Michelle Wirth and Austin Brady’s Harm Done (self-published, 2022) is a collaborative effort featuring Wirth’s poetry, Brady’s poetry, sometimes poems by both Wirth and Brady, sometimes sets of call and response poems by one then the other, and sometimes something blurrier. The majority of the poetry is accompanied by artwork from one of the two as well, if not – in varying degrees – more experimentally part of the poem itself. Harm Done’s experimentalism is a highlight, owing in part to its publication as a zine – or rather as a digital zine... or rather as a PDF, complete with page 2 technical recommendations “for best experience.” In a way, even the collection’s medium poses a question of identity mirroring that of the poems’, which mull over and wring out – as described by Brady and Wirth – “the goopy experiences of gender and masculinity from our different perspectives” and “the injuries that result from our complex selves violently encountering gender norms”; existing is inextricable from defining, and have to do so where categories fall detrimentally short.

That violence is a common theme throughout Harm Done, but generally in a subversive manner drawn from horror or fantasy, and with a sense of humor cast over a great deal of this pain. Tenderness isn’t an uncommon theme in a queer reading of horror. As described by David Ly in the introduction to Queer Little Nightmares, these explorations “push back on the idea of monsters as fearsome” by “finding belonging when the world wants only to see us as monstrously other”. Fittingly, many of the poems in Harm Done are flavored less like body horror and more like body dark comedy, or, as outlined in “Rage Quit,” with a “set me off and watch the monster-/movie transformation into an/angry queer” B-movie type of violence that isn’t not comedic. “How to become a werewolf” asks “how do I get bitten by a/cryptid? Where do I sign up?”, while “stage suit” studies “how to distill via tubes &/erlenmeyer,/a drink to guzzle/to transform?/what potion do i need to push/(through sharp)/into flesh?” Outside of the fantastical, “I’m starting to smell like my dad” offers dark comedy without metaphor, grounded in the speaker’s real-world anxieties that “of course it’s not like T just makes you match / a generic template of male: / it activates / your own little nucleotide sequences / sequences passed down to you / from specific men” – even if finding peace remains somewhere in another liminal space:

Smoke some cigarettes / drink cheap martini mix / to complete / the olfaction package / and
give myself a hug / collarbone press until it hurts / and tell myself: / I’m here for you / and /
you’ll get free of the people hurting you / someday

As you may have gathered, the sense of humor in Harm Done tends to be very dry. “Getting Buff” feels like a gender-focused reimagining of Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool.” It’s one of the collection’s more disciplined stream of consciousness–flavored poems, hitting like reps at the gym if what one were lifting was their gender presentation, blending the obvious (“I lift weights/I push plates/I eat raw chicken”) with the humorous (“I piss lite beer”) and the caustic (“I eat car battery/I cry at lunch”). “I fuck to cum” is the kind of line in a poem that seemingly hits with absolute artlessness but could probably turn more people onto the art of poetry if this was what they thought poetry at large asked them to “get.” I personally love a bit of straightforwardness cutting through the abstractions of poetry – I’m a dummy and I appreciate when a poet is ok just spelling it out for me. “male gaze fractures on a testosterone body” is one of Harm Done’s highlights in this regard, contrasting frustration with unwanted policing of one’s body (“joke’s gonna be on you fucks/when those tiddies you wanna/grope so bad are covered in/curly hairs. when these/wrists you wanna pull me over to you are/decorated with a dark lawn/that you call disgusting. this is/who i was the whole time”) with frustration of curating desirability (“but then the rare dicks i/don’t want soft? but the objects/of my gaze that i want to want/me. but what if what they want/isn’t my real body … will i still engorge you with a/voice crack and otterstripe down/my abdomen? the few of you/i’ve hand-picked. how cut can/my muscles get?”). A great deal of the language of Harm Done doesn’t allow itself this bluntness, and sometimes its stream of consciousness can veer into word salad, but there is generally a great deal of accessibility in here without promising easy answers that may not exist. Harm Done is about the questions and will often experiment with form to figure out how to ask them.

