Today's book of poetry: Brood. Rob Thomas. A Bywords Publication. Ottawa. Ontario. 2014.
Winner of the 2013 John Newlove Poetry Award
Best best best cover since Christian McPherson's The Sun Has Forgotten Where I Live.
Rob Thomas has a hell of a sense of humour.
Check this out:
cereal killers
we have Rice Krispies
just where we want them.
we're gonna make'em talk.
carry on, Snap, with your terrible
death rattle, no crying over
spilled secrets, Crackles.
is that really all you have
to say for yourself, Pop?
next we break the Wheaties
and cast the Cheerios
before that horrendous tiger
with his frosty grin.
...
Rob Thomas takes some well known nursery rhymes memes and turns them on their heads with a light handed flip of direction and intention. Thomas has a deft hand of unexpected tricks and treats for more than just Halloween.
These turgid little/short poems carry disproportionate weight as Thomas darkens the edges of everything just a little with Brood.
iv, missing children
that golden girl
isn't she that golden girl? Papa Bear remarks.
the one who was sitting in my chair.
Mama Bear swats the carton from his paw
and peers at the pixelated image.
you mean the one who tasted my porridge,
she corrects.
Baby Bear belches and levers
a hunk of gristle from his teeth with a claw.
and they say she's missing?
...
Rob Thomas entertains the hell out of the reader in this chapbook from Bywords Publications.
His Brood is that quiet whisper you hear that tells dark secrets.
These are the new nursery rhymes that taunt all of life's safe moments, they bring little comfort but they are amusing as all get out.
That discordant clang of a church bell in the distance, ringing when there is no need for it to be ringing. This clarion call is quietly, malevolently reproaching the notion that the future will work out for the the good..
message in the bottles
sometimes you wish
you could squeeze the kids
into the trunk and drive
to Florida
where the toaster
sun brands the likeness
of you-know-who
into each well-braised
and sand-powered backside
where vegetables
swim in your cocktail
and you might swim as well
because here's cold
too cold to forget
or remember to even think
of paint bottles --
kaleidoscopic --
swelling in the trunk
...
Why does Today's book of poetry enjoy grim - the same reason the best humour cuts close to the bone. Sometimes you just want to run around the fun house, getting startled by the scary clowns, the monsters in the dark.
Rob Thomas
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rob Thomas is a stay-at-home Dad. He's had an incredible life and you can read about it all here:
The poem is succinct, funny, and disturbing all in one. An irreverent revery about escape, and its potentially dire result. The words are carefully chosen, but not precious, and effectively shaped into a potent little poem.
-- Alice Burdick - 2013 Bywords John Newlove Poetry Award Judge
Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher. They are shown here for publicity and review purposes. For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.
Today's book of poetry: Birds Facts. Dave Currie. Apt. 9 Books. Ottawa, Ontario. 2014.
Dave Currie does the almost impossible, he makes, for a short period of time, birds the most interesting subject on the planet. Currie's creative micro-fiction/prose poems soar.
Bird Facts is a deliciously snarky collection of prose style poems that painstakingly break down the ornithological mutterings of an etymological Birdman of Alcatraz if he were a modern Scheky Green.
Chicken
There are more than twenty four billion Chickens living on planet Earth, and nearly all of them lead miserable lives. No large-scale pharmacological solution has ever been attempted to deal with this epidemic of Chicken misery. However, science is ever changing.
By the mid-15th century BC, the Chicken's quick egg deployment brought the species worldwide stardom. Presumably somewhere around this time scrambled eggs were invented.
Chickens have individual personalities. When allowed to live outside of the prison industrial complex, they are actually quite gregarious. As can be intuited from children's cartoons, Chickens attract mates through choreographed dance routines. Not on display in cartoons is the headlong mounting that ensues immediately following these dance routines.
Apart from using these socially inclined animals for nuggets, humans like to train them for "Fancy Chicken Shows." In some places, ten thousand people will show up to catch a glimpse of one of the three hundred birds on display. Fancy.
...
Dave Currie really is marvelously funny in a sustained and disciplined poetic vigor. It might have been an easy project for Currie if he allowed himself to release the hounds of comic poetry but the smarter poet, that being Currie, is a restrained as he is brilliant.
You don't show all your feathers at once.
Unless you're a peacock.
Each and every one of these slightly alarming avian deconstructions follows a particular rigour. These prose poems are as consistent in form and style as they are in fowl punch line.
Ostrich
Ostriches do not bury their heads in the sand. They never have -- no one has ever seen them do it. Not even once.
Ostriches only eat the highest quality of foods. They can run 50km per hour. They never got tired of walking. Ostriches like to keeps things casual. Freewheeling hippy birds do not pair for long but they do split parental duties. Except of course laying eggs, which the lady ostrich does every second day. Ostriches tend to be democrats. Egyptian Vultures attack unguarded Ostrich nests by tossing stones at the enormous ostrich eggs.
The infant mortality rate for Ostriches is 85%. If let to die of old age, Ostriches die in their fifties. An ostrich does not chirp -- it booms. Ostriches look ridiculous when they dance. Adult Ostriches spent the majority or their time alone. Their eggs are the largest and smallest on the planet; they are largest in size but smallest in comparison to species. Spinster Ostriches often help guard nests. This comforts them in their ugliness and makes them feel useful.
