 The first poem in Donna Vorreyer’s To Everything There Is — “In the Encyclopedia of Human Gestures” — begins with the speaker cleaning up a distasteful mess: “Kneeling again at the altar of my dog’s shit.” It’s such an ordinary action: familiar, mundane, unpleasant, necessary. As the title suggests, the poem explores what it means to inhabit a human body, its intricate and holy machinations: … what better evidence of the divine than the workings of the body, all its wastes and its contortions, the joint’s ball and socket rolling with the bend, the foot’s tension arching to balance on the toes, the orchestration of the hands that comb the grass to scoop the mess, the same hands that will later survey this aging flesh, the same hands that will run soft across the lush landscape of your body … Such a smart move here, to begin with scooping pet poop and ending with making love. It’s how our days go, how our lives proceed. Shit and sex and so much else, the domestic and the delirious. As the opening piece in the collection, it performs the titular promise: this book will be expansive, inclusive, reaching for the all in our lives. A truism about poetry — or possibly just a true fact — is that language is entirely incapable of doing what we ask of it, and what we ask of it, over and over, is to keep us alive. To stave off death. This is the tension a poem holds, and the best ones vibrate from it. “I struggle to name the ache that godzillas its way / through the bright cities of my bones,” the speaker of one poem offers. It’s a sentence that does exactly what it is lamenting its inability to do: gives language to grief. Grief is ever present in this collection from Sundress Publications, Vorreyer’s speakers mourn lost parents, dead animals, past lovers, past selves. Wisely, the book resists easy answers or all-too-simple moments of healing. The next-to-last poem ends with these words: “If you must be resigned to anything, be resigned to this—so much of anything is completely out of your hands.” Talk about faint consolation. But this is not to suggest that To Everything There Is is a bleak book. Not at all. It merely avoids the facile. This, too, is the project of poetry, right? To render the human condition without reducing it to the mushiness of abstraction. Vorreyer demonstrates a careful eye for image; she is a skilled observer and recorder of experience. In one poem, a teacher leads a group of students through a museum: We arrive at the dinosaur remains, the reconstructed bones majestic, scaffolded with bolt and steel. We learn to tell carnivore from herbivore by the teeth, which bones lingered in pits of tar, how the creatures thrived, but could not abide change. Spurred on by its narrative, the poem moves through the museum and the speaker’s internal and external reactions with precision and care, and the reader lingers in the language, taking pleasure in those moments of doubling in which observed details yield metaphorical resonance. Formally, this book is wide-ranging. It’s Vorreyer’s third full-length collection (plus she’s also published seven chapbooks), and she’s most certainly a poet still willing to try new things, to push her range. There are poems in couplets, poems in tercets, longer single-stanza poems, poems that use indentation to cascade down the page, shorter poems that are sonnets or sonnet-adjacent. There are multiple centos and a Golden Shovel. All this variance in form gives the book a kind of instability, in a good way; a reader can never get too comfortable. A poem titled “Ebb Tide” opens with this: The first blood-rush of breath, and it’s morning again. The insistent and terrible light throws patterns on the bed. Love, it’s time to wake, leave this comfort and re-enter the world. It’s a pretty good metaphor for the reading experience this book delivers. There are patterns, but they are not predictable. There is love, but it will soon be time to leave. There is darkness, but there is also morning. The light returns, but sometimes it’s terrible. These poems get a lot of mileage from such juxtaposition of opposites; many of them begin with a speaker reckoning with contradiction or with the reversal of expected associations. One poem is called “When you see us not talking at the restaurant, do not make assumptions about us”; another begins thus: “Others praise the soft eye / of the antelope, but the miracle / of your body is more worthy.” Vorreyer challenges both herself and her readers to look beneath the surface of her images, to think beyond our usual expectations. One point this book makes again and again is that while the body may hold impossible quantities of grief, it is also and always a source of pleasure. In a poem titled “The Opposite of Amnesia” (is that a definition of poetry, or perhaps only an aspiration?), the speaker tries to work her way through grief. First, she considers escape, via sailing, but is stymied by the weather. Then she moves on to the act of making, only to find frustration again: “I deftly string a thousand shells before / they tumble and leave me weeping on the pier. / I have been nothing but brine and iron for weeks.” In the end, she does find the solace she seeks in the arms of a lover: “We search for omens on the beach, sigh / and dive together into a surf of tangled sheets.” Mortality is inevitable, these poems teach us, and grief is inevitable, but it is the warmth of human connection that sustains us. And perhaps that, in the end, is the project of these poems: to find — and celebrate — the moments of connection and beauty and pleasure amid so much loss. Amorak Huey’s fourth book of poems is Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress, 2021). Co-author with W. Todd Kaneko of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2018) and the chapbook Slash / Slash (Diode, 2021), Huey teaches writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.