Reviewing Harm Done requires discussing a number of elements that generally fall outside the definition of poetry. “The Curtains” – a sprawling poem about haircuts and gender norms – takes full advantage of the digital medium, changing the page dimensions to give the poem extreme verticality and still run off the page. Homophobic slurs are scratched out in heavy pen stroke. 

Some poems, including the aforementioned “Rage Quit,” are partially typeface, partially handwritten, creating more visible call and response that can appear anywhere on the page, and it’s fun to feel like you’ve discovered a poem written around another poem by a particularly devious previous owner of the book (especially when the handwritten speaker kicks off their exasperation with a playful “Hello! I’m here to rouse some rabble”). “Things I want to ask you about White Knighting” takes the form of a multi-page worksheet with questions (e.g. “Is emotional labor a form of white knighting”) and lines for answers, which are filled in with handwritten responses that are the non-direct answers one would expect of poetry (“When you are assigned weapon at birth, all care/feels like rebellion”). It also contains Harm Done’s most notable example of what is the text and what is the art: instead of a handwritten answer on one of the sets of worksheet lines, the lines instead twist into artwork of a wolf caught in a trap. While this example is inextricable from the poem, some of the art – a lot of it – can feel somewhat just there, marginalia that matches the mood but doesn’t feel essential. Not as much of it plays with the idea as I would have hoped for, but as far as criticism goes, I’m not too upset about wishing for more of a good thing.

Purists of the written word might rankle at this, but what constitutes poetry is always shaped by technology, whether it be the margins on the page, the resources available to a translator, or, in the case of Harm Done, the low-barrier accessibility of the medium. Poetry often feels like it has to adapt to the eBook. I found myself rotating my iPad to read No’u Revilla’s Ask The Brindled (Milkweed Editions, 2022), which displays some poems based on your preferred font size (as many eBooks do) and others presented statically to retain the layout of the printed page. The eBook of Franny Choi’s The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (Ecco, 2022) starts with a publisher’s note about the impossibility of retaining lines breaks as the author intends in a format where any given eReader has a different screen size, and notes using hanging indent as an imperfect but best available solution to this puzzle. What I find interesting about all of this – outside of the quality of the poetry – is how Harm Done uses the digital zine not just as for the medium’s accessibility, but finds opportunity for expression in it. It’s an especially appropriate structure for its subject matter of battering at rigid, pre-existing rules of form. It’s a welcome embrace.

​

Charles Rammelkamp’s Catastroika is the best romp with Rasputin since the animated film Anastasia – with none of the sugar coating. Based on the true story of Aron Simanovich, Jewish secretary to the notorious monk who perished in Auschwitz, and his friendship with Rasputin’s daughter, Maria, Catastroika takes us on a thrilling kaleidoscopic ride through some of the most horrific and strangest parts of Russian history.
 
 – Anne Eakin Moss, professor of Russian literature, Johns Hopkins University
 
https://northofoxford.wordpress.com/2020/04/12/catastroika-by-charles-rammelkamp-available-for-pre-order/
​

The title of Beth Gordon’s collection sets you on your wary guard, then tightrope-walks you through the twenty-four poems. The name is apt for the whole collection, not least for the overriding themes and imagery of death and loss, but for the overwhelming and dizzying mysteries set up in every poem that throw you on edge. You know danger is lurking there, but you can’t see it yet.
​
I read these poems over a series of weeks, as each one’s disparate images took time to digest. And as the images and phrases seeped disjointedly into my consciousness, a tension was created as I skirted around twenty-four particularly dangerous situations.

The opening poem ‘Looking Away at Lambert Airport’ instantly sets the tone. Images of lives; distorted, damaged and corrupted are uncomfortable; humans are cruel, selfish and destructive. The title serves to remind us that in the face of suffering, most of us look away. When pain, loss or disease humiliate, it is easier to dehumanise the sufferer; the female twin subjects of the poem are rendered animalistic with talons and fur. We go back to our screens.

