Fantasy - Ben Fama (Ugly Duckling Presse)

Today's book of poetry:
Fantasy.  Ben Fama.  Ugly Duckling Presse.  Brooklyn, New York.  2015.

"Sunset", a four page prose poem, opens Fantasy by Ben Fama, and reading it is like the first time you do a drug that opens up new worlds.

Fama lets loose with one remarkably sustained howl at our current trajectory.

Fama literally bombards and overloads the senses in his run-on stream-of-brilliant-consciousness prose poems.

Then he inserts one of these little bon-bons:

Elle

i would
make out
with you
hold hands
smoke weed
etc

...

Ben Fama's sense of humour eats monsters for breakfast.  These poems feel as though they were written by a sky-diver in mid-fall/flight, a luge racer on LSD, the last bloody man standing.

Fama is not ahead of the curve, he is the curve, bending the world to his narrative with Hunter S. Thompson/Fran Lebowitz gusto and zeal.

These damn poems make you feel like you are inside the mind of a higher order of alien - processing everything current about the earth and doing it at inhuman speed.  It's a kaleidoscope that is ferociously entertaining.

Frank O'Hara

The only time I wish
other people heard my thoughts
is when I put your name
into youtube.com
right now I'm thinking
I wish you were still alive
so I could be your partner
whether in art or life
I'm not really sure
mostly life I think
but they say
life imitates art
so who knows

...

It is completely unfair of me to rant poetic about the longer poems of Ben Fama and then not include them.  They make up the biggest part of Fantasy, and they are as tasty as your favourite dessert.

The longer poems in Fantasy challenge inclusion in Today's book of poetry but they are splendid catalogues, social registers, stylish lists with a Jim Carroll New York cool and a Joyce Carol Oates smart.

We took turns reading the longer poems out loud here at the office.  The interns took turns.  There was howling laughter, much looking up references, copying down lines to repeat later and generally just causing a joyous ruckus.  All thumbs up for Ben Fama here.

Wayne Koestenbaum queries about Fantasy "how did Fama invent a tone so perfect and icy, so equal to our times?"  And he is exactly right.  How?

The Line of Beauty

I love summer, the luxury of poetry, gin
and tonic, quinine lost in juniper

...

These short poems are really a tease.  Ben Fama's Fantasy as a whole is a masterwork and perhaps a masterpiece, only time will tell.

Today's book of poetry always likes it when anyone gives a tip of hats, props, to Saint Margaret of Atwood, one of Canada's sacred treasures.  Fama does that.

Fama is firing on all cylinders in this fine, fine, fine book of poems.  

Three 'fines' only because four would look ridiculous - "and a man in my position can't afford to be made to look ridiculous."

Ben Fama

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ben Fama is the author of several chapbooks and pamphlets, including the artist book Mall Witch (Wonder), Cool Memories (Spork), Odalisque (Bloof), and Aquarius Rising (UDP). His writing has appeared in The Believer, Denver Quarterly, Boston Review, Jubilat, Lit, and The Brooklyn Rail, among others. He is the co-founder of Wonder, and lives in New York City. Fantasy (UDP) is his first full-length poetry collection.

BLURBS

Sometimes something gets written and it surprises you, though it feels familiar. An early-twenty-first century decadence with its adderalls. Still the colloquials and the coteries of the New York School, but now with selfies, with crying selfies even. And klout scores. And there is fashion week, the Miami, the Los Angeles. Tans. Pools. I read Fantasy again and again, thinking I could learn to recite its spell on my own. It is a book about an end. An end of our economic empire. Of the fantastical expansion of income. And the poems here just keep going. They keep going to work. They plan what to do when one encounters an active shooter situation. Sort of. Because there is no plan really that makes sense except maybe to keep showing up to work stoned.

