Amateurs At Love — Patricia Young (Icehouse Poetry/Goose Lane Editions)

Today's book of poetry:
Amateurs At Love.  Patricia Young.  Icehouse Poetry/Goose Lane Editions.  Fredericton, New Brunswick.  2018.

Today's book of poetry has Pharoah Sanders on the box and he's cracking out a sterling version of his song "Africa/You've Got To Have Freedom" and we are loving it.  That's about as good as it gets.  Today's book of poetry wanted something lively, joyous, up beat to help us celebrate Patricia Young's Amateurs At Love. 

Patricia Young is no amateur.  Today's book of poetry has been down the Patricia Young road twice before.  Once for Short Takes on the Apocalypse (Biblioasis,2016), and once for her Consider The Paragliders (Baseline Press, 2018).  You can see them both here:

http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.com/2017/04/short-takes-on-apocalypse-patricia.html

http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.com/2018/03/consider-paragliders-patricia-young.html

And here we go again.  It should be clear why, once again Patricia Young has hit us in the poetry sweet spot.

Amateurs At Love is crafted into six sections, each alive with its own magic.  Today's book of poetry got stuck in the first section, "This Could Be Anyone's Story", stuck isn't the right word, neither is paralyzed.  We're going to go with transfixed.  These short prose poems are note perfect, precise and patient.

Young is a pro.

Inside Sleep Country, Bird Murals

INSIDE SLEEP COUNTRY, BIRD MURALS glow on the walls:

peacocks and flamingoes, macaws and parrots. The old man wants

a firm mattress. The old woman longs for a good night's rest.

But the warehouse is a gruelling maze of daybed, canopy beds,

waterbeds, platform beds, sofa beds, truckle beds. Beds the size of

coffins and sandboxes. Beds sluggish as tugboats and shallow as

wading pools. They lean against a child's bunk and remove their

shoes. After you, he says, and she begins her ascent. They climb the

ladder, heads butting through clouds and sunsets, until they roll,

exhausted, onto a super-deluxe, memory foam mattress. Lying on

their backs, they talk about old wounds, betrayals, and whiplash

lust and bursitis. They have children, don't they? Grandchildren,

too? The lights dim. They hear the last customer leave. Doors lock.

Plumage rustles. There's a lone creeing sound. They reach shyly

across the expanse. After all these years, how is it possible? They're

still amateurs at love.

💫💫💫

Today's book of poetry sent Thomas, our newest intern, into the stacks to see what else we had in stock from Patricia Young.  Young has published 12 books of poetry and six chapbooks (as well as a novel).  We have eight of her poetry titles on our shelves, in no particular order:

Those Were The Mermaid Days

Melancholy Ain't No Baby

More Watery Still

Here Come The Moonbathers

Night-Eater

What I Remember From My Time On Earth

Short Takes on the Apocalypse

Consider The Paragliders

And now young Thomas, our newest intern, will be tasked with finding Patricia Young's other titles. 

Today's book of poetry would be remiss not to suggest you dear readers do the same; look for Patricia Young books.  We suspect, that like us, you will discover a voice worth your good time and a wit you wish you had.

Amateurs At Love is gold.  Like the afore-mentioned Pharoah Sanders, Patricia Young knows how to come correct.  In "Animal Tales", another of the six sections, Young and anthropomorphism get into a Noah's Ark of four legged and winged creatures.  Young treats them with respect, reveals their wit.  You'll believe every word because Young has the true burn.  It all sounds like the truth.

Rabbit

When the children peered through gaps in the fence surrounding

their play area they were confronted with a shocking sight — a

teenage girl whipping a rabbit with a willow branch. The girl

heard the children's whimpering and came over and threatened

to whip them too. So young and so pitiless, the daycare workers

said as they shuffled the little ones into the church basement where

they sloughed off their Muddy Buddies and rolled out their mats. It

was time to nap. Time to dream. That night the children told their

parents about the girl and rabbit, and the next day their parents

told their friends, who then told their friends, and so on, person

to person, until rumours of the girl's pathology travelled around

the globe, full circle, returning to the rabbit who merely rolled his

pink eyes. The children were fantasists, of course. To the rabbit's

mind, truth was the water dish in the corner of his hutch, the whiff

of clover on a summer morning, the diamond stud in the girl's ski

jump nose.