Gordon’s vehement imagery is bitter and heart breaking. Visions of death emerge, bubble up in nearly every poem and subside. We are called upon to imagine ‘What my daughter’s hair felt like when she was dead;’ something is ‘riddled with bullets;’ we go to ‘ICU’ and ‘emergency rooms.’ Widows dance with ‘dead husbands,’ an Irish Pagan has been dying ‘since the moment she was born;’ there are tombstones, carcasses, skulls and rotten things. You find yourself racing haphazardly through each poem to search for an answer; staring myopically at each image and idea, as if in a dream, as each poem paints a piece more. Something awful has happened. What, and to whom?

Structure and poetic form are adeptly manipulated. The poem ‘Loquacious’ makes giddy use of enjambment to emphasise the poem’s title of unfettered verbal outpouring, in a panicked or despairing confession that works to avoid the crux of the matter; emphasising the poem’s theme. This structure is employed frequently to create lists of images which overwhelm the reader. At times, this is heady and joyous – ‘Road Trip Redux,’ despite its negative view of travelling nevertheless creates the hedonism of random adventure. At other times like in ‘Christmas Eve,’ enjambment is used to heap up upon the reader lists of misery like an outpouring of loss. Questions are asked and not answered - left despairingly in the air - abandoned as hurt and lost things. The ghost returns at the end of ‘I Buried My Father Twice’ to ask: ‘Where are you, where did everybody go?’ These heartbreakingly lonely and sad questions are never answered for the ghost; nor the reader – who continually questions the identities of the elusive ‘you’ to whom Gordon addresses her poems.

Along with death, disease is a key image. It is an inheritance; a curse that is always lurking and passed down like old furniture. In ‘April Sixteenth Two Thousand Seventeen’ Alzheimer’s haunts us; numerous cancers prowl through the pages. Genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis cripple the next generation as ‘nothing ever ripens’ in ‘Walking Catfish,’ while children are routinely ‘tumour-ridden’ in ‘One of Those Days.’ Contagions of rabies, diphtheria, smallpox, and Zika virus loom over us; comas are implied in the sleeping cocoons of ‘Goose Season’ where nature is out of kilter and migrating birds, despite their hereditary instinct, lose their way.
In Gordon’s poetic world, the body is frail; and the mind, assuaged by the body’s weakness, is frailer still. ‘April Sixteenth Two Thousand Seventeen’ paints the impact of loss, the peanut butter eating, day-time red wine drinking, pyjama wearing kind of coping. The kind of coping that thinks ‘fuck it,’ in ‘I Tell You I Dreamed of Reading Poems in Phoenix’ and stops the car in the middle of the road. In a world of dead teenagers, dead daughters, dead brothers, dead fathers (sometimes twice), dead friends and their dead fathers and dead lovers, Gordon creates dark images of despair and escape.

But escape is not always dark. With only a few words, Gordon evokes a sense of place and often it is the desert to which she returns to create a scape to escape. In coyote circles with ‘dust drenched winds’, ‘vultures’ and ‘stars,’ the open desert is before us as a clean and safe place where stasis ensures nothing is lost and nothing is complicated. Escape is also found in dreams, another recurring image. Non-sequitur images in Gordon’s poems are themselves dreamlike, men ride on unicycles and mutter about dialects; dreams and the dreamlike in her poems begin with greens and orange, plants and animals, then throw dangerous confessions or realisations around like exploding hijacked planes. Verbalised realisations that can destroy as much as the death and disease.

There is kindness though. And hope. In ‘I Think You Live In Constant Fear of Tragedy,’ Gordon empowers the broken body and encourages it to ‘relearn the art of twist and bend,’ calling it to somersault and ‘promise your ribcage to the stars’ in the safe haven again of the desert with its coyotes and vultures. The body is disjointed, but lovely, spirited from the grotesque to the spiritual. ‘The Possibility of Journey is a Heavy Thing’ empathises with the failings of the weak body; be it old or traumatised, and gently encourages bravery; ‘the fear will dissipate.’ Gordon offers the possibility of continuance. Never more so than in the collection’s final poem ‘Alpha or Omega’ when she plays with the notions of who will be last and first to inherit. She brings together here, and in ‘Just One of Those Days’ strong, kind women who care for the sick, pick up the pieces, cook easy meals for others while foregoing lunch and ultimately will be the hope and saviour of us all.

