Phantom Ride - Joseph Mulholland (Baseline Press)

Today's book of poetry:

Phantom Ride.  Joseph Mulholland.  Baseline Press.  London, Ontario.  2017.

Each and every one of Joseph Mulholland's little screenplays disguised as poems will someday be an Academy Award winner.  These poems are clever diamonds and will shine from every direction at once.  No cubic zirconia, no zircon, no moissanite.  These stones are ice.

Today's book of poetry is tickled pink to lay Phantom Ride on all of you beauties because gems like this only come by every so often.  That every facet holds poetry water - Mulholland is some crafty jeweller, one nasty cook.

Camera With Humidity Under Its Lens

To line the camera's edges with butcher paper is to tender a light

so tenuous it'll wax unfashionable. It was admirable how your father

refused time & again, to be another silent film era swashbuckler

shaking sea urchins out of mud-flecked boots for a few laughs. Somewhere

an octopus rolls Rs off the blood-light of breath. A knock-kneed horse

in a buzzing field, a cloned Anita creeping up on flexed toes. Her necklace

of sand dollars, her whispering eyes. The camera cuts the horizon in half,

a single drop of blood arches its back in mid-air. Bullet marrow, scent of agave.

The car crash scene extras take turns spitting into the stucco reproduction

of the Fontana di Trevi. After the broken glass has settled the sky—

both open wound & overturned ceramic bowl trapping a far-off galaxy's light—

memorizes its own reflection, a nimbus of silver tendons, a force

without counterfeit behind weakening blood vessel walls.

An entire city fainting at the end of your garter pistol's cold nose.

💫💫💫

Phantom Ride is another Baseline Press small miracle of beauty, but that comes as no surprise to Today's book of poetry.  Pound for pound, Baseline Press produces the most beautiful little books on the planet.  Karen Schindler's books are visually sublime.  And with Joseph Mulholland at the helm of Phantom Ride, Baseline Press has a rich enough vein of gold to call in Ben and Little Joe.

Mulholland has every single reader here at Today's book of poetry enchanted.

Zhuchka's Love Letter to the End

     ". . . a beastly trick, a vile trick—to take a piece of bread, the soft part,

     stick a pin in it, and toss it to some yard dog, the kind that's so hungry

     it will swallow whatever it gets without chewing it, and then watch

     what happens."                   - Dostoevsky

Before the roosters crow I hear the curtains wheeze.

My heart is a bear trap with a fox's paw caught

in its teeth. There is a torn sack of flour in the cupboard,

I can smell fear warming the flour mites' breath.

The postman offers me his foot—I know he's poisoned

his bootlaces. Deep in the house tables are tipped over, chairs

dragged across floorboards, splinters unearthed. From here I can see

the church steeple's window streaked with snail trails.

Sawdust on the slaughter hall's floor like snowfall—

my throat a torn nest. The wind, with its rubber tongue,

tries in vain to rub out the moths' chalky eyes—the baker's palms

the color of bruised pears. I sit under my master's bedroom

window. I can make out the raspy voices of winter coats crammed

into an overcrowded closet, vicariously reliving the memories

of their wearers; the tick-infested wool & wind-shaken

cicada shells of autumn nights—empty bottles of perfume

lulled to sleep by a pinhead's brutal lullaby.

💫💫💫

Phantom Ride is so rich you're going to get poetry fat reading it.  This cat is burning down the house like he just discovered the best cook book in the land and everyone else is still eating beans.

Our morning read flew by in several quick bursts of mirth.  These poems are as bright and quick as something that flies through the sky.  Today's book of poetry isn't thinking jets and rockets, they abound, this is rarer metal, think meteor.

Today's book of poetry would like to apologize for our sporadic schedule of late.  Real life gets in the way of poetry all the time.  Today's book of poetry will continue to post as many blogs/reviews as we can, and when.

