What Snakes Want — Kita Shantiris (Mayapple Press)

Today's book of poetry:
What Snakes Want.  Kita Shantiris.  Mayapple Press.  Woodstock, New York.  2015.

Kita Shantiris can burn, baby, burn.  There is something unique in her poetry kitchen, something akin to magic.  Her poems are plenty fine narratives about the this and that of our monkey dance, strong and articulate.

If it were just that, Today's book of poetry would be satisfied, but What Snakes Want contains a higher gear that kicks in at precisely the right moment.  It is a hard and quick slap to the face, Cher snapping a young Nic Cage's head back like a bobble doll in "Moonstruck" and saying "Snap out of it!"  Shantiris body slams us with some tidy resolutions, some small puzzle piece that implodes on contact with your reasonable mind.

Scars

I'm looking for a photo of you from Burma.

One that was shot after combat.

One where your cheeks are lined

with sweat and fear like the treads

tanks make driving through mud.

Deep in the jungle, I'm looking for a way

to forgive you for the monsoons

and all you leeched from us.

Something to illuminate

the explosions that followed.

A way to forget all the nights

I pretended my bed was a ditch

and sleep had already killed me.

A way to forget you brooding in the doorway

like a panther in one of your way stories.

Someone inside me kept watch

while you taught us to make bedrolls

the way they taught you in the army.

If I didn't learn quickly, you might strike

with your unpredictable paw.

You waged hand-to-hand combat

with the furniture and anyone big enough

to question your authority.

Now you are a prisoner

of your wheelchair.

I'm going to push you as fast as I can.

It's time you knew how it felt

when you gunned the blue Ford to ninety.

You're not driving anymore.

You're mine for interrogation.

💫💫💫

Kita Shantiris is a sniper.  A poetry ninja.  She gets in close for the kill when necessary.  Shantiris reminds us again and again and again of the empowering generosity to be found in good poems.  What Snakes Want glows with liberating discovery, villains are uncovered and named, heroic acts of redemption and failure, dark and fetid.

It's all in Shantiris' What Snakes Want.  Today's book of poetry was reminded how much we like to be surprised, how much we appreciate being challenged.  What Snakes Want delivers with every poem, all of them enlightening, aimed at the sun and all that blue - or aimed at so much of that dark we abide because we must.

Rear View Mirror

You grabbed the past in your hands

by accident. You were looking straight ahead

as if nothing were in the mirror.

It had been a night of happy hallucinations.

Furniture in my front yard to make room for dancing—

windows wide open, hips slightly in synch,

sweat and reggae infecting everyone.

The cops called it disturbing the peace.

You split after we carried the bed in.

You'd almost made it to the off-ramp

when a black and white pulled even.

You smiled at the officers like you were innocent,

made a smooth move adjusting the mirror.

They laughed when it broke loose

and everything behind you fell into your lap.

💫💫💫

What Snakes Want made for a very spirited morning here in the Today's book of poetry offices.  Kathryn, our Jr. Editor, took the helm and assigned the poems with her typical moxie and jam and elan.  Kita Shantiris was given the "star" treatment, and for good reason.  What Snakes Want vibrates with a rebellious and generous intelligence.  Think of PJ Harvey playing anything.

The morning reading was full of knowing smiles and then the other kind, sublime moments.  Just like Today's book of poetry asserted when we began, Kita Shantiris can burn.

What Snakes Want recognizes how much violence occurs without it being named or recorded.  How much is endured in silence.  Many of the poems in What Snakes Want are "giving sorrow words" as Maryse Holder both said and knew too well.  Shantiris breaks down some of the dark standards of quiet acceptance, bites back a bit, she has an alternative.

Goethe's Girdle

Nothing is more fattening than solitude.

My heart growls

stripping the cupboards.

Dear Wilhelm, I have tried

trading peristalsis for passion—

walnuts and sausage,

babka and schnapps — Homer

when my stomach balks.

Each word is a lump.

Let's not bite at my delusions.

