Monsters, Zombies and Addicts: Poems - Gwendolyn Zepeda (Arte Publico Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Monsters, Zombies and Addicts: Poems.  Gwendolyn Zepeda.  Arte Publico Press.  Houston, Texas.  2015

Gwendolyn Zepeda tries to convince us that she is a hard-hearted woman as often as she can in this totally charming collection.  There are monsters, zombies and addicts sprinkled throughout Zepeda's Monsters, Zombies and Addicts: Poems.  

But they are never the monsters you'd expect.  You won't see these zombies coming.  And aren't addictions the damnedest things.  Everybody has them but not everyone knows it.

My Superpower Is Leaving

any situation at top speed. And sometimes
leaving makes the people left behind
call you names. They say "Bitch. She thinks she's too
good." But my ears are also heroic and turn the
opposite of supersonic.
Can fold against my head so I don't hear. They
fold down like my heart, which contracts to a
wad of steel.

...

Zepeda has a great sense of humour and you all know how much we like to laugh here at Today's book of poetry.  Zepeda has some doozies.

But it is not all fun and games.  These observational narrative poems rollick.  Zepeda's zombies muse eloquent about all the big and small things that get us from one day to another.

There are no sacred cows in Zepedaland.

Portent

I was baking a cake to take to my mother-in-law's house for
Thanksgiving.
I'd bought raisins in an off-brand box. Opened the box, dumped
it over the batter.
I saw gnat-like creatures in the air. I looked into the box and it was
full of little worms.

I screamed and threw the box onto the floor. Cried because
I really hate worms and 'cause
I'd wanted this cake to
impress my mother-in-law.

He came into the kitchen and yelled, "What the hell?"
He looked in the bowl, said, "That shit won't kill anybody."
He stuck his hand in the batter, scooped out the worms and
chucked them in the trash.

I finished up the cake and watched my in-laws eat it later
but

I couldn't eat dessert myself, of course. And now
I only buy the raisins people say are full of pesticides.

We got divorced, too.
Mmm, mmm, good.

...

Zepeda is a Queen of misdirection.  You think she is going to snap your head back with a jab, she's showing jab, jab, jab, and then when you expect it the least, she comes in with a hook out of left field.

This is Zepeda's second collection of poetry and it is mature wit and clever pontification.  Time and again Zepeda attacks an ordinary moment out of an ordinary day and makes that moment excellent. She is able to both expand and compress these moments and ultimately illuminate some deeper truth that was hiding there.

This is a type of magic.  Perhaps she has been bitten by a poetry zombie and is now infected with poetic zombie reasoning.   Monsters, Zombies and Addicts: Poems certainly has a take-no-prisoners approach.

I Eat Crazy People

The rabbit smells the lion's shit and that which it has digested.
Discovers it's had antelope for lunch and
so can't possibly be hungry again.

The rabbit eats clover in the shadow of the lion,
enjoys the way his shade keeps others at bay.

As the rabbit dies,
is eaten,
she takes one bite of the lion in return.
Does she infect him with her spit, maybe?
The possibility makes her smile, right before it's over.

...

We here at Today's book of poetry thought Gwendolyn Zepeda's Monsters, Zombies and Addicts: Poems was just scary enough to jack up the senses, put us all on the edge of our seats.

Zepeda sounds intensely honest, enough to make you see that she is right about monsters.

Gwendolyn Zepeda

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

GWENDOLYN ZEPEDA was born in Houston, Texas, in 1971, and attended the University of Texas at Austin. Her works has appeared on numerous websites, and she has written and illustrated her award-winning website, gwendolynzepeda.com, since 1997. In 2004, Zepeda was awarded the Cultural Arts Council of Houston/Harris County’s Individual Artist Grant for literature. Her writing was hailed by EFE newswire as having the “potential to transform Latino literature of recent years and rid it of its bad habits and clichés.” She is currently wrapping up a two-year term as Houston’s first Poet Laureate. Her works include her most recent poetry collection, Monsters, Zombies and Addicts (Arte Público Press, 2015), her debut book of poetry, Falling in Love with Fellow Prisoners (Arte Público Press, 2013), Level Up / Paso de nivel (Piñata Books, 2012), Better with You Here (Grand Central Publishing, 2012), I Kick the Ball / Pateo el balón (Piñata Books, 2011), Lone Star Legend (Grand Central Publishing, 2010), Sunflowers / Girasoles (Piñata Books, 2009), Houston, We Have a Problema (Grand Central Publishing, 2009), Growing Up with Tamales / Los tamales de Ana (Piñata Books, 2008), and To the Last Man I Slept with and All the Jerks Just Like Him (Arte Público Press, 2004). She continues to live and work in Houston.