...
Once again Ottawa's Apt. 9 Press ups their design game. Bird Facts is as attractive as it is amusing.
Dave Currie can be very proud of his avian poetry. Cameron Anstee can be proud that he continues to find work that lives up to his handsome designs.
This is not Colonel Saunders or finger-licking good -- but these fowl poems are hard to put down, you will want more of this delight.
Roadrunner
The Roadrunner preys upon rattlesnakes. The Roadrunner preys upon bugs. The Roadrunner is the only one who can take down the Tarantula Hawk Wasp. Roadrunners live in the desert, they nest around cacti.
They have been known to grab humming birds at nectar feeders. At family reunions they avoid the Cuckoo like the plague. They can control their own body temperature by adjusting their position to capture sunlight on their black spots. Roadrunners, in their family units, claim territory and never leave. Fleeing is for the weak. Roadrunners are also called Snake Killers, which is pretty damn badass.
Roadrunners make good parents. They often eat the last baby to hatch, as a family. Cannibalism is their yahtzee, infanticide on family game night. Maybe this is why they are the state bird of New Mexico.
...
Dave Currie has given Today's book of poetry the first big poetry laughs in a while. Bird Facts is the most fun you will have without pulling the feathers off of something. The most fun you will have until the crows come home to roost.
AUTHORS BIO
David Currie currently lives in Ottawa.
298 Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher. They are shown here for publicity and review purposes. For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.
Today's book of poetry: The Cave. Tom Holmes. The Bitter Oleander Press. New York, N.Y., 2014. Winner of the Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Book Award for 2013
How do you make human those first moments of transition when a species is animal and then they become human?
Is it contained in that first deliberate painting on a cave wall?
Tom Holmes might have you feeling that. The Cave posits those moments of the transformative human past and gives them scope, room to percolate in our active and overburdened minutiae.
The First Painting
I had no urge except to sleep
with her in the cave, but I felt
sympathy, I cared. I sensed
intelligence in a crevice. I saw
life. I saw a bison's back
in a crack, I saw
the whole world, the whole sky,
all of night. The night
with the bisons, the horses, and rhinos
before me, before my eyes -- I saw
a backdrop with all the beasts.
I saw blood on my finger.
The arc of a bison's back
appeared with one stroke.
The second urge arrived.
...
Tom Holmes is explaining who we are today by stepping into our giant footprints and deciphering what it is that makes us sentient, capable of thought and therefore choice.
These big question poems pose a challenge to the readers understanding of what it means to be human.
It is all in here, The Cave, the start of faith, the beginning of manufacturing, of commerce. Holmes is outlining or at least providing a hypothesis for nothing less than the beginning of our conscious time on this planet.
Plato is just hanging out around the corner, Holmes has his own cave and in it all is explained in time.
The First Prayer
Father, it is cold for spring,
snow lingers in shadows
below cliffs and trees,
the ground is not giving,
and the beasts smell you.
The fat and dried meats
dwindled away days ago
as did your final breath.
The fire is warming.
Forgive us our next meal.
...
Holmes assesses the future using the tools of the present. He has discovered and/or decided to share time travel. He is in every moment, Holmes somehow spirals through time. The poems in The Cave
are our first revelations as we move away from the black glass monolith, bones in our hairy fists.
Sorry, Kubrick obsessed intern writing copy for a moment.
Today's book of poetry thought these poems were cut with a digital laser, precise as that.
A Brief Autobiography Of The First Artist
I was carving
the sharp end of a spear
when I sliced myself
and my blood spilled out.
It was smooth and thick
and salty.
I tried to rub it off,
it spread evenly and thin.
More pulsed out
in rhythm with my heart.
I clutched my chest.
The blood continued its pulse.
I smeared my arm
and then my thigh.
I slapped a rock.
The blood held its place.
I found a red hand
on the rock. My red hand
detached and peaceful
like a greeting or foreboding.
My blood stopped.
I sliced myself again.
I made more hands
and flung red drops from my fingertips.
There was so much red
before it all went black.
...
Tom Holmes
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tom Holmes is the editor of Redactions: Poetry, Poetics, & Prose and the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently The Cave, which won The Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Book Award for 2013 and will be released in 2014. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize seven times and his work has appeared a number of times on Verse Daily. His writings about wine, poetry book reviews, and poetry can be found at his blog, The Line Break: http://thelinebreak.wordpress.com/.
BLURBS
Hand art on Paleolithic cave walls is the artery, but observations like cut gemstones are woven into Tom Holmes' exciting tapestry of The Cave with its hunger for mystery to balance you along the edge: "When the wall opens, / I am lightning in the antelope's antlers / and the stripe along its jaw." These poems wrestle with the concept of time. They want to capture time, yet realize that time is elusive. So, they attempt to understand time through concrete experience, which poses its own dilemma. Even The Needle, a vehicle which hopes to stitch the fabric designed to apprehend time, is ephemeral: "Let me tell you about the needle. / It is and it is not. It points / to what will be, and what it isnt..." Undeterred, the poet continues his quest. Enjoy this exciting journey through the primordial future.
--Alan Britt, judge for the 2013 Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Book Award.
