Flightpaths: the lost journals of Amelia Earhart — Heidi Greco (Caitlin Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Flightpaths: the lost journals of Amelia Earhart.  Heidi Greco.  Caitlin Press.  Halfmoon Bay, British Columbia.  2018.

Reading Heidi Greco's Flightpaths: the lost journals of Amelia Earhart is like falling into a Saturday afternoon matinee at the movies of my youth.  Greco has imagined and made real all those things we've so longed to discover about the ending to the Amelia Earhart story, the beginning of the legend.

Greco's done her homework.  Today's book of poetry knew about the "friendship" between the high flying aviatrix and the President's wife.  But Greco takes them up among the stars where they make snow out of one of Eleanor's boas.  Greco reveals dark secrets and hidden gems, jewels for the inquisitive historian.

The theories Heidi Greco expands on as to the demise of Amelia Earhart have been given light of day before but Greco affectionately moves past rumour to give rich flesh and bone back to the narrative.  Just like those afternoon movies of my youth; Greco sets up the audience and then delightfully mows them down.

July 8

Made an awkward wade to the plane, for another quick series of maydays.

Dumb luck revealed a little sack of fruit floating beside my seat (how

could I have missed it?), a gift from one of the sweet women at Lae. She'd

handed it over smiling, saying repeatedly "po, po." She should have said

"poo poo" as it's not agreed with me. Shit, shat, shatted. Enormously. I

may have lost more fluids than the soggy fruit supplied. Modesty long

gone between Noonan and me. Even so, this is beyond normal, requires

a skirt. Eleanor and Katharine, my cohorts in independence, would laugh

at how ladylike I've become.

...

Heidi Greco's Flightpaths: the lost journals of Amelia Earhart offers up more than one solution to the famed pilot's true story.  We deduce that Earhart had an open relationship with her husband and a thoroughly modern and adventurous dance card that spanned both gender and expectation.

These poems fantasize more than one perilous end for Earhart, but any real fan of Earhart, or any ardent reader, will already have heard these theories.  What Greco does that amazes is to create a narrative the reader can and does believe.  We believe the movie as it is playing out in front of us.  

With a variety of conjured tricks, Heidi Greco has us eating her fictionalized account of an unknown story right out of her poetry hands.  She doesn't even bother with a poetry bowl.  Greco gets us to believe a thing is true even though we already know it is made up.  That's some good poetry cooking.

This, my new husband

The father sells shoes, shiny as the pomade

he slicks into his thinning hair.

This dull groom of mine welcomes the war,

explains to me, as if to a child,

"An army marches on its feet,"

What am I to learn from this?

Surely, the measuring of feet cannot

fill the needs of his mind.

I would stand with the women

in the factory, if I could.

But no, I am cautioned:

I might show my hand, reveal

some bold trait, one that could draw

unwanted attention. Or worse,

speak out with too strong a thought

one not befitting this pretty head I now wear,

maybe get sent to the loony bin

along with the other hysterical wives,

the ones who didn't behave.

Hair this long annoys me, tangling in the brush,

this continual dyeing of roots to keep them brown,

mouse enough to blend with this dun-colored world

the sentence I must serve, rest of my too-lifeless days.

Oh, for a pinch of danger, a taste of sudden intrigue,

anything to fire up my engines.

,,,

Today's book of poetry morning reading was just a little off track today, everyone remains a little subdued and saddened by the passing of the great Canadian poet David McFadden.  Earlier this week David finally succumbed to a lengthy illness.  

David McFadden was a big influence on Today's book of poetry.  Mr. McFadden had been to our home a couple of times and for a brief period of time we corresponded regularly.  We were never buddies but we were friends.  Today's book of poetry was very honoured to be included in 70th birthday book for David.  We weren't buddies — but I wish we had been.  David McFadden was looked to up by an entire generation of Canadian poets and Today's book of poetry is saddened by his passing. 

Stuart Ross, celebrated poet and close friend, has suggested that he is going to read a David McFadden poem at all of his readings in the future.  Today's book of poetry thinks we should all follow the same plan of action.

After a round of David McFadden poems, mostly from Poems Worth Knowing (Coach House Books, 1971), we got back in to the proper flow and gave Heidi and Amelia a proper flight test.

July 12

To think I used to mope about the thickness of my ankles, call them my

elephant legs. Bigger than ever the ankle is blooming, like an overfed dahl-

ia in my cousin's flower bed. Now it truly holds the shape of an elephant's

leg, would make a good umbrella stand for someone's elegant foyer. Yet

despite its bulbous shape, it feels as if the bones are disintegrating. As if

the constant salt air has seeped inside and begun dissolving them. Can't

distract myself from the pain anymore. Reciting poems, making up songs,

repeating my times tables, nothing does the trick. Zero times 180 is still

zero. Since Fred no longer needs the pills, I may try using the ones that

remain. What effect they may have on me, I cannot say. Tomorrow I mean

to begin some letters to family and friends. Perhaps a batch of sweet fare-

thee-wells.

...