💫💫💫

Goose

The goose was in love with three ganders and they loved her in

return. The farmer, however, had no time for romance. Financially,

he was in over his head and also underwater. He needed to

downsize. This worried the animals, especially the goose. A month

earlier, on her birthday, she'd laid her last egg. Now, no matter

how she bore down — not one speckled oval. Like all lovesick

creatures, the ganders were a font of ideas and suggested the goose

feign broodiness. An excellent plan, she said, and refused to leave

her nest, even to eat or drink. Day and night her adoring ganders

gathered around to recite sonnets in praise of her fertility but after

the third debt collector had driven off, the farmer summoned his

hapless  waterfowl. You've laid more eggs than any other goose, he

said, and I am grateful, but you are old, old girl, and now you must

return to the bee balm and sky. Too dignified to make a fuss, the

goose arranged her head on the chopping block and the axe came

down. Instead of blood, a bouquet of dandelions spouted from her

neck. The awestruck ganders watched as the yellow clusters turned

swiftly to seed balls. Puff, they cackled, puff, puff.

💫💫💫

It's a rainy gray day in the nation's capital but we're all smiles here at Today's book of poetry.  When the pros drop in they make our life easy.  The morning read was both humorous and profound.  Young can be Richard Pryor funny and deadly serious at the same time.  Great trick.

Thomas, our newest intern, was introduced to the morning read this morning and of course because he is new he had to read first.  Thomas looked us right in the eyes and then nailed it, read Patricia Young with wit and timing.  We gave him and Amateurs At Love the full standing ovation.  Thomas bowed.

Mother

I took her hand and pulled her toward the park and begged her to

explain why everything I wanted to know was unknowable, like the

boys hanging around the edge of the canal. I wanted to know the 

difference between hypocrisy and lust. Also: the true story of Adam

and Eve. Was the Garden of Eden a foreign country where you

drank from a porcelain fountain or was it the beast with two backs?

I wanted to know: how could a beast have two backs? Other things

too: tricks to stay sane in prison. Should I memorize passages from

the Bible or Dante? Hanging upside down on the monkey bars,

I wanted to know why she, my mother, sitting on a stone bench

unwrapping a small meat pie, had blotted out her past. She bit into

the cold pastry, gravy oozing from the corners of her mouth, and I

wanted to know, would I too have to reinvent myself with duct tape

and flowers?

💫💫💫

Today's book of poetry is clearly a Patricia Young fan, you will be too if you can get your hands on Amateurs At Love.  Just like Pharoah Sanders, you can't go wrong.

Patricia Young

ABOUT THE POET

Patricia Young has published twelve collections of poetry and one of short fiction. Her poems have been widely anthologized and she has received numerous awards for her writing, including the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, the B.C. Book Prize, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, a CBC Literary Prize, several National Magazine Awards, the Bliss Carman Award, and the Confederation Poets Prize. She has twice been nominated for the Governor General's Award for Poetry. She lives in Victoria.

BLURBS

"Amateurs at Love is as delectable as anything I've read in ages. Young delivers her salty truths in dreamscapes that straddle a ridge between drollery and devastating one-two punches. Here you will find prickly pangramics, grousing animalia, family fables, insight and allegory, and — as in the best of teh best — yourself." 

     — Sharon McCartney

"These poems could well be anyone's story, but each told in light touches is particular, the tone sometimes dark, if kept steadfastly whimsical in intent. A horse gorges on fermented daisies. Mice haunt a cottage with their absence. A boy comes to understand his mother has no answers for him. Not Patricia Young. Thankfully, in Amateurs at Love, she has found one for almost everything."

