table knife.
Everything is nothing but almonds
divided by almonds, and grass blades
savouring our shadow's champagne,
a car without wheels crawling through mud.
Why does everyone seek refuge elsewhere?
Whoever has the orange will peel the skin.
Whoever has a thread will feed the needle.
The one with enough footsteps will walk to the store.
Our only harvest is the one we're gathering, this moment
is what will eventually become of us, our yield is now.

...

The first part of Hard Work Cheering Up Sad Machines is made up of shorter, one or two page poems. Later on in the collection Heroux spreads out a little and writes some longer poems and poem sequences. This all works.

Our morning read was a Heroux buffet. We read from Hard Work Cheering Up Sad Machines of course, but we also opened up Emergency Hallelujah and In Defense of the Attacked Center Pawn. Milo, our head tech, led the charge this morning which should leave him in a good mood. His new task is to now track down and procure the other thirteen titles Heroux has listed.

Today's book of poetry is certain that in the years ahead having Jason Heroux on your shelf will help to prove your smarts.

Blue Yodel of the Broken

What more do I want how many
more feathers would make me happy
on a bird how much extra egg yolk
do I need in an eggshell.
Our death chirps like a cricket
in the quietest corner of the dollar.
Bees are kept where two bones meet
a body develops in the body
where fruit trees are grown
the cows are kept
in the same name as the place
where the hay is kept.
Our death jumps into us the way
the moon leaps into a lake to cool off
swimming in the water that isn't there.
What more of a handshake
can you hold in your hand
how much of this fork
do you need to eat dinner.
The blown-out candle
is kept where the wish is kept.
How much more walnut meat
in the walnut shell would it take
to make us feel safe in the world.
I believe in the barbecue cover
that covers the barbecue I believe
in the same name as the place
where the bird is kept
the cage is kept.
How much more
piggy bank can
the piggy bank hold.
Wherever you are
you are a little rain
that never rained you are
a little hurt that never hurt anything.
Sometimes in the bank I touch
someone else's money and wake up

...

If you read Today's book of poetry more than once you'll realize I am praising a new book of poetry almost every other day. I fear it could all just begin to sound like rain. But the truth is that for every book of poetry Today's book of poetry posts there are three or four that don't make it. I DO like every book that makes it onto the blog. If the blog sometimes lacks a completely fresh veneer or the vocabulary to do these books justice it is entirely on Today's book of poetry.

Books like Jason Heroux's Hard Work Cheering Up Sad Machines are the reason this blog exists, I try to serve up gems every time out but this one is a highly polished jewel.

Jason Heroux

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jason Heroux is the author of three previous books of poetry—Memoirs of an Alias, Emergency Hallelujah, and Natural Capital, which was shortlisted for the 2013 ReLit award—and two novels. His work has been published widely in chapbook form and in journals, and has been translated into several languages. Jason lives in Kingston, Ontario.

BLURBS

“Jason Heroux continues to develop his bold style through the delightful fusion of otherwise jarring images.”
—Jonathan Ball, Winnipeg Free Press

“Natural Capital is a helluva good read. I inhaled its 47 poems in one long breath—they left me excited and wondering exactly what it is that makes them so captivating.… Great book. I’d give it several major prizes all at once.”
—Rod Pederson, Arc

“Jason Heroux’s skill as an image-maker recalls Tomas Tranströmer.… In an ideal world, Heroux’s poems would be doled out monthly, one at a time. They would be slotted into the mailbox, or handed to us by some peculiar stranger on the sidewalk.”
—Nick Thran, Event

“At its heart, Heroux’s gift—however existential or surreally humanistic—lies in the transformation of ways of seeing the world, of analyzing it and of language. The poems themselves, in their unique ways of seeing, are humbling at the same time they are refreshing.”
—Cynthia Reeser, Prick of the Spindle

Jason Heroux

Video: Jason Heroux

mansfieldpress.net

561

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:
How to Draw a Rhinoceros. Kate Sutherland. Book Thug. Toronto, Ontario. 2016.

Kate Sutherland has created a rather robust bestiary but it only contains one principal animal. More correctly one type of animal, yes, How to Draw a Rhinoceros is seriously amped with a cornucopia of rhinos.

Sutherland's research is rich and varied and a little astounding. Kate Sutherland is thorough and her sources for the poem "A Natural History of the Rhinoceros" will give you a little tug and twist into her ample resources.