Beth Gordon’s collection Particularly Dangerous Situation is published by Clare Songbirds Publishing House and available at www.claresongbirdspub.com/shop/poetry/.

Disclaimer alert! I like to stress that I can’t confirm if any of what I’ve said above is what the poet meant. I lived in her poems for several weeks, and this is what I took and what stayed with me. Enjoy the poetry prism; the rainbow looks different from every angle.

Before the Big Bang Makes a Sound
Poetry
Kelsay Books, 2020
$16.00, 57 pages
ISBN: 978-1950462698
 
Time, faith and love are the big themes that bang against each other in Carolynn Kingyens’ lovely lyrical poems. She writes in “Coney Island”:
 
            I want to go back in time
            where hope hangs heavier
            than the moon;
            when love is hard as a fist
            inside the throat…
 
But in the final poem, “Never Look Back,” she reflects:
 
            Oh, the drudgery
            of nostalgia,
            the sentimental –
            strange hoarders of ghosts.
 
“No One Is Immune” opens with a sort of tongue-in-cheek epigraph from Britney Spears and features a bump-and-grind pop diva who is starting to feel the effects of time, icing her swollen joints after every show.  But it ends on the sobering reflection:
 
            But the body, like time,
            continues to keep score
            on all of us, and no one
            is immune.
 
But it’s more than physical breakdown that time brings, though that’s one of the effects, as we see in poems like “Autoimmune,” in which the protagonist is blindsided by a disease already in her DNA, or in “Break the Mirror in Your Youth,” where she laments that beauty “has less / of a shelf life / than vegetable oil / and MSG.” It’s all there before the Big Bang even makes a sound!  For we also read in poems like “The Attic,” in which a woman comes upon a “dust-laden time capsule” in the form of a photograph of herself in a bikini, the unforeseen emotional and “moral” evolution that comes with time.
 
            You stare into those
            squinty eyes of that happy
            and still hopeful girl,
            who is unaware
            of all the kneeling to come.
 
“Kneeling” suggests the poet’s ambivalence about religion and “salvation,” which we read about in poems like “Bathroom Crucifix” and “You Can’t Handle the Truth” (“Christ says His sheep / will hear His voice; I am listening.” You can feel the skepticism in those lines).
 
“Of Mice, of Men, of Chickens” begins:
 
            I come from a long line
            ​of women who can break
            a man’s heart
            and a chicken’s neck
 
This is the “love” theme, inseparable from time and faith, and just as complicated. We read in “Fantasy Meeting” about an imagined reunion with an old lover in Grand Central Station, in which “your eyes will tell / of your regret.”  For this, finally, is what time amounts to, as we read in the penultimate poem, “The Parable of Time” (“Time is boss / She owns us….”)   
 
            Time has many daughters –
            Déjà vu (Deja),
            Irony,
            History,
            Regret,
            and the toughest
            of them all – Karma.
            These are her agents,
            her reapers.
 
Kingyens’ meditations on religion, relationships, growing older, though, are often laced with a sly humor. “The Northerners,” for instance, tells the story of a couple newly settled in a community south of the Mason-Dixon line, trying to fit in.
 
            You couldn’t understand
            why every sentence
            started and ended with Honey
            like, Honey, I’ll get that, or
            You don’t want to do that, Honey.
 
            It was a little too intimate
            for Northerners.
 
Set mainly in New York City, these poems are alive with wit and insight.

Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. A chapbook of poems, Me and Sal Paradise, was published last year by FutureCycle Press. Two full-length collections are forthcoming in 2020, Catastroika, from Apprentice House, and Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books.

