Her Heartsongs - Joan Colby (Presa Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Her Heartsongs.  Joan Colby.  Presa Press.  Rockford, Michigan.  2018.

"....and they will be so young

They believe touching solves everything."

Joan Colby is brimming with innocent magic and experienced folly.  Her Heartsongs rings vibrant, if it were published by a big house (no offense to Presa Press, bless their cotton socks), everybody in poetry world would be talking about it.  Joan Colby is breaking no new ground, there is no experimenting here.  Instead these poems are reliable as a train, steady enough to be on tracks.

Joan Colby is not afraid of anything, much less afraid of going to a dark place.  Her brave poetry works in a straight line.  One foot in front of the other.

Colby has at least one solid gold, 24 carat, talking old school pure, line in almost every poem in this book.  It's uncanny.  These are knock you to your knees lines, kick you in the ass lines, gobsmack you with truth lines.  Every poem should have them.

Securing a Memory

In the passenger seat

Also known as the suicide seat,

That was me. You were driving,

One hand on the wheel, the other

Holding me. I already knew how this

Would end, that it would indeed end

And it wouldn't matter because I'd have

This memory. The pink sweater

I am wearing, fuzzy as how I feel

In this proximity to love. My own face reflected

In the side window while the dark

Landscape pours past, how we are not

Speaking in the immense blossom

That opens between us, night petals rank

And dangerous and seductive so that

My mouth tingles

Though we are not yet kissing,

Just driving, driving and I tell myself

Remember this moment, how it feels

Years into the future. This memory

Which settles on me like a hungry animal. You

Peripheral, to my left,

Left with its sinister connotations,

A profile. It's not important

That we engaged like teeth on meat

Or sawed our bodies until like trees

We fell and fell and fell

Into that koan of presumed

Silence. In that deliberate memory

I painted on the walls of all the years to come

I am always seventeen.

💫💫💫

BOOM.  That's how you do it!  These poems are "coming of age" poems sans trite.  These are mature poems.  These are poems from the voice of an older woman.  Today's book of poetry couldn't help but think of the four sisters I grew up with.  Our home was a matriarchy, without question, and my sisters grew up under the influence of a battle-ax strong mother.  The sisters have always impressed me and reading poetry that reminds me of them, well, it's simply splendid.

Joan Colby isn't just spinning tales of growing up female, she is attempting to tell us all how to live better lives.  Colby isn't proselytizing but her sharp narratives always end up with us realizing something important, something worth remembering.

Food

School lunch: baloney sandwich, plain. No butter,

Mayo, mustard. I am known

As a fussy eater. My mother

Thought people who liked eating were obscene.

Gross acts of bodies. When we shopped

She gorged greedily on fudge sundaes,

At home sucked broth in penance. Sometimes

She cracked walnuts and picked the meats

Daintily with a silver tool. I thought

The hollowed world would look like that

Irregular but perfectly clean.

My mother served boiled potatoes, unsalted lamb,

Tuna out of cans. I ate raw carrots

From our garden pulled directly from the dirt

And wild mint, spruce needles

Nectar sucked from phlox.

My mother worshiped restraint,

My father health.

I simply didn't know the taste of things.

Suspicion rose in my heart like flood waters

When Mrs. Adducci tried to feed me spaghetti,

when Mrs. Person made Swedish meatballs,

when the roadside cafe married eggs to grits.

At the dinner table I rolled my bread into balls

Pastel as the Sunday host I had to swallow whole

And flavorless, an air-puffed masquerade.

Now, I wield seasonings with abandon,

Try any new taste, and strangeness,

Seagull wings, snake's tongues, a wealth

Of passion fruit, coriander,

Saffron and sea salt.

I dip thin oblongs of meat

Into delicate Thai peanut sauce.

Far away, my mother takes out her teeth

Dunking bread in milk without sweetening.

I pummel stone-ground dough into a shape

For rising. It doubles like love given for no reason

Here's what I have learned:

That death in life is never

Knowing what is good.