A deep and selfless imagination anchors The Cave. Tom Holmes gives himself over completely to his vision and his project is nothing less than inhabiting the spirit and the flesh of our collective ancestors. The speakers here, in the daily specifics of early life on earth, retell the beginnings of our consciousness as it rises from fire and rocks to images illuminated on the cave walls and in the night sky. Each poem is a distillation of the individual efforts of art that result in the common bonds of our humanity. From “blood on his finger” and “burnt wood and ash” to “where the wind took form” we retrace our physical and spiritual past in song and paint. The voices in these poems are absolutely credible, and Holmes’ writing is “a song it carries from a star.”
– Christpoher Buckley, author of Back Room at the Philosopher's Club
A writer looks at the famous Paleolithic cave paintings in France, and then he becomes an ancestor at art’s birth, birthing himself as a writer at the same time. Tom Holmes “set down [his] bowl of burning animal fat / to illuminate this hollow the world” in poems that embrace what it means to be a fledgling human and nods toward Platonic allegory in poems that delight and sometimes sear. In “An Origin of the Other” the sacred and the earthy conjoin in manifesting this human world, what we have been, what we have become and are becoming still. An ambitious and strange book of intelligence and empathy.
– Laura McCullough, author of Rigger Death & Hoist Another
Today's book of poetry cut and pasted two of those blurbs from the excellent poetry site Redactions. Which you can see here: http://www.redactions.com/our-books.asp
Tom Holmes
Three Bad-Ass Poets: Tom Holmes - Reads Paleolthic Poems
Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher. They are shown here for publicity and review purposes. For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.
All of the above have sent books to Today's book of poetry and I cannot thank them enough. All of these publishers have been more than generous with their time, energy and their beautiful books. Today's book of poetry has been astonished.
For you, Today's book of poetry reader - check out these presses, each and every one of them have catalogues of incredible books. You'll be astonished by the beauty that is out there.
There are so many book of poetry out there swimming around that is hard to know what shore to swim towards. The really scary part is that I'm only skimming the surface, but fun skimming it is. Check out these presses and all of their incredible books.
Michael Dennis pontificating...
Statistics Update for Today's book of poetry:
Poetry blogs/reviews to date: 295
Publishers: 130
Readers: 79,879 - sometime Sunday, January 25, we will hit 80,000 readers (I would like to thank each and every one of you.)
Today's book of poetry: Inheritance. Kerry-Lee Powell. Biblioasis. Windsor, Ontario. 2014.
Kerry-Lee Powell is Winner of the 2013 Boston Review Fiction Contest and the 2013 Malahat Review Far Horizons Award.
Damn it all to hell if she isn't the best thing since sliced bread.
Inheritance could be the best book of poems I've read since my own father died. Inheritance starts as an elegy to a dead father. It doesn't stop there.
If this book doesn't show up on every "best of" list, every award nomination list, there is nothing I can do about it - but it should.
These harrowing poems could only venture forth out of a deep and abiding love for truth, It is a scourging, searing swat of emotional intensity.
The Last of the Hitlers
The storm tore a pier off Long Island Sound,
unearthed a row of oaks and a Mafioso corpse
from the grounds of the Federal Reserve.
New York at dusk is neo-classical,
all coloumns and wingless silhouettes
crowding the high windows.
Down here it's sewage and hazard warnings,
sirens shrieking like bereaved women
and the last of the Hitlers on his daily walk,
holding the frail vial of his body taut
because he's vowed to spare the world his blood
and let the ignominious line die out.
If he spills a drop the taint will spread,
infect the causeway and the flooded marsh.
Last of the Hitlers, last of the Patriarchs.
Although in this gloom he could be you or anyone,
a Canute who seeks to command
the engulfing waves with a stay of his hand,
while a fresh storm on the Atlantic gathers force.
Let the Greats smash
their pianos in resounding finales,
lash the air with salt and applause
for this lone man at the land's drowned end,
as if he was the last monster, the last god.
...
Powell is searching for all those lost souls caught adrift and sinking.
She looks around those corners and sheds light towards the all encompassing darkness as though she were an usherette, flashlight in hand, in an old theatre while Bela Lugosi lit up the black and white screen.
Malefic
What isn't clear is how she keeps breathing
in the locked trunk of his car, mouth and nostrils
taped or how he steers the slack heap
of her body up the stairwell to the unlit
place he often dozes in while shady figures
on the screen steal off with other bundled shapes
in loosely strung narratives but where also he lies rapt
staring up through cracked plaster
to where his secret star throbs like an ache
in the temples, spelling out the nightly pattern
and pace of the recurring thoughts that spur him
to become at first a dimly felt presence
between streetlights and entrances
but every now and then a face, blurring amid
stunned winces and repeated blows in the unkempt
room that shifts in and out of focus,
ink spraying in all directions, because she
is a bird in a chimney
fingers smeared with soot, reaching for her one
chance for escape, when the grabbed fabric
drags behind her in that ordeal from the window
to the bathroom where he is a looming angel
to whom she falls in sudden worship, across slicked
tiles and into fragments in black plastic,
back in the trunk and again when the officials
dredging the canal look up to guess which high rail
he has leaned from, the unknown perpetrator
to see his own ill-defined silhouette in the water
and the weighted sack shatter that brief mirror.