      — John Barton

"In Amateurs at Love, Patricia Young reveals parallel realities, not ghosts but fleeting glimpses of ourselves. Everyday love coexists as drama on a momentary stage, just on the other side of a veil, or it lives in a dreamlike state in which we are not sure if we are being dreamed or are dreamers. Young's extraordinary power of observation draws us in with fine detail, and the resonant precision of her language carries us along." 

     — Patrick Friesen

Patricia Young Reads from An Auto-Erotic History of Swings

Video: Sono Nis Press

gooselane.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.

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.

Real is the Word They Use to Contain Us - Noah Wareness (Biblioasis)

Today's book of poetry:
Real is the Word They Use to Contain Us.  
Noah Wareness.  Biblioasis.  Windsor, Ontario.  2017.

No idea who Noah Wareness really is but that's one hell of a pseudonym.  Today's book of poetry is fairly certain there's a man behind the curtain controlling all the levers like an all-seeing Wizard of Oz.  Noah Wareness is a great pen name.

Opening up Real is the Word They Use to Contain Us is a little like listening to Richard Pryor for the first time all those years ago.  I was working in a small movie theatre that was on the second floor of an old building in Peterborough.  There was a boxing club on the first floor.  We showed a real variety of flicks.  You also never knew what would be playing on the box between shows.  Never did find out who owned the records we played but that's where I first heard Paco de Lucia.  That's where I first heard Richard Pryor.  I remember it clearly because it flicked a switch.

These are truly great poems, stories, bribes, menus and memos for the cleverly deranged.  Real is the Word They Use to Contain Us is as much a manifesto as it is a book of poems.  These poems are a declaration of war in a battle most of us don't know is being fought.

Noah Wareness is cavalier, candid and so damned sharp that there's a genuine fear of cutting yourself on his wit.

I'm No Expert

but I heard the physician Duncan MacDougall

devised a sensitive platform-beam balance

to weigh terminal patients as they expired,

eventually placing each departing soul between

eleven and forty-two grams.

                                              I'm no expert, but

I've got a bathroom scale, and I read it before

I sad down, you know? And when I stood up

over a pound had vanished. I'm no theologian,

but I've certainly weighed my share of turds,

an experiment most anyone can replicate.

                                                                   You sit

and think about Plato dividing the soul: reason,

volition, desire: three perforated squares.

Later theorists added compassion and stillness,

microtubules, parallel processing and generative

grammar; but in 1911, in his backyard garage,

MacDougall built a transcranial camera to catch

every last detail staining the bowl.

                                                       Nobody'd call

me an engineer, though. I don't know the weight

of compassion, or what might foil its tendency

to rise.

           Don't ask me why corn kernels float.

...

Real is the Word They Use to Contain Us genuinely does not read like any other of book of poetry I have ever encountered.  Noah Wareness writes with a strange lyricism somewhere south of a ranting Nick Cave and north of the razor wire strung out by William S. Burroughs.  And he does it with some sort of hyper stream-of-consciousness and the extracted musk glands of honey-badgers.  Wareness is relentless as he dive bombs down on the assigned targets with his massive artillery.

It is hard to narrow in on precisely what it is Noah Wareness is running toward but the trip is the thing and Real is the Word They Use to Contain Us chases you like a bull breathing hard on your blistered and bloodied feet as you search the maze for daylight.

Today's book of poetry could have used a Sherpa to help navigate some of this terrain but just when the air gets too thin and the load gets too heavy Wareness comes along with something so beautiful, wise, alarming, exciting or illuminating that it lightens your load, solves your concerns.

