Tatterdemalion - Jennifer Londry (Chaudiere Books)

Today's book of poetry:
Tatterdemalion.  Jennifer Londry.  Chaudiere Books.  Ottawa, Ontario.  2015

"Hindsight is a temporary virgin                                    a has-been"

       Second guessing the timetable

"I ain't no killer, but I could be."

       Dueling musicians

Oh, hello.  It seems you've stumbled into the Today's book of poetry offices just as I was making a list of the lines I wanted to steal from Jennifer Londry's very fine Tatterdemalion.  It was going to be a long list.

Or how about that killer title, I'm in love with what is a new word for me, Tatterdemalion, to be "ragged or disreputable in appearance" says Merriam-Webster.

Londry's second book of poems comes to us in seven sections but her voice doesn't waver much.  Too bold, brave and brash to be bitter but there are some sad miles on this road.

Three awful days without god

The asphalt aquarium of my innocence wobbled

and became unhinged.

Crouched in the garage

I read the label on a box of toddler-carbs--

folic acid, zinc oxide, vodka, niacin, riboflavin, carbon monoxide.

My mouth tastes like the morning after, plan B.

My hair is an auburn mess

twisting and turning inside my smallclothes.

They caught me running uphill on a one-way street

naked in a new pair of shoes

attempting to outrun the mundane.

...

Londry is an admirer of Ann Sexton and it shows like red lipstick on a collar.  Today's book of poetry has long been an ardent admirer of Sexton.

We sent Milo to the Today's book of poetry bookshelves and he came back with Sexton's The Death Notebooks, Words For Dr. Y., Live or Die, The Book of Folly, All My Pretty Ones along with a Selected and a Collected Ann Sexton.  We included the reading of a few Sexton poems along with Londry's for this morning's read.  Didn't take long for us to remember why we call her Saint Ann of Sexton.

It doesn't take long once you've opened the cover of Tatterdemalion to see that Londry has the same razor edge sharp that she admires in Sexton.  Some of these poems would be willing to cut you.

Ramble

I am the driver behind the wheel.

Keep going, she says, out-manoeuvre this array of facades--

clown face storefronts with down-up circular penny staircases

from Plenty's fallen pocket.

Snapshots of dead relatives scotch-taped to the hooch-man's window.

3, 9, 7

suddenly, the world rights itself.

Green lights twitch everywhere.

...

Today's book of poetry is particularly pleased to be writing about a title from a local Ottawa publisher.  Chaudiere Books is the hard work of Rob McLennan and Christine McNair.  Chaudiere Books are producing top flight beautiful books and Today's book of poetry is proud to brag local.

Jennfier Londry's Tatterdemalion has pace.  These poems never dwaddle.  Most of them are whippet thin and greyhound strong, it's all muscle and lung.

Who shan't                           escape

A pale witness picks up a cigarette and lights its final inhale.

Quitters live in a wasteland.

Sway and stoop.

Cemetery gate is open, nothing gets in.

Not even the twice dead.

The man who choked on a rat snake

the man who messed with Eden.

Like a shotgun awaits a prayer

it will take years for the city to mend.

...

Tatterdemalion bristles, this is fierce poetry, full of desperate situations and dire consequence.  You might even think that some of these poems are salvos aimed at redemption but Today's book of poetry thinks Londry is working towards a higher purpose.

These poems want those red lips, that gin and that blue sky.

Jennifer Londry

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jennifer Londry is the author of two previous books of poetry: Life and Death in Cheap Motels, which was adapted for stage, and After the Words, which was nominated for a Saskatchewan Book Award. A featured reader at the 2009 Kingston Writers’ Festival and at the 2011 Sweetwater 905 in Northern BC, she has also facilitated and organized a literary event for Alzheimer’s Awareness. Jen has taught creative writing and recently was a judge for Words from the Street, a creative writing competition, which gives a voice to the downtrodden, in association with The Toronto Writers’ Collective. She is also a contributor to the anthologies: A Crystal through which Love Passes, Glosas for P.K. Page (Buschek Books, 2013), Where the nights Are twice As long, Love Letters of Canadian Poets (Goose Lane Editions, 2015), and has work forthcoming in the Alzheimer’s anthology, A Rewording Life, editor Diane Schoemperlen, creator Sheryl Gordon. Currently Jen is collaborating with the documentary filmmaker Sarah Turnbull at the Carleton School of Journalism and Communications to produce a mental health video.