Heidi Greco puts belief in the hands of the reader.  We come to believe that this movie is real.  Poetry that transports is a hard currency to deny.  Flightpaths is money.

Heidi Greco

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Heidi Greco is a longtime resident of Surrey, BC. In addition to writing and editing, she often leads workshops – on topics that range from ekphrastic poetry to chapbook making. She’s been an advocate for the literary arts in her community and was instrumental in establishing two distinct reading series, but she considers her greatest success to have been convincing her city to hire an official Poet Laureate. She writes in many genres – with poems, fiction, essays and book reviews to her credit. Her books include a novella, Shrinking Violets which was co-winner of the Ken Klonsky Award in 2011. Her work has also appeared in many anthologies, most recently in Make it True: Poetry from Cascadia (Leaf Press, 2015) and The Revolving City: 51 Poems and the Stories Behind Them (Anvil, 2015). In addition to making Sunday suppers for her adult sons, she keeps a sporadic blog at outonthebiglimb.blogspot.ca.

BLURBS

“Flightpaths: The Lost Journals of Amelia Earhart slips easily from windowpane prose to lyric as Heidi Greco delivers the realities, the fantasies, the possibilities of Amelia Earhart’s last flight over the Pacific Ocean with a complex simplicity that gives us both what probably was and what might have been — building a poem/story of a life bigger than history.”
—Brian Brett, author of Tuco: The Parrot, The Others, and The Scattershot World

“In this unique and intriguing fictional tale, Heidi Greco convinces us that Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed 10 Electra went down near a remote Pacific island. This tragic event, and the disappearance of Amelia’s plane into the ocean, leaves the reader wondering what happened to this brave pilot who accepted the challenge of a world flight in 1937.”
— Ann Holtgren Pellegreno, Pellegreno was the first to fly a Lockheed 10 Electra around the world on the Earhart Trail. On July 2, 1967, she dropped a wreath on Howland Island.

“I am not one to read a lot of poetry, but when combined with contextual passages and based on a historical event, my interest was piqued and my imagination stimulated by the fascinating concept that Ms Greco has penned. Recommended.”
—The Miramichi Reader

Heidi Greco

Feature Poet @ PJ/PNW

Video: TheVideoGuys

caitlin-press.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

The Fix — Lisa Wells (University of Iowa Press)

Today's book of poetry:
The Fix.  Lisa Wells.  University of Iowa Press.  Iowa City, Iowa.  2018

Winner of the IOWA POETRY PRIZE

The Fix is in.

Lisa Wells has climbed right into the poetry heart of Today's book of poetry.  Wells burns like her hands were made of matches.

Today's book of poetry did not recognize the language Lisa Wells was employing at first, some renegotiation was necessary, and it was my fault.  But Today's book of poetry did know from the very first poem in this insanely entertaining debut that it was going to require a seat-belt and helmet.

The Fix has a sureness to it, an accomplished voice, Wells gets to the heart with zest and immediately consumes the reader with her abandon fervor.  Today's book of poetry had to think about it for a minute and then it hit us.  We have only recently become aware of the superpoetry of the nurse/poet Belle Waring (Belle Waring died of cancer in 2015).  There's a zany, I don't give two shits - except that I care deeply, mantra.  A completely abandoned building sort of shouting that goes on in the poetry of Waring and Wells seems cut from the same fine cloth.

What Today's book of poetry was clumsily trying to say is that we are BIG admirers of Belle Waring and were surprised to find Lisa Wells raising the same hairs on our poetry neck.  Today's book of poetry will be looking at Belle Waring's Refuge (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990) and Dark Blonde (Sarabande Books, 1997) at some point in the near future.  The Belle Waring books arrived in our offices courtesy of our Southern Correspondent, The Twangster, reigning St. Louis Champ.  He sends regular literary "care packages."

Today's book of poetry is so happy to introduce you to the poetry of Lisa Wells we can hardly sit still in our seats.

Theory of Knowledge

Alive on the highway shoulder.

The ruddy trucker passed

tossed a can from his cab

and I scrambled to retrieve it.

Cut like a twig and titless

the boys said

bbs on a breadboard.

Crossed my arms over my chest

in the frigid stock room of the mini-mart

while a classmate donned a nylon bib

and counted my cache into his hamper.

So I whipped a boy at school with my windbreaker

and where my zipper caught his shin, he split.

Blood slipped through the fold

mercury slow.

For that, a teacher faced me toward a wall

to think about my wrongs.

I don't need a wall to know.

...

When Today's book of poetry tells you the Lisa Wells poems are not concerned with point of entry, they attack you like an unseen gas, impervious to detection and thoroughly effective;  you're not going to believe what will happen to you — even as it is happening.

That last sentence/paragraph will have Max, our Sr. Ed., bleeding out his eyeballs; but Today's book of poetry has learned that we have to poke the beast once in a while just to make sure he is still breathing.

Back to point of entry.  Lisa Wells is the perfect poetry assassin because these poems come at you with such humour and wit that we often don't see the big "pop-up" mallet she keeps in other hand.  The Fix is devoid of trickery, These poems come at the reader straight down the middle of the page, Lisa Wells may be the Larry Csonka* of American poetry.