A Wagging Wheel

welcome to the smoking

industry.

it's not what you

think. it's worse.

ever since youtube

got started we've been making

like zero money.

nobody pays anymore

for smoking.

all those

iphone 6

motherfuckers

at the bus stop

doing streaming

video,

and white

clouds in the office

windows

overhead

clearing up

one by one.

now we're working in

rented port-a-

potties. the

big ones you can drive

a wheelchair in.

your bachelor's degree? it's

a piece of paper.

welcome to the smoking industry.

four, five of us smoking

in a green plastic

shitter

behind a horse stable

only we're still

artists,

artisans.

in these suffocating

boxes there's

no lights

ventilation

water 

or electricity.

you can's see your hands.

you vomit.

the office tips sideways.

and when the cheques

come they're typed

on the thinnest paper

basically kleenex.

pissing blood

after a long day's

smoking

and the cheque's ripped,

you can't

read the numbers

then plus there's the

sixteen-year-olds

who hitch here in freight cars,

all clown paint and

brandishing cleavers,

they show up

around sundown

like a teen vampire movie

and they don't stop singing

the same song.

ROCK ME MAMA LIKE A WAGGING

WHEEL, ROCK ME, MAMA, ANY

WAY TIME TO FEEL, HEY, MAMA,

WAKE UP AND ROCK ME

ROCK ME MAMA LIKE A WINTER'S

TURNING OF RAIN, ROCK ME

MAMA ALL DAY IN A TRAIN, HEY,

MISTER, YOU GOT A SMOKE

and every one

of 

them, in between

the checkings

of their phones,

will ask

to bum a smoke.

they got on emergency

psychiatric welfare by

cutting

GODSPEED U BLACK

EMPOROR

in the ikea coffee

tables

of their mothers,

and they say they stopped here

to bum a smoke.

they say that's the only

reason they stopped here.

well fuck.

rookie,

this is it,

the smoking

industry. and

fuck youtube and the world internet,

fuck not being able

to read

cause you had one ordinary stroke, fuck

mirrors cracking when

they look at you,

fuck dropping bread in the toilet,

fuck

warning labels

getting bigger every morning,

fuck

trying to use

a toothbrush when you

have oral

cancer, fuck the

exchange ratio,

fuck

burn marks on my air

fresheners, fuck the emergency

tracheotomy industry,

fuck

being forcibly restrained

and prevented from 

smoking

at your own child's sleepover,

fuck tar sticking your eyes shut,

fuck

stepping outside

for one minute

and birds hitting you in the chest,

fuck whoever came up

with the name noam chompy

for a dog,

FUCKING KIDS

GET OUT OF MY OFFICE

WITH YOUR RUBBER BAND

TOILET PAPER

TUBE

GUITARS.

okay?

okay.

welcome to the smoking industry.

here's

your gun.

it probably won't even go off.

...

Just following Noah Wareness through this labyrinth of poems, prose poems, connecting passages, asides, contracts, pamphlets and other assorted paraphernalia is a quest.  But rewarding at every turn.  You can't have poems this incendiary without making some burn holes in the carpet.  Something is going to spill over.

At this morning's reading we noticed the door to Max's office open and "gone fishing" sign on his desk.  Not sure where he has ventured off to but we will keep his office just the way he likes it.  The rest of the staff tackled Real is the Word They Use to Contain Us with considerable gusto and aplomb.

Today's book of poetry understands that Noah Wareness is an outsider poet; unaligned to any isms and with a big tongue in his cheek.  We won't even pretend we were prepared to deal with a poet of this nature - but boy, oh boy - we were damned happy to take a kick at the can.  Originality is rare as hen's teeth and Noah Wareness is one of the most original voices we've encountered in a good while.

Everything's Politics

for Melanie

The words are the power the words would destroy.

Now it's December, I wrote about this park already,

the powder snow streaming over the walking paths,

blowing in ribbons, billows, all torn kitecloth trailing,

revealing in its traces the soft flank of the wind.

It isn't a sign. It's not the wind's mixed metaphor.

The wind ins't the snow's; and nothing's ours, too.

Either way, now it's March. On Highway 17, Emese

calls them snow snakes. Our tires run them down.