BLURBS
"With capricious locution and charged language, Tatterdemalion fires the belly like spiked punch. Londry's poetry is fierce, full-tilt, and darkly unexpected--she thrives in the off-kilter corners of the dystopian human condition. Kick off your shoes. You're in for a wild night."
     - Sandra Ridley

"In Tatterdemalion, Jennifer Londry weaves her dusky art at its best. A jagged, intense, down-the-rabbit-hole collection where leisure suits, dismembered limbs, the minaturized world of dollhouses and asphalt aquariums mingle into poems with a dark, folk-tale vibe. Immersive, beautiful tatters."
     - Jeanette Lynes

"The poet write perceptive lines I savour like hard candy on the tongue."
     - Shelley A. Leedahl

chaudierebooks.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.

Martha - Leslie Allison (Ugly Duckling Presse)

Today's book of poetry:
Martha.  Leslie Allison.  Ugly Duckling Presse.  Brooklyn, New York.  2015

When I tell you that in part, Martha is a sex fantasy for lesbians you are going to start thinking one thing.  Well, think another, because Martha is a ghost story.  No, a feminist knee-slap, laugh out loud kitchen party, if it were Martha Stewart's kitchen and she were surrounded by sex-slave minions.

This is a carnival ride with illustrations by Molly Schaeffer that will remind Canadian readers of Joe Rosenblatt style drawings of flying labia, multitude of them arranges into bouquets, mental bromides, dashing off of the pages.

Today's book of poetry believes two important things are happening at the same time in Leslie Allison's highly entertaining Martha.  There is the pink-toned-pink-lipped-Divine-over-the-hill and bonkers comic romp that is Martha.  And at the same time it is clear that Allison is being serious as a heart attack with every word.  

There are no titles per se in Martha and it is unlikely my choices of text fall into Leslie Allison's original design so please know the fault is mine, not Allison's.  Today's book of poetry thought that every line in this punk steamroller of a chapbook was cherse.  And ghosts.

- - -

Dear Diary:

do you remember when I arrived?

back then the images were like straight out of Moby-Dick

noble and naval, ropes, wood

cold steam lilting truth from room to room

and now

well, my vagina

has nerve damage

and it's all

I can think about

in the drawing room

I see Kate

names are not ever real words

but Kate is a word

Madeline's palatial shudder creates a vortex that sucks me

under like riptide

and dark moisturized genderless Kate

is endless

forever trailed by Ghengis Khan

who puffs himself up and

sheds in her shadow

Martha's skin is neon moire

her oily hands are dishrags

even still portions of her always appear to be moving

she appliques a life-size two dimensional version

of every object in the house

onto that very object

an applique of a curtain

on a curtain,

a chair on a chair

so the palace is a quilt

Martha's own body is concealed

behind an applique of herself

this house may be the house

in which she lives

marbled curls and peels

distortion

she fingers literally everything

this may be the definition of 'crafts'

...

Martha has our heroine joining Martha Stewart's fictional nun's-habit-wearing-harem in an oddly fantastic Martha Stewart world of delicate debauchery.

Leslie Allison's Martha sure roiled up some reaction at this morning's read.  Milo made great comic strides riffing through this ghost love story full of passion but then every once in a while he would bounce awkward over some of the more overt and ribald sexuality that prance over these pages like a Madeleine Schubert driven Pegasus.  Kathryn, our new intern, punctuated Milo's red cheeked silences by pointing out that women's sexuality has been thoroughly colonized by the oppressive nature of the male gaze and that books like Martha undermine the dominant male role in our deeply polarized and protestant society.