If you could see me

in this orgy of distraction,

you'd say, my friend,

I want love too much.

No. I want too much

to be deserving.

Oh, if my blood were lighter.

I'd open a vein and float.

💫💫💫

Today's book of poetry just liked the way Kita Shantiris got it all down on the page, accessible as a phone book back when they were a much needed Rosetta.  Darkly detailed and forgiving at the same time.

Like all the poets we like best here at Today's book of poetry Kita Shantiris offers light and hope.  No innocent glee, Shantiris is still aware of the undertoad, its dark allure.

Kita Shanatiris

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kita Shantiris, also known as Kita S. Curry, is an American poet and psychologist. Published in the U.S., Ireland and England, her poetry has appeared in Ambit, Crannóg, the Fish Anthology, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Quarterly West, The Moth, Slipstream, Wisconsin Review and other journals. Her poems were included in The Border, a collection of three poets’ work published by Bombshelter Press (1984), and two were anthologized in The Faber Book of Movie Verse (Faber & Faber 1993).
After a long hiatus focused on her career as a psychologist, Kita resumed writing again. In 2012, she won 2nd Prize in the Ballymaloe International Poetry Contest, and she has twice been a Runner-Up in Fish Publishing’s contest (2011, 2014). Her first full-length poetry collection, What Snakes Want, was published by Mayapple Press in 2015. It received Honorable Mention in poetry from the Eric Hoffer Book Award, was a finalist for the INDIEFAB Award, and was shortlisted for the International Rubery Award.

Psychologist Dr. Kita S. Curry is CEO of Didi Hirsch Mental Health Services, a non-profit in Los Angeles (www.didihirsch.org). Its Suicide Prevention center, mental health and substance use programs help more than 90,000 children and adults each year. Kita brings personal and professional experience to this work. Suicide has taken the lives of three relatives; when she was young and uninsured, she first sought treatment for depression at a community mental health center in Philadelphia.
Frequently interviewed by the media, Kita has been honored for erasing the stigma associated with mental illness and bringing services to communities of color. She was selected for California’s Advisory Committees on Suicide Prevention and Stigma and Discrimination and has served on the boards of several advocacy organizations—most recently the National Council on Behavioral Health. She currently serves on the Steering Committee of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
Kita graduated Phi Beta Kappa, cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. in English. With the support of an NIMH fellowship, she earned a PhD in Psychology at UCLA. Her husband, Peter Curry, played guitar in the long-running surf band The Halibutsand currently plays bass in Grammy-nominated Los Straitjackets.

BLURBS

"Something edgy and intense haunts Kita Shantiris' poems, always threatening to flare up just outside their frames. Like a great auteur, she teases us with implication, with slow builds, the sneaky reveal, with what you can't yet see. Or, she'll give us a flash of aftermath, letting us glimpse "a tub of red water" where the violence has already taken place. Carefully orchestrating her pace, Shantiris lets things dawn on us, which contributes to the sense of delicious discovery one has in reading this collection. Wanderlust, an ode to coffee shops, an erotic poem set in a gaudy Laundromat, a child lying in bed hearing her abusive father come home…it's all here, articulate, compressed, suspenseful. "It takes brandy to center me/glowing alone here." The reader will likely find herself glowing along with these poems."
     —Amy Gerstler, author of National Book Critics Award winner Bitter Angel

"One could spend a lifetime with Kita's new and powerfully personal book of poetry, What Snakes Want. The poems speak of a life replete with love, loss, pain, honesty, insight, longing, sensuality, and a deep unabashed unsentimental appreciation for the very gift of life itself. The poems are accessible yet abound with rich imagery, beautifully wrought observations of the natural world and of our very human behavior, and they do so with an intensity of feeling and care that ultimately resound with hope as they reach in and touch the soul."
     – Ed Harris, actor, screenwriter, director

"Already recognized with awards, Kita Shantiris is a poet whose work in this book glows with a naked, scalpel-sharp intelligence and a refreshing delight in language. Full of startlingly good poems—"The Last Lake" comes to mind and "Milking the Adder," the source of the title, especially. What Snakes Want is a fine collection, and one of the most exciting I have read in recent years."
      – Patrick Chapman, poet,  A Promiscuity of Spines: New and Selected Poems

Kita Shantiris

Selected readings from What Snakes Want

Video: Bob Bowdon

mayapplepress.com

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DISCLAIMERS

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.