There's nothing in this frail little magic, not to hold,

no stone for power's throat. We ask the words for

true and false, the power the words would destroy.

It's just how seeing makes more seeing, this mind,

ours, running up to itself with shapes in its mouth.

The world's netted through with words, whichever

way, but always too fine to catch nothing at all.

When I finish this page, it was raining instead.

Either way, it's past four in the night. It's not now.

The wind's come looking back like something else.

...

It's not very often a book like Real is the Word They Use to Contain Us comes along but when they do it is cause for celebration here at Today's book of poetry.

Not only can Noah Wareness cook with elan, he's added some new and pleasing spices that were entirely new to our palate.

Today's book of poetry 

thinks this might be a photo of

Noah Wareness.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Noah Wareness uses STAEDTLER pens, SHRANDER imagery, THOSS nightmares and WEER narrative frames.

BLURBS

"...something approaching genius... every word from the stage was a perfectly-shaped bullet..."

     -  Michael Rowe

"Reading this book will make you see the world a little differently."

     -  Zachariah Wells

biblioasis.com

616

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.

Harvest the Dirt - Wil Gibson (Great Weather for MEDIA)

Today's book of poetry:
Harvest the Dirt.   Wil Gibson.  Great Weather for MEDIA.  New York, New York, 2015.

Spend some very enjoyable time reading Harvest the Dirt by Wil Gibson and you might be inclined to think that he is one dark and rough piece of bark.  

That is until you read his terribly tender ode to Kurt Vonnegut Jr., "So It Goes."  There is almost always an exception to the rule.

Gibson's rules might run along the lines of the "drink 'em, smoke 'em, crank 'em when you've got them" school.  These poems describe a difficult life of great turmoil and torment, a road full of bad turns and bad choices.

So how does Gibson turn this into such bittersweet poetry?

What  I should've said to the older gentleman

who happened into the bar during a poetry

reading and stayed for the duration:

I saw you nod in approval with the first bent heart poem you

heard. Was that the first time you heard someone else speak your

mind? I saw that you dropped a twenty dollar bill in the passed

hat payday, so I assume the open wounds on stage were enough

for you. I saw my Granddaddy nod the same way the first time I

read him a poem. He knew the poem was about him and smiled

a struck match to burn away the lost cause from the dust bowl

lump in my throat. In your open mind I saw Granddad's pride. In

your accidently art-filled evening you gave back to me a reason for

writing I thought I had lost or forgotten.

...

Gibson is a romantic, no doubt about that, but he doesn't give in to it easily.  It's all kicking and screaming, coming across the finishing line on fire sort of stuff.  

Harvest the Dirt is earthy stuff, an eight-ball, dime bag, bobo huffing earthy stuff that hits the nail, repeatedly, right on its big flat head.  Gibson is almost polymorphous in his range of romantic follies. He is affectionate about: certain country singers, Tom Waits, Bobbie Gentry, his family, the American South, meth labs...

Last Man Standing

I refused to smoke or snort meth the first time I did it. The more

experienced tweakers put it in toilet paper and told me to swallow

it. When my stomach acid dissolved the thin wood pulp, the

explosion of crank into my system burned a hole from my hips to

my mouth. Each organ etched its name into my skin with a cattle

prod. Lightning shot through my intestines.

I ran to the bathroom and shit out everything I had ever eaten in

my entire life. I shit out my mother's breast milk, and the amniotic

fluid I floated in for nine months. I shit out things I thought about

eating. I shit our everything I had seen other people eat and all the

food in all the commercials I had ever seen. I vowed to never do

this horrible drug ever again.

Twenty minutes later I had a straw to my nose and was being

passed a freshly packed light bulb to smoke from. I inhaled the

sweet smell of impending snow and hot chemicals. My head

spun like the world around me. I didn't eat, sleep, or do anything

remotely sane for the next fifty-three hours.

The next seven years were facsimile nights and carbon paper days.