—JULIANA SPAHR

Ben Fama’s softly amalgamated new book, Fantasy, quietly elicits states of mind that we do and do not continue to inhabit. Memory traces, evacuations of past ruins pile up under present day linguistic and textual edifices. The socio-political erupts gently at the edges of fanboy/fangirl communiqués in which “fundamentalists decried jolie for using her wealth to surmount death and god.” In Fantasy, Fama uses his poetic intelligence to override dilemmas of understanding, and agitate all our ADLs (activities of daily living)—no small task for these overripe poetic times.

—KIM ROSENFIELD

Fama has many faces, and fame comes in many sorts and sizes—from the one-week notoriety of the cover story to the splendor of an everlasting name (I may be quoting), i.e., Anaïs Nin commiserates with Trent Reznor about the fact that Kate Moss’s tan lines are, right now, more famous than either one of them.Fantasy is a Zipcar to cruise by such commiseration on the way to a resort Google maps can’t locate, but that “if you can’t afford it,” at least you can “affect it,” and there’s still “Glamour all night.”

—BRUCE HAINLEY

Ben Fama

reading at Space Space

video: Bianca Stone

uglyducklingpresse.com

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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.

For Your Safety Please Hold On - Kayla Czaga (Nightwood Editions)

Today's book of poetry:
For Your Safety Please Hold On.  Kayla Czaga.  Nightwood Editions.  Gibsons, British Columbia.  2014.

Winner of the 2nd annual
Kitty Lewis Hazel Millar Dennis Tourbin Poetry Prize

I've never quite experienced the like.  The first few poems of this collection had me dizzy with joy, a little like the first time you saw Wayne Gretzky, or the first time you saw Mikhail Baryshnikov fly.

You've never read family portraits like those in For Your Own Safety Please Hold On.

Kayla Czaga writes like she has 200 years of wisdom coursing through her veins.  She uses language we are all familiar with but somehow escapes the bounds of previous gravity, these plain speaking poems soar.

In my corrupted opinion this is the best book of poetry I have read this year.  No one in the office here at TODAY'S BOOK OF POETRY disagreed.

Another Poem About My Father

I don't get poetry either. Mostly I get cavities,
junk mail. Once, I got eleven hundred dollars
in small change from my father for Christmas.
He said, You've got to work for your money--
meaning you've got to haul it through six feet
of snow to the bank, Good luck, here's a bag.
My father is more like a poem than most poems
are. He once tucked a living loon into his coat
and brought it home to amuse my mother who
loves birds, especially surprised-sounding birds,
especially owls. My nostalgia receptors zigzag
wildly through me when I think of my father
pushing his metal detector across all the parks,
schoolyards and riverbanks of this great nation,
waving it back and forth--like some sort of
yayhoo, my mother would say--until it beeps
solemnly above a nickel. With a butter knife
he cuts such slender metaphors from the earth.

...

Czaga in For Your Safety Please Hold On has a new intensity, you don't see it coming as much as feel it.  These poems are universally personal, crowd-sourcing intimate.

Joyce Carol Oates is vastly under-rated if you ask me, and we here in the office at TODAY'S BOOK OF POETRY all agree on that point, her novels have always had a way of making me feel as though I were inhabiting a world of her design.  What I mean is that her universe becomes yours.  It is a familiar even though it is new terrain.

Kayla Czaga knows the same trick.  When she is writing about family it sounds suspiciously like she is writing about your own.  When she writes about herself she almost makes you think you are looking in a mirror.

23RD Birthday

In this city where all the shops stay open
the people close early. I closed. I told

another person, I cannot
love you anymore, please mail my books
back to me. Then I went bowling

and threw seven consecutive
balls into the gutter. Misery of the five-pin. I slept

in a bathtub. People keep buying me
clocks. Puddles keep collecting
sidewalks. Maybe I'll collect puddles

or clock out like so many people I've seen
on buses, that man who wept

violently into his scarf and the rest
of us trying to ignore him, turning up
our not-listening devices. Tonight

I am twenty-three and looking
for someone gentle enough to hold back

my hair--this could be you, stranger
with your three-point smile and hairdo.
Tonight I want to stop watching the clocks;

I fear I'll become them--spinning
in circles with hands covering my face.

