Backup Singers - Sommer Browning. (Birds, LLC)

Today's book of poetry:
Backup Singers.  Sommer Browning.  Birds, LLC.  Austin, Minneapolis, New York, Raleigh, USA.  2014.

Sommer Browning has a world class sense of humour.  The poems in Backup Singers read like the liner notes off of a waitress's cheque book from a Tom Waits' song.  These little ditties are the shadows of the bullets, the echo of some footsteps, the raw retort to a loud nonsensical world. Browning puts together a slick patois for the language she is teaching us.

Sommer, I'm dying

Sommer, I'm dying. I get this message on my phone in line
at Rite Aid. Sommer, I'm dying, you scream in my ear at
the rock show. Sommer, I'm dying, you write in closing on
 a postcard from San Francisco. Sommer, I'm dying, it's my
heart. Sommer, I'm dying, can you feel this? Is it normal?
as we stomp through the snow to get cigarettes. Jesus woke up
but who muscled the boulder away? Some prince kissed the
beauty but who wrote it all down? Let's go to the mummy
exhibition. Let's read aloud Fear and Trembling. Let's slow the
flow through one carotid. Sommer, I'm dying. Present tense.
Subject. Verb. The thinning blood vessel, the soft pulsating
stone, retina shriveled and rattling around in the skull. I can
hear it when I jump. Then don't jump, I say.

...

Backup Singers has a rhythm all its own.  Some of these poems sound like statements for the defense and others like screams from the prosecution.  But they all have the same intelligent urgency about them.

Browning makes juxtapositions by breaking the ankles of the opposition.  There is a pinball energy in these poems and it bounces frantic to connect all of her dots.

When I see a tree bend I feel the thick chill of a church pew

When I see a tree bend I feel the thick chill of a church pew
cooling my ass. When I hear the clang of a flag pole I see a
head, bodiless, chewing words on a screen. When I read the news
I see my baby smile at what's behind me. When I slice an onion
and when I tongue a blackberry seed I slide into a wet bathing
suit, when I run up the cellar steps I sing Bible songs, I cheat at
cards, the city coos to its drunks at night, and the city's shores by
morning flap strips of plastic spank the beach who's your daddy
is all anyone thinks and destruction, older than regret. The pastor
in the parish hall, hidden even as he shakes every hand, and the
fingers, open it up and here's the people.

...

At times Browning is almost sweet/surreal and we love that.  Today's book of poetry also found a couple of list poems in Backup Singers and you just know how much we love those.

When you were with Emily I was with Matt

When you were with Emily I was with Matt,
when you were with Sarah I was with Paul,
when you were with Sarah I was with Brian,
when you were with Kelly I was with Pat,
when you were with Liz I was with Paul,
when you were with Sarah I was with Johnny,
when you were with Kim I was with Robert,
when you were with Liz I was with Matt and Pat and Andy,
when you were with Erica I was with Robert,
when you were with Liz I was with Jason and Robert,
when you were with Apple Pie I was with the Armenian,
when you were with Eliza I was with Noah.

...

Today's book of poetry was won over early by this crisp collection.  Sommer Browning has just become our favourite poet named Browning.  We did a straw poll in the office.  Robert may have been one hell of a Victorian with all his dramatic monologues, and Elizabeth the B. another, but we are Sommer Browning fans here.

there is a problem with your interrogative

there is a funny joke
about the best medicine for
hatred being
an umbrella -- no
a wheelbarrow

...

Sommer Browning

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sommer Browning writes poems, draws comics and tells jokes. She is the author of three chapbooks, most recently THE BOWLING (Greying Ghost, 2010) with Brandon Shimoda. Her poems and drawings have appeared in The New York Quarterly, Typo, Octopus, past simple, Free Verse, The Stranger and other places. With Julia Cohen she curates The Bad Shadow Affair, a reading series in Denver.

BLURB

There is an enormous amount of joy that comes with the announcement of a new work by Denver, Colorado poet and illustrator Sommer Browning, and the recent AWP in Seattle saw the release of Browning's second trade poetry collection, Backup Singers (Birds, LLC, 2014). Given the amount of her quirky and hilarious comics were utilized as part of her first poetry collection, Either Way I'm Celebrating (Birds, LLC, 2011) [see my review of such here], I must say that a book by Sommer Browning without comics is unexpected (and even slightly disappointing). Still, there aren't many contemporary poets with her penchant for tight lines and terrible jokes (Montreal poet David McGimpsey is a rare exception), and the results are absolutely stunning.