...
Kerry-Lee Powell is fearless in the way fearless people can be -- her laser purpose would seem to be to illuminate that unseen moment. There are human interactions we recognize only after the fact, if ever, if at all.
Powell sets her poems out to feed off of these moments, she mines the internal conflict, makes it public.
Inhuman
They called from the hospital to say
this time you were really dying.
I was fifteen, late home from the movies,
mouth bruised from kissing.
I'd seen so many deaths on the screen,
with knives and guns, capes and fangs.
Death didn't drain off into an armchair
as monotonous as your laboured rasp.
Twice I stood by you, shifting from one
leg to the other, my kindnesses stolen
from soaps, from stars with skin like milk,
their breasts over the flattened soldiers.
At the hospital I couldn't pretend
I wanted to lean into you as the others leaned
to heave their grief out into kisses. I backed off,
tried to look like a loved one, a human.
It's no wonder that your face
visits my face in the mirror the least often.
My neglected grandfather, I would like you to have seen
that string of teenage suck-marks around my neck.
Your blood, my first romance.
...
Pity the dead, pray over the dying.
Kerry-Lee Powell uses her personal history like a spring board. Watch as she jack-knives into your thoughts.
These poems stay with you. The jack-knife in this case isn't the dive. Powell actually cuts into you, leaves a mark.
Kerry-Lee Powell
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in Montreal, Kerry-Lee Powell has lived in Australia, Antigua, and The United Kingdom, where she studied Medieval and Renaissance literature at Cardiff University and directed a literature promotion agency. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies throughout the United Kingdom and North America, including The Spectator, The Boston Review, and The Virago Writing Women series. In 2013, she won The Boston Review fiction contest, The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award for short fiction, and the Alfred G. Bailey manuscript prize. A chapbook entitled “The Wreckage” has recently been published in England by Grey Suit Editions. A novel and short fiction collection are forthcoming from HarperCollins. Inheritance is her first book.
295 Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher. They are shown here for publicity and review purposes. For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.
Today's book of poetry: A Thin Line Between. Wanda Praamsma. Book Thug. Toronto. Ontario. 2014.
Wanda Praamsma uses short narrative events from her life to encapsulate moments as though they were short sequences from dreams we are familiar with. There are often two narratives and two voices juxtaposed, but because they ring true, as personal and universal, so "family", they resonate, hard, with the reader.
Praamsma is a citizen of the world and regardless of where she is in her narrative, in the world, the reader feels comfortable under the spell of these poems.
Praamsma uses that "thin line" for balance. She is emotionally precise like a surprise entrance of a character in one of those dreams.
A Thin Line Between is one long poem broken into sequences, sections, moments, and they are untitled.
...
michiel I see saskia in the way you move, the way you stand there with your
hands out to the side (like a penguin, a gracious penguin)
a woman graceful in every step walks along the road a bag of rice balanced on her head
are you sleeping with our cousin? the girl in the bakery asks
a motorbike races by and a woman's shawl blows turquoise into the wind a bloated truck rumbles past, overloaded with coconut shells
we laugh
we sleep in different houses
simone's on the canal
and I'm by the vondelpark
but our heads are so similar
our teeth so similar
our minds so up and down
our worries so in tune
we might as well be in the same bed
instead we are at festina lente on the looiersgracht
we say, with this generation
ours
it is all on the surface
you squeeze yourself into these profiles
on linkedin on facebook on twitter
I am this one long list of accomplishments
I smile in every photo
that's what I am showing to the world and that's what people are seeing and
then they get
JEALOUS that I am here and they are there and
we are all longing for somewhere else
...
"longing for somewhere else". Today's book of poetry loved this section.
A Thin Line Between is a photo-album of a family. An old 16mm. camera clicketty-clacking away at your memory. Family frolic blinking your memory.
These untitled sequences roll by as familiar as your long-time neighbour, you've never heard them before, but you know them and it is reassuring.
A Thin Line Between also functions as an abiding and loving tribute to the Dutch poet Lambertus Roelof (Bert) Schierbeck (1918-19960), "Bert" Schierbect was active in the Dutch resistance during WWII, in later years he was very active in the Dutch literary scene. (Bert Schierbeek was also part of COBRA, an internationalist artistical movement that intended to renew and modernise the postwar visual arts and poetry (with members like Karel Appel, Hugo Claus, Corneille and LucebertWIKIPEDIA ).
These poems don't rely on location, as in geography, Praamsma goes everywhere, but instead Praamsma's ability to constantly place the reader in the present of each poem renders every country, every settting, home.
...
IN THIS SEGMENT THE SECTION "DOOR" IS IN FACT A POEM FROM BERT SCHIERBERT'S BOOK OF THE SAME NAME
...
the idea of association
bert wasn't interested in historical novels, making this whole complex thing
pasting all the parts on a bulletin board to help your mind sort it out
that was boring
but people read them, people like them, michiel says
bert wanted prose he wanted poetry he wanted interconnectivity
the Oneness of all things, dancing on a page
the door a door is open or closed a door that's open is a hole toward space a door that's closed part of the wall marks off space if it moves it is a door so I am a door
bert looked own at me, those eyes
the kind your mind grabs onto
hold melts marks
me in my pink pagamas
a huge sombrero on my head
you can have it, he said, take it home to canada
in the photo I look past the great brim and my eyes zoom into his
and perhaps that is it
the One moment I had with him
...