💫💫💫

BANG.  Get that into you!  Today's book of poetry would be a liar if we didn't share our immediate reaction to typing out these Joan Colby servings.  We freaking love when we get to the end of a poem and feel enthusiastic.

Today's book of poetry racked our small brain trying to bring to mind another poet who so thoroughly and clearly presented a moral framework, an emotional blueprint?  Nora Gould comes to mind.  Both Gould and Joan Colby speak of the earth in specific geography, they name the birds, the trees, the air.  Then having painted a necessary background they both add the details of blood and heart to take it home.

There is so much Today's book of poetry admires about Her Heartsongs that we've already tasked Milo (our head tech) with tracking down any of the following Joan Colby titles:

The Seven Heavenly Virtues

Carnival

Broke

Ribcage

Ah Clio

Pro Forma

The Wingback Chair

Bittersweet

Properties of Matter

Selected Poems

Dead Horses

The Lonely Hearts Killers

The Atrocity Book

How The Sky Begins To Fall

The Boundary Waters

Blue Woman Dancing in the Nerve

Dream Tree

Chagall Poems

Beheading the Children

Eleven Poems

By our count Joan Colby has 21 books of poetry.  That's a great body of work by any ones count.  Today's book of poetry is convinced we've just uncovered the tip of a very large poetry iceberg.

The biggest discovery Today's book of poetry has made since starting this project over six years ago was the number of poets and publishers at work in the big wide English poetry world.  Astonishing.  Our latest research shows over a thousand poetry publishers, small and large, in Canada and the United States.  And the best of discoveries in that big world are moments exactly like this one.  Joan Colby's honesty is illuminating and her wit sublime.  Also like the sisters.

How to Love

Mockingbirds in the pines wake me. Light

Scuttles through blinds like lovebugs

Smearing windshields, fuzz of bliss, doomed thistles. See

What they're in for, how they

Solve themselves.

Here's how we ought to love: the way two children

At the beach begin with shells and wet sand.

How their hands dredge a moat or pat

Turrets into being. Watch this, one says,

Knocking the whole thing over,

They laugh and run into waves

That find both coming and going easy.

The way sun blankets them

While breakers keep collapsing. Nothing

They need to explain.

💫💫💫

It is the first of June here in the capital and everyone has on sweaters, and heavy socks.  Today's book of poetry even saw a winter coat on this morning's coat rack.  It is colder than it has any right to be and I fear I've woken up in November.  Kathryn, our Jr. Editor, wanted to shut the furnace off before the morning reading because when it jacks into service it gives the entire building a Ornette Coleman shake.

Joan Colby raised our spirits this morning.  These poems are surprising, too simple to be this good.  But make no mistake, Joan Colby can burn.  She says something worth knowing every time she lays it down.

Joan Colby

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joan Colby, b. 1939, has published widely in journals such as the Atlanta Review, Gargoyle, Little Patuxent Review, New York Quarterly, Pinyon, Poetry, South Dakota Review, Spillway, The Spoon River Poetry Review, among many others. She is the recipient of two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards, a Rhino Poetry Award, the new renaissance Award for Poetry and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. Colby has published seventeen books, most recently Carnival (FutureCycle Press, 2016). One of her poems is among the winners of the 2014 Atlanta Review International Poetry Contest. Colby is currently a senior book editor with FutureCycle Press and an associate editor for the Kentucky Review. She lives on a small horse farm in northern Illinois with her husband and assorted animals.

BLURBS

“Emotional intensity and large sympathies characterize this collection, which is underwritten by an intelligence itself as fiery as it is sharp.”

      -Philip Dacey

“More than almost any poet I know, Joan Colby follows John Keats’ advice to ‘load every cranny with ore.’ Whether she’s mining salt or emeralds, the reader will be the richer for it!” 

     – Dan Veach

“Colby is heir to Penelope, muse of shiver, drafting darkness and light into a haunting tapestry of wisdom and truth.” 