*Larry Csonka played for the Miami Dolphins and is universally respected for his inside game.  Fearless and unstoppable.  "The Sundance Kid" won a couple of Superbowls and was the star running back on the only professional football team to have a full undefeated season.

Memoir

I stitched my mask of hide- snout- sinew- talon- and rode

the vast savanna to war

in my former life. I was the hybrid. I sewed my brutal double-helix

     into a child

and packed her boots with greasy wool that felted as she walked in bright

stratified color. Carpathian bronze couldn't buy her off

when she leapt at the throat of my lover.

Him I called The Lion for his yawn and yellow ringlets.

I placed a Deglet date upon his tongue, I pressed

the golden scarab into amber, straddled all his lap, kissed

my cresset to the yurts of my superiors

and in this life, I think I'd like to do more damage.

...

Today's book of poetry thinks that Lisa Wells has a considerable reserve of grit, she knows that most injustices go unpunished and that many go unnoticed.  Wells is a reporter, and an excellent one at that, but she can't stay neutral.

Our morning read was robust to say the least with an excellent cast of characters here for the event.  Jeff popped by to measure my desk for another bookcase, at present I count something like fourteen bookcases, one-hundred and twelve shelves, in my office, but I need a couple more.  Jeff has the knowledge.  He also has a great voice and rattled off a couple of Wells poems.  Thomas was on this morning, he brought in his friends Pistol and Barb.  All three of them contributed.  The office was a busy place this morning.  

We laughed and laughed.  All complaints get sent to the fifth floor.

With Lisa Wells, no complaints at all.

"Poetry Man"

      after Phoebe Snow

To recall the cull of this life.

That one must harvest by selective annulment

the body they will wed

                     and the body they will hustle

from dress to tongue on the sly

                                           for days

I lay as a flank in my lover's maw

                      swathed in wine while warm

winds frisked the wisteria.

It was innocent.

He lashed my wrist to the mast.

He tied my blind because I wanted

to be battered in the swell

            and blossoms purple still

any place he pressed his mouth

any place

I asked for it.

By now I know, I begged:

relieve your mouth its bland aperture

Talk to me some more

~

Home's that place       somewhere      you go each day

in absence of his finger I have conveyed to my teeth

a relentless procession of corn chips, zoned out

on the bedroom wall.

Little my tongue does for the hole it circumnavigates.

It was a clear day, sun jigging figures from the leaves

on the alien green of College Park

              I was ocular in his arms

an enormous pupil, blown open.

     We knew the hour had come

by the way the light collected

raptured to several heavens

there's no need to choose.

~

If choice is obviated  "Le Paradis n'est pas artificiel"

his letter begins, anxiety of what is

in back of each long note.

He compares me to a garden.  "Why weed what winter will kill?"

Fidelity is perennial, survives the cold     cloaked as a peony.

He wishes me a grand carouse at the local dive, a dry

bottom bun for my rubber burger

and another man's sex         bashful boy.

~

do not touch the stove you will

fuse to its element    slaver over

the burn.             You don't have to go.

You're hiding something sweet

from this swollen thumb

and from these glossy welts derives

the suspicion that I am truly sick.

Monstrously wooed by these

reports of injury, he admits

         "its invocation of parts. You have a thumb. Eyes."

Instruments of agency.   Logic divides

pleasure from having

               give it to me

All Medea's remonstrations ended on a blade.

downed in the poisoned mug, draped in the tainted gown

but she never howled

when love departed

she muscled out to meet him.

...

Any of you regular readers of Today's book of poetry will know that we are always a sucker for poets who find hope.  Lisa Wells gives us renewed hope, and why not?  

This energy, zip and intelligence make for that rarest of books, can't miss poetry.  It will "muscle out to meet" you.

Burn, Lisa, Burn.

Lisa Wells

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lisa Wells is a poet and nonfiction writer who lives in Tucson, Arizona. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, the Believer, Denver Quarterly, Rumpus, Third Coast, and the Iowa Review.

BLURBS

“Full and luscious as a grape before wine-making or a moon before love-making, the poems in The Fix live in a roadside space that’s earthy, sensual, erotic, and wild. Lisa Wells writes by feel, shaping, kneading, and bending the line the way a potter builds a ceramic vessel from the bottom up, coiling around a central idea until it’s solid, visible, and ready to be marveled at.”

     —D. A. Powell

“The Fix is ruthless, sleepless, vigilant, obsessive: a profound work of mystery and matter, of power and pleasure, in which any singular truth is always just a step ahead, a bit beyond reach, below sight line. This new voice is so strange it sounds familiar, like family unforgivable or a lover who’s never over, or like a kind of food only grown on alien soil but that tastes disturbingly like your childhood. Here, every line is a surprise, a curve, a path this visionary poet cut just this moment for you to travel deep and emerge altered by this, her stark dark knowing. You’ll read this brilliant book again and again looking for the way back from it.”