A Thin Line Between is fragment after jigsaw fragment of a giant puzzle. The fragments flow into one another, but it is all being revealed at pace, remembering the dreaming? In-situ it all makes sense, it is all necessary.
Wanda Praamsma's book is a non-linear portrait of family and Praamsma's place both in and outside of its bounds.
India, Canada, Croatia, Amsterdam and the inside of your head -- Praamsma is seemingly at home wherever she goes.
...
in the yellow house
listening to jazz on french radio
(the french play better music and laugh a lot more, says dad)
you hear that baritone sax
you hear that steady beat
swishing
swishing
sietze is making soup and roasting pumpkin seeds
making the stove
making a fire
stirring the pot
they are getting along again S & S
after the argument over glazes
sometimes we have these big flare-ups, mom says
you just want to throw in the towel
______________
thirty-eight coloured umbrellas tracking towards on flight of stairs it's amsterdam weather in an upper canada town all the light drifts away and yet the stones around me begin to pop darker pigments heaving relief I look up from the page, and in one swift moment all the umbrellas disappear
closed up, back inside, to hide
...
Praamsma constantly juxtaposes her world and the whole world for dramatic effect, illuminates our world in the process.
Wanda Praamsma
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Wanda Praamsma grew up in the Ottawa valley in Clayton, Ontario. Her poetry has appeared in Ottawater, 17 seconds, and Feathertale, and several literary non-fiction pieces have appeared in the Toronto Star, where she worked for several years as an editor. She has worked, studied, and lived at various points in Salamanca, Spain, Santiago, Chile, and Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and has travelled to many places in between and beyond, including Cuba, India, and the Balkans. Praamsma currently lives in Kingston, Ontario, and is working on an MFA in Creative Writing through the University of British Columbia. a thin line between is her first book of poetry. Find Praamsma at www.whywandawrites. com, or connect with her on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/wpraamsma.
BLURBS
Few books are so gracefully themselves: a thin line between accomplishes an atmosphere that seems enigmatically familiar, complex and unassuming. It is, in part, an intimate and oblique portrait of a major Dutch poet, but even more so, it’s an exploration of how we should live. The doors in this poem lie between inner and outer worlds, family members, places, life and art – and the speaker’s curiosity and candour leave them wide open. – Sadiqa de Meijer
Mixing shapes, genre and line break into a multi-layered poem (long poem and dozens of little poems), a thin line between is within and without, it opens like a door, and moves through family, love, “the mysterious he,” language, and all those other lives we have lived. It conveys the beauty of crafting our own selves, edits and all, and asks the questions: “What is this place i come from?” “Where is it i am going?” and most importantly, “How am i going to write about it?” – Katherena Vermette
Conversational, associative on many levels, Wanda Praamsma’s long poem pulls a reader in to what is both said and unspoken. a thin line between probes the dualities of resemblance and difference, here and there, leaving the door of her heart ajar in its testing of interconnections within this highly creative Dutch family. – daphne marlatt
a thin line between balances the intimacy of personal narrative and memory with a sweeping meditation on experience and language. By reflecting on the relationship and inherent tensions between “without” and “within,” it locates the hidden pause within even the most fleeting, seemingly ordinary, moments. – Johanna Skibsrud
A thin line between lives up to [its] promise — it has plenty of fizz. – Toronto Star
It is [a book] about following lines — of heritage, of thought, of desire — and where those lines might lead. — The Kingston Whig-Standard
Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher. They are shown here for publicity and review purposes. For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.
Today's book of poetry: Throw Yourself Into The Prairie. Francesca Chabrier. Sarabande Books. Louisville, Kentucky. 2014.
You want to know what the internet is, how to write a novel or to build a net? Francesca Chabrier will give you the necessary answers, instructions, information.
It might arrive air-mail on the misty wings of a flying fish - but arrive it will.
Whimsy can be a waste of time or a portal to a better understanding. Whimsy can be that moment of childhood clarity disguised as delight when your best friend explains the universe and it makes sense, even if only for a brief moment. Clarity, certainty and knowledge can be that fleeting.
Throw Yourself Into The Prairie is an incandescent delight.
The End Of The Lonesome Era
The internet means I want to touch you.
I write to you on the internet to say hello,
why don't you try and touch me too.
I found a lettuce growing machine on the internet.
I found tiny cans of oatmeal, and a replica
of a painting that I printed out and hung on my wall.
The internet feels like almost being someplace.
It feels like doing a pretty normal thing
somewhere strange, like playing fetch in a graveyard.
Behind a veil of clean glass, there are so many eyes.
I thought mine were hazel, but it said they are brown.
The internet never sleeps. It is millions of spiders.
Big spiders and little spiders. Spiders whose bodies feel like linen.
Spiders that look fierce. Spiders that are harmless.
Spiders that move in the dark and behave like the sea.
...
These utterly charming poems work at the speed of a whip cracking but leave no scar, instead, a knowing smirk. The reader is not just amused -- but amused and newly informed.