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

and that for our readers in Europe there had to be notification of the use of those "cookies.  Please be aware that TBOP may employ the use of some "cookies" (whatever they are) and you should take that into consideration.

How to Wear This Body — Hayden Saunier (Terrapin Books)

Today's book of poetry:
How to Wear This Body.  Hayden Saunier.  Terrapin Books.  West Caldwell, New Jersey.  2017.

Is it fair to call poetry reasonable?  Hayden Saunier writes poetry that makes a very convincing case out of reason, gentle reason at that.  Relationships happen and Saunier has plenty to say about them—

and about how to "stay alive" in this world.

As Christopher Bursk (author of The Improbable Swervings of Atoms) suggests, Saunier shows us "how to live on this planet."  Saunier connects us.

Hard Facts

To stay alive do not resist

that's what you're told

as if it were a simple act to make yourself

be only meat

and bone

pressed down into an asphalt street

and not a form of suicide

erase yourself be dead enough

that he or she or they'll decide

there is no need to kill you

though do not resist

can make no guarantee of this

but if you stay alive

do not resist will mean you have to stand

your dead self up

walk out into the world alive

which is another kind of death

and harder every single time

you have to kill enough

(do not resist) to stay alive.

...

Today's book of poetry thoroughly enjoyed ambling through How to Wear This Body.  Hayden Saunier is easy to feel at home with.  Yet, from somewhere deep below the reader can't help but sense the spirit of Carson McCullers dancing behind the scenes.  McCullers always knew more than she revealed, she knew what was in the dark, untended corner of the room. McCuillers' once said that "there's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book." 

It's not that Saunier ever has the catastrophic arms of fate swinging for the fences but deep below the surface of these poems, you can feel the "undertoad."

Hayden Saunier is one smooth character.  Most of these poems ring familiar, not because we've seen them before, but because they accurately catch the rhythms that sustain us.

Hard Facts

She's cleaning fish.
Old rivers of raised veins
twist down her forearms
through networks of scars
down her wrists to the roots
of her fingers, the palms of
her hands, her arms
rest on the workbench a moment,
this woman who could be
any woman on the lee
side of any harbor
where there's been war.
She picks up a bone-handled
blade from the workbench,
scrapes guts into buckets,
flicks bits of shine from her
fingertips, and I wonder
how long, if at all, it took
before she could pick up a knife,
and knife, in her hands cut
by knives, but the answer,
I venture, like the answer
to everything else, is —
it depends on how hungry you get.

...

Saunier has no trouble with putting it out there, "Hard Facts" is a good case in point.  But Saunier can also contemplate and savor, her poem "Asparagus" is almost as crisp and tasty and tender as the real thing.

Our morning read was another slightly subdued affair.  Today's book of poetry is having a hard poetry week. Today's book of poetry will be in Toronto this weekend for the funeral of David McFadden, Canadian poetry giant and one of my heroes.

But our hearts are heavier still.  Stephen Reid (writer/bank-robber), died earlier this week.  Stephen Reid was the husband of Susan Musgrave.  Our regular readers will know it already, but Today's book of poetry's esteem for Musgrave knows no bounds.  She is one of Canada's finest poets.  Today's book of poetry sends our deepest condolences to Ms. Musgrave and her entire family.

Our staff did get down to business and gave Hayden Saunier's How to Wear This Body a proper Today's book of poetry reading.  Our dear friend Alexandre added his accent to the proceedings which lent an international feel to the event.  We did Hayden Saunier proud.