     —Brenda Shaughnessy, judge, Iowa Poetry Prize

“The Fix is perfectly executed. It’s always poetry, yet it never strains to be poetry. It’s flush with nervous and yet confidently directed energy. Its most striking moments are never haphazard, but are surprising and indelible. It doesn’t read like a first book, it reads like a book for life.”

     —Shane McCrae, author, In the Language of My Captor

“Lisa Wells knows all too well that a fix is just a habitual stay against the moment’s decay, and in these corporeal poems equal parts binge and purge, one can only wonder what rough bitch slouches down low to be reborn in a Paradise as dirty and comfy as a trucker’s blown rig.”

     —Timothy Liu

Lisa Wells

reads "The End"

Video:  BitchMedia

www.uipress.uiowa.edu

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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

Declassified — Mariela Griffor (Eyewear Publishing Ltd.)

Today's book of poetry:
Declassified.  Mariela Griffor.  Eyewear Publishing Ltd.  Marylebone, London, U.K.
2017.

Declassified by Mariela Griffor is bursting at the seams with ideas, imagery and outside influences.  A short retinue of guest stars has to include:  Nelson Mandela, William S. Burroughs, George Orwell, Sappho, Kurt Cobain, David Foster Wallace, Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Sofia Kovalevskaya, Sylvia Plath, James Joyce, Henry David Thoreau, Ariel Dorfman and Marcel Proust.

Regardless of the guests, in the end these are poems of love and loss.  Every highway we know has ditches littered with the ruined and rusty hulks of what someone once called hope.  Or at least the wire-fenced, flower adorned, temporary altar, a reminder of someone's worst moment, another person's worst loss.

Recovery

May 20, 2014

For Regina Derieva

We never met; we never spoke to each other

except through the immigrant song of Jan Johansson,

we knew we were united in

indestructible fibers of life breathing

in and breathing out, marching

to the sound of old days, in countries

that remind us of our own countries,

speaking old languages, that remind us of our own tongues,

we became so suddenly eternal tourists with a right to vote.

It was a time in my life when I stopped laughing

and I knew you did too. I could see it

in the photographs of magazines and

journals where new poems by you were published.

I knew what it was to be without a reason to laugh.

So sorry to have to miss you,

well-planned journeys, well they never happened.

I planned several trips to Rinkeby,

a town that I avoided fiercely when

I was there. It is not easy

to be reminded of cut wings, as you know.

My trips to Stockholm were always

the same, Gamla Stan, centrums, H&M

and the Viking Museum, then back to Uppsala.

Rinkeby was a forbidden point,

the limbo of anybody's trajectory.

But had I known then you were there

I would have faced the fear

and visited you.

I love your work. The fresh, naïve
and sweet idea the world can be improved, stained
on the pages everywhere.
I love the way you put the
best of you in your poems. The way
you make yourself at home inside a whale,
the way some of your images cannot
leave my head for days, exactly like
a pop song. The way you make me think
with each line and take me to places
I have never been before.

I love the way that insufferable persistence
of something must change in this
endlessness of war times, this time that
consumes each of us and makes us bend
in the direction of the wind a dozen times per day
as in your poem. I pray for that persistence
to infect everyone who reads you.

I'm sorry to have missed you in this life.
I imagine what great times you and I would have had
if we only had the opportunity and time, and money of course,
don't forget that, to meet.

Silly of me to think we would have had
that cup of coffee in Gamla Stan
and talked about pigeons and old catholic schools,
and how the world is not changing but ending.
Nature has its tricks, and even if we make progress,
it will make us part of its garden. Yes, at least.

...

Today's book of poetry has always flattered ourselves that we are "experienced."  It is to laugh.  Mariela Griffor's Declassified reminds Today's book of poetry just how sheltered our life has been.  Up until a post-Katrina visit to New Orleans, I had never heard a gun shot from a weapon fired in anger.  I've only heard it once.  Admittedly it was several rapid shots from a pistol followed immediately by three or four quick bursts of machine gun fire in return,

The last rebellion of any kind here in Canada was the failed FLQ operation.  That was when I was young and both Quebec City and Montreal were as far from Peterborough as Mars.  Griffor's Chilean history and her experiences as a political refugee are but one layer of the Griffor onion.

Today's book of poetry was won over quickly, Mariela Griffor has lived through things we cannot begin to imagine and come out the other side clean and hopeful.  How astonishing is that?  People still have to love and tenderness plays a big role in the Griffor canon.

The Last One

Last night I could not sleep,
the children were not at home. They both had
sleepovers. I was tired, too. Too much time away from
grown ups and I know they will be OK, I will move
back. This time, closer to my father, that at that
time will be old and probably very cranky. But
I will move back to spend with him the
time we never could give to each other before.
I will move back to those mountains in between
Pucon and Talcahuano, I will go to the beaches
around. I also plan to write.