Elegy for Drive-In Movie Theatres

An unripe knife forgotten in the inner elbow of a sliced lime, nights

thick with carbon monoxide & the prickly throats of desert flowers

populating the outer edges of darkness. The sound of ghosts necking

behind a horizontal pyramid of light. Perfume-sweetened exhaust fumes

making a savage bracket of meek mileage—dashboard dust

covers up all traces of blackout weather. To your weed-weary abandoned lots

to buckling plywood screens & the dirty windshield myopia of empty

bodies in motion. Saturday's mouths swimming in & out of rearview

mirrors. Not far from the last line of parked cars, a pair of owls

perched on a discarded railroad tie—the hum of tiny black tongues.

💫💫💫

Today's book of poetry cannot wait for Joseph Mulholland's next poetry project and you should be excited too.  Writing like Mr. Mulholland's is the reason Today's book of poetry loves poetry in the first place.

Magic.

                   

Joseph Mulholland    

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joseph Mulholland was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  He is currently a Ph.D. student in comparative literature at the University of Toronto.  Before coming to Canada, he lived in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where he studied Latin American literature at the University of Puerto Rico.

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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

Joseph Mulholland was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is currently a Ph.D. student in comparative literature at the University of Toronto. Before coming to Canada, he lived in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where he studied Latin American literature at the University of Puerto Rico.

Joseph Mulholland was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is currently a Ph.D. student in comparative literature at the University of Toronto. Before coming to Canada, he lived in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where he studied Latin American literature at the University of Puerto Rico.

Joseph Mulholland was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is currently a Ph.D. student in comparative literature at the University of Toronto. Before coming to Canada, he lived in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where he studied Latin American literature at the University of Puerto Rico.

The Earth Gods Are Coming - Gabe Foreman (Baseline Press)

Today's book of poetry:
The Earth Gods Are Coming.  Gabe Foreman.  Baseline Press.  London, Ontario.  2016.

"Grace is electricity, science has found,

it is not like electricity, it is electricity...."

                                                                                - Donald Barthelme, 

                                                                                  "At the End of the Mechanical Age"

Today's book of poetry was terribly fond of Gabe Foreman's A Complete Encyclopedia of Different Types of People (Coach House Press, 2011), so when we saw The Earth Gods Are Coming come through our poetry door we knew what we were getting into.  

Foreman continues to write with one foot firmly planted on terra firma and the other in a variety of parallel and non-parallel worlds.  The Earth Gods Are Coming has an entirely disproportionate serving of intelligent whimsy.  Gabe Foreman is all about the "what if" universe.

The poems in this volume don't have titles.

~~~

You called music

the nicotine-patch

of the masses.

Some songs were in the key of Lord Byron.

As though we found an orange on the floor

and held it to our faces.

Poke rivals with those keen little stars.

Now kick that charging security guard

in half, with your naked foot.

A cough, spread-eagling through the cove at low tide.

Charlotte, various breeds of unicorn prance in predawn meadows,

preying on incantations of your face expelled by the tiny lungs of songbirds.

You were not real.

At least not mentally real.

You were a gymnast, and I,

a musician hired by NASA

to sing about the moon.

"The moon beams are rafters branching over," etc.

"The moon's iambic diameter is at its maximum

when you come over," etc.

A ghost tugs a panel of ocean fear

across a dumpster's busted radio.

It pelts your grubby backpack with caddis flies,

and pelts as well the faded jackets

of the men who stoop after cigarettes

while another Saturday fills with cars

who crash into motels already on fire.

...

According to Foreman we might find some light in the Dead Sea scrolls, Ninja campers and corn-dogs.  Talking oxen will relax our minds and ancient Mayans await pilgrims arriving in taxi cabs.

His random and encyclopedic flashes of brain lightning all point in the same direction, to grace, to electricity.

~~~

At the lamp store shopping for a lamp,

do you have any lamps

that don't work?

I need to replace a light which never worked

that I smashed when I was dying.

I have but one lamp

that doesn't work

but it comes with a curse.

Are you willing to purchase it

before I ramble on about the curse,

a hex both banal and morose?

Of course.

I paid an exorbitant price

for when I took my new lamp home

and set it in the old light's nook,

before I stooped to plug it in,

it worked.

...

Our morning read was big fun.  Even though no one has seen the sun for a couple of days there is an unmistakable optimism that only arrives with the smell of spring.