- See more at: https://artepublicopress.com/blog/houston-poet-laureate-gwendolyn-zepeda-releases-second-poetry-collection/#sthash.iD11V9tP.dpuf

BLURBS
Zepeda captures "the isolating loneliness urban life often engenders."

     Booklist on Falling in Love with Fellow Prisoners

"With a world-weary yet love-drive voice, the Houston laureate unerringly explores the workplace, relationships, culture and motherhood."

     The Monitor on Falling in Love with Fellow Prisoners

Gwendolyn Zepeda

Houston Poet Laureate

reads at the 2014 GIA Conference

video: Grantmakers in the Arts

artepublicopress.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.

Origami Poems Project - Jan Keough/Editor

Today's book of poetry:
Origami Poems Project.  Jan Keough/Editor.  Origami Poems Project.  Indialantic, Florida.  2013-2014.

Today's book of poetry will have a slightly different format today.  The six small micro-chapbooks that were sent to us by the Origami Poems Project are too short to be considered for individual attention on this blog.  But collectively they pack a punch.

These are small, fit in the palm of your hand books, only a few pages long, but there is nothing slight about them.  Today's book of poetry was thoroughly smitten and entertained.  We passed these perfect little gems around the office like bon-bons.

T

Inside a Dog's Head - Helen Burke, 2014

Inside a Dogs Head (for Wendy and Pixie)

There are three words

Inside a dogs head.  Walk ..Friend and ..Sausages.

Throughout the day when they are not

Devising a better philosophy for the world

These words run in tandem up and down

The field and in and out of the woods.

By the stream when they stop and give you that quizzical look

They are unlearning all that jeopardises and intimidates Happiness.

A dog always hopes that we will see sense and undo

All the harm we somehow inflict upon each other.

They explain the word friend while chasing their tails

Or running for a stick.

But even while they spell it out

We walk back to the car ..not seeing autumn under our feet

In need of scrunching. Not seeing the trees so fearful

Of the white world that soon hangs on the branches.

But inside a dogs head - there will always be another Spring.

Sausages for tea. And. Another friend to make.

Another walk to take - down to the silver stream.

...

Helen Burke really does inhabit a dog's life Inside a Dog's Head.  But there is no barking.  These poems will simply make you look at your dog a little differently, look at every dog differently.

I've never danced with a dog but Helen gets it exactly right, if you are, ever, going to dance with a dog - it's Johnny Cash or Petula Clarke.  

Helen Burke

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Helen Burke has been writing poetry for the last twenty-five years. She has just completed a one woman show at the Edinburgh Festival. Over the last two years she has been a regular reader at Literature Festivals and events in the U.K. – and her work has appeared in numerous poetry magazines and anthologies.
She has also had short stories published, written for and performed on radio as well as working as a visual artist. Winner of the Manchester, Devon and Dorset, Norwich, Suffolk and Leslie Richardson (Yorkshire) Prizes, amongst other awards. Ian McMillan has said of her work – “This is a poet with verve, wit and humanity.”
Her collections include: Poetry – Helen Burke (1997), Island of Dreams (1997), Gift (2001), and Zuzu's Petals (2009). Her newest collection, The Ruby Slippers, is available from amazon.co.uk
Listen to Helen's radio broadcasts on ELFM (East Leeds UK).

* * * * * *

Deft Turning.  Ira Schaeffer, 2013

Upside-Down Cake

Mother Mayhem, Queen of Hearts

remember how you bound

your pal, your son

tighter than the Gordian knot

with welts and kisses -- your embrace

a coil of vipers, a tickling hysteria.