Accrual

Some nights my mind still tries
to peel away squares of blackened paper
from the old-fashioned kiosk

of my spinal column, photographs
and placards posted by the body
behind the mind's back, years ago,

glued with spit and wheat paste.
Images gone, titles gone,
all part of the whole

structure now, hardened,
darkened, their weight subsumed
into frame. The way a tree grows

first around, then through, barbed
wire, or folds the small grey marble
headstone of a child into its

knotted roots. Such heaviness
our bones haul in and hold inside.
No wonder we can't fly.

...

Today's book of poetry must apologize to Hayden Saunier as we were a bit distracted this week.  Saunier's poetry deserves the readers full attention.

Hayden Saunier

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hayden Saunier is the author of three poetry collections, Tips for Domestic Travel (Black Lawrence Press, 2009) a St. Lawrence Award Finalist, and Say Luck (Big Pencil Press, 2013), which won the 2013 Gell Poetry Prize. She is also the author of a chapbook, Field Trip to the Underworld (Seven Kitchens Press, 2012), winner of the Keystone Chapbook Award. Her work has been published in such journals as Beloit Poetry Journal, Nimrod, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Her work has also been featured on Verse Daily and has been awarded the 2011 Pablo Neruda Prize, the 2011 Rattle Poetry Prize, and the 2005 Robert Fraser Award. A poet, actor, and teaching artist, she holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and lives on a farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

BLURB

The interconnectedness of everything on earth, how we belong to it all, how permeable boundaries are between us and the natural world, how things sing and what they sing of are rendered with aching acuity. Whether a poem’s focus shines on a “rump sprung sofa,” a turkey vulture, or dazzling autumn trees described as “sugar maple drama queens,” even evanescence becomes rich and luminous in these poems. This is a gorgeous, precise and deeply graceful collection.

     — Amy Gerstler

Hayden Saunier

"Where Poetry Begins"

Video: Serenity Bishop

terrapinbooks.com

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DISCLAIMERS

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.

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

and that for our readers in Europe there had to be notification of the use of those "cookies.  Please be aware that TBOP may employ the use of some "cookies" (whatever they are) and you should take that into consideration

Dementia, My Darling - Brendan Constantine (Red Hen Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Dementia, My Darling.  Brendan Constantine.  Red Hen Press.  Pasadena, California.  2016.

Brendan Constantine's Dementia, My Darling.  Narrative poetry, mostly.  Surreal but surprisingly narrative.  Surprising poems.  Narrative, surreal when Constantine needs it, surprising and witty. Witty and surprising narrative poems with a surrealist kick.

Inconsolation

There used to be different words here,

a lawn with benches, a statue of wind.

This is where your hand would go, my

shoulder, a good laugh. We shared

a sixth sense of humor, that is,

we always knew what the dead found

funny: calendars, money, an informed

opinion. Now the birds sing like

car alarms. The bees just want out.

You can push the night around

with your tongue.      We do.

We go to the cafe and order a bed.

We ask for curtains, a notebook, then

blow on our cups without drinking,

blow away. Say, How long's it been?

When's it gonna' be soon? What

we wouldn't give for what we gave.

And this is when the dead start

laughing, when you and I decide

to keep waiting. Let tomorrow cool

awhile, until we're two other people.

They'll know if we're inconsolable.

They'll know how to drink lying down.

...

Today's book of humour greatly enjoys Constantine's "sixth sense" of humour.

Today's book of poetry has been reading Edward Hirsh's How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry.  It's an insightful and gracious read, a sterling guide if you ever feel you need one.  Brendan Constantine's Dementia, My Darling made me think of Hirsh's concept that poems contain "stored magic."

      I believe such stored magic can author in the reader an equivalent capacity

      for creative wonder, creative response to a living entity.  The reader completes

      the poem, in the process bringing to it his or her own past experiences...

      ...the kind of knowledge--one gets from poetry cannot be duplicated elsewhere.