      – Richard Peabody

“Joan Colby knows how to take anything familiar and have us readjust our view of it. Her energy never flags as she transforms nerves into a tapestry or delves into the structure of a foot and tells stories that go where we’d never have expected them to go. There is a probing character to so many of her poems, as they give up layer upon layer of meaning or suggestion. Such a pairing of imagination with the craft to frame it is a rare gift.” 

      -David Chorlton

Joan Colby

Waterline Writers - 5/20/2018

Video:The Waterline Channel

presapress.com

760

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.

This Sweet Haphazard - Gillian Wegener (Sixteen Rivers Press)

Today's book of poetry:
This Sweet Haphazard.  Gillian Wegener.  Sixteen Rivers Press. 
San Francisco, California.  2017.

These remarkable poems seem to do two things at once, they gently reassure you that all will eventually be okay, until it's not.  Gillian Wegener's This Sweet Haphazard plays both ends against the middle as though she were a rationalizing mall-mom, but dressed like a gun-slinger underneath.

Or we can approach This Sweet Haphazard this way.  How does Wegener know what she knows?  The precision of her approach, how a neighbour who doesn't want to rock the boat by telling her firework-crazy neighbour that she hates fireworks.  Only to find herself pleasurably lost in the beauty of same, the final spectacle spectacular and Wegener finds the beauty.  And then to fold that like taffy, Wegener twists to the real end of the poem where accuracy takes over and the smoke and the dust from the fireworks obscure the real beauty of the night sky, all those stars burning bright.  Wegener pulls off this sort of savvy machination repeatedly, seemingly at will.

America by Train

America passes by the window like a set of slides being shown too fast.  Here are

the desert scenes with long stretches of blank landscape, but you know that it's 

all in the details. How the gray-green cactus will open up the most beautiful pink

flower for just one day, but you'll never see that flower from this train window.

How the lizard will wait on its rock for the unfortunate cricket to land and

become a tiny meal. You won't hear the screech of the hawk welcoming sunset

or see the startle of the mouse in hearing that cry. What you can see is brown

and gray and vaguely green, with the wide, darkening sky overhead, and it's like

holding a book you know will be a good read but that you aren't allowed to open.

      But here are the passengers, their unchosen details out for display. The

man and wife who argue about every little thing in hard whispers and then

in loud voices, not quite shouts, not much softer, but not really meant for

the entire car to hear. She has something to say about how he shaves. He has

something to say about the way she cooks turkey. She is wearing a yellow hat

fifty years too late for yellow hats with small cloth daisies, and he has a cane

that he whittled himself, and they are going from Bakersfield to Kansas to see

her sister. He has something to say about that, too. Another passenger peels

an orange, and another says he was attacked by dogs in Indonesia and is going

home to get treatment, but the sores on his arms and face don't speak of dogs,

and the gloss of fever means everyone for the most part leaves him alone, and

what he wants most is a mug of tea, but because he is so tired, he decides to wait

it out. Another passenger walks ahead for a smoke. A baby sleeps on her father's

shoulder. The conductor reads a magazine and wishes he were elsewhere.

      And America passes by like that in the night, when the windows show

nothing but passenger reflections. It becomes New Mexico. It becomes

Oklahoma. It becomes a train moving through a world made up of nothing

but darkness punctuated by the little comma moon overhead. It becomes

a train standing still as the world moves past. The arguing couple grows

quiet, her head on his shoulder. The feverish boy sleeps and murmurs

with feverish dreams. The baby is awake and watching her own reflection

in the window, waving at her sweet new self as the night folds around us.

...

Well crafted almost sounds disparaging these days but Today's book of poetry still thinks that's how things should be done.  Gillian Wegener's poems are air-tight.

Frequent readers of Today's book of poetry will remember that we are suckers for a good list poem and Wegener obliges in fine form with a dandy, "The Old Mill Cafe."  Today's book of poetry would normally use it for fodder but frankly we were so smitten with Wegener's particular disposition that we were drawn to several other poems.  You meet women like Wegener every day, smart, decisive and decidedly kind and gentle (when she wants to be).  The wrong assumption that is often made is that these attributes reveal a weakness of some kind.  But the real lion doesn't always have to prove herself to be a lion.  She just is.  She can be as kind and gentle as needed.  Until she has to be that other kind of lion.