Kim Harvey at Palette Poetry has recognized "Pray the Dust" by Njoku Nonso in "Poetry We Admire," a monthly special feature.  Check out the October listing here:
https://www.palettepoetry.com/2019/10/10/poetry-we-admire-death/

96 pages
March 28, 2019
Shadelandhouse Modern Press

Stay with me here for a moment. What is the distinction between a “cultural shift” and a “cultural crisis”? Having lived in mostly rural and conservative places, I’ve understood the difference largely to be a matter of categorization. Those who can abide by “new” ways of thinking and being, who are not flummoxed or nonplussed by amendments to cultural categories, are likelier to view changes in the culture as “shifts”; whereas a “crisis” occurs when members of a society look upon people, ideas, or conditions that do not easily adhere to previously established acceptable categories with fear, confusion, or animosity.

Taken a step further, what does it mean to “categorize,” particularly when that activity has everything to do with how we live—in terms of law, identity, healthcare, etc.—because it has everything to do with our understanding?
These are important questions to me for what I hope are obvious reasons. And it is when James Alan Riley touches upon these themes that I am most engaged with his recent poetry collection Broken Frequencies.
Time is one of the most important means of constructing understanding. Consider this. One of our greatest beliefs is that people are capable of change. That means people are dynamic, not static. But how could we understand something being dynamic if not for the concept of time? Would a Permanent Now necessitate something (or a subject) being entirely static? Is time not a requisite for dynamism?

Likely, we don’t actively think about time in that manner, though. But how many of us wonder what could have been if, say, we hadn’t been sick and missed that day of school, or if we had taken that job instead of the other, etc? The possibilities haunt us. Yet we understand that we must progress in a certain confining manner: that of time. And once we have affirmed our decisions and made our moves, we are committed. We move forward.
Possibilities and hauntings come together nicely in the poem “Ghost Story.” I enjoy the following lines immensely:

            I tell this story as true from the comfort
            of two lifetimes away…
            one of the many possible untold versions.

These are simple but compelling lines. They brought to mind, as many moments in Broken Frequencies did, this line from James Wright’s poem “Today I Was Happy, So I Made This Poem”: “Each moment of time is a mountain.” And it’s true: consider all the things that had to transpire in just the exact manner that they did in order for you to arrive at this moment in time. Each of us are climbing over Everests each moment of our lives. And it is not unusual to look back at previous expeditions and contemplate these journeys: how long ago a particular journey was, what other journeys may have been but never were.

Crucial to categorization is language. Generally speaking, poems that dwell on language, particularly panegyrics to syllables, don’t do it for me. In saying that, when a poet draws attention to language in a way that is not merely in veneration, I take notice.  Consider the opening poem “In a World Without Birds”:

            They know a bird when they see one.
            They recognize feathers and wings,
            but that’s about as far as they can go
            beyond the different colors…
            the generic woodpecker or chicken.
            In a world without birds, all ducks
            are the same duck quacking in circles
            on some stagnant, unkept pond.

Clearly there is a relationship between understanding and language. We distinguish male cardinals from bluejays not only by our ability to distinguish the physical attributes of these birds but also in our ability to name (to categorize). When this ability is stymied, so is our understanding, at least until someone can correct us, can give us the language that we need. This is not inconsequential. It is how we understand our lives.

But even the most verbose and engaged and eager to learn amongst us get it wrong, for “Distance, like memory, can be deceiving,” as the speaker tells us in “Theories of Elegance.” Further, there are unavoidable failures:

            I am trying to play a song
            I cannot play, trying to explain
            something that cannot be explained (“Playing My Brother’s Guitar”).

And then there’s disease which incapacitates. What appears to be Alzheimer’s disease alters reality for a man named Walter in my favorite poem of this collection, the tragic “The Catherine Wheel.” Elaborating on the events that occur in this poem would only spoil the poem, so to say the least this poem evidences the loss of language and categorization, of distinguishing between past and present, and how these losses make existence difficult. (I would ask that as you read this poem to pay attention to Walter’s character. He was once a man preoccupied with his future and how certain critical junctures in his life posed risks to the comfortable future he wanted.)

Broken Frequencies deals in heavy themes, no doubt, but it is far from inaccessible. The language is clear, and a poem never strays from the heart. I hope you take the time to journey with Riley in his collection of poems. I think you will be happy that you did.