Hard to know for sure if Gabe Foreman is an optimist but when my staff had finished reading The Earth Gods Are Coming aloud to each other they were all smiling.

~~~

What thoughts I have of you tonight, transformers, as the power fails in

a swelter, and the subway falters between stations. The charm of the

failing transformers is that they deliver peace to neighbourhoods that

might deserve a meal by candlelight.  I remember a week of statewide

black out. This was years ago, decades past, in a similar heat wave. On

the second night, my wife (1) and I invited an old timer we spotted on the

street for supper. I placed a candle on the table.  The man was bearded,

sweaty and grubby.  Over cold soup and raspberry wine, he spoke of

desperate nautical voyages he had experienced, of near starvation at sea,

often in superb detail.  I felt his story contained alien circuitry, but my

wife absorbed the hardship of the man's cannibalistic past and wept

openly.  We never told him, but she and I had dabbled at people-eating

in college.  In those days, our dorm had been a slow-cooker of untenable

grief.  Those who grabbed hold of the burning filament and climbed

inside our fading bulb had made no promises, just as we had made no

plans.  We had been different people.  Over barbequed steak, our guest

half-forgot a joke whose punch-line was: you are what you eat.  My wife

laughed.  we were like one person then, the flickering meat, the dark

hallway behind where my wife was sitting, and the parts of the joke that

the old man had forgotten.  When respectable Americans bid goodnight

to old timers, they seldom make chivalrous vows in Latin, or promise

never to forget, but my wife and I did both, first over fortified sherry

and blueberry pie, and a second time, on the porch, before the old man

finally staggered off into the darkness and was consumed.  Before he had

left, our guest asked if he could borrow a flashlight.  He asked again, as if

we had not heard his words.  When he was finally gone, my wife and I

knew that we had done the right thing.  We sat on the porch swing, and 

counted all the flashlights in the house.  There were six.  One for each of

the babies that we had planned to have once the power came back on.

Look, a shooting star, I said.  Amanda turned to me then, smiled, and

became an older man for the rest of her life.

(1) My wife's unusual superpower was that she would spontaneously change age

and sex, on average every few months or so.  These transformations occurred

randomly, and were beyond her control.  They presented a terrific challenge to our

marriage.  More a curse than a gift really.

...

Gabe Foreman's considerable charms are almost too grand for a chapbook but Saint Karen of Schindler seems to be able to carry any weight with her marvelous Baseline Press.  Schindler continues to produce chapbooks of subtle and exacting beauty and fills them with poetry worthy of the splendor.

Today's book of poetry is a sucker for certain things and the Japanese Uzumaki tissue used to make the flyleaves for The Earth Gods Are Coming is beautiful enough to make you cry.

Gabe Foreman's The Earth Gods Are Coming reads like a much larger book, good poems do that.

Gabe Foreman

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gabe Foreman's first collection, A Complete Encyclopedia of Different Types of People (Coach House, 2011), was awarded the A.M. Klein Prize for poetry and was shortlisted for the Concordia First Book Prize. Gabe lives in Montreal where he works at a soup kitchen.

TPV Spring 2012: Gabe Foreman "Should I listen to this ox?"

Video:TorontoPoetryVendors

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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.

Sonnet in a Blue Dress and Other Poems - Sarah Tolmie (Baseline Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Sonnet in a Blue Dress and Other Poems.  
Sarah Tolmie.  Baseline Press.  London, Ontario.  2014.

Sonnets that are sweet to the eye and the ear.

The old sonnet is not the most common popular form, not in the real world, or at Today's book of poetry.
           BUT Sarah Tolmie has struck a rich vein, Sonnet in a Blue Dress and Other Poems reads vibrant, modern and true.

Not to suggest that Tolmie has taken the sonnet to the roller derby or a Tom Waits concert.

These poems ring off of the page with considerable authority and precision dancing around inside the certain boundaries of form, they dance modern.

3

These are old problems, old as Augustine.
He said we must have faith in things unseen:
Believe our friends befriend us, lovers love.
We cannot know, because between us lies
The great distance of mind from mind, galaxies
Apart. Yet from across the room I feel
Your heartbeat quivering on the air.