The Dyerville Giant

When a tree falls in a forest,

a tree like that, anyway,

with all those years ringing it,

having sprouted out of the soft earth

before Jesus was even a spark

in his Father's bright eye --

when a tree like that falls,

it cracks and echoes so that

even the gnats careening

in the sun near the creek

take pause. And when this tree

fell, the crash was like trains colliding.

The ground inhaled and held

its breath, waiting for impact.

The sound rolled through the forest

and made salamanders hide

in their damp burrows. It thundered

like a train wreck, and so

the townsfolk drove out

to the trestle to see the havoc,

while the fine silt of redwoods

rose and then settled

in the forest behind them.

...

Today's book of poetry's morning read was a slightly more subdued event than some of our recent escapades.  Milo, our head tech, and Kathryn, our Jr. Editor, apparently drank all of the Scotch in Vanier last night.  Their little wounded souls are being dragged around the office today like corpses with open wounds.  Neither of them appreciated this morning's Ornette Coleman concert over the office box.  His ground breaking saxophone and disharmonic reverberations were beyond their reason.  They didn't enjoy it at all.

Our reading was without musical accompaniment and Gillian Wegener's particularly humane kick at the proverbial can helped Milo and Kathryn see some light on the horizon through their caked and crusty eye-slits.  If for no other reason than they could see kindness still existed in the world at large.

This Sweet Haphazard

No one calls this town pretty.

Not with the dusty oleanders off the freeway

and the ragged fence boards of backyards

propped up with two-by-fours, and

the canals with their twin likes of slow and safe,

and the ash trees, dead branches dangling, and

the large, pale no-one's-home houses and

the foreclosed houses and the small houses

with their carefully tended geranium borders,

with the plum trees gone overripe and sticky.

No one calls this town pretty, with the heat

rippling of the parking lots and the sighs

of aunts and uncles sitting in the shade of garages

filled with cars that were once meant to go places,

and the church marquee scolding that

Jesus Did Not Read Porn, and the swarms

of mosquitoes buzzing the standing water

from the leaking sprinkler heads in the park.

And yeah, no one calls this town pretty

as the creek laps at its share of shopping carts,

and the untended grasses bleach dry by April,

and the public pools are mostly closed,

but the sky here turns indigo on summer nights,

and the hummingbird chases the sparrow

from the feeder, and the kids on the soccer field

run as fast as kids anywhere, oblivious

to the town around then, because after all,

it isn't so bad. It's an okay town.

We know where all the roads go,

and we know where to get good coffee,

and we know what time the train pulls through.

We know too we're more than soil, more than sky,

more than what you've read in the news,

and no, it isn't pretty, but we still live here, and

tonight the moon will rise, almost full,

over this sweet haphazard of home.

...

Gillian Wegener's long poem "Neighborhood" sounds a bit like every neighbourhood on earth from Minneapolis to Moscow, and from Houston to Helsinki.  Today's book of poetry felt a bit like going home when reading This Sweet Haphazard.  Not a home we've ever had but a place we'd like to be.

Gillian Wegener cooks.  Her sound reason gives us hope.

Gillian Wegener

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gillian Wegener is the author of three books of poetry: a chapbook, Lifting One Foot, Lifting the Other (In the Grove Press, 2001), and a full-length collection, The Opposite of Clairvoyance (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2008), and her new collection, This Sweet Haphazard (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2017). Widely published, she has won several awards for her work, including the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize in 2006 and 2007, and the Zócalo Public Square Prize for Poetry of Place in 2015. Wegener, a junior high teacher, lives with her husband and daughter in Modesto, where she coordinates and hosts the monthly Second Tuesday Reading Series. She is a cofounder of the Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center and has served as the poet laureate for the city of Modesto.