Everything was broken light bulbs, broken promises, broken

promises, broken promises, broken hearts, and full-blown crazy.

Most things were broken. I lived awake and died in my dreams

every rare time I slept. I still have trouble sleeping.

...

Wil Gibson's Harvest the Dirt is the meat section of the grocery store, pure bloody protein.

Today's book of poetry's morning read was raucous to say the least.  Milo has seemingly overcome any trace of his previous shyness.  He can't wait to get up in front of us and read and he has become quite good at it.  Many mornings now we simply let him read to the rest of us.  Today everyone wanted to get in on it.  Kathryn insisted on reading the Vonnegut poem, twice.

Whole. South. Side.

Dust bunnies scratched weak scream claw marks down

the hallway.

No milk in a new house,

third this year, another cupboard empty.

June is a terrible month to move,

made easier when you lack clothes and furniture.

The new cockroaches were smaller.

The new neighbors mutter "poor white trash"

under their breath, never to our faces.

They don't mean it as hurtful or angry,

they only mean we were pitiful.

They smile with sad eyes and treat us like

a man whose wife cheats on him.

There is no way to tell someone they have been forgotten.

...

Gibson takes it all on in Harvest the Dirt - poverty, race, violence, drugs, country music and so on.   He does it with the slow grace of a poetic Richard Pryor.  Saint Richard of Pryor never passed a pipe he didn't like and was the best straight-up stand-up there has ever been.  We here at Today's book of poetry like to make big proclamations just to see who is listening.

Wil Gibson is a slap and a caress, not always in equal portions.  Poetry like this can make you squirm in your seat and that is a good thing.  A damned good thing.

Wil Gibson

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wil Gibson was born from a good idea and a bottle of bourbon and raised in some of the poorest communities northern Illinois and eastern Arkansas have to offer. He is a proud, mistake-prone, father of four.

BLURBS

Harvest the Dirt is the fuck-you-listen-to-me reminder that life is real, and raw, and constantly in a state of push and pull and break. Gibson doesn’t need metaphors to talk about drugs and despair and life. There’s no hidden meaning. This is not a collection of self-help pieces. He’s not going to tell you that anything will ever be better. What Gibson will do though is craft a guide of real-world, worst-case scenarios, so that maybe you’ll give a damn about yourself, or the world around you, or art, or whatever it is to which you yearn to cling. This is Jim Carroll and William Burroughs meets George Carlin and Sam Kinison in a dark alley for an I’ll-raise-you-a-story kind of raw. This is not a book of poetry; this is an experience.—Chris Margolin, The Poetry Question

Harvest the Dirt is a gritty, relentless testament to the survival song that is Wil Gibson. Each poem is a bloody ride out of the city that birthed you; a psalm in the name of recovery; an open window on a stormy day somewhere in the middle of this country. This book is filled with a man’s truth and, while it isn’t always pretty, that truth never apologizes.—Carrie Rudzinski, author of The Shotgun Speaks and The History of Silence

Here, now, in 2015, there is an eye on race, southern culture, and the relationship between the two that is as focused as I remember it being. That eye is large, and general. Wil Gibson’s Harvest the Dirtis specific, and on the street. But no less large. Harvest the Dirt is proof that country music doesn’t need a fiddle, a pedal steel, or even sounds at all. All country music needs is a heart breaking or a heart trying to mend, and a bent ear. Enjoy the listen.—Justin Wells, singer / songwriter

Full of should-have-saids and self portraits, Wil Gibson’s newest collection gives a vivid look at the life he has lead. It is harsh. It is visceral. Most importantly, it is truth. Harvest the Dirt captures the purest of moments and the most honest of self-reflections through remembrances and images of an universal truth about the America we live in. It is an insightful read of contemporary poetry in an unrestricted and accessible tongue.—Katrina K. Guarascio, Swimming with Elephants Publications

Wil Gibson

"Stories"

(NPS 2015)

video: Button Poetry

greatweatherformedia.com 

448

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.