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As I age, poems are akin to fights. At 52, win, lose, or draw, they are all going to hurt. Thus, the question becomes “Is it worth it?” and, no, more often than not, it isn’t - writing or reading them. Very occasionally, it is, though. “Famous Train Wrecks of Ohio” by Bill Abbott is one of those rare times. I suppose I should state somewhere around this point that I have known Bill for a couple of decades now, and we’ve shared stages in a couple of states. I should also state that all of that would mean bupkis if his poems weren’t worth the hurt. The opener, “Starting Over,” establishes where we all are, “forgetting that a life happens with or without what I have …" Here is honesty, the truth. Life goes on, often in spite of our actions, careless as to our intent. Life is also mundane, and the titles of some of his poems reflect this - “Another First Date” and “Fear of Flight” - but the poems … brother, nothing is mundane there. If you read this, you're in for a Hell of a fight. Is it worth it? Damn right, it is. Jim Sells is a stagehand, former Marine, slam poet, music columnist, and sports columnist.
 In this deeply personal, often experimental debut collection, David Hanlon contemplates the elliptical nature of trauma and how language alternately diminishes and amplifies our place in the world. The poems in this chapbook remind us that experience is not a linear emotional event: it is a psychological organ that lives and breathes outside our bodies where the battle lines drawn from memory grapple with waves of premonition, and where pain transforms into promise. Spectrum of Flight is everything a full-length collection should be: tender, ambitious, and relentless in its pursuit of meaning. From the collection’s opening poem, I’ll never forget the dead fox on the roadside with its guts hanging out, Because I’d never seen a fox on my council estate before Because I was seven or eight years old at the time Because the first time I did / it was daylight / and it was dead Because I too / only come out in the dark Someone who has never experienced reinforced trauma asks, what is it about the human heart that returns it to the point of trauma? What does the heart seek in the repetition of traumatic experience? These are the wrong questions. The human body has a center of gravity that allows it to move with relative safety within the world and so does the human heart. The heart does not move toward trauma. Trauma is a thief that steals the heart’s center of gravity, then uses elliptical trajectories to masquerade as a safety mechanism to keep the heart isolated, to keep it coming back to trauma’s point of origin. Webster defines the word because as “reason next explained.” It is a word perpetually seeking its counterpart in language, a word always in motion. Poet Lyn Hejinian in The Rejection of Closure argues that repetition “challenges our inclination to isolate, identify, and limit the burden of meaning given to an event (the sentence or line),” and I think this is the argument Hanlon makes in this poem, which makes it the ideal departure point. I’m not convinced that isolating a traumatic experience makes it less impactful. The idea seems rather absurd. Rather than seeking to limit or contain the impact and meaning of the experiences being carried, Hanlon’s opening poem seeks to give them what their asking for, to find the counterpoint of these traumas and extinguish their gravity. If words had medicinal properties, because would be the antidote to isolated. The repetition of the word at the beginning of every line reaches across the white space between lines to connect these instances of experience, to make them less alone. The poem slips and slides between levels of memory and perspective, inviting other points of trauma to speak, “Because one time a bully / from entrance to exit / held a penknife against my gut.” The poem’s movement between instances of physical conflict, flashes of memory, and sudden moments of realization sets up one of the central themes in the collection: trauma isn’t confined within the distant boundaries of memory. It can not be witnessed from a distance; its gravitational pull demands our complete attention. In the physical world it’s a terrifying reality, but this is the field of poetry where we are called upon to make peace with the unthinkable. In poetry thoughts and language become malleable objects we control. The elliptical nature of the collection allows Hanlon to draw upon all the possibilities, to make elegant juxtapositions, to liberate experiences from their place in time, and to break the rules of conventional syntax. It’s the later in which I think Hanlon particularly excels, elevating his poems from the sterile “documentary realism” that often drains narrative poetry of its energy. His poems consistently display careful thought to the orientation of the poem on the page. It’s a tendency that is both reassuring and heartbreaking. It reminds us this a voice that, from a young age, learned to choreograph language and body presentation as a basic survival skill. Spectrum of Flight is the poetry of Hanlon’s autobiographical experience. Sexuality, bigotry, depression, heartbreak, and personal recovery (the return of the center of gravity) all become physical forces in this collection. In the poem “On seeing Derek Jarman’s ‘Sebastiane’ when coming of age” we find Hanlon’s speaker in the midst of adolescent torment: Batty boy Batty Boy! BATTY BOY! B A T T Y B O Y There is nothing childish about the promise of violence. Upon the kind of examination only memory committed to the page can provide we understand the word is being used with enough force to break it. It breaks because of the speed at which it moves. It breaks because its volume can not be contained. It breaks because eventually it hits its target and shatters leaving its victim with a belly full of shrapnel. The poem continues and eventually Hanlon finds his way to a stunning discovery, “I don’t know how I stumbled / on such a film in my family home.” The film in question is Derek Jarman’s “Sebastiane.” The juxtaposition of the threat of violence and the actualized violence experienced by Saint Sebastian in the film is one the poem doesn’t make lightly and in the middle of torment, there is a moment of solace when Hanlon discovers “defined muscle / laid up against jagged rocks / softened into tender-made beds / where any head such as mine” would be “comforted / as one is by the sight of new life in spring.” This particular passage reminded me of poet Charles Olson when he argued that a poem conducts energy from the source to the reader and that “the poem itself must, at all points, be a high energy construct and, at all points, an energy discharge.” Syntax allows us to exert control, take risks, and – eventually – break words and rearrange their energy. Within the context of Hanlon’s poem, it also reminds me that a high energy construct can be quiet, contemplative, and revelatory. In “Moon as masked self” Hanlon’s use of the diptych presents us with two forces working against each other, weaving in and out of each other’s trajectory: the left side of the poem a tender love letter to the self, the right side a righteous litany. Again, we are lulled by the elliptical sway of the poem until the poem’s final reconciliation, Don’t leave me here any longer I can’t keep up this pretense I can’t keep on shining just to be seen Writer Hannah Gadsby once said that ‘coming out’ is not the point of trauma, it is the accumulation of trauma. It’s the inability to reside any longer on the border between the visible and the erased. When I came to the end of “Moon as masked self” I immediately recalled Hanlon’s opening image of the fox on the roadside. I recalled the importance of the image of light throughout these poems, the image of things being seen, and the threat that comes with being seen by others (in the classroom, in the sport’s apparel store, on the street), but most of all I’m reminded of the existential threat of not being seen (like the fox). A person does not shine to be seen. A person shines because. A person does not come out to be seen. A person comes out because. Voice is not the rejection of silence; it is the rejection of being silenced and it is one of the most compelling features of Spectrum of Flight. Spoken with certainty and compassion for personal experience and gut wrenching heartbreak, these poems value movement to and away from the source. It is, in every way, the high-energy construct Charles Olson was talking about. *With gratitude to the following essays “Projective Verse” by Charles Olson and “The Rejection of Closure” by Lyn Hejinian. ***
David Hanlon is from Cardiff, Wales, and currently living in Bristol, England. He is training part-time as a counsellor/therapist. You can find his work online at Riggwelter Press, Dirty Paws Poetry Review, Into The Void, Boston Accent Lit, Yes, Poetry, Barren Magazine & Royal Rose Magazine, among others. You can follow him on twitter @David Hanlon13 Julia Beach Anderson received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and a Master of Fine Arts from the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa. She lives and works in New England as a graphic designer and content writer. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Occulum, Barren Magazine, and Flypaper Lit.  