Reviewed by Paul David Adkins

The Feeder
Jennifer Jackson Berry
YesYes Books
© 2016
978-1-936919-47-5
$18
(https://www.yesyesbooks.com/product-page/the-feeder-by-jennifer-jackson-berry)
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Autopsy of Post-Traumatic Guilt: Loss and Non-Redemption in Jennifer Jackson Berry’s The Feeder

“I lost our baby.” Jennifer Jackson Berry’s speaker opens her debut, full-length poetry collection The Feeder with a matter-of fact confession, terse yet deceptively complex. Conversely beautiful and shattering, this simple sentence answers three simultaneous questions:  “Who lost the baby? I did;” “Who did it belong to? Both of us;” and, “Whose fault is it? Mine.” Because, in The Feeder, it is always the woman’s fault: the miscarriage, the weight gain, the relationship problems. And it is upon this brilliant opening sentence that Berry builds her book.

The cover of The Feeder, entitled Didymus, by Brenda Stumpf, perfectly exemplifies the conflicts which Berry’s speaker faces. From a distance, one can see two empty dresses facing opposite directions. Or is it one dress halved, containing a Matroyshka-like rose at its center? Perhaps, though, as seen from above, a woman looks down at her thick legs. However a viewer interprets the cover, the topics of body image and emptiness fill the collection.

At an autopsy, the coroner must ascertain the cause of death through complete examination of the body. In The Feeder, the speaker escorts the reader through the collection wound by wound. Miscarriages (14 are cataloged in “I Lost Our Baby”) punctuate the volume like buckshot holes. In “I Did Things for the Stories,” the speaker confesses, “We eat what’s gone / bad together, / / the dead, the dying, / the never-born.” She observes in “Lost & Found Love Poem with Oranges and Trash,” during a moment of wracking post-traumatic stress, “. . . when I get home / the sweet fruit are buried in the trash.” The miscarriages and losses are synonymous with weight gain and eating disorders. So joined are the notions, the speaker reveals that women become the meals themselves, in “Writing the Fat Girl,” “My Offal Honeymoon,” and “Fat Girl Has Regular Sex.”

In Jessie Carty’s 2011 collection Fat Girl, the speaker explores the idea of weight gain and potential promiscuity. She writes in “Fat Girl in the OB / GYN,” “Mom told the doctor I needed the pill. / She was sure my love / / of Twinkies would translate / to my fat thighs opening for any touch.” Both Carty’s and Berry’s speakers view the body through a cold, analytical lens. The Feeder observes, in “Another Poem About Infertility,” “The body creates new, / until it doesn’t.” Meanwhile, in Fat Girl poem “Fat Girl on Grooming,” Carty’s speaker observes during toenail clipping, “. . . She / can even reach the right foot as long as she leaves / her right breast dangling between her legs.” The body is, to both poets, an item of utility.

As The Feeder advances, the speaker explores the unfair responsibilities laid upon a woman regarding the success of a relationship. She must maintain appearances (“The Trouble of Curls”), provide sexual gratification (“x = feathers, y = boards”), attempt to solve the couple’s fertility issues (“The Infertile Couple”), and feel guilt for all failings, both in intimacy and pregnancy (“Contemplating a Gift for a Pregnancy Announcement”). These unrealistic expectations foster an atmosphere of perpetual insecurities regarding pregnancy, sexuality, and marriage. “Post-Miscarriage:  Day 186” provides an extraordinarily poignant example of how a woman forges a monument to personal grief and loss through forgetting to cancel certain pregnancy-related notifications and subscriptions after her miscarriage.
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Berry’s collection hinges on the unsettling surprises of what constitutes loss and grief within the basis of a modern marriage. As with the coroner examining every physical aspect of a corpse, Berry’s speaker navigates the very lifeblood of what makes a relationship so difficult when framed by disappointment, guilt, and uncertainty. And, as the author closes the volume, the speaker again experiences expectancy of a child, ending with a stunning end to the narrative arc the poet has so carefully crafted through the book. And it is with this close that Jennifer Jackson Berry so carefully cradles the dead and living side-by-side in her gentle arms.