​Chris Prewitt is the author of Paradise Hammer (SurVision Books), winner of the 2018 James Tate Poetry Prize. Chris's poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Twitter correspondence welcome: @poetcprewitt.

In her experimental style, Book Review Editor Emma Holdaway takes a journey through Out of the Sky by Michael Prihoda.  Check out her review HERE!

Find out more about Prihoda's work here:
​https://michaelprihoda.wordpress.com/

Hardback
128 pages
2019

Copies of this anthology may be purchased here:
https://www.flyonthewallpoetry.co.uk/product-page/pre-order-planet-in-peril

​In the mid 1970s when I was doing my A levels in Botany and Zoology, it was all CND and pollution. Since then I seem to have heard more and more about global warming, plastic, fires in the Amazon, habitats and species becoming extinct, on and on. And what have we really done to counter this? Very little. Instead, we seem to have been sleep-walking and being pretty ineffectual. When I hear Greta Thunberg, I want to both cheer and weep; joyous that a young woman is so lucid and powerful in speaking truth to power, cynical that her appeal can cause the massive shifts in business and politics that are needed to make a real difference before it’s too late.
 
Planet in Peril is a voice for us ordinary, powerless folk who don’t really know what else to do but document what we stand to lose and record words and pictures of protest and comfort. I like that the book has sections devoted to the Earth’s ecosystems, our oceans, and the impact of us humans. I like too that it examines the future, particularly through the eyes of the young.
 
Featured poet, Helen Mort, opens with a provocative piece where she imagines coming back as a tree, “when the sky glows orange, I’ll be steadfast.” The poem recognises the huge role trees play and thus far their ability to “persist,” be “blunt phoenix”.
 
Between the poems and photographs is an easy to read commentary giving clear, verified information and statistics about the natural world and the delicate balance of ecosystems and organisms. Poems chart the silencing of trees, animals giving birth, the fragrance of blossom, ice, microscopic marine plants, snow on a child’s face, hot summers, corals, and our attempts to say sorry. Many of the photographs make the reader stare into the eyes of animals on the brink. This is an unnerving interaction, forcing us to see these creatures as just like us, fighting for their families, their territory, for survival. Animals, birds, insects, small and large feature as essential links in the chain. The photos show fauna in their prime, brightly coloured, both muscular and frail, in flight, fearful, majestic and wild.
 
Turning again to the poetry, Rachel Ikins’ piece uses familiar personification to characterise the planet as “a big, soft woman” ravaged by extremes of weather until “exhaustion takes her.” This simple device is powerfully handled and is a useful means of helping evoke a human response, giving us a visceral connection to “an anonymous woman forgotten by the entitled masses who wrangle and tromp all her secret places.”
 
Phil Coleman’s “Red List” is a damning poem set out as an alphabetical catalogue of man-made disasters and inventions, “Landfill. Light pollution. Logging…Urban sprawl. Unchecked. Urgent.” Rachel Haddy’s poem “Battlefield” draws comparisons between what mankind has done and warfare. Her emotive vocabulary evokes ancient fights “on the beaches”, assassinations and “the war dead.” Amongst the poems we even find a haibun and a villanelle. Joanna Lilley’s bleak poem “Specimen” starts with the horrific possibility that “there will come a time when there were only two humans left in the world and they will be dead. You, perhaps, and me.” These displayed human remains will represent the “alleged architect of annihilation.” Elaine Beckett takes us further into the future in her “2084,” “the apple pip is still in its plastic bag as transparent as the year they sealed it.” How shocking that the commonplace may become a precious relic.
 
Featured photographer, Emily Gellard, captures the cold, blue magnificence of an Antarctic glacier, massive and riven with alarming fissures. By contrast, her Macaw photo is a brilliant close up of the dazzling red feathers around the bird’s eye. Fitting then that in “Yellow Beak” by Christopher Hopkins we encounter “the carcass of a seabird” and learn how it met its demise: “And there gather the choir that sang its death; shaped pellet trails and bottle tops, the weathered beads of nameless colour, the fish and shrimp of its plastic suppers…a stomach full of death.”
 