I start when you come in, involuntary.
You disturb the air and I'm inspired
By your chemistry: I breathe you in,
As real and clear as oxygen. Fort, da
Is bridged in juice. Even if you stand aloof,
Faultless information loops across our
Space, no matter what Augustine says.

...

There is a simmering heat beneath these poems.  It is tangible on the edge of each page.

Tolmie is one pole-axed pole-cat with a problem.  Unrequited love is always a bitter trail of tears, and for all her obvious wisdom Tolmie gets tangled up in the wrong doors of love just as foolishly as the rest of us.  Bob D. might say that she was "tangled up in blue".

The ace card here is these perfect little gems Tolmie has carved out of her chosen form.  Like a jeweller on a mission, she has carved each facet so.

13

See you and raise you. Raise you like an island
Hove in sight. Raise you like the wind under
A kite. To an angel down from Paradise.
Raise you to the power of the infinite.
All games of chance bore me to death, so
I raise you like a feather on my breath.
No-one bets against the gods but fools
And they have nothing else to do, except
Rule nations and shoot to win at pool.
Not so I you. You are the real deal.
I've spun you high on fortune's wheel
Because you deserve to be there, in my view.
And then, seeing what you have become
Just staying in the game, I've won.

...

The heart wants what it wants, what it can't have, what will hurt it most.

Historically, hearts suck.  They don't work like a brain, won't listen to reason.  We are hopeless meat-sacks of love and desire and our weak-kneed hearts know it.  So does Tolmie.

23

We think love can beat death and entropy.
It can't. Best you can do is have it age
And change with you, capably. Holding
A new penny in your hand doesn't make
You any younger, and only richer
By one cent. The youth and beauty of
Another does not mean yours is not spent.
What did you buy with yours? Of that love,
What is left? What interest has accrued?
And how much would you lose, only to
Start again with a single penny? Not
Even yours, but merely lent? A sum
So small you hardly see it in your palm,
Just a glint for which you would trade all.

...

Sonnet in a Blue Dress and Other Poems resonates for me.  These poems are so damned smart and vibrant and those are things we love here at Today's book of poetry.

If you get a chance and use You Tube, look up Dexter Gordon's song "Tanya".  Play it.  These poems are that good and in the same mood.  Gets richer with every listen, these poems do the same with every read.

Sonnet in a Blue Dress and Other Poems is another blue ribbon publication from Baseline Press. Karen Schindler continues to get Today's book of poetry's vote, not just because her books are all so beautiful, they are, but because she continues to find such good poetry to fill the pages.

Sarah Tolmie

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sarah Tolmie is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Waterloo, trained as a medievalist at the University of Toronto and Cambridge. Her novel The Stone Boatmen came out with Aqueduct Press in April 2014. Her first full-length poetry collection,Trio, is forthcoming from McGill-Queen's in 2015.

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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.

Where the Back Roads Take You - Debra Franke (Baseline Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Where the Back Roads Take You.  Debra Franke.  Baseline Press.  London, Ontario.  2014.

Debra Franke's Where the Back Roads Take You does an awful lot of very good things in short order. This stunning little book from the formative stable of Baseline Press starts with a startling good poem and then never stops.  "Gone" is about loss, and much of what follows explores that theme in one way or another.

Gone

Turn over the rock
at the river's edge, feel
moss and grass growing
even in the darkest space,
find substance in this quiet place.
Whittled light slides through
ridges of your heart like sun-burned
trestles of a train bridge
across an orange field.
This is a love poem.
When you are finished
with the rock, use language
to understand the river
and how it never ends. Or look
beyond to tall peaks of pines drinking
from sky to quench their thirst.
There is no one for miles.
Even the heron has landed
somewhere else, looking for home.
One of your friends you loved most
has been gone since winter.
The loss runs
through the bones of your river,
is the open trail calling
you deeper into a wilderness
pulled by a sky of blue horses.
This too, is a love poem.

...

These poems are carefully engineered emotional freight trains.  Franke seems quite pleased to play both sides of the fence with her hopeful lamentations, her sad humour.  Mostly what she is showing is enviable control.