By: Jill Mceldowney Lindsey Novak’s debut chapbook is snakes and mirrors, “sexless angels,” blue skies, mothers and daughters, Edens and “cum on gold teeth.” The chapbook works to situate the reader in a world at odds with itself, a world where God competes with woman, a world where mother is pitted against daughter, and where woman battles herself as defined by these violences. This is a book about healing, about navigating the aftermath of the traumatic relationships that one has with religion, with family, and with the self. Much like the title of the chapbook insists, in the world Novak builds for her reader, healing can only be achieved through reliving the re-loop of trauma—like a child parroting back its first words to its mother, Novak’s echoes teach us how to speak. Echolalia investigates the nonlinear, often disordered path toward healing after trauma. As a reader, as a human, I cherish honesty and this book, in its investigation of the nonlinear process of healing, is as honest as they come. The speaker in these poems is brash, rough, real, honest about their lived experience and though they often speak with an attitude of disconnection, an attitude that shows its teeth and says “so what?”—the urgency in the poems is such that the reader is pierced by the vulnerability of the speaker’s voice and the tendency for self annihilation: “I’m doing drugs again so that I will feel less betrayed by my body, be less inside this space.” (Gerburah) Novak subverts religion and deconstructs the monotheistic ideology in order to investigate what it means to live beyond gender roles. The world Novak builds for us is godless and haunted by a semblance of a deity built by sin, generational shame. Novak makes it clear—this Baptist guilt is blood deep. Her speaker is one such who has been betrayed by religion, mother, their own body: “My trigger lives deep inside me, with Baptist guilt, shame. I forgot the new moon yesterday & then I forgot my own name.” (Iconography) Guilt becomes so prolific that the speaker cannot even remember their own name. The language is simple but staggering, evidenced by such lines as “I collect mother figures” (Dead Names) “I’m tired of not being taken seriously” (What it Feels Like to Puncture a Vein). Through the voyage of text, the speaker learns to be both mother and God to themself. By its end, the book sings notes of both hopefulness and apprehension. Who could blame this speaker after all? Who wouldn’t expect them to brace for the echo’s rebound? Novak recognizes the infallible process of healing, the way it fails and the way that, though one loop of trauma / grief may close, the wound remains open: “I healed my own pneumonia. reformed my broken bones, & every time I go home, I have to cleanse the negativity from my blood” (A Total Witch Hunt). At the heart of Echolalia is a desire to understand conflict, cruelty, and the misunderstanding of humankind. Now, more than ever, we need a book like this in order to serve as mirror for the way we encounter and manage the complex dualities within our social order. Novak has gifted us with a splendid debut that is sensitive, thorny, defiant and disobedient. This book will stun you into returning to it again and again. Lindsey Novak is a writer who followed the sun west from her native Missouri Ozarks to the dusty Arizona East Valley. She teaches composition for Arizona State University and her work appears in The Fourth River, The Rumpus, Atticus Review, Angel City Review, Puerto del Sol, and is forthcoming in Chattahoochee Review and Stonecoast Review. She is a 2019 Best of the Net nominee and her chapbook, Echolalia, is available from dancing girl press.
Jill Mceldowney is the author of the chapbook Airs Above Ground (Finishing Line Press). She is a founder and editor of Madhouse Press. Her previously published work can be found in journals such as Vinyl, Prairie Schooner, Muzzle, the Sonora Review, Whiskey Island and other notable publications.  By: Julia Beach Anderson In his essay Between Things: On the Ode, poet Stanley Plumley argues, “whatever else an ode is, whether it praises or muses, we think of it as a lyric with size – whether in actual length or imaginative displacement,” and while reading Tyler Truman Julian’s Wyoming: The Next Question to Ask (to Answer), with its central metaphors and unconventional tumble from one poem to the next, I kept coming back to that idea: a lyric with size. As Linda Gregerson also notes, the “enduring feature” of the ode is its occasion, not its form. That isn’t to say this collection sacrifices form for the sake of occasion. Julian’s poems offer stunning symmetry, imaginative syntax, and a sharp intelligence guiding the expansion and contraction of language. Pragmatism struggles with sentimentality, but not against it. Identity is unabridged, yet divided at its core when both speaker and poet assert their desire on the page.