When your cruelty was spent

you'd lure me back

with baking pans and pineapple slices,

framing your eyes like golden spectacles

then holding them up to mine -- I saw

the one I loved return.

The Jolly Baker laughed, the eggs cracked,

sweet dust powdered your pretty hair,

I watched the mixing blades spin --

without your centrifugal loathing

our topsy-turvy world inverted

as the batter thickened.

Then with quilted mitts

you managed a deft overturning --

my hunger and dread now rested

on a glass pedestal,

a dainty dish sweeter for its rarity --

Mother, you fed me lies;

you fed me love.

...

Ira Shaeffer's confessional Deft Turning is a slice of relationship world.  That intimate ground between a child and mother and then the child grown.  It is not always chocolate chipped cookies and a kiss before bed.  

Shaeffer is working out some cathartic stuff here and it makes for some compelling poems.

Ira Shaeffer

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ira Schaeffer,an active member of Ocean State Poets and a proud supporter of the Origami Poems Project, is the current recipient of the Editor’s Choice Loft Chapbook Award. In addition, Ira’s recent poetry has appeared in a variety of publications, including, Penumbra; On the Dark Side: An Anthology of Fairy Tale Poetry; Tastes like Pennies; 50 Haiku; Wising Up Press; and Silver Birch Press In addition, his poem Primavera, was a 2014 nomination by The Origami Poems Project for the Pushcart Prize.

* * * * * *

Stone.  Corey Mesler, 2014.

This is a glorious chapbook filled with treats.  William Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch get us going and Mesler fills in the blanks.  This is a stone world and we are welcome in it.

Stone is a major treatise writ small.  But it has weight.

Coda:  Gift

A child will bring a stone home

and keep it as if

it were a precious gem. This

is the understanding

of the world we lose as we age.

On my desk is a desiccated

flower, a gift from

my daughter, the bestowing angel,

and the stone, now here, conferred.

...

Mesler has a lovely take on the world in these gems.

Corey Mesler

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Corey Mesler has published in numerous journals and anthologies. He has published 8 novels, 3 full length poetry collections, and 3 books of short stories. He has also published a dozen chapbooks of both poetry and prose. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize numerous times, and two of his poems were chosen for Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac.
With his wife, he runs Burke’s Book Store in Memphis TN, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores. www.burkesbooks.com
He can be found at www.coreymesler.com.

* * * * *

In Between.  Martha Clarkson, 2014.

Martha Clarkson has an awful lot of useful stuff to say in this short little chapbook.  She is one of those poets whom I imagine I would get along with famously.  I like the way she thinks.

Church of Colors

Red gave the sermon. Blues made up the choir - turquoise, navy, cornflower, and midnight. Silver

was an acolyte who almost set the altar cloth on fire. Brown's the organist. Sky Blue tried out for

choir but didn't make it. Yellow managed the nursery but refused to change diapers. Only one child

was lost that first year. Pink kept the books, noting that donations were down, due to a fading con-

gregation. Purple passed the communion tray. Gold rang the bell. Green mowed the tiny patch of

lawn out front and washed the dishes after fellowship hour. Black presided over the funerals, like you

might expect, and White was the wedding hostess. Orange was the deacon, who, like a ship's purser,

had an unclear role. Somewhere above, God wore Ray Bans, blinded by his own faith.

...

Martha is a pistol and these poems come at you like they were shot from a little tiny gun - and then BANG.  The reader discovers what a little gun can do.

Martha Clarkson

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Martha Clarkson is a corporate designer and receives mail in Kirkland Washington.

She is a writer of poetry and fiction and is not adept at folding origami but glad to be part of this. Martha won best short story for Anderbo's 2012 contest and has notable mentions in "Best Non-Required Reading" two years in a row.

* * * * *

Extras.  Winston Plowes, 2014.

Everything is happening in the closed world of Winston Plowes.  His very short poems pepper this chapbook as though a serious Richard Brautigan had returned to play.

Man in car

The Range Rover mounted the pavement

Its driver texting Thailand, reversing against the arrows.