Oh that Kathryn.

- - -

Actually that's the only face she has

and she puts it on every morning

flipping through profile pages

the usual suspects drum out their wares in waves

do you even know what is interesting about that?

I sure don't

to be fair, I know nothing if I'm not high

I just wait for Martha to feed me mashed potatoes

with her little fingers and I suck them until she tells me to stop

but Madeline, she chants a little song in my ear

when Martha goes out of town:

we built this temple

not let's burn it to the fucking ground

oh

how I wish she meant this

flower

When I went into Martha's room last night

to ask if I was allowed to change out of my habit

one of the interns was stoking the embers in the fireplace

one was burrowing her face in Martha's immaculate bush

and one was singing the day's numbers:

Martha Stewart Living

Omni

           Omnimedia Inc Inc Inc!

Novemmmmmmmber Twenty-Two, Two Thousand and

      Thirteen

3.44 + .04

(1.18%)

open o PEN open 3.41

hiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh 3.45

l-ah-ooow 3.36

volume ume ume volUME 135,119

average volume 305,000

maaaaaaaarket cap 323.5 miiiiiillllllllllllllioooooooooon

"Maybe now isn't a good time," I said quietly

        and exited habited.

...

Leslie Allison is doing at least three things in the absolutely delightful romp Martha.  Today's book of poetry wishes we were better equipped to tell you exactly what they are.  We aren't.

So we'll stick to what we know and why we do like Martha.  How could you not?  Martha vibrates with a boisterous brio, it almost hums in your hands as you read it.

- - -

Dear Diary:

I can hear Kate's blood through vines overheard, I can hear the

     moon in the bed.

Three bodies are masts and the dog ate through the crotch of three

      pairs of my underwear.

The moon smokes through Kate. Did she call them panties?

Three masts are smoke on the dog.

that night, I saw myself

walking through the desert

I was hanging there, being mildly amused

cheeks warming up, crotch turning violet

the disembodied eyes in front of me

their waves growing darker and darker blue

I think it stopped being consensual when Martha got in there

up to her elbow

her ruched gloves stretched taut

she said she needed a wet brush for the waves

more like a give to it

more like a torn wake

...

Today's book of poetry would give away almost all the Crying Charlie's in our possession to see the look on Martha S's face as she read this fawning and fabulous fantasy ode.  We would hope she'd keep it next to her pillow.

Leslie Allison's first chapbook is a stunner.

Leslie Allison

Photo: Mekko Harjo

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Leslie Allison is a writer and performer. She composes choral music for performance collaborations with Francis Weiss Rabkin. Her dance and poetry criticism can be found in HTML Giant and The Brooklyn Rail, and her band Cross released its debut album, It's Curtains, earlier this year. Martha (Spring 2015, Ugly Duckling Press) is her first chapbook.

BLURB

If you hear yourself morosely whispering I’d really hoped there’d be more stoner girls slaying the ghosts of the patriarchy here just as you are stepping out of the shower on a dark wintry morning, cheer up, help is at hand! Here, in this little book, Martha Stewart has joined up with a wave or weave of beautiful peonies opening our decorous and sullen heart-minds into the pure pleasures of an altered universe: plural, funny, sexy, bright and animate. Leslie Allison has made a new room for poetry, a hologram of a corner shimmering where no corner exists. Enter, bring a towel, or not!

     - Ann Lauterbach

uglyducklingpresse.org

453

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.

Tender Data - Monica McClure (Birds, LLC)

Today's book of poetry:
Tender Data.  Monica McClure.  Birds, LLC.  Austin, Minneapolis, New York, Raleigh.  2015.

Because we haven't had a "list" poem in a while and because you all know how much Today's book of poetry loves a good list poem, we are going to start off today with a hummer.