Works Cited

Berry, Jennifer Jackson. The Feeder. Portland, OR:  YesYes Books. 2016.
Carty, Jessie. Fat Girl. Alexander, AR:  Sibling Rivalry Press. 2011.

​Paul David Adkins lives in Northern NY. He served in the US Army from 1991-2013. Recently, he earned a MA in Writing and The Oral Tradition from The Graduate Institute, Bethany, CT. He spends his days either counseling soldiers or teaching college students in a NY state correctional facility.

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Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp
 
“Stale Bread and Coffee”
Poetry,
Alien Buddha Press, 2019
$10.50, 66 pages
ISBN: 978-1093326017
 
 
Rooted in Philadelphia, g. emil reutter’s poems evoke a post-industrial America whose better times are in the rearview mirror. As the very title of the collection suggests, the joy has mostly gone cold, hard and musty. The title poem begins:

​          He lives in a house in a neighborhood that has been
          forgotten. The only visitors are the mailman and the
          trash truck. He waits for the stale bread to toast
          reheats yesterday’s coffee, listens to the silent telephone.
 
Bleak is the first word that comes to mind. Yet there is a strong bond to and love for Philadelphia, the “Cradle of Liberty,” where these poems take place. The first hint, for me, comes in the second poem, “Melting,” which conjures up a hot summer day in the city. The last line reads: “water ice dripped on the warm cement.” Water ice! The confection’s sold everywhere by streetcorner vendors, but I think only in Philadelphia does it go by that name, a frozen treat flavored with juices – cherry, mango, lemon, blueberry.
 
Time and again, reutter locates these poems, “on the corner of 30th and Market,” “on the corner of 13th and Chestnut,” on Kensington Avenue in rugged North Philly, or in a memory of Roxborough High School. The poem “16 Miles” describes a commuter train “passing graffiti / scarred bridges, trash-covered banks / hurtles toward the turn of the Schuylkill / past the ivory of Penn into the temple of / the old railway gods.” The poem, “City of Brotherly Love” describes another sweltering summer day, “heat and ozone warnings  / traffic jammed all day on the / twin bridges….” It’s another bleak picture as he ties the scene to a larger worldview: “It’s a day like any other day / soldiers die overseas in wars / with no direction….”  Many of these poems take place in bars and diners. 
 
But the characters in reutter’s poems do not lead lives of quiet desperation, as Thoreau would have it, so much as they lead lives of quiet resignation.   As he writes in “These Bones”: “I really don’t complain much / I am today, but I go on / It’s all I know how to do.”  The poem, “November in a Diner” describes this attitude so vividly:
 
          Varicose veins hidden under knee highs
          36 years walking this floor watching as
          young ones come and go she collects
          tips, works the hours, pulls the shifts
          slings plate after plate across the tables
          never a spill. The counter full of lonely
          old men….
 
Sounds bleak, but – no complaints from her either.  The poem ends: “She counts her tips, rests her swollen / feet on the seat across from her.” Resigned to her fate.
 
Yes, there is grief all over the place in these poems. Take “War Widow Cries Today,” for example, or the sad picture of an abandoned dilapidated house in “Of the Lost”; or the lament for that post-industrial America in “Something Wrong Here?” which concludes: “inside windowless buildings / that once were / America.”   But there’s a tenderness throughout, too, for the people, the city, the nation, the poets in the bars, the waitress in the diner. Stale Bread and Coffee is fortifying – if not necessarily nutritious!  As reutter concludes the poem, “Cards”: “smell / the coffee, taste the oatmeal, and / live the life dealt to you.”

​Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. A chapbook of poems, Jack Tar’s Lady Parts, is available from Main Street Rag Publishing. Another poetry chapbook, Me and Sal Paradise, was recently published by FutureCycle Press. An e-chapbook has also recently been published online Time Is on My Side (yes it is) –http://poetscoop.org/manuscrip/Time%20Is%20on%20My%20Side%20FREE.pdf

KD and other fantastic mags and presses gets a shout-out in this interview of Paul Robert Mullen.  Check it out HERE.  Thanks, Paul!

reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp
 
“How Wally Lost His Thumb and the Boy Scouts Became Cannibals”
Poetry
Spartan Press, 2019
$12.00, 132 pages
ISBN: 978-1946642882
 
As the title of Al Ortolani’s collection suggests, this book is a hoot, reminiscent of Jean Shepard’s stories, In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash and A Fistful of Fig Newtons among them, likewise tales of growing up in the Midwest. Except where Shepard’s characters are forever mired in childhood, Ortolani tells a sort of “coming of age” story as we watch Wally and his friends grow up – or grow older, anyway.  For Wally is sort of a perpetual sadsack, even though he is a genuine seeker of truth.
 
The collection is divided into four sections, and through them we watch Wally go from childhood to college to a post-Vietnam version of adulthood. The first section is called “Crayon Sucker,” and in the first poem, by the same name, we see Wally (though not named) as a class clown.  The poem ends:
 
            His parents learned to accept Cs
            from their above average,
            crayon sucking child.
 
Sometimes the Wally poems are told in the first person by Wally himself, sometimes by an unnamed contemporary. A variety of friends come and go. There’s Charlie Miller and Gordon, the Cowboys and Boy Scouts. They go to the carnival, they get into trouble, get into fights; they drive cars; they learn about girls. In “Boys Dig Through Neighbor’s Trash Only to Become Beset by Great Mystery” they learn about menstruation. In “Mama DeBeauty Explains a Necessary But Uncomfortable Aspect of Dude Ranching” Wally and the unnamed narrator of the poem spy on a couple of comely girls only to be caught by their mother.
 
            I pointed to Wally
            and said in shaken desperation,
 
            My friend’s in love
            with your daughter.
 
Mama DeBeauty takes the boys aside and allusively describes the consequences.
 
After a middle section, “Crow,” describes similar coming-of-age drama of the character Johnny Crow, we are back with Wally, now a college student, in the section entitled “Oscar the Lab Skeleton,” which refers to a prank Wally pulls one day with a science-class human skeleton. In this section, Wally discovers drugs and also becomes curious about, well, “the meaning of life,” and so his spiritual journey commences. Gordon and Charlie are back, and Anna and Bambi Alvarez are part of the gang, too.
 
Finally, in “Dancing at the American Legion,” the final section, Wally deals with loss. He’s lost an arm in Vietnam, lost his friends, his home, his family, homeless and hapless but still a seeker. (“Wally Practices Pranayama at the Self-Serve,” “Wally Sings Amazing Grace in an Arkansas Cave.”)
 
In the last poem in the collection, “Wally Smokes a Cigar with Sam Clemens,” that nameless speaker tells us, “The last anybody heard, Wally traveled to northern / Minnesota, sold his Ford, and purchased a rundown / house boat.” He’s about to set off down the Mississippi to New Orleans. How Wally Lost His Thumb and the Boy Scouts Became Cannibals is by turns humorous, tragic, insightful and sad. It’s a good, lyrical adventure in the heartland.

​Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. A chapbook of poems, Jack Tar’s Lady Parts, is available from Main Street Rag Publishing. Another poetry chapbook, Me and Sal Paradise, was recently published by FutureCycle Press. An e-chapbook has also recently been published online Time Is on My Side (yes it is) –http://poetscoop.org/manuscrip/Time%20Is%20on%20My%20Side%20FREE.pdf
 

Kissing Dynamite is proud to announce a special submission call for writing related to poverty.  Hand to Mouth is a special feature zine curated by Rebecca Kokitus and Joaquin Fernandez.  See submission guidelines here!

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