His day had gone from bad to worse,

the car park was unexpectedly closed.

...

Plowes is dead serious and light of heart.  It is an excellent combination.  

Winston Plowes

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Teacher, compere, performer and poet, Winston Plowes spends his days fine-tuning background noise and rescuing discarded words. These are re-sculpted over a glass of wine into magical poetry birds he releases by night to fly to new homes in journals and online destinations worldwide.
He lives in a floating home in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire UK, where he tries to persuade his black cat, ‘Fatty’ that it’s a good idea for her to do the same.
Find out more about his work at his website here – www.winstonplowes.co.uk

* * * * *

Silent Work.  Martin Willitts Jr., 2014.

Silent Work by Martin Willitts Jr. is a short treatise on love.  How it works and how it doesn't. Willitts is able to get to the heart of the matter in quick work.  These connected verses work towards a conclusion we can all live with.  

The world is a better place with kindness.

Such a simple resolve yet so few of us see it through.

Silent Work

2.

This is the silent work of love. The hard work

is made easy, and the easy work is made hard.

Like after a tornado, there is the aftermath

when everything calms; or,

when distance between towns makes a long journey,

the absence of love can make a relationship

seem forever.

After the settling of stars are no longer in the sky,

what could possibly be more intense than love?

What could possibly be more drenching than hate?

Someone said, we can love all you want,

we can forgive with all our heart, and still,

love might not come to us.

When we believe we have given all we can give,

give more. Give until the silence of love is an overture

and the heart is a swelling of tides.

It is like wind-fall rising and settling.

...

Martin Willitts, Jr.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Martin Willitts, Jr. retired as a Senior Librarian in upstate New York and currently is a volunteer literacy tutor. He is a visual artist of Victorian and Chinese paper cutouts. Martin was nominated for 5 Pushcart and 3 Best Of The Net awards. He is the editor of Willet Press. (Update: 2014 the OPP nominated Martin's poem, Love is Breathing, for a Pushcart Prize.)

* * * * *

Jan Keough has done a remarkable job.  This series, Origami Poems Project, is a huge undertaking and from what I can make out they have published hundreds and hundreds of different little books.  If these six are any indication the Origami Poems Project may be quietly, slowly, one little book at a time, taking over the world.

All six of these chapbooks were swell.  Everyone at the office thought so.

origamipoems.com

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Sonnets - Bernadette Mayer (Tender Buttons Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Sonnets.  Bernadette Mayer.  25th Anniversary Edition.  Tender Buttons Press.  New York, New York.  2014.

Sonnets is a 25th Anniversary re-issue and rethink of Bernadette Mayer's ground-breaking and mind-expanding poetry.  It's as hot as a blow-torch.

Are we ever lucky.

Ottawa poet Amanda Earl could probably give a much better read of this text with her understanding of the history of both "women's" and "erotic" poetry.  She would be the first person I'd like to speak to about this book.

To me, these strange and illuminating sonnets sing love.

Sonnet

Love is a babe as you know and when you
Put your startling hand on my cunt or arm or head
Or better both your hands to hold in them my own
I'm awed and we laugh with questions, artless
Of me to speak so ungenerally of thee & thy name
I have no situation and love is the same, you live at home
Come be here my baby and I'll take you elsewhere where
You ain't already been, my richer friend, and there
At the bottom of my sale or theft of myself will you
Bring specific flowers I will not know the names of
As you already have and already will and already do
As you already are with your succinctest cock
All torn and sore like a female masochist that the ryhme
Of the jewel you pay attention to becomes your baby born

...

Bernadette Mayer was not fooling around when she got all this down.  She's intent on turning it all inside out just to get a better look at the beast.

These poems are fragments of "found poetry", re-imaginings of form and style, Mayer includes instructions on how to reconstruct her constructions.  Bernadette Mayer is a little like Heath Ledger's Joker, sometimes she just wants to see it all burn.