Canadian wunderkind Kayla Czaga casts a similar spell -- and I am left to wonder where these young poets are coming from that know so much more than their years? This is a newish sort of wisdom, artfully articulate, deftly adroit, funny as hell and sprinkled with a knowing certainty.
The Beautiful Poem
Beautiful Australian girls wearing pinafores under the umbrellas
of Business Executives in the rain
Beautiful Antarctic girls riding on the backs of dorados, holding
fish heads in their cold, dusty, curving arms
Beautiful Hawaiian girls swimming in circles
Beautiful girls from Shangri-la, all Capricorns, all left-handed,
chartering helicopters to the Memphis skyline
Beautiful Taino girls giving birth to babies that sleep in glass cradles
Beautiful Swiss girls climbing Mont Blanc in Phys. Ed.
Beautiful Lithuanian girls with blonde hair and golden thighs
pencil diving into the Baltic Sea
Beautiful Irish girls playing house on an island otherwise
entirely populated by subversive politicians
Beautiful Antiguan girls playing cricket near Galley Bay
Beautiful Earth girls are easy
Beautiful Irish girl, you are crunked in a totally green dress,
you are paranormal, you have a headlamp in the grass, you are
digging and can see China
Beautiful Korean girls snapping pictures of the dam
Beautiful Italian girls working in a factory near Siena that
produces mahogany torture racks with platinum chains
Beautiful girls from Zanzibar walking across raffia beams
holding handfulls of counterfeit cash Natural Disasters and then:
dancehalls with natural lighting, where natural beauties with
natural haircolor & natural instincts play Russian Roulette
Beautiful Spanish girls of Moorish descent, longing to hear music,
active in the pursuit thereof, digging for musettes in arenas
Beautiful Romanian girls stretching before breakfast, mounting
a single, chalky beam, dismounting perfectly into their coach's
arms
Beautiful girls on experimental diets flying without cargo on a
biplane over the coast of Normandy
Beautiful Arab girls sewing puppets of djinns
Beautiful Argentinean girls with clear skin, glossy hair, sound
teeth, bright eyes & experience fornicating in all British overseas
territories.
Beautiful American girls, completely unmagnificent, holding
themselves together by the ends of their braids
...
These poems, given the chance, fall like the first snow of a new winter. Big, white, welcomed beautiful flakes, each as original as the first hands on the first clock, sundial ancestors.
Francesca Chabrier is that sort of poet, has that sort of voice.
In The Valley On A Hill
a Ferrari zooming
and agape
coming down
the big hill I live on
red and speedy
I wait for you
to invent a new gear
and ask Chelly
if who I want to be
is okay
because my brain is sharp
today and when it is
like this like a blade
I take my weaponry
into the tent I pitch
as high as the voice
I want to use
to sing to you all my friends
I know what people mean
when they say:
"I do not condone violence"
and hand you tiny deer
to put in your hair
but I'd like to crush you
nonetheless
...
Throw Yourself Into The Prairie sings itself, resonates like that pop song you always thought you knew.
Francesca Chabrier -- you won't have any problem remembering that name -- you are going to see it again.
Francesca Chabrier
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Francesca Chabrier is the author of the chapbook The Axioms (Pilot Books, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Action Yes, jubilat, notnostrums, Sixth Finch and Sink Review. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and lives and writes in Oregon.
BLURBS
"With joy, resilience, and mindfulness, Francesca Chabrier makes poems that sing, laugh, cajole and weep. The spirited world of this book is assembled out of the poets/ unique and artful voice, as we find here when she so lovingly writes: "the tent I pitch / as high as the voice / I want to use / to sing to you all my friends." Who can resist?"
--Peter Gizzi
"Francesca Chabrier's Throw Yourself Into The Prairie is beautiful. This book, told in chapters, really does tell a story of a world that is surprising though mundane, gentle though sad, and at every turn filled with amazement. Both hers and our. This is the world I want to live in. Chabrier's voice is the exact opposite of the bossy pedants we've all heard too much from. Like Berrigan, she is "feminine,
marvelous and tough."
--Matthew Rohrer
"Look fierce, do not think too hard about loss, say how to write a novel, keep a list of beautiful women, say axioms, write like an angel -- one of our beloved recording angels -- put it in chapters, send it out into the world. Francesca Chabrier proposes scenarios that test our imagination's courage and stamina; her words fuel our brains' desires to live fuller and more exquisitely meaningful lives. Watch Francesca Chabrier as she goes about not stopping Throw Yourself Into The Prairie's charms. Once you are under their spells you won't want to stop reading this other-worldly good book.
-- Dara Wier
sarabandebooks.org
293 Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher. They are shown here for publicity and review purposes. For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.
Today's book of poetry: Revising The Storm. Geffrey Davis. BOA Editions, Ltd. Rochester, N.Y.
2014.
Winner of the A. POULIN JR. POETRY PRIZE
Geffrey Davis writes with harsh beauty. His poems are an honest and eloquent attempt to suss out what it really means to be a man, and what it takes to get there.
Fatherhood is opened up like a gutted crack-smoking fish -- yet Davis finds moments of subtle and soothing beauty with a lock on language that staggers the reader. Davis is not playing fair, he's a rumbling storm of lightning.