I will take walks in San Pedro to
meet those people I saw the last time
when I was there, and I will run to the
Ocean, to touch the black sand of San Pedro,
I will be closer to God, feeling the thick
air of the early morning. I will let the salt
make my face ruggy and I will think about you and
those days in Chiloe, at the End of the Earth.
I also will go and visit my old relatives, those
that are so old that they don't even remember their
ages. I will put back the pieces of that last poem, and
will promise that you will always have a place in my mind.

It's time for you and me to go different
ways. You find the place your soul was longing.
And I will choose to stay here without you and
with the other I love. Just hang out there,
the day to get together is every day shorter,
but now it is time for me to do so much more.
Last night as I said I could not sleep
I knew this would be my last letter and my
last poem for you.

...

Our morning read was set up by Eric Burden & War belting out the long version of "Spill the Wine."
When Eric quit his temperamental scat, with War throbbing behind him like "hot rings of fire," we got on with our poetry business.

Kathryn, our Jr. Editor, started us off this morning and we were away, Thomas sat in, along with Lucy, our newest intern, and declassified Declassified.

Sometimes the horrors of life confound us innocents, but those rare souls who have had their pearls polished by terrible friction and come out the other side shining write wondrous and brave,  Griffor can write deeply caring and sweet poems, or she can knock on the darkness door. 

Hardship

Somebody told me this country was hard:
But not this hard.
I didn't believe it because
I came from a hard country myself
and because I lived in other hard
countries so I was not afraid.
I thought we were different yet not
that different. I have nostalgia
for the homeland as I always
did have nostalgia so it was
nothing new. When I started
to see and feel in this new
spooky way and my left eye
started to tremble and I could not
control the movement, like the
most embarrassing tic you can
imagine, I withdrew. The time
began to walk slowly in the
inside and very fast on the outside.
The day after the new election
the bombs and the new troops
didn't stop, we will not talk
about it, because as in my hard
country we don't talk about it.
We can talk only about what
we can talk about and the
rest is just the poor imagination
of dissidents. And how can it be
interesting to talk about what
dissidents talk about if
we already talked about it in the past
elections in the last century. It was
always the same. I do try to see the
good side of living in a hard country
though, so I'm not totally a critic.
I do want to have
my duties, my opinions, and I do
want to see things are changing for
the better, including the economy as
they say on TV. One of the good things
when soldiers come from the front line.
Have you seen the screen of the TV full
of beautiful children running to meet
daddy or mommy coming back? And
the uniform they wear, really beautiful,
no marks of blood or dirt anywhere.
Nobody could guess what
those uniforms can say. Don't take
this the wrong way. I also come
from a family in another hard
country that knows very well
the duty and honour of wearing a uniform
especially this one. What hits me
that hardest is the bouquet
of flowers the soldier brings to his
bride or wife and the running of
this beautiful woman to his side,
the crying every time. Perhaps because
I'm a romantic and I like flowers
or perhaps because I remember his
face destroyed by the hand grenade
he was carrying or the landmine
put in the ground by who knows who.
I guess we will never know. I remember
thinking how much makeup
the mortician had to put
over his face to hide all that
damage. His hair looked good
but those nostril pieces missing
will haunt me forever. See? My
country is also hard. Like
yours. I do think there is
a reason sometimes, yet
most of the time I just think
there is a bigger plot and not
exactly by God or the Devil that things
are this hard. Those who don't
think I'm right, they tell me
to get over it, to adapt, to adjust
and get over it. The ones that think
I'm right, they are mostly silent,
they hide, they don't like my
posts and they avoid
me when I get too difficult.
The problem is that I cannot
adapt and I'm always surprised
seeing more and more people
give in. Yesterday my oldest
child told me in the grocery store
she hated Albanians. Why? I asked
her and she told me, in her building
on the first floor there is a family
of four living in a nine hundred square foot
apartment and all above them can
smell their disgusting food,
bending over to my ear she whispered
and said, I don't like them because they
are all terrorists. And how do you know
that? I asked. Everybody knows that
she responded looking over her
shoulder to show me the Albanian couple
paying at the next cashier. I tell
her that's it. No more. I know I
will adapt. I will write more things
that can be printed and some people
will never read my poems and maybe
I will not think this country is hard
anymore and I will see the positive
side of the whole story and forget.
In the meantime I don't, I'm dangerous
if I remember scars , doorbells,
the sulfur smell of the tear gas
bomb and whistling zig-zag of
bullets coming from an unknown
direction, or if I remember he didn't
have his three left hand fingers.
[But excuse me for a moment,
my friend Cora is at the door,
we need to chat about her French doors
she is getting for her house]
Back to what I was saying:
He used to play the guitar with that hand.
I know they told me this
country was hard but I'm telling
you the truth when I say, nobody
really told me it was this hard.

...

Today's book of poetry has a soft spot for Chilean poets.  Nicanor Segundo Parra Sandoval (1914-2018), is an all-time favourite here in our offices.  Mariela Griffor will have the recently interred centenarian Parra, smiling, at the very least, a certain sly grin.  Griffor is that hard as nails poet with a gentle and loving human heart.

Magic.