     -  Rob McLennan

Sommer Browning

Official Trailer for Backup Singers

Video: Birdsllc

birdsllc.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.

Kingdom - Elizabeth Ross (Palimpsest Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Kingdom.  Elizabeth Ross.  Palimpsest Press.  Windsor, Ontario.  2015.

The best thing about my position as Over Lord here at Today's book of poetry is that I get to read a lot of poetry.  It's a strange world indeed, for me to read all these poems is a privilege.  For my splendid in every way next door neighbour it would be a torture worse than being staked to the ground over a nest of fire-ants.

So with all this poetry to read I was still startled when reading Elizabeth Ross's Kingdom and encountering a poem I already knew.  This is Ross's first book.

It took me a minute until I placed it.  When it came to me it was an aha moment.  Of course Sue Goyette and Molly Peacock had included a Ross poem in their excellent anthology The Best Canadian Poetry 2013 In English.  

You can see Today's book of poetry's look at the Goyette/Peacock anthology here:
http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.ca/2014/08/the-best-canadian-poetry-2013-in.html

I'm taking an accidentally long route to the heart of the matter, it's not on purpose, but Elizabeth Ross's Kingdom has me swaying on the branches of a memory tree.  Somewhat wobbled like when you hear that one Van Morrison song that makes you weak in the knees.

Prayer

Raise me to cook a healthy diet.
To write thank you letters. To set
and unset the table. Carry things.
Fetch things. Make my bed.
Raise me to behave myself.
No boyfriends with long hair
and ripped jeans who say "chill."
Rap is a definite no:
no bling, no belly buttons.
Raise me to teach myself
a lesson -- perhaps the new French
phrase I learned in school -- tais-toi.
Teach me to keep secrets. To stay
out of other's private business:
rooms, closets, drawers.
To understand not everyone
will like me. That pain
is unavoidable. Teach me
how to tell a lie.

...

These poems are instantly recognizable as true.  Poetry true.  Real life true.  Ross has a way of knowing more and saying it in less that is heartbreakingly sweet.  Not sugar sweet -- but Patsy Cline sweet.  Honesty always goes a long way and Ross has that covered.  These poems absolutely beat the crap out of coy.

At this morning's read there were some interesting responses.  Milo liked these poems enough that he read a second one out loud.  Our new intern Kathryn read three.  Now the two of them are sitting in the corner handing it back and forth.

Dear Diary
           June 10, 1995

Linoleum, his mom's kitchen,
she was grocery shopping.

He didn't know what to do
so I lay down and showed him.

Afterward, his knees turned pink.

When his mom came home,
she made us macaroni.

...

Elizabeth Ross's poems burn right through any hip dark cynicism to get at the real DNA of her own heart.  No melancholy here, but vivid reporting from the perilous journey.  Ross has been held to the flame and these well-tempered poems are first rate steel.

Kingdom is one of those books that Today's book of poetry connected with immediately, on a visceral level.  One minute I'm an old man in my book-lined room and the next minute I am a teenage woman with serious decisions to make.  Imagine my surprise.  Ross transports.

Gin

Juniper branches
in my mouth, a constellation
of twigs, berries, planets

revolving on their helix,
a thrilling science
lesson. But this is

far from kids' stuff,
no bicycle powering a light bulb.
It's DNA

twisting in me.
My father's mother: lipstick, stockings, ice
cracking in our lonely room. Glass

muddled with fingerprints
and mouth marks,
everyone I love

asleep in their beds. Self-
reproach is slippery; a woman
I've never known is easiest to grasp.

I sip some more.

I separate a little.

I hold onto what I can.

...

Kingdom feels a bit like the house where I used to live it is so familiar.  How could that be?  Good poems don't care who you are they are only concerned with who you are willing to be.  Elizabeth Ross has written a book that I like so much I'm just not certain how to tell you.

Ross will have more for us, of that I'm certain.  And Today's book of poetry can't wait.

Elizabeth Ross

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Liz is the author of Kingdom (Palimpsest 2015). Her work has been published in a number of literary magazines and selected for inclusion in Best Canadian Poetry 2013, as well as longlisted for the CBC poetry prize. She’s from Vancouver Island and Vancouver, where she was poetry editor of PRISM international; she now lives in Toronto, where she’s currently at work on a series of personal essays and a book of poetry.