In the end, the young writers turn unashamedly to rhyme where they can find no reason. Take Chanpreet Samra’s “We’re Sorry, Mother Nature,” and Ethan Anthony’s “The Tale of Two Lime Trees.” The young people pose questions, mourn loss and the waste of resources, make accusations, as at just eight years old Lilian Amjadi Klass remarks, “the rubber, the metal, the wood and the lead, disaster at your fingers.” Elizabeth Train-Brown found the only way to preserve the Tigress in her poem was to have “her tattooed on my back – an elegy, a ballad, something that I could soak into my flesh like smoke.”
 
When a young person like Edan Osborne aged twelve tells you “I’m cracking under pressure and shaking to the core; stop this global warming – I can’t take any more”, we have to return to where we started and grasp Helen Mort’s glimmer of hope: “If I must come back, let me come as a small tree, slow-growing, sturdy, hesitating on the ladder the sun throws down to me.” Planet in Peril is a haunting book, compelling for its honesty and truth. It deserves to be a resource for both education and protest, a record of our time. I wish it well on its journey out into the wild. It’s dangerous out there and some people still don’t care or want to listen. I think what is has to show and tell is brave, gentle, angry and worthwhile; poetry and photography as art and armour.

​Pat Edwards is a writer, workshop leader, reviewer and general poetry activist from Mid Wales. Her debut pamphlet, Only Blood, was published by Yaffle Press in October, and her next will be out with Indigo Dreams in 2020. Pat hosts Verbatim poetry open mic nights and curates Welshpool Poetry Festival.
 

Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp
 
A Midwest Girl Thanks Patti Smith
Poetry,
Slipstream Press, 2019
$10.00, 32 pages
 
What a terrific title for a book! It’s also the title of a poem, which begins:
Patti stole a steak in the Village
Wrote poetry at the Chelsea Hotel
 
            I knew I only wanted
            To be a wild mustang
 
Davenport’s poems are wild and witty reflections on life, femininity, death, and everything in between the covers. “At sixteen I couldn’t wait  / to be felt up,” she writes in “I Was an Impatient Girl,” and in “Married in a Fever” she recalls:
 
            Maybe I was hard on your beloved
            Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme hardtop.
            It was stifling as only August in Phoenix
            can be, and you said it one too many times:
            Be gentle with the door, and I thought
            really, this chunk of steel going to break?
            So I opened and slammed and opened
            and slammed as I stood on the hot asphalt….
 
It’s a hilarious story about getting married that ends: “Forty years later and / that fever never broke.” Thank you, Patti Smith!
 
Some of the most affecting poems in this collection are about the author’s mother, focusing on her demise. About half a dozen poems – “For My Mother,” “Curling,” “A Talk with Friends,” “Dancing with the Dead” and “Why We Eat” among them  – are meditations on their relationship. Some evoke the atmosphere of grief, the odors of nursing homes, the rituals of death. Others are tributes to her mother’s moxie. “For My Mother” begins:
 
            As the nurse removed her vomit-streaked gown
            my mother raised he skinny arm,
            stared at it as if she were Odette
            as if this were Swan Lake,
            and said, Well isn’t that something,
            it looks just like a chicken leg.
 
“A Talk with friends” addresses the moment of her death, the need for privacy in the midst of commotion, while nurses are trying to be “supportive.”
 
            I need my weeping, sobbing,
            sniveling, need to be alone
            with my mother,
            who heaved a coal scuttle
            into our fireplace morning and evening… 
 
This last recalls the poem “Curling,” the author’s childhood in Scotland, her father in the navy, her mother taking care of the family; an officer’s wife, the author’s mother would dress for occasions, the author watching as she applied makeup.  “Why We Eat” is a riff on a family friend’s lasagna brought to the family after the mother’s funeral.
 
