Bad Animals — Tom Cull (Insomniac Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Bad Animals.  Tom Cull.  Insomniac Press.  London, Ontario.  2018.

Every single poem Tom Cull writes is a different type of gold.  Bad Animals had Today's book of poetry going in poetry circles.  This cat can burn.

Today's book of poetry is going to start today's festivities with one of the finer list poems we've encountered in a long while.  It seems Cull can whip these wild musings into movies that attack the inner cortex of your brain from all sides with skill approaching magic.

Preparing for Apocalypse: 13 Survival Tips

1.  No one will survive the apocalypse.

2.  In addition to anything starring Will Smith, consult the 

following movies: Deep Impact, Melancholia, Armageddon,

Waterworld, WALL-E, 28 Days Later, and Eat

Pray Love.

3.  Add the following titles to your self-help library: anything

by Anne Coulter, Blood Meridian, Roughing It in the Bush, Not

Wanted on the Voyage, and Les Revenentes.

4.  Replace GPS with GSP.

5.  Audition for the following reality television shows:

Survivor, The Biggest Loser, Hell's Kitchen, Naked and Afraid,

Polyamory, Married & Dating, Real World, Deadliest Catch,

Full House.

6.  Compress your vocabulary—remove words such as

ambivalent, ecopoetics, neo-liberal, and crepe.

     i(a). idiom. Literalize your metaphors (open a can of worms,

     eat slow food, put a ring on it, issue trigger warnings, make a

     killing, beg to differ, cross that bridge, etc.).

     i(b). diction. Prepare for shifts in word definitions: glacial,

     for example, will mean "very fast." Koodo, Google, Hulu, and

     Snapchat will become onomatopoeia.

7.  Know when to follow; know when to retweet.

8.  Trade in Apple, BlackBerry, Tinder, and Kindle for apple,

blackberry, tinder, and kindle.

9.  Loot anthropology museums for supplies. (Didactic panels

may also prove helpful.)

10.  Refrain from correcting improper usage of personal

pronouns I and me.

11.  Stay limber; work on your cardio. When shit gets real,

remember tip #1 and/or Will Smith in Bad Boys II.

12.  Get comfortable with killing. Start small—a worm, maybe a

mayfly—then move up to vertebrates. Don't always choose ugly

things. You will get the hang of it.

13.  Make a list dividing the people you know into columns A and 

B. When the time comes, you'll know what it's for.

💫💫💫

Tom Cull is a new age poetry Tom Robbins, Kurt Vonnegut, long winded but smarter Richard Brautigan and that crazy old insurance company's wild life documentary narrator.  All in one, and more.  What Today's book of poetry is so clumsily trying to say is that  Mr. Cull hits every poetry nerve receptor we have and calls out a few we didn't know we had.

It's as simple as this — Tom Cull's poems explode off of the page propelled by intelligent wit and a fantastically agile and humane closet of frailties.

Mr. Cull, who is apparently also an ornithologist/zoologist of the highest order, is also unhinged in the best possible way.  Tom Cull is not wired like the rest of us.  As a result he is perfectly placed to objectively cut through our human nonsense, all our bullshit.

Show and Tell

Dead man in a box

inside a larger box.

With us.

Moving down a mile-long line

of pylons on the 401,

a hawk folds and dives behind

a row of cedars.

A stack of sandwiches,

devilled eggs,

tarts, and coffee.

"I'm a man of few words."

The dead man replied, "Yes but you use them

all the time."

The season is fall.

He leaves. For days

he leaves. Moaning and terrified.

The hospice nurse asked, "Have you

been able to return to

any of your normal activities—

light housework, cooking,

laundry?" His reply: "I have a wife."

The child in the spotted dress

hides behind the coffin, and the bruises

fade yellow.

💫💫💫

Those of you Today's book of poetry fans with long memories will remember that Today's book of poetry wrote about Tom Cull's beautiful Baseline Press chapbook What the Badger Said back in June of 2014.  You can see that here:

http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.com/2014/06/what-badger-said-tom-cull-baseline-press.html

Today's book of poetry had nothing but admiration for Mr. Cull's Badger.  Bad Animals is a step into the big league and Cull has made it a head-turning giant step.

Our morning read was held out on the porch for the first time this year, all bright sunshine and promise.  Today's book of poetry asked the crew to dedicate today's reading to Toronto playwright and most excellent man, Andrew Batten (1963-2019).  Andy loved poetry.