BLURBS

“In the lush, vivid poems of Elizabeth Ross’s Kingdom, an agile, engaged and astute mind offers the names for much of the kingdom of the heart. Ross carries us through the dangers and ecstasies of girlhood, with its boundaries and breaches, and into the openings and enclosures of the adult world with its “sound of something bigger.” Kingdom is the startlingly accomplished, brilliant debut collection of an important new voice in Canadian poetry.” 

     - Rhea Tregebov

“…Elizabeth Ross’s poems seem, to me, to inhabit a transition zone. They are often situated in ordinary domestic moments, but it’s as if there’s a little swinging door inside them and the reader finds herself stepping first to one side, then another as the poet switches views. Liz, herself, is rooted in this stance—a trustworthy observer of the goings on, a witness to the troublesome aspects of the ultimately impenetrable nature of the symbolical, and the potential razor-thin splinter of ice within the commonplace…” -Marilyn Bowering

palimpsestpress.ca

405

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.

Dancing on a Pin - Katerina Vaughan Fretwell (Inanna Publications)

Today's book of poetry:
Dancing on a Pin.  Katerina Vaughan Fretwell.  Inanna Publications.  Toronto, Ontario.  2015.

Susan McCaslin called Dancing on a Pin "a powerful threnody."  I sent out the Today's book of poetry research team on a fact finding mission and they came back with this definition: "a mourning song or hymn, performed as a memorial to a dead person."

Well, Dancing on a Pin is certainly that.  Katerina Vaughan Fretwell's sad litany is a report from the front lines of a cancer story.

Fretwell is unremorsefully candid in this prolonged banshee wail.  If there is beauty she finds it - but these poems are not for the weak of heart.

Cancer en camera

Lung cancer was still the biggest killer among cancers...

     No 'Dear' for you -- tap-rooting inside Jack. Dr. Crusher
opens our teleconference, Stage IV, no chemo, your heart can't take it.
Nor mine, the news a steaming cow plop. Lung tumours are kernel
size. Cornfield disguise, clever. CA, Jack loves corny jokes.
Pinhead-size ones hide in the liver?

     As we hoe that row, he adds, Come in two months after
another CI scan. Screen blacks out nurse smiles, Didn't suggest making
a will.

     So Cancer, how many devils line-dance on a pinhead? It's
you I hate, not Dr C beholden to his Oath. But you lousy garden of
loose strife. I'm Jack's wife. He envisions you yanked out. No matter
what, we allot you not one God-particle of our fertilized love.

...

Fretwell is an open book as she details the climbing of a very difficult mountain.

The cover of Dancing on a Pin is a detail from one of the many paintings Fretwell painted during her perilous trek.  These paintings appear throughout this collection of poetry and many of them are sadly beautiful detailed explorations of cancer cells.  Fretwell is nothing if not full frontal and full speed ahead.  These paintings become very poignant markers of the confrontation Fretwell and her dying husband endure.

Free Ride

But of all diseases, cancer had refused to fall into step in this march of
progress.

You're Kokopele in a gangster's fedora, the rabbit that stomped the
magician's top hat, the sly undercurrent in a cat-tail swamp.

May you slow down, smell the rosebush and forgo shape-shifting.
Eschew the temptation to be a giant Cineplex.

Content yourself as a cornfield kernel. Please yourself as pinhead for
jitterbugging angels and vermillion-devils.

Bromeliad to Jack's Wise Oak, bacterium to his intestinal fortitude --
attest to the truth, you symbiotic parasite.

Guests don't abuse their hosts. It's rude to clog up the plumbing or
the fan, short the circuits  dim the halogen.

If you bulge like a tuberous begonia, beware Raid, Weed Killer, and
above all, my Meditation Book and Prayer Wheel.

...

Fretwell inserts as much humour as she can find into this battle.  And it is a sad story with just the one ending regardless of how brave Fretwell remains.

We care because these poems work.  We are, in our small way, beside Fretwell and her stoic husband as they suffer, as they endure, and as the fates make their final play.

Fretwell remains clear eyed and crystal clear in her frank confrontations.  To make art out of this much sorrow is a gift to both her beloved husband and to us grateful readers.

Jack, My Heart

     The question ... will not be if we will encounter this immortal
illness (cancer) ... but when.

     That sunless afternoon, face roseate, signs vital, surgery set.
I kiss your blue lips, our devotion voiced, you're trucked to OR.