But there is also so much joie de vivre in A Midwest Girl Thanks Patti Smith, so much YES!  My favorite? “Women,” the affirmative menstrual flow:
 
            The moon isn’t just a light fixture,
            a rock, a wife,
            an oddity in the sky.
            When our moon rises red,
            phones light up,
            girlfriends share where they watch:
            beside the ocean, from a driveway,
            on the east-facing patio of a steak joint.
            We know her, our moon.
            We know quickening
            in our bodies, we know abundance,
            life streaming through us and out,
            the rich flow of crimson blood.
            On our nights we are abundant,
            engorged, voracious for food, for love,
            for the rising and falling tide.

reviewed by Matthew A. Hamilton

Clare Songbirds Publishing House, 2018
14.00 USD
134 pages

After reading Benjamin Schmitt’s third collection of poetry, Soundtrack To A Fleeting Masculinity, I was immediately drawn to the words of Fr. Dwight Longenecker: “In a world that seems increasingly meaningless, poetry helps you dig deep.”
 
Schmitt’s poetry forces us to dig deep. With a clear and accessible voice, Schmitt introduces us to “this collapsing civilization” that we call the United States of America. And if you watch the news, read newspapers, or listen to the radio as I do, you, too, must be astounded by all the irrational speech on social media, the street violence, and the incompetence of our national leaders, what Schmitt calls “the archaic grime of the republic.”
 
Most of this grime, I am ashamed to say, Schmitt contributes to men, although a few profane women occasion this poetry collection as well. The poems are composed of 80 numbered tracks. Reading the majority of them out loud reminds me of listening to a heavy metal band ranging against the harsh reality of men today: immature boys dominated by anger, sexual frustration, and hopelessness. In “Track 52,” for example, we learn that some kid named Chris discovers “his father smoking weed/at his workbench.” Understandably, Chris, given no other direction, ends up “with drunkenness and a metallic smell/that could almost be seen in the dark mind.”  Additionally, in “Track 53,” we discover three disturbing individuals: a husband that “enjoyed the beatings,” a boyfriend, after watching what seems to be hard core porn, enjoys “slapping her during sex,” and a female same sex couple absorbed in an inordinate relationship “in cloaks of arm fat.” “Track 62” an all too familiar scene of a school shooting: “his cherished bullet was in the barrel/light of God burst.”
 
This grime also manifests itself in America’s politicians, those individuals who are supposed to be exemplars of civility, professionalism, and ethical standards, but often submit to unruly desires, or make reprehensible and, sometimes, risky decisions. In “Track 35,” Schmitt opines how he feels about contemporary politicians: “The Democrats are really donkeys/and the Republicans are really elephants” And again, in “Track 54,” the manipulative politician wants us to believe he’s working for the public’s interests, but what he really wants to do are things like shutting down “every public library and make them brothels filled with/sexy librarians.”
 
The crux of Schmitt’s latest collection can be found, other than in the title of the collection itself, in “Track 13” and “Track 68,” what Schmitt’s calls a “fleeting masculinity.” In other words, many men today are not men at all, but immature little boys unwilling to face life’s responsibilities.
 
All is not lost, however, according to Schmitt. In “Track 55,” he writes: “The United States is a landscape/seeking reconciliation.” In other words, most people living in the US are good people and want to do their part in keeping their country strong and prosperous by getting rid of corruption and building better leaders.  And who may be the voice of the people? “Track 78” provides an answer: “maybe poets give/dignity to the blackness.” 
 
Schmitt’s words give meaning to a meaningless world. He provides hope to generations of young Americans whom have lost hope. Thomas Merton wrote: “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” Perhaps by losing yourself in this beautiful and timely collection, you will find, as I have, and as Schmitt promises in “Track 80,” “the full measure of hope.”

Matthew A. Hamilton holds an MFA from Fairfield University and a MSLIS from St. John’s University. He is a 6-time Pushcart Prize nominee. His stories and poems have appeared in a variety of national and international journals, including Atticus Review, Coe Magazine, Noctua Review, Burnt Bridge, Boston Literary Magazine, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Muddy River Poetry Review, and Tuck Magazine.  His chapbook, The Land of the Four Rivers, published by Cervena Barva Press, won the 2013 Best Poetry Book from Peace Corps Writers. His second poetry collection, Lips Open and Divine, was published in 2016 by Winter Goose. He and his wife live in Richmond, VA.