Revising The Storm is one of those books of utterly complex simplicity. You think that Davis is operating with a new spectrum of light in order to see the black and white truth. He let's you believe those things, momentarily at least, and then educates the reader with an expansive understanding of all shades of grey.
What I Mean When I Say Farmhouse
Time's going has ebbed the moorings
to the memories that make this city-kid
part farm-boy. Until a smell close enough to
the sweet-musk of horse tunes my ears back
to tree frogs blossoming after a country rain
I'm back among snakes like slugs wedged
in ankle-high grass, back inside that small
eternity spent searching for soft ground, straining
not to spill the water-logged heft of a drowned
barn cat carried in the shallow scoop of a shovel.
And my brother, large on the stairs, crying.
Each shift in the winds of remembering renders me
immediate again, like ancient valleys reignited
by more lightning. If only I could settle on
the porch of waiting and listening,
near the big maple bent by children and heat,
just before the sweeping threat of summer
thunderstorms. We have our places for
loneliness -- that loaded asking of the body.
My mother stands beside the kitchen window, her hands
no longer in constant motion. And my father
walks along the tired fence, watching horses
and clouds roll down against the dying light --
I know he wants to become one or the other.
I want to jar the tenderness of seasons,
to crawl deep into the moment. I've come
to write less fear into the boy running
through the half-dark. I've come for the boy.
...
These poems read like the potent prayers of a new kind of mystic. Geffrey Davis has deeper vision, wider breadth, a bigger wounded heart, than most of us. But good Lord, this man can write.
The journey he takes with his father is epic in scale and junkie broke.
These poems are emotionally searing but you don't always see it coming. They work on you like a pot of water on the stove for the lobster, you start it off cold, flame up slowly, and the lucky/unlucky lobster never sees the flame, doesn't notice the rising temperature (or so we think), and then these brilliant poems sneak up on you, cook your ass off.
King County Metro
In Seattle, in 1982, my mother beholds this man
boarding the bus, the one she's already
turning into my father. His style (if you can
call it that): disarming disregard -- a loud
Hawaiian-print shirt and knee-high tube socks
that reach up the deep tone of his legs,
toward the dizzying orange of running shorts.
Outside, the gray city blocks lurch
past wet windows, as he starts his shy sway
down the aisle. Months will pass
before he shatters his ankle during a Navy drill,
the service discharging him back into the everyday
teeth of the world. Two of four kids will arrive
before he meets the friend who teaches him
the art of roofing and, soon after, the crack pipe --
the attention it takes to manage either
without destroying the hands. The air brakes gasp
as he approaches my mother's row,
each failed rehab and jail sentence still
decades off in the distance. So much waits
in the fabulous folds of tomorrow.
And my mother, who will take twenty years
to burn out her love for him, hesitates a moment
before making room beside her -- the striking
brown face, poised above her head, smiling.
My mother will blame all that happens,
both good and bad, on this smile, which glows now,
ready to consume half of everything it gives.
...
This is supposed to be a first book but I find it hard to believe. So did everyone around the office, the consensus was that Davis must have published a dozen or so under different names.
Geffrey Davis writes with such hard won experience you'd think some these poems came from a deeper well than his tender years would allow, further than we can fathom. These poems personify grace under pressure.
These poems resonate with such tenderness that the terror almost vanishes.
More Than Forgery
I.
In middle school, I practiced
signing my father's name, for days,
filled empty sheets of paper secretly in class,
comparing his graceful autograph to the frauds.
The beginning tripped me up -- the capital A --
his detail so hard to copy: the tight flourish
of ink just before the first downstroke of the pen.
Because I worried over penmanship, because,
like him, I favored an unfinished cursive,
I watched my forgeries lean toward the real thing
before endorsing the backs of his V.A. checks,
piled up during the months he vanished into rehabs
or chased fixes: Payto the order of food to hush
our rumblings. The checks kept us
in lights and warm water.
II.
Or the way my father
tapped his foot while playing the guitar: he kept
a different, distant beat -- the one to play against.
The lyrics he belted became wounds riding the air
and left me, the boy who wished and wept for birds,
fighting off tears so he would sing another hour.
By high school, I knew he'd left for good.
His A stayed in my hand.
It flares up in every Adam or Alinique
I write -- in every love letter I end, Always yours.
...
Today's book of poetry is honoured to present this book to its' readers. Geffrey Davis, in Revisiting The Storm, is what most poets aspire to, except better.
This collection is so strong, but never brash, it's tender broken love fills your heart with every page.
Astounding stuff - the consensus around the office is that Revising The Storm is one of the best we've seen.
Geffrey Davis
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Geffrey Davis holds an MFA from Penn State University, where he is completing a doctoral dissertation on American poetics. A Cave Canem fellow, Davis is also the recipient of the 2013 Dogwood First Prize in Poetry, the 2012 Wabash Prize for Poetry, the 2012 Leonard Steinberg Memorial/Academy of American Poets Prize, and the 2013 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize.
BLURBS
“...Geffrey Davis translates and transforms our contemporary modes of love, violence and history. Revising the Stormfeels written by a poet who has traversed several previous lives and honed them into a language of beautiful survival. Urgent, tender, imaginative: this is a tremendous debut.”