Monica McClure is a poetry assassin of the highest order.  Her aim is perfect and she is packing some serious heat.  There is very little tender in Tender Data but it is all heart.

Monica McClure

Monica, vain as two crystals in a window

Monica, proportionate face like a student drawing

Monica, passable body like a non-celebrity

Monica, competing affects getting crossed

Monica, languid like a tranquilizer napping in the sun

Monica, sensitive like an artist coming to terms with failure

Monica, signing over her paltry assets

Monica, sleazy like the nouveau riche

Monica, watching herself while watching you

Monica, like a summer in the shade of a factory

Monica, editorial like the ego ideal and like the ideal ego

Monica, effusive like alka seltzer

Monica, blushing like purple areola

Monica, disarming like a borderline

Monica, free as a stolen mink

Monica, steadfast as scotch from an Islay faraway

Monica, lost like a puppy in an undertow

Monica, like lambs in a cavern

Monica, like grey birds aerial diving

Monica, broken like tea leaves in the hand of Jack the Ripper

Monica, in love for the empire and courtly manners

Monica, menstruating with endless iron

Monica, like a truck full of hoop skirts

Monica, sculptural with Debuffet's dirty pick

Monica, saintly fallopian tubes butterflying

Monica, easy like a promise to make

Monica, sluggish as the mind in conversation with itself

Monica, kissing deep a plum cooled on mint

...

Today's book of poetry had to read Tender Data over several sessions simply because the book got too hot to handle.  These pages burn.  McClure absolutely never lets up on the gas.

McClure is fresh, these poems as crisp as new snow, and at the same time these poems know things that only a certain kind of experience reveals.  McClure sounds like she's read everything you've read and then a lot you haven't.  How did she get so wise?

Then we have to deal with the title poem, her opus, "Tender Data",  Oh my, oh my.  What wondrous thing is this?  Monica McClure's long poem "Tender Data" is surgery with an emotional laser and she lays it all open.

     "You don't have the guts for me

       Why people do evil is

       the only question worth asking"

Think Hunter S. Thompson and Erica Jong having a love child devoted to poetry and writing a new feminist manifesto for a new order.  No prisoners taken here.  McClure isn't afraid of anyone or anything.

Today's book of poetry would absolutely love to show you the entire poem but the length of the poem precludes inclusion.  But take our word for it - McClure is staking out territory with fierce intent.

Mammary

The Chateau Marmont in winter

is like a beautiful woman in the morning

on the second day of her period

It's a body rejecting its implants

Lindsay Lohan is walking around

like she owes the place

sliding into the darkest seat

with two lesbian truckers

I'm sipping an Italian aperitif

and feeling exuberant

like it's the 20th century

and a love sick Breton is whispering

messages on my answering machine

in an empty antechamber

while I check my powder on my iPhone

When I lost my academic job

I became an unskilled sex worker

and got pregnant out of professional frustration

My mother drove me to a midwife

in the first light of morning

Lazy Susans on the table spin me

another cold highball

...

Today's book of poetry regular morning read was a fiasco.  The women in our office insisted they do all the reading this morning.  Kathryn, our new intern, must have used the word "empowering" at least seven times.  She gave all us men the stink-eye more than once.

Tender Data is powerful stuff and it is gloriously relentless.  McClure struts with her time on stage because she can and we all reap the rewards.

White Girl Wasted

There's nothing inherently noble about work

At New York Dolls I could choose to sit

and let men buy my drinks

instead of hauling ice buckets

of champagne across the mainstage floor

I didn't make money when I got drunk

instead of getting men drunk

but I was not cold or sober either

My heels dangled from the bar stool

as I watched the engorged breasts of girls

tremble in the arcade-like wavelengths

weightless and bovine

A happy couple stumbled in and soon

the wife was throwing up

in our dressing room

We held her hair back

careful not to drop ashes

in her shiny blowout

I was Kathy Acker in the 80s

doing nothing exceptional yet everything

in a corset without muscles

Her husband had paid for two hours upstairs

and was up to his watches in flesh

You girls are mistaken I said

to seduce this stupid city

Then I went home no richer or poorer

than when I showed up

I wish I could get shit-faced wasted

on my own dime

and have someone I trust carry

me screaming and drooling into a taxi

I think of the words of Anastasia

the fat ballerina of the Bolshoi

"I'm going to fuck the shit out of this world."