BLURBS

“In This Sweet Haphazard, Gillian Wegener turns her well-tuned ear, her sharp eye, and her considerable intelligence and humor to the California of lightning fires, bulldozed almond trees, and murky rivers with unpredictable currents, as well as that of clear desert night skies, foggy coastlines, and the green light that filters through the sequoias. She sees the beauty and melancholy all around her, and she approaches it with tenderness and without aesthetic pretension. This is a beautiful book of powerful poems.”

     —Jane Mead, author of World of Made and Unmade

“‘Place, to the writer at work, is seen in a frame,’ writes Eudora Welty. ‘Not an empty frame, a brimming one.’ Everything is brimming in Gillian Wegener’s fantastic new collection of poems: rivers, bees, the Old Mill Cafe, forest fires, churches, Neville Bros. Service, the ghosts of Humboldt County, the streets, shops, and citizens of Modesto, California, and most importantly, the unmapped geography of the human heart. Candid and creative, Wegener charts past and present, interior and exterior, in order to create a poetic landscape we never want to leave.”

     —Dean Rader, author of Works & Days

Gillian Wegener

Sacramento Poetry Center

Video: Tim Kahl

sixteenrivers.org

629

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

Feeding The Light - Jaki Shelton Green (Jacar Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Feeding the Light.  Jaki Shelton Green.  Jacar Press.  Durham, North Carolina. 2014.

Any poet who mentions Miles Davis, Pharoah Sanders, Herbie Hancock and Ornette Coleman all in one poem is going to get the attention of an old jazz-rat like me.  These names fall of of Jaki Shelton Green's capable lips with such familiarity they might almost be an afterthought.  After all, what reasonable poet wouldn't want these giants wandering their poems and setting tempo?

But Today's book of poetry would be misleading our readers if we led you to believe that Feeding the Light is about jazz.  No, jazz lives here but it's not the addressee.  Green uses a stream of extreme consciousness to pinwheel through kaleidoscopic narratives.  There is light, as the title suggests, and it is refracted through a dozen different lens in real time.  The effect is splendid.

feeding the light

                for aunt lilly

                          (who taught me how to see in the dark)

we risk ice storms postpone passionate death to swirl head

first beyond wise breathing lessons beyond crimson soaked

necks crushed knuckles and stinking birth skin all the way

down past gray fields chaste moons yet light so pregnant it

seeps across insolent skies too ashamed to name the dances

too ashamed to name the shaman who eats the jazz behind

iron doors praying for half notes that cure blindness cure

the bestial that lurks inside places troubles on the water one

tenor eyelash at a time reappearing at the bottom of a worn

out morning after cup of mils pharoah herbie ornette we

risk falling out of the well used belly the platinum engraved

womb that cherishes a right handed bass player clean blue

velvet shoes that keep nameless eyes waiting he has a way

of singing thick thighs apart in the middle of blazing duets

knows how to pull blossoms out of the ground through

february snow drifts feeds a bastard sky child nothing but

horn a wild child reading the book of the thousand nights

and a night blue velvet shoes can't keep a damn lie straight

in between identifying frozen crushing faces slaughtered for

whispering jazz slaughtered for smelling like jazz wooden

zulu spears silver coins wet feathers we risk losing our

sense of flight our gypsy hearts in search of jazz eating

shaman who serves holy bread with blues water his voice

slicing daylight feeding small pieces to all that is left of a

brown jungle girl whose bones smoke up every juke joint in

between here and all the places she died alone on alabaster

steps voice strangled by kisses prayers abandoned weeping

shaman cures her dreams pours billie sarah nina ella down 

her throat horny hips thrust shatter shred blue velvet shoes

across the room a narrow mirror becomes a road and she

learns to fly straight through a glass sky she be music now

she be night-fed she be forgiveness rupturing a worn out

morning after cup of herself she be birthing remixing clocks

calendars numbers maps her sweat sweet round midnight

honey washing up onto a shore of seasons smelling like

drums tasting like a flute of curry we risk night searching

wanting to taste her skin.

...

Feeding the Light isn't about jazz but it has all the rhythms, drives like good jazz.  Green is making multitudinous connections at light speed, all held together with a rock solid bottom, foundation.