The Today's book of poetry staff responded with gusto.  Our morning read of Tom Cull's Bad Animals was the best we've had around here since we blasted through David Lee's last book.

Today we're going to finish the proceedings with another smashing "list" poem.  Thank you Tom Cull.

Invasive Species

European green crab

Purple loosestrife

Zebra mussel

Sea lamprey

Emerald ash borer

Didymo

Gypsy moth

Sub-Saharan Zeus moss

Asian long-horned beetle

Phragmites

Karaoke

Giant hogweed

Asiatic carpe diem

Common buckthorn

Northern snakehead

Killer shrimp

Rusty crayfish

Brown spruce longhorn beetle

Mountain pine beetle

Sirex woodwasp

Dutch oven

Butternut canker

Common crested Brohammer

Japanese knotweed

Garlic mustard

Dog-strangling vine

Alfalfa blotch leafminer

Stuffed crust pizza

Prussian drone operator

Eurasian witch lemming

Holy Roman trebuchet

Oriental weather loach

Asian swamp eel

African clawed frog

Spanish slug

European yellow-tailed scorpion

Red-card slider

Water hyacinth

Gangis Kanye

Jayden

Eurasian wild boar

Burmese python

Tyrannosaurus rex

Giant African land snail

Three-sceptred monarch

Herb-crusted salmon

Panko-crusted tilapia

Open-concept kitchen

Spotted eastern gulch

Barrel-chested man-child

Three steepled tree weevil

Right said Fred

💫💫💫

Bad Animals is some of the best damned cooking Today's book of poetry has tasted, flat out.  Today's book of poetry loved these poems and assures you that given the chance you will love them too.  

They are that good.

Tom Cull

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tom Cull grew up in Huron County and now resides in London, Ontario, where he teaches writing and serves as the city's current Poet Laureate. His chapbook, What the Badger Said, was published in 2013. Since 2012, Tom has been the director of Thames River Rally, a grass roots environmental group he co-founded with his partner Miriam Love, and their son Emmett.

BLURBS

"Like his black bears that have drifted too far south, Tom Cull's poems wander through a suburban wilderness, out of place, unpredictable, full of purpose, nosing among the wasting, surreal artifacts of human life, looking for sustenance."

     —Jeffery Donaldson, author of Missing Link

"Bad Animals sings a natural world rendered absurd by human hands. In the same line, the same breath, the reader can find grief and calm, folly and beauty, spectacle and longing, yet Tom Cull's poems always circle back to joy."

     —Laurie Graham, author of Settler Education

Tom Cull (8th Poet) | Open Mic Poetry May 3, 2017

Video: London Open Mic Poetry

insomniacpress.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.

The More - Ronna Bloom (Pedlar Press)

Today's book of poetry:
The More.  Ronna Bloom.  Pedlar Press.  St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador.  2017.

"I'm not the sort of person who gets people into trouble,

But the trouble I'm in, we're all in."

                                                                                                - "I Start The Day"

Today's book of poetry read Ronna Bloom's first book, Fear of the Ride (Carleton University Press, 1996) some time ago and pulled it down from the stacks for a refresher on Bloom.  And are we ever glad we did.  Two poems in we remembered everything we needed to know about Ronna Bloom's poetry.  We're in.  She writes it, we'll read it.

Stone cold, rock hard, solid.  Fear of the Ride was full of short, precise, simple poems that took up instant residence on our emotional radar.  So what do we know prior to The More:  Bloom writes hard and clear and clean poems with razor crisp edges, and does it within an emotional framework built on empathy but never above sympathy.  Bloom writes poetry that knows the ways of the world.

Some people are forced, through circumstance, no fault of their own, to see more than their share of suffering.  Not that anyone has ever figured out exactly, how much suffering each of us should bear.  Ronna Bloom's voice has seen her share, and perhaps the shares of a few others.

The More has a precision of empathy laced with irony that is consistently compelling for the reader.  Bloom, these twenty years removed from Fear of the Ride has lost none of her considerable edge.  All these years of experience have added a deeper layer of emotional understanding and with it a considered melancholy.

Appointment in Samarra

30 people in chemo today multiplied by

x hospitals in y countries and z universes.

Back here. H smiles through 4 syringes of chemicals, 2 bags of saline,

and a flush of life-giving killer liquid.

White-haired sisters in their 70s share clippings of their modelling days

with shirtless men in big cars, take selfies holding up their matching drips.

A woman in the corner looks exactly like what is happening to her.

Pale and bald like coal after a fire.

Slap me good and hard with mortality while I'm strong.