...

I don't know how old Kayla Czaga is -- but I know she is young.  I can't even imagine how fine her future poems will be.  But I am certain I'll be anxious to read them, and after reading For Your Safety Please Hold On you will be too.

"Sometimes
it is the sound the Lord makes
snipping split ends off

my soul."
--from MANY METAPHORICAL BIRDS

So many books and so little time, but this is one I will read again, and then, a while later, again. Why?  Like watching a magician on video with fast forward, slow motion, replay, I want to learn her tricks.

Temporary

At the Ash Wednesday service, waiting
for the priest to cross my forehead, I watched him
touch the faces of the people in front of me,
mishearing him say, Remember you are blessed.
I was horrified when I remembered it
was really, Remember you are dust, with ashes
thumbed into my forehead. Headlights spattered
through the intentionally broken glass
windows of that beautiful downtown church
tucked behind a mall, as I tried to understand
and to dust you shall return. Traffic lights
flickered through Christ with arms nailed
open, Mary robed in blue, mourning into his feet.
After the service, I spilled out of the church
into wet February and public transit hauled me
back into my crumbling ordinary life. What
happens after this? When Jesus died,
it was temporary, the stone rolled away,
but where is he now, and can any of us hope
to go there, or is it all ashes and dust
covered bookshelves? Last week, Liz tried
to explain taxidermy to me, how she peeled
a rabbit, then rigged its pelt back into
rabbit-shape. She emptied a set of robin's wings
to sew onto its back--the flying rabbit.
It looked alive, a stitching trick, the way
my dead relatives look alive, resurrected
in photographs. It reminded me of colouring
Easter eggs with my mother. We blew the yolks
into a bowl before we dyed the shells
blue and yellow. How the eggs looked full
until we held them up to the light.

...

For Your Safety Please Hold On should be front page news for everyone who loves poetry, mandatory reading for everyone who doesn't.

Kayla Czaga

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kayla Czaga grew up in Kitimat and now lives in Vancouver, BC, where she recently earned her MFA in Creative Writing at UBC. Herpoetry, nonfiction and fiction has been published in The Walrus, Best Canadian Poetry 2013, Room Magazine, Event and The Antigonish Review, among others. For Your Safety Please Hold On is her first book.

BLURBS

"Funny, smart, sophisticated, guileless: reading Czaga is like drinking a glass of water in a desert.  Every once in a while there arrives a young poet whose astonishing aptitude for the craft rises so clearly, so beautifully, the relief is palpable.  For Your Safety Please Hold On is Czaga’s answer to Moure’s Domestic Fuel and Solie’s Short Haul Engine... and like Moure and Solie we don’t need to expect great things from her. Great things are already here."

    --Elizabeth Bachinsky

"Kayla Czaga's For Your Safety Please Hold On recalls what was radical about Robert Lowell's Life Studies a half century ago. With wit and empathy, it moves beyond the confessional to reclaim the intimate and personal as an adventurous subject for poetry. Reading it is like being brought into someone's home and told all the family secrets--never an imposition, it feels rather like an initiation into the clan. I thoroughly enjoyed it."

     --Paul Vermeersch

Feature Poet Kayla Czaga @PJ

nightwoodeditions.com

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THE KITTY LEWIS HAZEL MILLAR DENNIS TOURBIN POETRY PRIZE is awarded annually to the book of poetry that I, Michael Dennis, like the most.  The award was named for Kitty Lewis and Hazel Millar who were instrumental to this blog during its' formative steps.  It is also named for the late painter, poet and all around wonderfully generous Dennis Tourbin whom I loved.  The award is virtually meaningless - except that the winner is entitled to a home cooked meal, with wine, if they ever come to Ottawa.