                                                                    

                                                                                             Edward Hirsh

                                                                                             How to Read a Poem

Dementia, My Darling bursts at the seams with "stored magic."  In Constantine's poetry universe logic is one step ahead or behind.  That's not quite right.  In Constantine world he builds invisible bridges to some parallel universe that chugs along next door to ours so that he can traverse that distance at whim.  It makes for some sharp poems brimming with considerable guile.

Another Natural Cause

People die from falling out of bed--

five hundred a year--more than are

killed by tigers, sharks, crocodiles.

There's a quota, a "stat" on a big

chart, next to famine & disease,

murder & plane crashes. Mostly

small children, the elderly, people

who can dream too hard. At least

twice as many have to explain it

to somebody else. Thousands of 

relations, not to mention cops,

medics, morticians, have to say

out loud, No really, it happens

all the time. Tonight, while we go

to school naked, get chased by bees,

discover we can fly, a few of us

pass into nothing, into bright light,

into marble stations of cloud. We

come yawning, rubbing our faces,

our faces creased by books, cups,

clocks, whatever we kept close by.

...

The poems we liked most, the superior poems, in Dementia, My Darling, and they were many in number, were top flight cooking.  Constantine can burn, there are new recipes here, some unusual spices, but the kitchen smells wonderful and all the plates keep coming back clean.

Today's book of poetry wanted to call in some big guns for morning's read but Milo, our head tech, and Kathryn, our Jr. Editor, said they had it covered.  Constantine's poetry made for a very engaged reading for both the readers and the listeners.  These poems rarely stretch to a second page but they all read longer, short stories, novels and so on bursting out of these few short lines.

The Bear Chapter

No one watches the stewardess anymore;

how she demonstrates the belt, the mask,

the life vest. We've got it down. Maybe

not our lives, our money & regret, or how

to breathe while kissing, but, by God,

we know how to survive a water landing.

The stewardess doesn't look at us either,

but at someplace that's really behind her,

the way dancers do. It's a recital, after all.

In the wild we're told not to sleep too near

our food, to put ever our champagne far

away. There's a checklist of other things,

written by a man so bored, he's forgotten

what survival is. Bears attack, he says,

if we surprise them. But he won't say

how; whether bears are easily frightened

or just don't like parties. When shipping

a bear by air, its ticket must be taped to

the cage in a waterproof bag. Someone

has to check this, someone who long ago

stopping imagining a sea full of floating

luggage, full of drowned bears in boxes.

The stewardess swims by. We call to her,

she to us; the ocean swallows our cries.

No surprises here.

...

Dementia, My Dear is Constantine's fourth book of poetry and these poems read every bit like they are from the hand of an old pro.  These poems are strong enough to swagger but Constantine is a little subtler than that.  These poems strut with confidence.

Brendan Constantine joins a long list of poets Today's book of poetry admires.  We have already assigned Milo the task of finding Constantine's previous three poetry titles.

Brendan Constantine

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brendan Constantine is a poet based in Hollywood. His work has appeared in numerous journals, most notably Ploughshares, FIELD, Zyzzyva, Ninth Letter, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, ArtLife, PANK, and L.A. Times Best Seller, The Underground Guide to Los Angeles. His first book, Letters To Guns (Red Hen Press 2009), is now required reading in creative writing programs across the nation. His most recent collections are Birthday Girl With Possum (Write Bloody Publishing 2011) and Calamity Joe (Red Hen Press 2012).

BLURBS

““Brendan Constantine’s Dementia, My Darling is a mediation on memory. Poems address the difficulty of the death of memory and how does a survivor deal with recollections of a father’s lie, a collective lie about snow, school desk carvings, sleep talking, moths, and hospital ceilings. This collection examines consciousness, connotations, and relationships. Constantine is a master poet illuminating the ordinary and extraordinary with his distinct voice holding humor and heart equally.”