Mariela Griffor

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mariela Griffor is the author of The Psychiatrist (Eyewear Publishing, 2013) and translator of Canto General by Pablo Neruda (Tupelo Press, 2016). She attended the University of Santiago and the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. She left Chile for an involuntary exile in Sweden in 1985. She is publisher of Marick Press. Her work has appeared in periodicals across Latin America and the United States. Griffor holds a B.A in Journalism and a M.F.A. in Creative Writing from New England College. 

BLURB

“Mariela Griffor’s brilliant poems navigate the distance between languages, homelands and heartlands. Her poems are the musical and engraved declarations the wounded world requires.”

     — Derick Burleson

Ma demeure brûle

5 Poems by Mariela Griffor

Video:  LOrigineDuMondeTV

info@eyewearpublishing.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

Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting — Shivanee Ramlochan (Peepal Tree Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting.  Shivanee Ramlochan.  Peepal Tree Press.  Leeds, U.K.  2017.

"You tell him

I am the queen

the comeuppance

the hard heretic that nature intended."

                                                                                      from - Vivek Chooses Her Husband

Today's book of poetry is unsure of what to say about the flame content of these poems.  The poems in Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting come in heavy and hot.  Shivanee Ramlochan is singing in a new key, these poems, a new language - but familiar.  Ramlochan is "the hard heretic" and she's paid full price for the experience.

Shivanee Ramlochan's poetry almost does feel haunted.  Today's book of poetry thinks we understand the need for ghosts to do her bidding.  Like more women then we will ever know about, the heroine of these poems has been raped.  That Ramlochan can/does make poetry, art and beauty out of such horror renders these poems almost sacred.

Duenne Lara

If 

I write into you hard enough

the rumour murmurs that you'll come for me.

If

I scratch you through the water mirror, suck you under my talons,

will you knock & claim me? I keep

this one soft garden in my trachea vacant; I

stripped speech for split gourds, choking on seeds so you

might come and live in me, little

lover, come

claim these metatarsal prayers.

Everyone knows I am haunting.

Enact it again, you whisper, using mora and purpleheart to tell me.

Mourn me all over, cloister to caul.

Weep me upright in our wedding bower, my little bride, and I

do, I do,

I take the four rivers of the forest by throat and algal sinew,

pump the waters into my lungs. Come,

I'll christen you away from the devil's doorstep,

duenne suitor, duenne saviour, duenne dowry,

Duenne, you are mine

by sharp incense and pistol recoil, by moth fabric and mouth to mouth.

The wooden atlas delivers deeper rings in us

while the devil tries again to win your heart,

grinning.

Come here, she marrow-bites.

I have something for you, but it looks like torture.

She scrapes it from the ruins of the moonlight museum.

She smiles as it eats our national anthem from your tongue.

No one told you how it would hurt, to have your feet forced against

family hearth.

The mangroves stroked you taut while the devil cracked your bones right,

a blister body of devotion

a casket of cunning charms to stamp you for her service.

I will never make you walk again, if you will be mine.

...

Shivanee Ramlochan's women, clan after clan, embody strong and resilient characters of noble charm and wit.  You also know that they are willing to carry a sharp knife that no gentleman need ever see.  Ramlochan's women love other women.  And are willing to cut bad men.

Today's book of poetry admits that we had to go to the mattresses with Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting.  Generally we don't like to admit how many times we have to go to the dictionary to get through a poem (and usually that is a poem killer), but with Lady Shivanee we were willing to do whatever it took.  Once you are on certain rides you don't ever want them to stop.  Dame Shivanee Ramlochan is a beautiful monster poet.

Poem after poem in Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting had us sad, happy, angry, and often in the same poem.  We think it is because Duchess Ramlochan has a bad engine with only one setting, when her engine is on things are ready to burn, like only the best bad engines can.

1. On the Third Anniversary of the Rape

Don't say Tunapuna Police Station.

Say you found yourself in the cave of a minotaur, not

knowing how you got there, with a lap of red thread.

Don't say forced anal entry.

Say you learned that some flowers bloom and die

at night. Say you remember stamen, filament,

cross-pollination, say that hummingbirds are

vital to the process.

Give the minotaur time to write in the police ledger. Lap

the red thread

around the hummingbird vase.

Don't say I took out the garbage alone and he grabbed me by the waist

and he was handsome.

                  Say Shakespeare. Recite Macbeth for the tropics.

Lady MacBeth was the Queen of Carnival

and she stabbed Banquo with a vagrant's shiv during J'ouvert.

She danced a blood dingolay and gave her husband a Dimanche Gras

upbraiding.

I am in mud and glitter so far steeped that going back is not an option.

Don't say rapist.

Say engineer of aerosol deodorant because pepper spray is illegal,

anything is illegal

Fight back too hard, and it's illegal,

>your nails are illegal

Don't say you have a vagina, say

he stole your insurance policy/your bank boxes/your first car

downpayment

Say

he took something he'll be punished for taking,

not something you're punished for holding

like red thread between your thighs.

...