Feeding the Light is not about jazz but Jaki Shelton Green is wailing when she tells the story of an arranged marriage in Kandahar.  Any romantic mystique fouled by the green toothed grin and rancid breath of the aging groom.  Green explores the intimate violence of a woman's world, she goes places most of us never see.

waiting for love

alone cold mint tea in orange plastic torn djelaba a red

you forbid waiting drowning in six too many capsules of

magic trying to remember the words of the astrologer or

what you were screaming as you fled into the secret clay

wall of your brother's house trying to understand that i am

only allowed to pray on wednesdays pray only in the blue

mosque in Mazar-e-Sharif or join your sisters at Karte-

e-Shakhi this strange but magical Kabul my captor Kabul

the first time I drank the darkness of a particular Pashtun

male the morning i am face to face with Malalai the only

female police in Kandahar we play burqa eye games before

she slaps me shouting to lower my gaze cover my hennaed

wrists or wake up dead i return to these walls i name home

to the sacred stitches and colors rugs from your tribe my

dowry my art i smoke the ancient hashish i found buried

beneath the kitchen wall tiles your younger sister Selah

arrives tells me it belonged to your grandmother we smoke

sleep cry eat the feta olives grapes and dream of weddings

hair beaches nail polish dark warriors bearing Tibetan music

we arrive by caravan to the wedding site your father tells

me you will come so i search for you amongst the men

that encircle the wedding party and begin wishing that i

could place a hidden camera in the back of my burqa so

i can see you when you remain invisible i am the foreign

woman laughing undetected beneath my blue wedding

tent a gift from your mother reminding me that this is the

way for a refugee wife suddenly i smell the secret blend

of wedding oils against my face it is Zarah your sister

laughing far too openly amongst men hugging thanking me

for her happiness not understanding the smile in her eyes

i do not feel my body shift or her left hand seize the gun

from my pocket Zarah my sister-in-law forced to marry

the man with green teeth shoots her head off during the

beginning of the weeklong Eid-e-Ghorbon trying to forget

all i am forced to remember razor wire nights Koochie boys

wearing desert faces speaking to me in all the languages

of hunger begging for gold thread i don't remember the

name of the particular dark Pashtun male or the color of

Zarah's wedding dress i try to forget her smile the way

blood creates its own art spraying the cake the gifts of sugar

bread honey spices prayer carpets scarves from her sisters i

remember your daily screams when i forgot and opened the

door to visitors is Peshawar forgetting always to wear my

chador i remind you that i am the same woman you danced

with beneath the stars in Kandahar the same astrologer

who meets your eyes in the bazaar i am every woman in

the snow covered streets of Ghazni or in Herat Province

lighting candles in search of Zarah's gold teeth i am the lost

bullet lodged in the wedding cake that the man with green

teeth serves to his new bride Fatima i will meet her in the

bathroom stalls next door to the blue mosque and pretend

i do not see her tap my market basket remove the muslin

cloth covering the fresh chicken dates onions potatoes

lemons drop my knife into the deep pockets of her riding

skirts our smiles whispering salaams it is the coldest night

without you and i am preparing a dinner for your return the

foods of our passionate longings lentil and bulgar patties

stuffed eggplant kasseri cheese my brother smuggles from

Turkey chicken pilaf raisin compote i spend hours shaving

oiling my skin soaking in frankincense ginger jasmine water

arrange rose petals through our bed sharpen candle

sticks that will light this night there is no more hashish guns

or knives only the wedding feast waiting.

...

Green inhabits the lives of several unforgettable women, some almost mythic in stature and substance.  These are brave poems about strong women in a world where they are not always valued or appreciated.  To say the least.

Feeding the Light made for an energetic group of readers at our morning read.  Kathryn, our Jr. Editor, took the lead as she most often does these days.  The readers were unanimous, they wanted more.

Gender and culture make for a big battlefield but Green does not flinch.  

an eclipse of skin

i

the blood was calling

ii

ancient spirits

gather beneath erect feet

cry an ancestral anointment

kiss torn torso

restitch face to smile

iii

splintered hands

hold death songs

one breath crawling towards light

iv

hidden in every finger joint

hidden between shoulder and neck

hidden between heart and rib

v

yo hair is in my drink missus sarah

go ahead and move it william

you know you don't want to drink my hair

do you william?