"Fragments of text borrowed from: Ctesias, Ancient India; Oppian, Kynegetika; Pliny, The Natural History; Kosmos Indikopleustes, De Mundo; Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo; Valentin Ferdinand, Letter; Edward Topsell, The History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents; James Bontius, An Account of the Diseases, Natural History, and Medicines of the East Indies; John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn; I. Parsons, A Letter from Dr. Parsons to Martin Folkes, President of the Royal Society, containing the Natural History of the Rhinoceros; L'Abbe Ladvocat, Letter on the Rhinoceros to a Member of the Royal Society of London; Comte de Buffon, Natural History; Oliver Goldsmith, A History of the Earth and Animated Nature.

How to Draw A Rhinoceros may be the most well researched volume of poetry to come across the desk of Today's book of poetry in a long time. Of course the research wouldn't mean anything if the poetry didn't work. Sutherland's poems work hard and the results are easy to like.

How to Draw a Rhinoceros

Begin with an elephant. Shorten the legs and the nose, pin back the ears

To cement the distinction, assert eternal enmity between the animals

Compare to:

cow calf bull ox

oryx buffalo camel

horse donkey goat lamb

lynx lion

pig hog boar sow swine

dog rabbit mouse

eagle duck

tortoise turtle toad

dragon elephant

overturned coach

mountain

Distinguish from:

fox

tiger

elephant

hippopotamus

unicorn

Use a woolly rhinoceros skull to sculpt a dragon's head

Delete all rhinoceros references from the Bible

Replace with unicorns

Add a dorsal horn and a suit of armour

Incorporate its image into an apothecary's coat of arms

Put a jaunty human skeleton in front

and one behind

Sketch a front view, a back view, a side view. Insert details

of horn, hoofs, ears, nose, tail, each of its component parts

Liken its genitalia to botanical specimens with Latin names:

e.g., Digitalis floribus purpureis, Aristolochia floribus purpureis, &c

Picture it grazing placidly in the foreground, while a fearsome compatriot

gores an elephant in the background

Position it on an island under a palm tree

in a jungle draped with vines

in a march rolling in mud

next to a river

in a desert

on a cliff edge

Depict it stalked by an Indian swordsman, or African tribesmen

armed with bows and arrows. Don't be afraid to mix and match

Confuse its armour with an armadillo's and situate it in the Americas

Render it with a ring through its nose, being led by a chain

or with its leg shackled

Paint it lying on its side, feeding in its pen

preening before an audience. Divest it of its horn

Mask the audience. Make it realistic

the audience fantastical

Sculpt it from marble. Cast it in bronze. Model it in porcelain

Perch a turbaned Turk on its back

Place a robed mandarin cross-legged at its feet

Put a clock in its belly

Enamel it on a serving plate

Engrave its likeness on a medal, a series of medals

suitable for collecting

Emblazon it together with a sailor on a banner

the sailor raising a glass of beer

in a toast: Bon Voyage!

...

Sutherland's How to Draw a Rhinoceros is a glossary to adorn the history of the rhino and messy human interlopers alike. By the time Sutherland finishes we can imagine a world where the only reason for human existence to flourish is to praise the big beast. But of course Sutherland is up to much more.

Today's book of poetry thinks you get the picture, Sutherland's rhinos are the platform, her high diving poetry act is what we are really here to see. How to Draw a Rhinoceros is a splendid poetry read; Sutherland both amuses and informs, teases and delights.

Kate Sutherland's How to Draw a Rhinoceros is a new mythology for the odd-toed ungulate and Rhinocerotidae will be eternally grateful for as long as they can read poems.

O'Brien's Four Shows

Museum! Menagerie!

Caravan! Circus!

The Rhinoceros

or Unicorn of Holy Writ

huge animal

immense size

enormous footprints

prodigious proportions

one of the largest black rhinoceroses

ever seen

huge monster

leviathan rhinoceros

great unicorn

Rhinoceros-ship

perhaps the only opportunity

of ever beholding

a FULL-GROWN LIVING RHINOCEROS

in the United States

the public will please remember

there will be no additional charge

to see this extraordinary

curiosity

...

Having been a member in curious standing of the Rhinoceros Party I felt it was my duty to get our morning read off the ground and started. Our office staff were a bit St. Patrick's Day green this morning but Today's book of poetry offered no sympathy. I put John Coltrane's "Giant Steps" on at a peaceful but not distracting volume, spiked everybody's tea, and on we went down Rhinoceros Road.

The Fun of Hunting Them

I. Theodore Roosevelt, East Africa, 1910

Any modern rifle is good enough. The determining factor is the man

behind the gun.

I pushed forward the safety

of the double-barrelled Holland rifle

which I was not to use for the first time

on big game. such a hard-hitting rifle

the best weapon for heavy game

I was using a Winchester

with full-jacketed bullets

I was anxious to try the sharp-pointed bullets

of the little Springfield rifle on him

I used all three of my rifles

It would certainly be well if all killing of it were prohibited

I fired for the chest

I first hastily into the chest

I put the heavy bullet straight into its chest

I fired right and left into his body

I put in the right barrel

I struck him with my left-hand barrel

I again knocked it flat with the left-hand barrel

I put both barrels into and behind the shoulder

I fired into the shoulder again.