—Terrance Hayes
“Geffrey Davis interrogates masculinity— as brother, son, father, lover—to examine the sources of love’s enduring and failed aspects ... I admire Davis’ emotional vocabulary, his attentive generosity and tenderness. Keep your eye on this gifted newcomer.”
—Robin Becker
"Geffrey Davis is spellbinding. He knows how to bring even the smallest heartbreaking detail to light. Tenderly but firmly, he leads us down many paths toward the center of a life..."
Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher. They are shown here for publicity and review purposes. For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.
Today's book of poetry: Peeling Rambutan. Gillian Sze. Gaspereau Press. Kentville, Nova Scotia.
2014.
FOR SABERA
"sorrow becomes a friend if it hangs
around long enough"
--from East is the Sun Behind a Tree
Gillian Sze
Back on October 14, 2014, Today's book of poetry (blog #257), I had the pleasure of writing about Gillian Sze's utterly illuminating second book, The Anatomy of Clay. Peeling Rambutan feels and reads as though it were written by a different poet - but one of equally fascinating and obvious talent.
Whereas there was a lightness to The Anatomy of Clay, an almost casual brilliance - Peeling Rambutan has weight. It is full of focused energy and power. But it is never too heavy. This balancing act takes game.
Once again, Gillian Sze is dazzling.
Come
and show me our various forms of leaving. By boat, by foot,
by the flash of our thumbs. By storm, by nightfall, by the
infant hours. Play me the heave of a train horn pushing
through the dark. Show me how a railway crossing rises as
easily and slowly as a dancer lifting one leg. Show me the
silent lightning, as if the sky surrendered, and we're waiting
for ash. Tell me that someone has already seen this and is
still looking up. Tell me how to prepare for the weather next
Saturday. tell me how to reduce stories to their simplest
parts. Tell me again our various forms of leaving. With the
engine running. With joy, avidity, stifled regret. Tell me how
the rooms fell silent. Faces looming in the back window.
The eye falling to the fence. Tell me about two-toned living.
The incompatibility of temper. the worlds you worked to
unite. the tumbling languages that refused to stay aloft. The
ground-bound postscripts. The plummeted paper planes.
...
Many of the poems in this third book of poetry by Sze are prose poems - and yet they flow easily enough, slide off of your tongue as though by design.
Contemplative is a good word to describe these precise poems of captured moments. Like you are constantly walking into rooms of new discovery. The edges are clear, reading them is like watching one of those old Polaroid photos come into focus in front of your eyes.
Garage Band
In Wen Chong Village, beneath a small light,
a group of old men settle on their plastic chairs.
Cradling their instruments,
they smoke cigarettes
and drink kung fu tea to defeat the dark.
Inside, their women fret over what to prepare
and pack for next day's lunch.
Outside, a weathered man stands to face his players
and wavers out a Canton opera,
spitting during the interludes,
and picking up at his cues.
...
Once again I have to mention Gary Dunfield & Andrew Steeves. This book continues Gaspereau's tradition of making the most beautiful books of poetry that Today's book of poetry sees. Looks shouldn't matter to poetry - but Gaspereau gives all other poetry presses something to aspire to.
How To Kill A Cockroach
Without qualm,
she peers at the bottom of her shoe and says, Never let a cockroach see your hand's shadow.
...
Peeling Rambutan is a travelogue of sorts that takes you inside the minds and language of foreign people and places that you will most likely never see - and leaves you feeling like you've been there.
That's a great trick. Bravo Gillian.
Gillian Sze
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gillian Sze is the author of two previous collections: The Anatomy of Clay (2011) and Fish Bones (2009). Her work has appeared in a number of national and international journals, and has received awards such as the University of Winnipeg Writers’ Circle Prize and the 2011 3Macs carte blanche Prize. Originally from Winnipeg, she now resides in Montreal.
BLURBS
Peeling Rambutan traces a young poet's journey into the interior of China, a place where "religion is a game of telephone and illumination," where epiphany is found in ancestral kitchens. Sze shows us a luminous, lyric landscape where old village vendors ride into Shanghai singing in rhyming couplets. What a beautiful, unforgettable trip reading this book is!
—MARY DI MICHELE, author of The Flower of Youth
Gillian Sze's Peeling Rambutan is an unforgettably vivid collection, combining her characteristic intimacy with subjects and a gut-punching instinct to get it across. Richly detailed with uncommon knowledge and observance, poised in articulation and always present. Gillian Sze is one of our most enchanting poets.
—DAVID MCGIMPSEY, author of L'il Bastard
Gillian Sze's voice is so assured and so clear. She sets out to explore where she is from, where "Here can't be found on a map," and then sends the images our way. She records, and then tattles in the best of ways: with curiosity and awe and humour. I felt at times that I was reading a novelist writing brilliant poetry. That is to say, these poems are busy with story. I loved them.
—DAVID BERGEN, author of The Age of Hope
Gillian Sze's sensuous, precisely-observed poems trace her identity across cultures, eras and continents, weaving together scraps of family lore, visits to changing landscapes, the smell of Malaysian fruits and Canadian snow. Her far-flung home, often in the air, often lonely and built from memory is of a sort many of us share. The poems in Peeling Rambutan enlarge our sense of who we are.
Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher. They are shown here for publicity and review purposes. For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.