     —Steven Reigns, author of Inheritance

“Dementia, My Darling is a suite of acute, beautiful poems about coming apart, slippage, love, emptying out, transformation, and carrying on. Every absurdly human moment in them is handled with smarts and just the right mix of inventiveness and delicacy. Each poem leaves its mark on the reader. Tender and humane and unsparing, the poems never surrender to despair. They all have a kind of brightness. Constantine renders the creeping surrealism of dementia from many angles, with the awe that is its due. Gaps, anagrams, collage and montage are employed to convey the myriad ways we fragment, multiply, dissolve. A fly is described as ‘an ink blot with wings / a blood spot / that sings a thin hymn.’ (!!) This book is a lyrical wrestling match with mortality.”
     — Amy Gerstler, author of Dearest Creature

“I love this collection. I’m dazzled by its spectacular acts of imagination, the places it invents, the ways it invents of describing those places. Its most wondrous feat, though, is the heart it allows to beat behinds its intelligence, the person that peers from its intricate, sharp, brilliant latticework: so much structure, so much sharpness, and that softness, too. Bravo.”
     —Mandy Kahn, author Math, Heaven, Time

Brendan Constantine reads at the 2014 Dodge Poetry Festival

Video: Dodge Poetry

redhen.org 

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DISCLAIMERS

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.

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

and that for our readers in Europe there had to be notification of the use of those "cookies.  Please be aware that TBOP may employ the use of some "cookies" (whatever they are) and you should take that into consideration.

Resume - Chris Green (Mayapple Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Resume.  Chris Green.  Mayapple Press.  Woodstock, N.Y.  2015.

Today's book of poetry is tickled pink to be back in the saddle after our sojourn to the south.  Luckily I took a herd of fine books of poetry with me.

Today, Today's book of poetry is looking at Resume by Chris Green.

Resume is all about jobs, work and the world that demands that of us.

I'm not saying Chris Green is a genius, I don't know the man, but these are wizard smart poems.
They crack like the fast end of a bullwhip.

These poems are alive with dark humour and profound wit.  And knowing, Chris Green knows stuff, he knows the emotional toll paid by those that toil.

Janitorial Ode

Each month a new motivational
poster above the urinals:
nature scenes with slogans like
DARE TO SOAR. Management
trying to love us.
But someone was taking dumps
in the locker room shower.
A kind of protest. My job:
to muck out the message.
A typical day, I hardly said
anything to anyone
except Henry, the machinist
prophet, who always took
the short view: she's fuckable,
she's fuckable, she's
definitely fuckable.
In the factory, sex worked
like a machine's heavy
breathing -- obvious as the absence
of windows. Tom and Bill were lovers
who had the same small job:
pushing a rod. They wore too-short
denim cut-offs, tube socks,
shirts tails tied into halter tops.
Tom would call ooohhh baby,
snatch at my ass when I mopped.
I wanted Michelle, the opposite
of a rich girl, braless, up to
her elbows in toxic acetone
(lunch time, I'd grind into my
writing hand, a kind of one-armed
violence until I'd explode).
then during the full heat of noon
I'd eat on the bank of a drainage
canal. I was young, lying
in the sweet ditch grass, my feelings
buried deep, deep. I didn't
want to admit it, but I was
heading straight to the bottom.
As if to prophesy, one day
a whole swollen deer floated by.

...

Boy, oh boy!  Resume is that rare book of poetry where there are no extra poems, no floaters.  Every one of these suckers is essential to this collection and hot as a fired pistol.

These are all good poems, there are several I might even call great -- or at the very least, very, very good.

Mr. Green is diabolically beautiful almost every time he opens his mouth.

These poems had the staff here at Today's book of poetry screaming out loud and almost coming to blows to see who would read the next one out loud.

Amy Gerstler mentions Studs Terkel when she talks about Chris Green's Resume and she is right. Studs Terkel's Working is an encyclopedic look at the heart and calloused hands of working America. Resume, although slight in pages in comparison, packs the same modern punch.  His contemporary voice is a take on the same territory -- but it is a take informed by the journalism of Hunter S. Thompson, the poetry of everyone from Auden to Bukowski.  Green has his finger on the modern and sometime macabre world as though he were a puppet maker, the rest of us puppets.