“West is just west / and it never runs out,” Sarah Suzor writes in The Principle Agent. It a quote Julian selected to preface the collection and its idea of immensity is felt throughout the collection. “West” is also the wellspring of frontier mythology in the United States, a demonstration of Manifest Destiny: the constant expansion of democracy and capitalism across the North American continent. It lies at the root of our sense of “American identity,” a longing for expansion in a world that, with its advanced technology and mobility, feels like it’s getting smaller. This is where we find the speaker in the collection’s opening poem. Wyoming has a little more than half a million people; its around 563, 626, it’s just easier to say half a million. All of us are spread out across 97, 914 square miles, about 5 people per mile, but your closest neighbor might really be 15 miles away. Immediately we are told that limitations have been imposed. Wyoming’s physical expansion has been curtailed and the people who make up its population, much like cattle on a ranch, have been individually accounted for, but are also reduced to an idea, a single herd of “half a million.” We have the capacity to recognize them as individuals – the speaker wants us to know this – but not the desire to carry the distinction forward. A choice has been made to round down, to reduce the number, to homogenize the group. It’s a choice that sets up one of the abiding juxtapositions in the collection: the heart’s desire to connect on an intimate level with one person, occasionally manifesting as the desire to connect directly with the reader, and the psyche’s inclination to distance itself from the herd and sublimate completely with the land. From this point forward we come to understand that capacity is easy; desire is more difficult. For the human beast, desires are myriad. Decisions require us to harness our desires, often suppressing or outright rejecting desire and diminishing our willingness to see the act through. It’s why someone dreams of moving beyond the borders of where they are, but is restrained by the pangs of imminent loss. In another poem Julien writes, “There is a fear, / in the isolation of a state, / where all know all, but hardly see one another, / that you will be forgotten.” In Julian’s Wyoming the simple act of seeing someone becomes an occasion worthy of a story to be told among friends who share gossip, activity reports, and conspiracy theories. To be unseen or unmentioned risks being unmade. In Julian’s poem Wyoming, the speaker’s spinning presence forces the stars to “burn a little brighter / just for you” while “flowers wilt in the artificial light,” but the euphoric sense of intensity he finds in the landscape comes with a steep price: the pain of isolation, leaving him to hope to be born again not as a person, but as a thing: “as highways, as prayer cards, as beer, as memory / as all things that connect me to you, / just you.” Of course the stars don’t burn brighter for one person over another, but it certainly feels true and in a sparsely-populated landscape, it’s easy to feel umbilical connections to the land and sky – to see the stars differently and to believe they see you. To be seen is to be remembered and like the star in the sky, the speaker burns brighter in the line of sight: he also burns brighter “just for you,” suspending for a brief moment feelings of isolation. Of all the poems in the collection, Haying is one I recommend spending time with. It’s the first poem in the collection where I felt the poet, as opposed to the speaker, step in and shift our perspective. It’s all about patterns, geometry, Spilled diesel around the pump. Beautiful, tragic, money. “But the hay’s good this year.” Spit. It’s about screwing up, missing corners, being too late, “I lost the pattern.” Spit This poem introduces a new authoritative voice to the collection, one that threads in and out of subsequent poems. When we refer to patterns and geometry, we know we’re speaking directly about landscape and agriculture, weather and human nature, but, in this poem, we’re also talking about language and desire. At this point I returned to Plumley’s assertion: a lyric with size. I also thought of G.M. Hopkins and John Keats and their ability to “build vertically” within a poem. Wyoming: The Next Question to Ask (to Answer) is also a collection of patterns, voices in poems that edit themselves as they move down the page; and geometry, four distinct sections arranged within the collection, calling and answering to each other. Occasionally a voice reaches out in direct address to the reader, a surplus of emotion that registers outside the defined lines of the poem echoing the “[s]pilled diesel around the pump.” When Julian writes, “I want you to understand / where the others don’t get it,” we sense that both speaker and poet are addressing the you of the poem as well you, the reader. I still talk poetry to people who don’t get it, (or they do) but that’s haying (or is it). In his introduction to Ritsos in Parenthesis, Edmund Keeley writes, “[t]he two signs of the parenthesis are like cupped hands facing each other across distance, hands that are straining to come together, to achieve a meeting that would serve to reaffirm human contact between isolated presences.” Again, we return to the struggle between desire (to come together) and capacity (the inability to do it). Cupped hands will never be parallel lines laying side by side. It’s a structure that seeks closure, but by its own nature rejects it. Parentheses are meant to be filled with ideas or instances of emotion that don’t quite fit the line or would otherwise disrupt the thought. There is no syntax more capable of expressing the pain of separation than a line break followed by parentheses. It’s an idea beautifully expressed in Julian’s The Next Question: The next question to ask (to answer), to be forgot: ( ?) Here the first parenthesis lets us know the answer will not lie parallel with the question – that it might bring clarity, but not resolution. In all likelihood, the answer will be perpendicular to the question: the lines