Our morning read was a full house sort of affair but it was the women who came out styling today.  None of the men on the Today's book of poetry staff had any of the angry sincerity that the women on our staff said was necessary.  For good reason.  None of the men on our staff have ever been the victim of generations of systemic sexism.

Rape is a mean bastard of a delicate topic and Shivanee Ramlochan has no trouble just kicking the crap right out of all previous tip-toeing.  These poems bear witness, frank and unforgiving.  And Today's book of poetry has nothing but respect for the strength in these poems — and the determination of the poet.  Regardless of the seriousness of the topic, the addressing of terror and male aggression, these poems are only successful if they work as poetry.

That's why we are here.  Shivanee burns.

Camp Burn Down

You and me and the fires we used to keep each other alive.

The fire at Camp Balandra.

The fire at Fort George.

The fire at fuck my throat

while my mother's on the phone, and the island's flooding

so everyone's indoors

but you are the skinniest raft

not provided for by the government,

unlawful from her to Tobago

and back.

There are small welts on the backs

of your hands as you braid me

down to the campsite.

This is the camp of Sunday afters,

your father's car radio

melting our eardrums while you move in me.

This is the fort of no retracing, every

place on my body you touch

burned nova.

burned past recognition.

You burn me into an atlas

into a Form One geometry tin

gripped

inside a perfect's handspan,

cock to cock to cheap vaseline,

burning me something new in each fire.

Snow might come to Tunapuna,

and your father would still spill

my guts in front of the market.

There would be hail in the public library,

and your father's pig cutlass

opening my thigh. The weather could vomit itself,

turn the catalogues of gale and gust inside out,

and the biggest damage would be

what I've done to you.

Remember the camp at the edge of the island?

The white stones brining to nothing

as you nerve-ground them between thumb and tongue,

scattering the wet cremations on my forehead.

I bless you, you said, I bless you here.

Nothing touched us except the rest of the world.

...

Today's book of poetry will remember the name of Shivanee Ramlochan because we will be singing it from the rafters for the next little while.  If you get lucky enough to read Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting you will be unlikely to forget either.  Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting will tear your fricking heart out and give you hope all at the same time.  That's a rare ride, a rare human combination.

Shivanee Ramlochan

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Shivanee Ramlochan is a Trinidadian poet, arts reporter and book blogger. She is the Book Reviews Editor for Caribbean Beat Magazine. Shivanee also writes about books for the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, the Anglophone Caribbean's largest literary festival, as well as Paper Based Bookshop, Trinidad and Tobago's oldest independent Caribbean specialty bookseller. She is the deputy editor of The Caribbean Review of Books. Her first book of poems, Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting, was published by Peepal Tree Press on October 3rd, 2017.

BLURBS

Ramlochan’s poetry slays whoever would force an ‘identity’ on it. It alchemizes the roles of grandmothers, abortionists, labourers, clerks, dancers, policemen, cousins, rapists into the greatest intensity of human. The world fucked the Caribbean archipelago, where European-derived shepherdesses and pre-Abrahamic Lilith now wander as peers among manifold beings. The music is consonantal, full of pleasure/pain. Rich as a García Márquez novel, these are uncompromising conversations, intimacy wrestling survival.

     —Vahni Capildeo, author of Measures of Expatriation.

This debut book is a subversive tour-de-force, a poetry of Holi powder and sarisilk drifting with beauty; of flayed predators, persistent hunger and thirst, broken bodies of daughters and sons; of cultural keep-down, wedding-weep, rape-ache, and the raw dreaming of rebel lovers; of abeer-streaked bodies’ sex-throb and split and Kali hex words brutally gleaming in the moonlit museum. These stunning poems fiercely and inventively wrestle language of beast, wolf, fishtail, and gods monstrous, singing firesongs of purification for the island dead and survival for the living. In these pages of la sangre viva, “spirit does linger.”
     —Loretta Collins Klobah, author of The Twelve-Foot Neon Woman.

These poems crackle with soucouyant ire and the voices of duennes in stanzas so bewitching you will not want to look away. Against a Hindu, Muslim, and Christian backdrop, abortionists, rapists, ancestors, and deities incarnate as grief. Surprise awaits in tightly wrought lines that are “no accidental shrine” to ancestry, femininity, and filial devotion. Always some darkness casts shadows against the beauty of love. Always the ghost of a story beckons the reader close.
     —Rajiv Mohabir, author of The Cowherd’s Son and The Taxidermist’s Cut.

In transgressive mode, Shivanee Ramlochan invokes gods, goddesses or demons to do what poetry should do–alarm and ignite us, surprise and blast us and tear at our heartstrings. Welcome to a challenging, unforgettable and courageous new voice.
     —Olive Senior, author of The Pain Tree.

Shivanee Ramlochan

reads three poems from 

Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting

at the Paper Based Bookshop

Video:  Shivanee Ramlochan

peepaltreepress.com 

692

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

EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE TODAY'S BOOK OF POETRY LIKES TO THROW IN AN UPDATE.  OUR READERSHIP JUST PASSED 400,000.  TODAY'S BOOK OF POETRY HAS A LOT OF PEOPLE TO THANK FOR OUR ONGOING OPERATION.  ASIDE FROM OUR STAFF - WE COULDN'T DO A THING WITHOUT K.  THANK ALL OF YOU FOR YOUR CONTINUED SUPPORT.