Aviary Security

The Tracy Aviary in Liberty Park:
birds in their undress--
redheads, goatsuckers, Lucifer hummingbirds, rough-legged hawks.
And peacocks in blue-fire skirts.

You can't choose what you do. I was young. full
of fear. Birds barred from the sky
appealed to my sense of remoteness.
Then, as if a dark dream--
I caught a man raping a peacock.

Not mythic
like Leda and the swan, this was Salt Lake City,
a place where people swallow impossible plots:
Jesus appeared in America
after his resurrection and strong-armed natives
to make us a heaven of Mormon men.

The great fan of color
and the man, a squalid Yeatsian
thrusting through an emerald field, a burning wall.
He was moaning
like an idiot, kneeling like he was praying.
The inconceivableness.
The long blackness of the peacock's glance.

I dragged the man through the aviary. It made no difference.
The poor dead bird and the man never cured.

...

These dark and dense poems crackle with heartbreaking humanity, they grab the reader on the first page and thrash the crap out of him/her.

Read six lines of a poem by Green to my wife yesterday.  She is still talking about it.  In a good way. And she is aces.

Green seems to have a sensibility similar to a more literary Bukowski, but perhaps subtler, Green will still blow your head off, you just don't see it coming in quite the same way.

Loss Specialist, American Express

That morning Republican Sonny Bono
called and said, "Fuck!" no Gold Card;
needed some big dumb diamonds.
Otherwise, the day was drear...infinite hours
on a tiny salary in a gray sea.
I was reading a poem by Auden,
something bleak to stay awake.
My Mormon boss yelled, "Heck!"
His ex-wife appeared in full rage,
stopped everything, screamed, "Oh you know why!"
She yelled and yelled--
gripped their daughter's hand.
My boss stayed where he was, stared
as if at a precipice...
He began to cry.
We all waited and wondered
at their anguish.
The daughter,
spiraling, terrible. I understood:
family awkward implausible. Later on,
no one comforted him. He had his own heaven.
And I returned to Auden.

...

If you can, find and read this book.  Then go searching for anything else by Chris Green, I know I will be.

 Chris Green

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Green is the author of three books of poetry: “The Sky Over Walgreens”, “Epiphany School”, and “Résumé”. His poetry has appeared in such publications as Poetry, New York Times, New Letters, Verse, Nimrod, and Black Clock. He’s edited four anthologies, including “Brute Neighbors: Urban Nature Poetry, Prose & Photography”, and the forthcoming “I Remember: A Poem by Chicago Veterans of War”. He founded LitCity (www.litcity312.com), a comprehensive literary site for Chicago. He teaches in the English Department at DePaul University. www.chrisgreenpoetry.com

BLURBS

This a wonderful cycle of poems. As Studs Terkel once wrote, “Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.” Through the vehicle of various jobs, roles, labors, and employments–manual, artistic, emotional, literary, familial, etc.–Chris Green gives us a lyric tour of human complexity, oddity, behavior and occupation. He has a novelist’s powers of observation. Résumé is full of humility, wit, smarts and heart, and all kinds of quiet astonishment. Studs would have loved it.

 —Amy Gerstler

These clear-eyed yet inventive poems about work offer a hard-won wisdom that lifts us above suffering to understanding. Green’s is a marvelously spare and colloquial voice with the kind of detail that cherishes and transforms our lives, that compels us with the authority of experience. His material is his own and others’ brutal and toxic jobs, which in the hands of such a skillful poet, provide a vision that reaches beyond the subject to his spare but complex epiphanies.
— Christopher Buckley

Working odd jobs going nowhere, the fear of futility, the problem of money, the uncertainty of life—such are the burdens of youth. In Résumé, Chris Green resurrects and transforms such lost periods of life. He sees that every job teaches, affirms that even the lowliest job is a step. Résumé is not merely a record of employment— it is art employed so that human dignity can be redeemed through understanding and wisdom.

 — Richard Jones

Chris Green

reading his poem, "Deer Sonnets"

video courtesy: jonnymess

mayapplepress.com

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