Vs. - Kerry Ryan (Anvil Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Vs.  Kerry Ryan.  Anvil Press.  Vancouver, British Columbia.  2010.  (Finalist for the Acorn-Plantos Award)

Kerry Ryan's Vs. is a book of narrative poems about her experiences in the cloistered world of boxing.

I have been a boxing fan since I was a very young man.  I've always loved the intensity.

If you watch much boxing at all you'll begin to notice the most remarkable thing.  Almost without exception, when a match is over, the two boxers hold each other like lovers.

throat

Watch the twinned ridges
of gristle twitching
with every strained breath

Never look at gloves
or she'll get you like a pickpocket;
the left distracting with magic and jabs
while the right sneaks in, ransacks

Read next punch
in the shadow of clavicle

Don't let her eyes hook yours,
drown your resolve
in reedy undertow

Lock onto her heaving collar,
throw six inches north or south
look at her nose, chin,
only with the steady leather attention
of your unflinching fists

...

These poems do the leg work that all boxers must.  They are up before dawn and shadow-boxing the sunrise.  Ryan romanticizes nothing about the feel of leather on the nose as the fist behind it tries to dispose of your need or the bruised ribs that fight off sleep, dust your dreams.

Joyce Carol Oates wrote a great book in 1987 called On Boxing that received much acclaim and deserved attention.  Kerry Ryan's Vs. belongs on the same shelf, the same pantheon.

There aren't that many great boxing books by women and this is certainly the first poetry collection I've encountered that dares slip on the gloves.

Muhammed Ali is famous for his poetry and wit - but his poetry, as much as I admire the great man, is the child's nursery rhyme.  Ryan gives us so much more.

ribbing

Hours after, her glove still pries
your ribs apart,
clenches lung, twists

You whimper in the bed,
wake with every breath,
shudder at the lapse
that left you prone
to the boulder of her right

Days later, clinic waiting room
each breath a thimbleful of air,
you press palms against ribcage,
try to contain the fury of a sneeze
ask when you can go
back in the ring

...

Ever had a cracked rib?  It hurts like every sin you've ever committed.

The "beautiful science" is not always beautiful but Kerry Ryan makes it real.  These poems look like an examination of a woman's journey into the gym and into the ring - but a jab is a jab, and a right-cross will flatten you, gender doesn't come into it, and Kerry Ryan is no dilettante.

matched

We never fight
both youngest children
still wanting to please, appease
who learned early small never wins
that injury, injustice
fuel poems and pictures
our different victories

We never compete
except in Scrabble
or sleeping in Sunday mornings
the gap never
wider than five points
such satisfaction in symmetry

So when I demonstrate
a one-two on your shoulder--
soft as a sparrow landing
one foot then the other--
you startle at confrontation,
seep toward the door

I know I've upended our balance
don't want to bully,
but my fists have been taught
to feed on the fear
in your flailing palms

...

Ali's poems were wind-whisp entertainments, the vapour of the cult of celebrity.  Ryan's are the ongoing interior dialogue of a fighter, what it means to hit and be hit.

These poems go the distance with vigor.

Joe Frazier would be proud of her grit.

 Kerry Ryan

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kerry Ryan’s poems have appeared in literary journals across the country. Her first collection, The Sleeping Life, was published by The Muses’ Company in 2008 and nominated for the Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry in 2009. In March 2009, she competed in, and won, a white collar boxing match. She lives in Winnipeg.

BLUBS

"Muhammed Ali, keep your guard up.  You're being measured by a better boxing poet.  Kerry Ryan has the clarity of vision that comes with a boxer's discipline and daring, the grace of a true poet's music of body and mind made one."

     Robert Kroetsch

"The poems in Kerry Ryan's Vs. come at you like quick jabs of light -- the writing is taut, worked over, sinewy, spare, and lean -- but never mean.  A delightful collection.  What else can be said?  These poems pack a punch."

     Jeanette Lynes

anvilpress.com 

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