     Your Isolation Room bereft, I race for java. Two best friends
bolster me in Family Wait Room. We crawl up the clock. 7pm,
Dr Decker

     diagrams upcoming re-section past your gut's inoperable
golf-ball. More waits, more updates. Code Blue Code Blue Code Blue
detonates

     our pin-drop silence. My heart-on-ice. More waits, more
updates, sprinting docs & nurses. Eons later, we pilgrimage

     to ICU. No heartbeat for twenty minutes, on life support and
clunky respirator, coma. Major brain-damage?

     Jenny prods, Touch him! I cup your cold shoulder, promise,
We will share eternity. It's okay for you to die.

     To nurse, friends, your eyes stay shut. To me, they open.
Your Spirit's final code for me alone. Us, winners, cancer loser.


January 29, 2013

...

I've read that poem six or seven times now, makes me weep, every time, I'm crying right now.

Today's book of poetry loves it when a book of poetry knocks us on our arse.  We love a book that kicks you awake, makes us feel something real.

Katerina Vaughan Fretwell

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Award-winning poet and professional artist, Katerina Vaughan Fretwell’s poetry and art reside across Canada and in Denmark, Japan, and across the United States. Recent poetry collections include Class Acts, Angelic Scintillations and Samsara: Canadian in Asia and Shaking Hands with the Night. Her poetic sequence “Quartzite Dialogues” was set to music by Michael Horwood and performed at the Festival of the Sound in 1999 and 2004 and at the Takefu Music Center in Japan in 1999. She is a member of the feminist caucus of the League of Canadian Poets. She lives just south of Parry Sound, Ontario.

BLURBS

Dancing on a Pin is a powerful threnody for the loss of her husband to the ravages of cancer. It is also a cultural, ecological, and spiritual inquiry into the history of the disease. This poignant process work, complemented by Fretwell's masterful sketches and paintings, spare us neither a direct gaze into cancer's ravaging maw, or an easy dismissal of hope. We become fellow travellers as we dance with Katerina and Jack on the head of a pin, the pin both of the first tiny cancerous tumours and the pinhead of pain and loss. The poet's render ironies guide us into the abyss and back.

     - Susan McCaslin, author of Into the Mystic: My Years with Olga

Katerina has translated the broken DNA codes of her husband's cancer, and the broken chains of love it tried to make of their lives, into life. This is mastery: rhyme, metre, space, timing, air, sound and silence, are laid out in DNA strings and sprays of all shapes and all the spirit and physicality of a poet at the peak of her craft. There is the intensity of Emily Dickinson here, the physicality of Ted Hughes, the radiance of Kathleen Raine, the transcendent mourning of Phyllis Nakonechny, and now, I must add to this list: the full presence of Katerina Fretwell.

     - Harold Rhenisch, author of The Spoken Word

inanna.ca
404

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 Significance of Moths - Shirley Camia (Turnstone Press)

Today's book of poetry:
The Significance of Moths.  Shirley Camia.  Turnstone Press.  Winnipeg, Manitoba.  2015.

These are quiet, gentle poems, a book of short precise poems, little truths.

These minimalist missives open up on the story of at least part of the Filipino diaspora to Canada, these are stories that have been mostly unheard.

There is an unseen/unnoticed army of Filipino Canadians/new arrivals, who toil as helpers in private homes, look after our children, work for minimum wage at fast food joints, The Significance of Moths gives voice to their stories, their lives.

Part-time Job

you came home that first day
with your uniform pressed

smiling

at the possibilities
it promised

the colour of birch
the scent of lemons

but here now
humbled knowing

cleaning toilets
your road
to distant riches

...

For someone like me, whose white, Anglo-Saxon family probably immigrated on a potato-ship and who grew up within the safety and norms of a dominant culture there really is no way to understand the experience of present day immigrants.  The Significance of Moths is a previously unopened door.

Shirley Camia opens up some of those doors of experience.  It's never a bad thing to learn more about other people's lives and Camia gives us a good look at a world most of us do not notice.

The Departure

the day was full of years
packed in a broken suitcase

as mama's lip quivered

a violin string
playing a sadness
that rang until hollow

a cry for her old life
and the lives she let go

...

Always powerfully understated and delicately fierce, these poems had Today's book of poetry convinced that they are both a lament and a proud celebration.  These poems are front line reports about what people will do for the love of family, for hope.

Most of us have never faced the prospect of waking to the knowledge that we must move to the other side of the world for the good of our family.  What would our poems sounds like?

Today's book of poetry is doing Shirley Camia and The Significance of Moths a disservice if we don't talk about the overall feel of this collection.  For such short poems, terse but never rude, crisp and fecund, they carry enormous weight.  This book weighed a ton.