Goodnight swans on your lakes of vodka

...

Today's book of poetry puts Monica McClure at the top of whatever list I'm making today, she should be on the top of whatever list you are making.  Tender Data will make you love poetry in whole new way.

Monica McClure

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Monica McClure is a write and performer living in New York City.  Previously, her poetry has been published in the chapbooks, Mood Swing (Snacks Press, 2013) and Mala (Poor Claudia, 2014).

BLURB

McClure may be the poster-girl for a new generation of poets: irreverent, well-read, sexy, even dirty, snarky, but ultimately fighting an earnest battle against reductiveness and easy answers to the complex problems of the Internet age: "Every citizen of this world is on trial/ I'm learning to speak legalese/ as I stroll through civil law like/ a gamine through a sample sale."

     - Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR

Word Warriors:  Monica McClure

Video: The Huffington Post

birdsllc.com

452

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.

No Work Finished Here: Rewriting Andy Warhol. - Liz Worth (Book Thug)

Today's book of poetry:
No Work Finished Here: Rewriting Andy Warhol. 
Liz Worth.  Book Thug.  Toronto, Ontario.  2015.

Today's book of poetry is slightly confused, I don't know what to explain first, my technique for choosing today's poems or Liz Worth's technique for writing them.

Let's start with Liz Worth and her astonishing second book of poems No Work Finished Here: Rewriting Andy Warhol.  Worth has taken the 1968 Andy Warhol novel A Novel and eviscerated it.   Within a self-imposed set of boundaries Worth tackles each page to tear away what isn't needed and to savour the juicy morsels, rendering them down to inexplicably fine poems.

You are here

I didn't do a thing last night

felt like a ghost

just staying up and all that, just talking

car noises in the background.

Some of my throat is gone.

Need some Obertrols--blue ones, blasting

oh, the orange ones are divine.

Is there ANY place we can keep calling

voice on the other end

know where we can get some.

This number in front of us--sister would know us.

We should start for the park. Takes forever.

Asleep on the bus, too gorgeous.

It's all right--fantastic baby,

you definitely are here.

...

And we are there.  Boom.  Worth plants us in the Factory with these poems that are a remixing distillation of Warhol's novel.  But they are so much more.  These poems are electric.  No Work Finished Here is simply a towering achievement.  Page after page after page of this opus burns.  It's a bit like going for that blue flame, dipping your fingers in lighter fluid and catching lit matches.   Whooosh.

Today's book of poetry was completely gob-smacked by No Work Finished Here and so was everyone in the office.  Our morning read hasn't had quite that smirky smack in the head edge since we last read Susan Musgrave, another great Canadian poet who can burn.

Push to tell

Kill me

in a fake voice,

disguising the real day.

Make them believe

we're stars,

unbearable to live with.

They hate me

for being what I am and

all your friends

get so mad at you.

Why should we wait here

like this, with doubt;

come and talk to me,

push to tell

how we are.

...

Andy Warhol was one interesting cat and Today's book of poetry is slightly ashamed to say we've never read A Novel.  We sure want to now.

Today's book of poetry isn't able to tell you anything about Andy Warhol or the Factory that you don't already know -- but Liz Worth sure can.  No Work Finished Here opens up the Factory like it was a can of tuna and Worth was the can opener, she just rips the top off of that thing.  Then she reaches in a plucks out the best of what she needs, hammers them into gems.