My body wants to run as though it's seen a ghost.

...

"but to stay true to the process and its shtick

in the service of a mission that holds in its mouth

the names and imagined wants of others"

                                                                                 - "This Breakfast"

Today's book of poetry enjoyed The More because Bloom is consistently entertaining.  Her serious poems can be funny as hell but Bloom's pitch never falters, she is always heading towards the heart of the thing.

Bloom has a compassionate heart but recognizes that heart isn't enough in a world willing to inflict what it does.  Bloom likes to mix it up emotionally and no matter how grim the circumstance Bloom has room for some tenderness.

Opposites

Everything I dread, I look forward to.

Whoever I condemn, I am him.

Whatever I think is irrelevant is, until I become irrelevant.

Tomorrow I'll be the one I bully today.

The next person I love scares me already.

u have a sweet face a boy told me when I was young, so I didn't show it.

I used my mind to hurt when I was hurting.

The queen sees her cruelty and bends in grief.

Like her, my remorse is as awful as my arrogance.

The word care means worry. To suffer is to allow.

The pain then is part of the happiness now.

Avoidance meets us halfway.

We could cut to the chase and embrace.

...

Another snowy morning here at Today's book of poetry.  Ottawa is certainly a winter wonderland of snow these days.  The morning read was commandeered by Kathryn, our Jr. Editor, from the word go.  Kathryn said that she felt an instant "attach" to these poems.  As we read through both The More and Fear of the Ride Kathryn assigned specific poems to specific readers as though she were a happy little Napoleon, more correctly like one of those Great Catherines, directing the battle from the comfort of the new reading chair.

It was hard not to notice that Kathryn had brought in a pillow, arm-rest covers and a beautiful length of silk for the back of the chair.  Or the piles of books Kathryn had quickly amassing on both sides of our new chair.

The reading itself was a slick affair, everyone got into Bloom's tight orchestrations and read them with the proper gravitas and glee.

A Blessing For The Waning

Here's to the last suck before birth of separation, before gums have teeth.

To skin that's soft, brown, rough, cracked, bruised, itching, callused,

folding over, touched. To the body held, whole unto itself.

Here's to what the body was before anything changed, which was never.

To the original flat chest of everyone.

Here's to the growths, hoped for and maligned.

The deletions, depilations, bargains, and beseechments.

Here's to loss of consciousness remembered waking up in the morning, in

recovery, bewildered, with toast in your mouth.

To the sleep that was good but is now interrupted and induced.

To pain that lodges, that travels.

Desire breathes like a tide, goes a long way out,

and surprises when it comes back in a swell.

The way grief does.

Here's to falling and to falling, and to falling falling.

To the curse of forgetting and its gift, forgetting.

To the gift of remembering and its curse, memory.

To having had a life. Us creature and our smells.

Here's goodbye to clothes that fit another body.

To the last embrace you didn't know was last.

Here's to kissing the last mouth on yours. Pucker up.

Pucker up now and go.

...

You all know how much Today's book of poetry loves a "list" poem and Bloom gives us a humdinger for our final poem.

Today's book of poetry was happy to see The More come through the door.  We have admired this woman's poetry for a good long time.  The More is ample confirmation the Bloom is the poet we always thought, but better.

Ronna Bloom

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ronna Bloom is a poet, speaker, psychotherapist, and author of six books. Her poems have been broadcast on the CBC, displayed in public spaces, recorded by the CNIB, and translated into Spanish and Bengali.
Ronna speaks and writes at corporate events, leads organizational retreats, runs workshops, and does poetry and writing coaching. She brings twenty years of psychotherapy practice to her work as a poet and facilitator.
She is currently Poet in Community at the University of Toronto and Poet in Residence at Mount Sinai Hospital.
Ronna has performed with Juno award-winning musician Jayme Stone. A one minute film based on the poem “Grief Without Fantasy” was made by filmmaker Midi Onodera and screened in the Official Selection at the Toronto Urban Film Festival.
Ronna has written 5 books of poetry, which some people really liked. Several of these have been shortlisted for Canadian literary prizes. Her sixth book, The More, was just released October 12, 2017.

BLURB
“Soulful, urgent, profound.”

     — SHARON ENGLISH, AUTHOR

“I think this is Bloom’s best collection yet. She actively engages with the world, saying things that I immediately want to write down to make mine.”

     — TRACY CHEVALIER, AUTHOR OF GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING

Ronna Bloom

"Salve"

from The More

Video: Ronna Bloom

pedlarpress.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