Where the Back Roads Take You is exactly the journey promised when Debra Franke started it with a quote from Anne Michaels' "Miner's Pond":

     Even in a place you know intimately,
        each night's darkness is different.

Killdeer

I followed you up the sandy path
between pines and spruce that summer,
the burning sun our only witness. I was seven,
and my worry kept pace behind you.
They told me later your broken wing was pretend,
that you were faking to protect your babies
so I would follow you away from your nest.
I was only a kid, but I knew the truth:
that anyone with a wing dragging
in the dust needed more from the world
than it was giving them--

...

Today's book of poetry is utterly smitten with these poems.  Franke does more with less in such a lovely fashion.  To paraphrase Levon Helm as he affectionately sang about Spike Jones, "we just like to hear her talk."

Franke is not a Killdeer though, as much as she can skillfully direct our attention and she is certainly directing our gaze in these gems, she has enough game to throw us considerable misdirection just for the fun of it.  And it is not a bad thing,

When people really know how to dance, you can just see it in the way they walk.

Sometimes

Sometimes I can't swallow truth any easier than a sparrow can

swallow a tractor. Sometimes a sparrow's view of the world is much 

more grounded than mine. Sometimes precise angles of knowing

can make truth feel more acute, and less the degrees of separation

from honesty. Sometimes the most honest truth is rain falling

parallel to your loneliness. Sometimes I wonder which is more true,

today's rain or yesterday's rain, and what is more true than a snail

coming out of its shell after rain, or a bear attacking two campers in

Algonquin? Sometimes truth is beyond words, beyond metaphor.

Sometimes we can only love theoretically, although we want to dig

into love as hands into a garden. Sometimes the end feels like the

beginning, and I wish we'd gotten here sooner, so we could have

started before we ended. Sometimes we can't distinguish the end

from the end. Sometimes snow and rain at the same time cause

confusion. Sometimes loves carries with it an illness of the heart.

Sometimes there is only wood beating in my chest. Sometimes the

mind is a back road, pushing itself into potholes while night hurtles

closer, stars collecting at your throat. Sometimes come morning,

there is only one way to see a blackbird. Sometimes a person's

leaving looks like arriving, only backwards and for longer.

Sometimes people disappear into mountains and only white space

remains. Sometimes canoes disembark from shore and vow to 

return again. Sometimes a storm brings lightning into our lives, and

splits a tree we love in two. Sometimes metaphors for love are

boats, carrying the aftermath of relationship. Sometimes the

aftermath is snow, falling like love from the sky and melting.

Sometimes love gets towed across bodies of water; sometimes not.

Sometimes love, with only one oar, keeps turning and turning.

...

"Sometimes love, with only one oar, keeps turning and turning."

That is the best melancholy-sad-hopeful-but-mostly-sad line we've seen here at Today's book of poetry in a while.

And melancholy is what I was feeling this morning when I discovered that one of our interns had brought a Kindle into the office.  I could smell it right away and of course I took it away from her before it hurt her.  I had to send her down to the furnace room to shovel coal for a few hours.  I kept the etch-a-sketch thingy and wrote Franke's great line down on a piece of paper.  Told the intern that she could read that.

We here at Today's book of poetry love books.  We love books of poetry - and so when we get a Baseline Book we are reminded of what the very best books look like.  This beauty, Where the Back Roads Take You is bound with St. Armand Canal paper, the flyleaf is of handmade Sugikawa (which we think is rice-bark), and the book is printed on Royal Sundance Linen 24lb.  It was typeset in Perpetua.  These things don't make poetry better, but Baseline Press consistently finds voices worthy of their artful printing.  

Debra Franke is another one of those voices.  Where the Back Roads Take You is a journey worth seeking out.

Debra Franke

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Originally from Port Hope, Debra Franke lives in London, Ontario. She holds a BA in Psychology, and completed her MA at the University of New Brunswick. Debra's poems have appeared in journals such as The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, Event, andRoom. She works as a Public Librarian.

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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.