And that would be enough.  Worth does more than that.  She bridges the gap from the Factory to us, the reader and then tells us how we are.

Values

I wanna tell you something

very secret:

my voice

is turned up

to drown out

all possible

conversation.

Background obstructs

those people

in the other room

with their fucking values.

Their tactics

have led 

to nothing.

Aren't you going

to fuck

for five minutes

with me?

On tape?

In the elevator,

pressing that button,

there's time for

charity, falsity.

...

So since Today's book of poetry pretty much loved every poem in No Work Finished Here (and that never happens, seriously), today's poems were chosen at random and with confidence.

If you want to know exactly how we made our random choices please send two Crying Charlies and a buck-fifty to Today's book of poetry with your enquiry.  You know the address.

No Work Finished Here: Rewriting Andy Warhol is one big thick lovely tome, coming in at over 450 pages, and for this reader it is a high water mark for Canada's most adventurous small press, Toronto's Book Thug.

Saying wow isn't saying enough, as far as Today's book of poetry is concerned No Work Finished Here gains immediate entry into that lovely pantheon of absolutely essential Canadian poetry classics.

Liz Worth

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Liz Worth is a Toronto-based author. Her first book, Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond, was the first to give an in-depth account of Toronto’s early punk scene. She has also released a poetry collection called Amphetamine Heart and a novel called PostApoc. You can reach her at www.lizworth.com, on Facebook (www.facebook.com/lizworthbooks), or Twitter @LizWorthXO.

BLURBS

“Liz Worth’s collection of poems is a testament to both her artistry and daily discipline. In an age of diminished attention, her perseverance in daily poem—making by mining the same source over and over reminds us that artists can be a model of life without distraction-how to go deeper and deeper until you find yourself looking back at you.” 

     — Heath Allen, composer of Andy, A popera

“What if you tore apart the city’s tenderloin; if you seized its ephemera and — before burning all the sweet voodoo — collected the best, and most brilliant cuts? This is Liz Worth’s stylish master-nightmare, No Work Finished Here. This is ‘the start of something true.'”

     — Lynn Crosbie, author of Where Did You Sleep Last Night

Liz Worth

@

Mike Geffner Presents The Inspired Word

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

116 MacDougal Street Bar/Lounge

Manhattan

Video: InspiredWordNYC

bookthug.ca

451

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.

Realignment - Ruth Roach Pierson (Palimpsest Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Realignment.  Ruth Roach Pierson.  Palimpsest Press.  Windsor, Ontario.  2015.

Sometimes when I read a poem I just have to slap the book down on the table and shout out "DAMN!" with a big, old Pat Carter exclamation mark.  Once in a while a poem just hits all the amusement buttons I have.  Ruth Roach Pierson peppers Realignment with just such marvels.

Agapanthus Blue Triumphator

With a name like that I could do almost anything

Loose my chastity to three men in one night

Write a new and better poem about a red wheelbarrow

Makes three beds and not sleep in a single one

Play Kris Kringle at the annual Christmas party

Win a hissing contest with my bad-tempered cat

Deliver a treatise on sin to His Holiness

Successfully sue the CEOs of Goldman Sachs

Peel back the layers of an onion without shedding a tear

Become president of the Brotherhood of Inveterate Curmudgeons

Build a chain of dungeons for those guilty of grammatical and 

              syntactical errors

Solve the case of who killed red robin

Learn the difference between a gong and a bell, a tongue and a clapper

...

Today's book of poetry has to admit we stumbled once or twice in the thicker passages but Realignment often just wants to see the look of surprise on your face.  Pierson waxes eloquent with a vocabulary that surpasses our current standards by a country mile - but we like to be challenged and we like to learn, Today's book of poetry also likes to be amazed.

Pierson echoes Thomas Wolfe You Can't Go Home Again sentiment again and again, but then like good ol' Tom, like the rest of us, she tries it, again and again.  That's the kind of animals we are. Resolution is a disconnected metaphor that we work and knead until it fits our current desire, fits into the confine of our need.