Acceptable Time — Tom Moore (Ravenna Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Acceptable Time.  Tom Moore.  Ravenna Press.  Spokane, Washington.  2016.

Rock

The boulders are whispering in the sea heat.

It's the same sun they've known

for a million years, the same sea.

As we walk along the beach we might

think they're just

dumb stones

but they are merely slow.

It takes so long for their mouths

to open (and a single vowel ten-thousand

years to form) that we don't hear.

We don't sense the changes overcoming

these rocks

as they split themselves into speech

nor the language of minds so strange

we're blurs on a copper sun.

...

That's how you write a poem!  Is it just me? I had to read "Rock" two or three times before I absorbed it all, before it sunk in.  Sometimes I think my head is made out of rock.

When Tom Moore is on, and he is on like a freaking siren, he is electric.  And funny.  Dark funny — and all you regular readers of Today's book of poetry know that we like that best.

As one of our Today's book of poetry heroes, the great Charles Bukowski said, when asked about writing poems:  "they must be full of power, they must make you want to turn the page."  And Tom Moore is all over that.

Don't be distracted by the lazy Bukowski quote.  Today's book of poetry loves Buk, but to be clear, Tom Moore's poetry is nothing like Charles the B.  We used the quote because Moore not only has power, he knows how to use it, and yes, we want to turn the page.

Hunting Out of Season

Though it's not his habit to be contrite

he enter the forest cautiously

for this is the place where the light over-spills

frozen ponds

and flocks in the long grass gather.

After checking his compass to make

quite sure

he's lost

he starts

to sing mating songs—waits

for the deer girls to show.

Slowly, they spill

from the forest with

legs of careful stepping

and their heads held high—

so near

the whole herd

clatters through his brain.

The eyes of each are blessed

with the gift of

perfect trajectory

and his songs bore into their minds

like bullets

they can't hear.

...

Today's book of poetry had to get Max, our Sr. Editor, out of his private salon/saloon, and team him up with Milo, our head tech, to try and find out who this Tom Moore is.  No luck at all.  Nothing!  The only thing Today's book of poetry knows about Tom Moore is that he can burn.

If he were a boxer he'd be a champ and most of his opponents would later complain that they didn't see it coming.  Moore has the velvet glove with a big old anvil inside.

What Today's book of poetry most admired in Moore's Acceptable Time was the Moore never rushes anything.  Moore likes to play it sweet until just before the curtain, and it works.  These poems act like crisp fables, the lessons uncertain until the last line, last word.  That's how to make it sing.

Bulb

At first it stayed in the shoebox

in the closet

in the hall

and talked to itself about the dog

that once ran its tongue

along the lid of the box

that went away when it heard

a noise

and never came back.

In the spring it discovered

it could unlearn the night and its own

imperfections.

Now, it's summer

—stuffy, warm, and deep—

and still it lies in the shoebox.

A tendril has started to dig

through the floor

drawing its strength from

the rotten wood

driving its thin brain steadily

into the other side of consciousness.

If we listened, we might

hear its heaving

comically serious

                Bulgarian

weightlifter grunts—feel

the house slip.

...

Our morning read here at Today's book of poetry was a little quieter than normal.  It is an overcast Saturday morning here in Ottawa and some of our staff phoned in with the Friday night flu.  Today's book of poetry likes to think we are an understanding employer and have decided not to flog any of them.  But they will pay.

Tom Moore would understand.

I put India Arie on the box with her version of "The Creator Has A Master Plan," the Pharoah Sanders classic.  Everyone in the office knew it was time for business and gathered round.  When India finished I read Acceptable Time to the troops.  Even Max stayed for the duration.

Max's approval carries a lot of weight here and it certified my contention, Tom Moore impressed us all day long.

Elegy

Sometimes the body has done enough.

It's not that the flesh

doesn't care

what the soul might have wanted

or for those who've come

by thinking

they could help—

it's because of all the partial deaths

that have happened before that

the last's made almost

irrelevant.

If the flesh could talk to the soul, it might

ask why, with skin flaking off and the

breasts having out-lived

their usefulness

it should go on?

Yet the soul can't answer

these or any other questions.

After midnight

the halls quiet down—

even the bacteria yawn.

Perhaps she would have heard

the bags of fluid beeping

as the bodies were washed by hand

or from somewhere far away

the echo of a flood tide, booming.

When the end finally came the

details of her death must

have been quite

extraordinary

like the glint she saw on a

metal hinge, the 

railing as

the light descended.

...

Today's book of poetry played the full four poem Monty today because Mr. Moore earned it.  Acceptable Time is a remarkable little book that punches way above its weight.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tom Moore is a Senior Instructor of Liberal Studies at Western Washington University.

ravennapress.com

691

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