...

Jaki Shelton Green is searching for the light in all things, storming through the darkness, spirit strong, reaching for the light.  This is the sort of optimism we applaud at Today's book of poetry.

Feeding the Light is one of those welcomed chapbooks that reads much bigger.  Once inside Jaki Shelton Green world everything expanded.  Green can burn.

Jaki Shelton Green

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jaki Shelton Green is a poet, creativity coach, teacher, and cultural activist.  Her books include Dead on Arrival, Dead on Arrival and New Poems, Conjure Blues, singing a tree into dance, and breath of the song.  The recipient of many awards, she was recently inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame.  She lives in Mebane, North Carolina.

BLURB

“Rooted in hypnagogic logic and deeply seated in the tradition of Jayne Cortez, Quincy Troupe and Ntozake Shange, Jaki Shelton Green’s verse narratives pay homage to the orphic ethos of the mythmaking South with all the viscous verve of Van Gogh with a palette of syllables, images and words blurring through our senses like the thick, sleek wax of magnolia leaves. Her images conjure cultural beauty from a world-weary—yet ecstatic—kaleidoscopic lens while sustaining a pained relevance that serves up love from every angle of human anguish: the forced marriage of a child bride; memories of grandmothers and mentors, praiseworthy and proud. In Feeding the Light, Jaki Shelton Green captivates with a global vision. Her poems are totems and tomes; they are percussive, convulsive and constructive.”

—Tony Medina, author of Broke Baroque, The President Looks Like Me & Other Poems, and An Onion of Wars.

Jaki Shelton Green

Poet Jaki Shelton Green reads at the 2014 North Carolina Literary Festival, where Green was announced as a 2014 inductee to the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame (www.nclhof.org). 

jacarpress.com

606

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 Silence of Doorways - Sharon Venezio (Moon Tide Press)

Today's book of poetry:

The Silence of Doorways.  Sharon Venezio.  Moon Tide Press.  Irvine, California.  2013.

Sharon Venezio can burn.  The Silence of Doorways bursts at its binding with brilliant barbs and bromides.  Today's book of poetry has a weak spot for certain automobiles and car-think so when Venezio gave us a kiss/hug tribute to her '76 Chevy Nova we were prisoners of love.

Venezio just doesn't let off of the gas.  No book is solid gold and this one isn't either, but pound for pound Venezio is a stone cold killer poet, she has all the goods.  Today's book of poetry was touched by the quiet tenderness woven in and out of these poems.  We were also heartened by the heat tempered terror Venezio was able to access by snapping her wise fingers.

Psychology 402: Brain and Behavior

When I discover I have to dissect a sheep's brain,

I go down the hall to Animal Behavior and plead my case,

but it's too late. I'll have to pry my way through

the four ventricles, push pins into gray matter and breathe

formaldehyde through a useless white mask.

I hold the brain in my awful hands, make an incision

at the base of the cerebellum, place a red pin

into the pineal gland, a green pin into the amygdala:

here's where it feels joy, here's where it feels fear,

here's where it remembers the beautiful dying stars.

...

Once again Today's book of poetry feels hoisted by my own petard.  There are way more than three poems Today's book of poetry feels necessary to bring to this party.

Whether Sharon Venezio is talking about family and how much fun that love/hate fiasco can be or the larger political/human issues like genocide and murder and mayhem, her strop sharpened pen nails it to the page like she was using a hammer.

She could even be in a bar.

From a Bar in Elizabeth, New Jersey

have to pretend

i am someone else

someone who smiles

while she pours drinks

tilts the bottle just right

so the liquor flirts

with the air

on the way into the glass

a foot and a half of formica

defines our role

all night they mine

my face for a clue

think i am someone

they can love

slur their dedications

in half-light

by midnight

cocaine's stimming

bird mouth

whoops at winter sky

through open door

this helps them

pretend they are

someone else

forget the snow

piling up on hoods

of cars forget the children

sheeted in beds

sleep wrapped around

their bright bodies

...