An Ending

the dance of the moth is over
its antennae drumming with broken fury
until the body gasps
and lies still

silence arrives
to the wings
in unflight

a power
already forgotten

...

Shirley Camia when describing this book said it a tribute to "all those struggling to carve out identities in a new place, but enveloped by the old.  Feet on one land, mind on another."

Today's book of poetry asked at the morning read, Milo said that they were "sad little tunes Dude." Our new intern Kathryn is now trying to smile Milo out of it.  He takes all of this stuff to heart.

This is brave, bright poetry distilled and pure.

Shirley Camia

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Shirley Camia is a broadcaster and journalist, born in Winnipeg to first-generation Filipino immigrants. She has traveled throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia, sleeping alongside the rice fields of rural Japan and falling in love with Canada's far north. She lives and writes in Toronto.

BLURBS

"Her sense of the Filipino-Canadian "home" is as spiritual as it is temporal or geographic. Home is, as the moth reminds us, where our beloved and their spirit endures." 

     --Ang Peryodiko

"The Significance of Moths" is one of those collections of free verse that will linger in the mind and memory long after the slender volume has been finished and set back upon the shelf."
     --Midwest Book Review

Shirley Camia

Wake

The Significance of Moths

video:  Turnstone Press

turnstonepress.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.

Trio - Sarah Tolmie (McGill-Queen's University Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Trio.  Sarah Tolmie.  McGill-Queen's University Press.  The Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series.  Montreal & Kingston, London, Ithaca.  2015.

Back on May 14, 2015, Today's book of poetry wrote about Sarah Tolmie's excellent chapbook Sonnet in a Blue Dress and Other Poems from the also excellent Baseline Press.  Today we have the distinct pleasure of sharing Tolmie's first full-length collection - Trio.

This is another collection of sonnets, 120 of 'em.  You have to know by now that Today's book of poetry is not a big fan of the formal, but we do try to keep a polymorphous and evolving mind.  This is a good thing for the dance that Trio invites us to.

5

Touchy, touchy, beauty boy. And you say
You have no ego. The slightest hint of
Disapproval and you get plaintive
Or your hackles rise. You don't really
Know what you want from me. Fortunately,
I do. Reinforcement: you've long been short.
You need a constant bath. This phase may pass,
But I don't think so. Fine. Come right back
With a stung retort. Yet women pet you.
Do we not? Why? Not because you're cute.
Because it is what you're looking for. Mama's
Hurt boy cries out, help; helpless, we answer.
No fair, you say, I suffer. I agree.
I hear. Men like you need women like me.

...

Our female protagonist is strung out on a very tight high-wire where desire and reason are the anchors at each end of the rope.  Of course she tries to keep it all balanced but with the weight of two younger lovers it becomes a precarious perch.

Tolmie puts it all out there, she's on a delicate precipice yet continues to sing electric.

28

Experimenting with unusual grips
I get the soft gift of your equipment
Resting briefly on my leg. These liquescent
Parts of us that we hide away, as if
Shameful, are just in another state,
One not quite solid. Breasts that we have to
Pour into cups to carry, hanging
Testicular sacs, ridiculous, they
Pose a challenge to the rest of us.
We are not all hard, all made, cooked to
The max. Just as our breath is gas, so too
Are we these trembling yolks, delicate
Skinned fluids. Amid your solid strength
Is change of state, always being born again.

...

These poems reach past the simply carnal, they are sad Marlon with his butter in blue, blue Paris.  These elegant poems dream and cry in the same breath.

Tolmie knows exactly how long each light in the darkening sky will last.

115

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 in 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.

...

Sarah Tolmie's Trio is a marvel.  Clearly Tolmie is a lover of a more formal poetic tradition, and she honours it, these poems are submarine tight - but for someone who loves the form she sure delights in rendering it invisible.

Trio reads more like a romantic and sad pillow book.  A few brisk kicks to the heart and a somewhat lusty frisk.  Tolmie uses these sonnets like bullets from a poetry gun.  She is trying to navigate the bloody journey that runs between her heart and two others.  But make no mistake, Tolmie's the boss.
It is a strong woman's journey.

Today's book of poetry will follow Tolmie anywhere now.

Sarah Tolmie

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sarah Tolmie is associate professor of English at the University of Waterloo. Her books include the novel The Stone Boatman and the short story collection NoFood.

mqup.ca

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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.