Clap Hands

I'll write you sonnets till you come
Home from school again, the music of your cave become
A stalagmitic presence, honey I don't have
An electronically regulated discharge tube that can emit
               extremely rapid, brief and brilliant flashes of
               light, such a squinting and twisting around
               as to disorder it's nice to divide a sonnet

This way when you might fuck me up the ass
On account of the presence of the bureau by the door
Cause of some song like the one by Tom Verlaine
Where he says adieu like a kid from Brooklyn

Tell like so cause me Bill loves you to not to know
Turn the hear to why over Bill me cause I'll know I you
Say and am to exist I not entranced pretty
Can't Bill with startling say Shakespeare myself that

Couplet I adore you it's my habit
I want manly things & should not, women come to me

...

Bernadette Mayer builds things up just so she can see how they tumble down, just so that she can put it all back together again, with precious intent.  She breaks up lines and the natural order of language and it startles the reader.  Sometimes it hits the reader like a brick to the head, she isn't kidding. Mayer cracks language apart to get inside to the meat, the meaning.  She is beautifully relentless.

Sonnet

Waiting for you to come back from a comedy show
You and I what do we do? We read Aristophanes
Because you are still in school. On the street
A crazed Hasidic man called you my husband, I am not

You are who I am pregnant, give me my kiss
You whom I often & silently come where you are
That I may be with you, we ought not to speak
At all like this for the women who are your brothers

Now we have a rest together and last & dream
Of the salt & pepper shakers & of the scary sisters
Of us who seem exempt chasing each other around
You knowing less than I cause I'm a formal mother

Not-son fuck me again
Close this night's seven windows

...

Sonnets is a crackerjack.  Many of the sonnets have titles, here are a few I loved: "Two Thousand Non-Interfering Ballet Dancers Get Rid of the Extra Witch", "The Handcuffing of Hermits Who Grab the Genital's Police", "The Complete Introductory Lectures on Poetry", and so on.  Mayer is a hoot.

Most of these poems are 25 years old, Mayers has added a few new poems, each as purposeful as the last.  This is one of those books where you can feel it vibrate in your hands, it is that vibrant.  Sonnets is a remarkable achievement, one hell of a book.

Bernadette Mayer

Photo by: Lawrence Schwartzwald

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mayer is the recipient of the 2014 Poetry Society of Shelley Memorial Award. Mayer is the author of more than two dozen volumes of poetry, including The Bernadette Mayer Reader, Midwinter Day, The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, and Poetry State Forest. Recently published are her works, The Helens of Troy, NY, Studying Hunger Journals and Ethics of Sleep. A former director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery and co-editor of the conceptual magazine 0 to 9 with Vito Acconci. Mayer has been a key figure on the New York poetry scene for decades.
Mayer has taught at Naropa Poetics Institute, New School for Social Research, College of Staten Island, and New England College. She has received grants and awards from: PEN American Center, Foundation for Contemporary Performing Art, the NEA, The Academy for American Poets, The Poetry Society of America, and American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Bernadette Mayer

Reads from New Directions' Time of Grief: Mourning Poems

March 7, 2013.  New Orleans

Video: Megan Burns

AND PLEASE NOTE that there is an adjunct volume entitled Please Add to This List, (Tender Buttons, 2014)

Please Add to This List is full of "experiments" and "responses" to Bernadette Mayer's Sonnets.  It is both a study-guide and a primer.  This would be a must-have for any poetry workshoppers, for poetry classes of any kind and for every reader who wants to supercharge their experience of reading Mayer's Sonnets.

tenderbuttonspress.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.

Dante's House - Richard Greene (Signal Editions/Vehicule Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Dante's House.  Richard Greene.  Signal Editions/Vehicule Press.  Montreal, Quebec.  2013.

The title poem of Richard Greene's fourth book of poetry, Dante's House, does take Today's book of poetry back to Sienna and the Il Palio.  And that is a great place to visit.

There is no feeling quite like the feeling one gets in Sienna.  It is where the old world, the really old world, meets the new world.  No city glows quite like Sienna when that sun sets all orangeyred over the roof tiles and the Tuscan hills.

The other eleven poems in Dante's House gave me jitterbug feet.  I had to get up and walk about my house after reading each of these poems.