Did I just read that?  Yes, I did.  The Silence of Doorways rears up and slaps the reader in the head every once in a while.  It's like Venezio reaches right up off of the page with an attention-slap.

Today's jazz allusion is that you think you are reading Dexter Gordon, all tight and whispery, controlled and precise and beautiful and then Ornette Coleman sneaks in the back door and blows that shit up!  Of course Venezio isn't talking jazz, she's too busy explaining how the world's heart works, Today's book of poetry just threw that allusion in there because we know how much some of you love jazzthink.

Our regular morning read was an enthusiastic romp.  Most of Venezio's poems are relatively short and as we went around the room the poems blasted out from each successive Today's book of poetry staffer as though we were gunslingers in a circle and showing off our draw.

Family Album

Here a cigarette dangles between her thin fingers;

she sleeps through conversation and ash.

Here she closes her eyes and the sea stops moving.

And here she is boneyard of unspoken words,

salt in the quiet throat of her marriage.

Here she is the green whiff of childhood.

Here she is sparrowed at the edge of the earth,

exiled in her dying skin. Here, like sorrow,

she is liquid in the bones.

And here is the day she will be gone, her eyes resting

no longer upon the tulips, their white

petals, like teeth, fall to the ground.

Here she is hair, and nail, and noise in the brain.

And here, dear body, be still. Time is the only lover

that will touch her now.

...

The Silence of Doorways is quiet thunder.  Sharon Venezio is a quiet poet assassin.  So much is on offer in these rumbling pages that it reads like a bigger book.  Today's book of poetry likes when a poet can make us smile, cry, nod our head in familiar recognition, shake our head in awe.  Venezio fills the card.

Sharon Venezio

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sharon Venezio recieved an MA in creative writing from San Francisco State University. Her poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Chaparral, Midway Journal, Reed, Transfer, Two Hawks Quarterly and elsewhere. She is co-director of the Valley Contemporary Poets and works as a behavior analyst in Los Angeles. The Silence of Doorways is her first full-length collection. 

BLURBS

What appeals to me most about these surpassingly lovely poems is the way they combine a trace-like calm with a sense of unease, and a luminous clarity with a feeling of deep abiding mystery. And when she's really on her game, Sharon Venezio--one of the best darn lyric poets to have wandered into L.A. in many a year--can make the ephemeral seem tangible and the mundane transcendent. Few could draw forth such elevated notes as these from a five-hundred dollar '76 Chevy Nova: "It was more beautiful/ than salt air,/ ocean, wing.// It was passage,/ shift, spark.// The bone dry/ squeaky waste land/ where life began."

     - Suzanne Lummis

In this impressive debut collection, Sharon Venezio photographs the stopped fragments of memory in order to restore the self to a dynamic flux of lived experience--"the wild dishevelment of being, that fierce blue drowning"--a kaleidoscopic portrait that refuses the social mediated subject position and the hunted vulnerability fixed by a male scope. In a daring act of rescue and art making, Venezio seeks the frameless frame, one that comprehends without limiting, shelters without walling in the silence.

     - Chad Sweeney

These completely engaging and unselfconscious poems are attentive to memory's various gifts and terrors, and its impact on both the outer and inner life. Witness her history with family, birds, a 1976 Chevy Nova, the breathing of a sleeping lover, the presence of insects and wild animals--Venezio captures all of it with her inner camera and presents to us her long-awaited fruits of "the burden of memory." From fiery, heart-stopping meditations on a childhood and elegies to joyous still lifes and portraits, she works by hand a personal museum with perfect words arranged just so. Poets and everybody, listen when she says, "if you want to avoid annihilation, open your mouth and sing" and get ready to be sung to in this marvelous first collection.

     - Roxanne Beth Johnson

Portraits & Landscapes, the poetry of Sharon Venezio

Video: Brian Newberry

moontidepress.com 

471

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.