Sink Review

Sarabande Books, 2010

When words have double meanings, each one chases the other like a shadow. No matter the usage, the word can never be completely rid of the secondary definition or even which one is the secondary definition. For me, one of the loveliest characters in Chinese is the character 疼, which can be used to mean “hurts” or “aches,” usually physically, such as “I have a headache.” It can also be used as “to love dearly,” with an almost unconditional tenderness and poignancy: “One sees how dearly her father loves her through the sacrifices he makes.” The two meanings merge into each other and surface through until it becomes impossible to tell which is the ghost of which, reading as immeasurably truthful to living and loving, both physical and emotional, both sad and hopeful.

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Action Books, 2011

Early in Peter Richards’ Helsinki, a persistent question forms: where—or what—is Helsinki? Helsinki is clearly more than a city in Finland here, to state the obvious. But the actual meaning with which Richards endows the name is harder to pin down. Helsinki is a liminal space where all these poems occur seemingly simultaneously. Each poem, untitled and comprised of a run-on sentence, flows into another other like ectoplasm. These poems walk through walls. And if they are indeed ghosts, whose spirits are they? These poems are the final haunting of a life remembered, a life slowly pieced together, poem by poem.

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The Song Cave, 2011

Starting at Broadway Bridge and winding down all the way to the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, Andy Fitch’s Island is a 240+ block walk through Manhattan. Much longer than the sixty minute, sixty sentence walks that make up his previous book Ten Walks / Two Talks (with Jon Cotner, out last year from Ugly Duckling Presse), this walk fits perfectly into a smaller format and, as such, is the fifteenth release from The Song Cave. This Massachusetts-based press publishes chapbooks from an eclectic range of poets in small signed and numbered editions with simple yet uniform covers. The Song Cave’s focus is, refreshingly, on self-contained, chapbook-length projects presented in a non-decorative, work-first manner. Fittingly, Fitch presents this particular walk in a stripped down, real-time style, with a series of paragraphed fragments transcribed from the tape recording of his thoughts and observations during the trek through the city.

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Cleveland State University Press, 2011

Grief and public grieving is often associated with human weakness and morbidity. It is not elegant to go weeping through the streets, nor do people in our country dress in black for any longer than the length of a wake or funeral. We are expected to remain solemn while grieving. However, here arrives a poet who has turned these emotions around to face their grievers. Emily Kendal Frey’s The Grief Performance treads through morbidity with love, poise, and bravery. Perhaps what Frey’s poems know that we do not know: “Today is the anniversary/of every other day. Insofar as/no one knows/anything new/about love.” Grief has an opposite and also a true match: love. Frey’s often sparsely-written poems tell us this—that grief and love have more in common than we typically acknowledge.

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Octopus Books, 2009

In The Difficult Farm, Heather Christle creates a parallel universe where the everyday weaves into the fantastical, where the things we don’t understand are magnified and elevated (“Yesterday, looking at a cinderblock’s/ reflection—lightest grey on golden floor—/ I finally understood painting. I was irate!”). This is a world of absurd magical realism; a world where men have “phantom antlers” which they try to groom, but end up grooming air; where relatives are (not represented by, but are) the “small green dots” on maps that glow and “move around”; and unmade birthday cakes resemble schoolmates we never met. The poems delight in oddities, inviting us to celebrate life as a collection of oddities. There is something beautiful and brave in the way The Difficult Farm embraces the small, strange things we are, exclaiming: see, everything may be weird, but everything is ours.

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Birds, LLC

The language in Chris Tonelli’s The Trees Around is sparse and direct, creating via the act of seeing. This landscape is a permeable one where poems merge together with image-rooted narrative: trees, birds, and loneliness. The prose poems’ melancholy is imperceptible yet organically rigged, posing a question to the reader: should they run after the heavenly or be content with the here and now? Within the poems contained in the rather shockingly pink exterior, we find the speaker in their physical condition, ruminating over the more real than real and looking beyond it, pushing forward from the circumstances that attempt to keep them contained within the mind’s island. It is by seeing through the material landscape that the reader finds the immaterial “I.” In “Lament W/Starling” Tonelli writes:

“Maybe if you stare at the Common a little longer,”
one of my friends says, “it’ll fucking bloom.
Let’s go.” Maybe if you’d
stare at the Common, I thought to myself,
you’d bloom.

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Action Books, 2010

(I Heard That) Lonesome Whistle Blow

Abraham Smith surveyed the poetic landscape and noticed a gaping hole left by the tragic-hero musician, Hank Williams. But how to capture the man’s contradictions? Eleven number one hits between 1948 and 1953, and yet could not proficiently read or write music? How to capture the biography of a broken man who left a legacy of failed marriages and tales mired in drugs and alcohol? How to capture a man famous for singing, “I’ve never seen a night so long/ When time goes crawling by/ The moon just went behind the clouds/ To hide its face and cry?” In Hank, Smith wisely avoids the temptation to rewrite a Hank Williams biography and instead goes for something much closer to the bone. Smith’s Hank oozes the essence of the joys and heartbreaks of the man found dead at 29.