These narratives fully, completely, inhabit the reader.  You are in prison.  You are at Yankee Stadium.  You are in Haiti.

Corrections

1.

My friend works medium security and says
of his mad charges, 'You can't be angry.
They're sick -- shouldn't be here.' To the near-sane,
he doles punishments when 'Fuck you, screw'
is prelude to a shank -- some soup spoon snatched
and ground against the whetstone of the bars,
a razor blade bound into a pencil's
eraser tip, or merely the handle
of a toothbrush made murder-one sharp.
And strange things: back in stir after
his biopsy a man threatened to force a pen
through the incision and crush his liver
unless given Tylenol Three. He settled for
Extra Strength and the promise of a doctor:
'I was just joking,' he added meekly,
knowing threats of self-harm bring sanctions too --
days apart in an observation cell,
diaper-clad and deprived of any thing
imagination could turn into a noose.
Others would cut themselves or even rip
open the skin and muscle with their hands;
one inmate slashed deeper than his scrotum,
poured blood and half his entrails on the floor;
luckless, he missed the artery and lived.
Some lifers, almost done, can no longer mount
the stairs to the range or have left their
wits at the scene -- time's muddled fugitives
who could not pick themselves from a line-up.
Beyond correction, a man with one leg
weighs 500 pounds and may no longer lift
himself. Torpid, he pisses and shits among
the blankets, cannot wash or move,
cuffed to a history of offences,
manslaughter (released) and then child rape.
His heart and kidneys wind down -- my friend,
tall as a linebacker, joins a staggering
scrimmage of guards and paramedics,
as they hoist the stretcher down stairwells
and across a lighted courtyard to the gate
where an ambulance waits to parole him.

...

Green so thoroughly inhabits  each world he explores that the poems become visceral experience for the reader.

These poems are visits to strange places, odes to friendship, musings on a "winter's God who mingles grace and grief."  This is one of those cases where Today's book of poetry just liked listening to Richard Greene talk.

Crooked Eclipses

     In Memory of James Gray Watson
     (1939-2010)


     Nativity, once in the main of light,
     Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crowned,
     Crooked eclipses 'gainst his glory fight,
     And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.

                                        - Shakespeare, Sonnet 60

New on the ground in Tulsa, you fought off
the boyishness of the newly hired prof
with a bow tie: you said, 'I want to look
different from the students,' and some old book
worm said, 'It makes you look different from
anyone', and so it did, added to the sum
of the things that made you -- the things clung to
by friends as now the sun-shadow takes you.

Once you showed me your surehanded father
surgeoning in photographs. A brother
and a son of yours took up scalpel and clamp
while your work lay under a table lamp,
five books mapping Yoknapatawpha,
the slippery Snopes and what Sartoris saw,
and, in the time I knew you, Matthiessen --
always gags on Killing Mr. Watson.

Austin was our place; din makers
over manuscripts, our jokes and whispers,
shenanigans through bookish afternoons
drawing reproachful looks over half-moons.
In the evenings, there was Johnny Walker Red
and things men say as they leave them unsaid.
Yet, clear spirit, you counselled me by poem,
recommended Frost for troubles back home:
you sent me to 'An Old Man's Winter Night',
while, to me, friendship was your gift outright.

Yesterday, your son checked your email,
read you my silly note, conveyed a hail
from your sickbed, sent your love, spoke plainly:
'In short, his condition worsens daily.'
Just pain and sleep: chemo becomes morphine
and seventy years of being have been:
I substitute have seen you for will see.
Tenses shift and I prepare for memory.

...

There is a tender elegance in the way Richard Greene looks at the world through his poet's gaze.  

There is a little bit of everything, awe and anger, beauty and brass.  The one thing you won't see in a Richard Greene poem is naivete.  He is never that.

Greene is worldly without being pompous, these erudite and articulate poems and never showy, they're knowledgeable.

Oils

Black and white and nationally portable,

a TV occupies half the kitchen table,

serves up The Edge of Night or Coronation Street,

as my mother, among copies of Vogue

and Chatelaine and The Daily News,

lays oils on the rough side of Masonite.