Omnium-Gatherum

I have only what I remember, Merwin writes, resigned not to a dearth

but an omnium-gatherum of memories--whether amorphous and 

unloosed from time or firmly grounded and undimmed as though

he's again playing, in the re-entered past, the protagonist in the theatre

of life.

From time to time mine ambush me as I walk down the street in full

daylight. Some delight, others devastate, breaking through the frozen

crust to re-inflame buried pain. Still others flit past my inner eye like

short-lived visual migraines. Odd fragments seek me out in dreams,

like last night's. I held a younger

woman in my arms and told her I had paid a terrible price for not

having children, but she, with her two, should go on and fulfill her

ambition. We found ourselves inside a house under renovation. Behind

a demolished wall, a laundry had been discovered that easily could,

we conjectured, be joined

to the kitchen. Outside there were explosions in the night sky, fireworks

in celebration of a Russian holiday, the face of a Czar shattering into

icy glitter. And all the while the woman from next door was setting out,

onto her front porch as on a stage, three bottles of pink-tinted water.

...

Milo had a few hop, skip and jump moments at this morning's read with some of the German text in Realignment, but wouldn't you know it, Kathryn, our new intern, speaks German.  She lived in Berlin for a year and although she is just telling us that now we are not nearly as surprised by this information as Milo appears to be.  Admiration and translation ensued.

The rest of us each picked a favourite and read in turn.  I was torn between the tender and touching "So" where the young girls are lithe and beautiful, a story "Overheard in All That Jazz Cafe" and "Herat Carpets" where a carpet tells a disjointed story of a marriage that probably never was and a future cut in two -- but I went for "Innocence" because that's the sort of lost Peter Pan I am.

Innocence

The cabin's screened-in porch

was where we slept, dropping

off only after much

whispering and listening

to the cries of the mountain lion

sounding, in our imaginations,

like a woman being murdered

somewhere deep in the woods.

We'd hoist ourselves

onto World War II

army cots, wriggling our bodies

deep inside surplus GI

sleeping bags, khaki, down filled

and gaze out across the river

at the not-yet clear-

cut mountainside illumined by moonlight

or by flashes of sheet lightning

from a distant storm.

But the sound filling those nights

more than any other, the sound

that eased our sleep persuading us

all was as it should be

in the world beyond the porch

was the paused, then deepened

growl of nighttime trucks transporting

peacetime cargo over Snoqualmie Pass

shifting down and down again

with the steepening of the climb.

...

Today's book of poetry has had a temporary Realignment, I'm still sore in certain places but comforted in the important ones.

Ruth Roach Pierson

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ruth Roach Pierson has published three poetry collections: Where No Window Was, 2002, Aide-Mémoire, which was a Governor General Literary Award for Poetry finalist in 2008, and CONTRARY in 2011. In 2014 Guernica Editions published an anthology of film poems she edited entitled I Found It at the Movies. Aperture, her chapbook of poems written in response to the photography of Josef Sudek, was also released in 2014. Realignment, her fourth poetry collection, was launched by Palimpsest Press in 2015.

BLURB

“For the fortunate reader of Ruth Roach Pierson’s book, her “realignments” are all enlargements – of working vocabulary, as words such as “brindled,” “mazard,” “umbrageous,” and “mephitic” take on new and surprising poetic power; of voice, as Pierson’s muscular syntax reflects the movements of an agile and capacious mind; of experience itself, as her Whitman-like catalogues embrace a dazzling breadth of times, places, and things; and – most especially, for this reader – of spirit, as objects resonate with human meaning through Pierson’s dynamic metaphors. Look and marvel, for instance, at how a simple piano stool in the title poem becomes an image for the winding realignments of felt life, enlarging our grasp on that turning, precarious world through which she guides us so expertly in this superb collection.” 

     — John Reibetanz

palimpsestpress.ca

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