While Williams sang he never saw a “night so long” with “time crawling by” Smith’s book reads like a torrent of days and nights caught up in the rage of an unstoppable flash flood. The book is 129 pages of pure lyrical gush and rush. Every paged packed with images and narratives piling onto top of each other and seemingly spinning out of control. Yet this “out of control” is the charm of Smith’s book. There a rawness that Smith captures by giving his poems freedom to roam, freedom to digress. In Three Poems, Ashbery decides a “truer” way is to leave everything out, Smith’s book is a valid argument for putting everything in. To qualify “everything” that is every off-note, every failed song, every whistle on a country road with the sun setting the sky orange, but everything is not necessarily “the facts.”

The book, at first glance, looks like one long continuous poem, however Smith separates the poems with what he refers to as “gibberish cuss.” Here’s the way the book begins,

	//(@(@(

	call him pile
	of crushed oysters before
	the road crew drags
	it’s slick kid and flat and hard
	on the eyes it’s like it’s glazed
	with rock salt penny candy
	and the stuff that breaks new neighs
	from knackered oldies
	and sweat from rapt fear

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Ugly Duckling Presse

The poems in Ben Fama’s chapbook Aquarius Rising expose a narrator trapped somewhere in the commingling worlds of pop-surrealism and nerdologyy. Do these worlds ever commingle? Apparently they do. The urgent voice in the poems—especially in “Girl,” “Angel Youth,” and “Glitter Pills”—resides in the world of dreams and desire, both staples of this sleek collection.

While some of Fama’s lines are permeated by a post-adolescent angst, the poems themselves—which invoke imagery of the planets and the sea—often radiate with a cinematic sheen that makes his world seem glossily appealing: “do you forget like I do /the middle name of a cloud /you sometimes loved?” he writes in “Terrarium.” This type of unguarded delicacy yields attractively to Fama’s smart-ass intonation, bequeathing to the poems an exceptional balance between fearlessness and unpredictability. Yet Fama sometimes seems to be a precocious student of indulgent hipsterdom, making the collection feel like an odd collage of pop culture and modern fetishism. Somehow the poems lend themselves well to a barely-masked narcissism that makes some of his verses sound like pages ripped out of your high school diary:

You had red hair and wanted us to lay
Your clothes were soft but I didn’t want to
…
Did you pour hot lava in the game console?

and in the title poem, “Aquarius Rising”:

give yourself
         a kiss
             because
                    you’re awesome

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Wave Books

The Duplicity of Donnelly

When I first heard about Timothy Donnelly, a friend sneered and referred to his first book as, “the one with the really difficult-to-pronounce title.” Donnelly’s second book, titled, The Cloud Corporation certainly rolls out of the mouth more easily than Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit. Consequently, it is an ordinary human flaw to criticize the complex, and certainly, one must note Donnelly’s resume: prestigious teaching position at Columbia, editor of the Boston Review, published by the widely-admired Wave Books, the two page New York Times Book Review. I can only see the Donnelly who, so honored to have been asked to read for The Stain of Poetry Reading Series at the Bushwick Literary Festival this summer, happily sat in a 100 degree, poorly-ventilated room at the Market Hotel to read two hours past schedule as sweat poured off his forehead and onto his reading material. This is not to say that because he has risen to a specific level of prestige, that he should only be expected to read in a cushy air-conditioned university. Donnelly is not just a summary of accomplishments. He isn’t just some over-accomplished poet who people are unreasonably going gaga over. In fact, this is what makes Donnelly compelling. Donnelly’s poems and Donnelly himself possess a duplicity. His poems make the world a more human and less created place. There is a natural and genuine quality to Donnelly that I don’t feel with every poet.

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LRL e-editions, 2010

Floating in the middle of one of the last pages in Elena Rivera’s 2000 collection Unknowne Land is a quote, italicized, isolated as if it were errant verse, disconnected and at best epigraphic. From Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, Rivera versifies Woolf’s prose:

			We start transparent and then the cloud thickens.
			All history backs our panes of glass.

The foreboding nature of unavoidable mortality aside, Rivera creates a wonderful chiasmus finding in another’s prose a nicely crafted couplet of verse and, thus, finding in these new lines of poetry something of general arch that has resonated throughout the rest of her work, commingling themes of history, memory, and time. The passage from one form to another—the imprint that one genre or medium may have on another genre or medium—continues in Remembrance of Things Plastic.

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