The brushes seem never to need replacing,

and the tubes of Winsor and Newton go

from year to year, the same ones never empty:

manganese blue hue, phthalo turquoise,

cobalt chromite, viridian, and terre verte,

purple lake, raw umber light, and Payne's grey.

Her gardens are decorative and terrible

as vined or beasted letters of a manuscript,

and undersea, whales and plankton and octopi

of equal proportion, as when sleeping

shortens the gap between dead and living.

Mind always elsewhere - on Adam Trask

and Mike Karr in mobbed up Monticello,

on Ena Sharples and Elsie Tanner,

the Barlows, all that marriage and murder

at Rover's Return - her automatic

touch making intricacies on the board,

shapes of memory from which she can

never turn away - a tiny brother

throttled by whooping cough, her father

weeping in the pantry, all the dailiness

of death in 1941. Thirteen then and never

right afterwards, except perhaps in oils.

...

Today's book of poetry liked visiting Dante's House and felt right at home.  Mr. Greene makes it all look so easy even when he knows life can be so sad.

Richard Greene

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richard Greene teaches Creative Writing and British Literature at the University of Toronto. His most recent biography Edith Sitwell: Avant-garde Poet, English Genius [2011] was widely acclaimed, and he has published three collections of poetry, including Boxing the Compass [2010], which won the Governer General's Award for Poetry. He lives in Cobourg, Ontario.

 

Richard Greene

Mississauga's National Poetry Month Event, 2012

Video:  Anna Yin

vehiculepress.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.

Transmitter and Receiver - Raoul Fernandes (Nightwood Editions)

Today's book of poetry:
Transmitter and Receiver.  Raoul Fernandes.  Nightwood Editions.  Gibsons, British Columbia.  2015.

This can't be a first book.  I won't have it.  Someone is lying.

Raoul Fernandes does not only arrive fully formed and brilliant, Transmitter and Receiver is simply scintillating.

Every page is a new adventure ending in some new sort of delight for the reader.

Fernandes has one of the most delightfully optimistic/pragmatic imaginations/personalities Today's book of poetry has ever encountered.

By Way Of Explanation

You have this thing you can only explain
by driving me out to the port at night
to watch the towering cranes moving containers
from ship to train. Or we go skipping stones
across the mirror of the lake, a ghost ship
in a bottle of blue Bombay gin by your side.
I have this thing I can only explain to you
by showing you a pile of computer hardware
chucked into the ravine. We hike down there
and blackberry vines grab our clothes as if to say,
Stop, wait, I want to tell you something too.
You have an old photograph you keep in your
bedside drawer. I have this song I learned
on my guitar. By way of clarification, you send
me a YouTube video of a tornado filmed up close
from a parked car. Or a live-stream from a public
camera whose view is obscured by red leaves.
I cut you a key to this room, this door.
There's this thing. A dictionary being consumed
by fire. The two of us standing in front of a Rothko
until time starts again. A mixtape that is primarily
about the clicks and hums between songs. What if
we walk there instead of driving? What if we just drive
without a destination? There's this thing I've always
wanted to talk about with someone. Now
with you here, with you listening, with all
the antennae raised, I no longer have to.

...

Dare I say it?  Raoul Fernandes is an optimist.  The silly fool believes in love and we here at Today's book of poetry love him for it.

He is a concerned and informed optimist.

This is splendid poetry.

Transmitter and Receiver is just the right mixture of confidence and naivete.  I think Raoul Fernandes is just like my dear friend Bean Salad -- smartest guy in the room (almost any room), but entirely too cool to be aware of it himself, or if he is, to let it bother him.

These poems are peppered with those seminal "aha!" moments, everywhere you look you find those "I get it!" epiphanies and suddenly the whole world makes just a little more sense.