I fired into its flank both the bullets

remaining in my magazine

I emptied the magazine at his quarters and flank

I put in another heavy bullet

I had put nine bullets into him

I sent the bullet from the heavy Holland

just in front of her right shoulder

The bullet went through both lungs

It went through her vitals

My second bullet went in between

the neck and the shoulder

The bullet entered between the neck and shoulder

and pierced his heart

The animal was badly hit

It needed two more bullets before it died

I had put in eight bullets, five from the Winchester

and three from the Holland

To let the desire for 'record' heads become a craze is absurd

None had decent horns

None with more than ordinary horns

None carried horns which made them worth shooting

It did not seem to have very good horns

Her horn was very poor

A poor horn

A stubby horn

A short, stubby, worn-down horn

His horn though fair was not remarkable

A fair horn

A good horn

The front horn measured fourteen inches

against his nineteen inches

It had good horns

The fore horn twenty-two inches long

the rear over seventeen

Thick horns of fair length

twenty-three and thirteen inches respectively

A stout horn, a little over two feet long

the girth at the base very great

A front horn was nearly twenty-nine inches long

He was a bull with a thirty-inch horn

A very fine specimen, with the front horn thirty-one inches long

much the longest horn of any of them

...

Kate Sutherland's How to Draw a Rhinoceros is a monster first book of poems that Today's book of poetry admired from the get go. Sutherland has taken a page out of the American novelist John Irving's playbook. One of Irving's characters in The Hotel New Hampsire intones that only way to succeed is to "get obsessed and stay obsessed." Sutherland's rhino obsession is all gravy to poetry readers, Sutherland knows how to burn.

Kate Sutherland

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kate Sutherland was born in Scotland, grew up in Saskatchewan, and now lives in Toronto, where she is a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School. She is the author of two collections of short stories: Summer Reading (winner of a Saskatchewan Book Award for Best First Book) and All In Together Girls. How to Draw a Rhinoceros is Sutherland’s first collection of poems.

BLURBS

“Kate Sutherland has created a surprising, beautiful and often tragic menagerie of poems about a powerful, peaceful beast that has the misfortune of being both magnificent and magnificently horned. Her brilliant resurrection of 18th-century rhinosuperstar Clara is an enchanting bonus.”

—Stuart Ross, author of A Hamburger in a Gallery and A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent

“Kate Sutherland writes a book of poems with the understanding that the colonial encounter requires a deliberate destruction of the colonized. In How to Draw a Rhinoceros, Sutherland draws upon historical documents and imagined perspectives to present a palimpsest that maps imperialist invasion, European plunder of brown and black countries, kidnapping, murder, and enslavement. In other words, the poems reveal the true face of empire. In verse that invents, alludes, and allows for considerable vivid delving, the poems present and speak back to white violence and a colonialism that framed and imprisoned those that they conquered (including people) as exploited ‘exotics’ for European appetites.”

—Hoa Nguyen, author of As Long as Trees Last

bookthug.ca

562

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"

Between Lives - Nilofar Shidmehr (Oolichan Books)

Conditionals - Peter Gibbon (bird,buried | press)

Immortality - Alan Feldman (University of Wisconsin Press)

Resisting Arrest, poems to stretch the sky - Edited by Tony Medina (Jacar Press)

Passport - Angela Hibbs (DC Books)

The last white house at the end of the row of white houses - Michael E. Casteels (Invisible Publishing)

Lady Crawford - Julie Cameron Gray (Palimpsest Press)

On Not Losing My Father's Ashes in the Flood - Richard Harrison (Buckrider Books/Wolsak & Wynn)

Love is a very long word - Majlinda Bashllari (Guernica Editions)

Blue Hallelujahs - Cynthia Manick (Black Lawrence Press)

Acquired Community - Jane Byers (Caitlin Press)

Life as IT - Daneen Wardrop (The Ashland Poetry Press)

Selah - Nora Gould (Brick Books)

I Mean - Kate Colby (Ugly Duckling Presse)

Still the Animals Enter - Jane Hilberry (Red Hen Press)

Fredericton - The City Series: Number Two (Frog Hollow Press)

The Red Files - Lisa Bird-Wilson (Nightwood Editions)

Where the Terror Lies - Chantel Lavoie (Quattro Poetry/Quattro Books)

Hard Work Cheering Up Sad Machines - Jason Heroux (A Stuart Ross Book/Mansfield Press)

How to Draw a Rhinoceros - Kate Sutherland (Book Thug)