When The Teeth Of The Gears Meet...

the music chimes, the bicycle
climbs the hill, the clock releases
a bird. The streetlight blinks, goes night
day night day night. My bed
is a giant reset button I hold down
until morning. When the teeth
of the dream meet the teeth of the morning
I pour myself a cup of numbers in the kitchen.
Daydream a wheel inside a wheel. Daydream
children running from the shore with cupped
phosphorescence that dies out before
they reach us. Rushing back to do it again.
And I am a child running toward myself
and the teeth of the memory meet the teeth
of the day meet the clock, the highway, the heart.
Or the gears don't touch, just spin like ceiling fans.
What's a day? asks the sun. What's night?
asks the moon. Will you send me
that beautiful book about asteroids?
I want my life to change.

...

Man, oh man, oh man.  This Fernandes cat really does sing.

About half way through my second reading of Transmitter and Receiver I called a team meeting of everyone here at Today's book of poetry.  I got everyone in a circle -- and then we read that sucker out.  Everyone took a turn.  Read a poem out loud, watched all the jaws in the room drop, pass the book to the next person, repeat.  More jaws.

Eventually, Billy, our sweeper, brought out bags of gold glitter and rained them down over us all while we danced in circles of glee.

Yes, Today's book of poetry loved this book.  In fact, this is the most exciting book of new poems since reading Kayla Czaga's For Your Safety Please Hold On.  

Someone at Nightwood Editions is doing a hell of a good job.

Mixtape
   
He collects his friends' broken Walkmans
and builds a flying machine out of them. Straps in
and launches from his rooftop in the fading light,
just after the crows have passed. These are the controls:
rewind, fast-forward, play and stop. All other variables
are left to the music, old mixes from friends. One of the tape's
ribbon is wrinkled in places from a recent unspooling.
It murmurs and crackles, but it still lifts the rickety machine.
Another tape contains, in the last empty minutes, rainfall,
a train in the distance. Someone says something he strains
to hear. At this particular height, the landscape is toy-like,
a miniature model, despite what all hell
he has been through down there. The blue eyes
of backyard swimming pools. A soccer field
like a green diary, locked. What all hell.
He coasts for a while in silence just above the streetlights
after the last tape clicks to its end. Lifted by something
approaching grace.

...

Raoul Fernandes certainly knows how to make an entrance.

"...nobody knows
what it means, but it's not like we are in the business

of meaning things..."
                                -from "Driftwood"

Raoul Fernandes has chops like Miles Davis and Transmitter and Receiver is his first masterpiece, with chops like these Today's book of poetry expects there will be many more.

Raoul Fernandes

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Raoul Fernandes has been writing poetry since childhood, and is involved in both online and offline writing communities. He completed the Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University in 2009. He was a finalist for the 2010 Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, and winner of the 2010 Sakura Award at the Vancouver International Cherry Blossom Festival. His poem “After Lydia” was recently adapted into a short film. He lives and writes in Vancouver, BC.

BLURBS
“What I receive from these transmissions is a convincing sweetness, a weird wisdom. This book reminds me of David Berman’s Actual Air, but it’s warmer. Raoul Fernandes writes like a night school teacher teaching us ‘something about night itself.’ It’s an engaging class, an occasionally mind-altering class, and I finished it feeling more hopeful and human.”
     — Nick Thran

It is rare to encounter a first book as wise and realized as Raoul Fernandes's Transmitter and Receiver. These poems thrum with tulip vending machines, mixtapes made by friends, apology letters to forest fires, emotionally intelligent ATMS. Fernandes repeatedly points to the relationships between all things: a Facebook friend request is "a conch shell left on your doorstep"; a mind is a "Walkman that [keeps] eating cassettes." Even machines aren't strangers -- no one's a stranger: the technologies are usually sympathetic and love is the amplifier.

     -- Jen Currin

"There's this thing," Raoul Fernandes tells us, that he can't "explain" -- but shows us with genuine poetic panache in this highly affecting collection. That "thing" is "circuit-frying, synesthesia-inducing" and the poems here -- quirky, lyrical, humorous, aching, romantic, magical -- reveal it, each one "a little moon / you can pocket." Here, "night flowers open with ease / in the politician's garden" and "Love disperses like light / across the Alaskan wilderness." Transmitter and Receiver is a pure delight. I savour its kinetic imagination, its subtle intelligence, its palpable charm.

     -- Russell Thornton

nightwoodeditions.com 

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