of the question and the lines of the answer crossing each other at a fixed point in time and space, but moving in two directions like water from the continental divide. The second parenthesis let us know we have arrived a thing forgotten or erased from our line of sight, perhaps something that was born unutterable. It lies before us confined within the parenthesis like a state within its borders or like a dissolving face cupped between the hands that hold it. It is something we can sense, but can not know it well enough to commit it to memory or call it to the line. Julian writes, as the final couplet of the collections first poem, “One might ask, naturally: / Who does leave this place and why?” It’s a recurring question and one the poet never answers, and yet there is great satisfaction to be found for both the poet and the reader because finding the answer isn’t the objective. It is enough that the question is the occasion around which the poems are built. It is the question that leads us to answers that don’t belong to it. That is the beauty of the ode. It takes us in unexpected directions, forces us to move in gigantic leaps, and, like Wyoming: The Next Question to Ask (to Answer), it always brings us home. *** A debt of gratitude is owed to the following essays from Radiant Lyre. I do not have the words to express how highly I recommend this book for any writer who wants to learn more about the lyric. Stanley Plumley, “Between Things: On the Ode,” Radiant Lyre, edited by David Baker and Ann Townsend (Saint Paul, Graywolf Press, 2007) “Ode and Empire,” Linda Gregerson. Radiant Lyre, edited by David Baker and Ann Townsend (Saint Paul, Graywolf Press, 2007) *** Tyler Truman Julian is a native of Wyoming, residing in New Mexico, where he is a graduate student, studying creative writing in New Mexico State University’s MFA Program. Though he currently lives in the desert, his work tends to focus on the areas of boom and bust, cold, isolation, and hard living that make up the American West. Julia Beach Anderson received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and a Master of Fine Arts from the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa. She lives and works in New England as a graphic designer and content writer. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Occulum, Barren Magazine, and Flypaper Lit.  By: Julia Beach Anderson
Guided by my first inspiration I conceived another thinker, a naked man, seated on a rock, his fist against his teeth, he dreams. The fertile thought slowly elaborates itself within his brain. He is no longer a dreamer, he is a creator. – Auguste Rodin In front of the Cleveland Museum of Art, resting in a courtyard for over a century as though spellbound by a mystical power, is a man carrying the weight of the world inside his mind. His expression never changes and though naked, the upper half of his body remains an ideal reflection of the philosopher poet: shoulders broad as winter, muscles thick with resistance, and a profile to rival Dante. Yet, unlike Dante, who passed through the gates of the Inferno and descended on foot with Virgil through the circles of Hell, this man can not walk. If granted a miracle by his creator and given the ability to move his muscles, he would find his “shrapnel” legs unable to make the journey after being damaged by a blast of dynamite tied to his pedestal on March 24, 1970. He is The Thinker. To his creator, Auguste Rodin, he was known as The Poet. In Darren Demaree’s new collection of poems, “Bombing the Thinker,” he is the central metaphor: a damaged thinker around which violence, both contained and unleashed, transforms the landscape. Leonard Bernstein once wrote that our reply to violence would be “to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.” It’s a statement I thought of frequently while reading “Bombing The Thinker,” not only because so much of the collection interrogates the transformative nature of violence, but because the act of writing poetry is, itself, a violent act. As poet Josh Bell said in an interview with Washington Square Review, “when you break the line, you control all space and time.” That’s heady stuff and there is no better place in which that kind of power could rest than in the hands of poet Darren Demaree. In the poem “Blown Up By Radical Protestors” he writes, How much salvation could they dislodge with their bomb placed between The Thinker’s legs? This was dark times they wanted filled with light? He lost legs & would have seen his penis dart down the stairs While it seems redundant to blow the legs off a man who is condemned to sit for eternity, it is the simplicity of the act that renders it spectacular. The Thinker, in his solemn repose, appears both unaffected and overly burdened by his surroundings. As a statue he is immune to the post-Vietnam, Cold War chaos that sent shockwaves through American culture on the nightly news, but as The Thinker he is cast in the role of symbol and gatekeeper of the ruling class comfortably resting behind the locked gates of their privilege where money ensured their children would not return from combat with broken bodies. As Demaree notes, it isn’t satisfaction the statue’s bombers sought, it was salvation, literal preservation from ruin. Here, salvation is a thing to be “dislodged” from the space between the legs of the statue and the pedestal he rests upon, between the thing that is admired and the structure that elevates it. It is not only the blast of dynamite, but also the spark of separation that illuminates the darkness of our predicament. It is a theme that Demaree returns to throughout the collection. In what is the most tender poem in the collection, “A Damaged Thinker #40,” Demaree imagines an alternate universe in which the now Damaged Thinker has the ability to chart his own course and follow his own desire. Demaree imagines that he “would simply leave” if he were capable and reject his role as “a landscape / for the Ohio academics” who discuss and debate his worth. In a world full of sculptures, there are a limited number of Rodins and among that circle, there are a limited number of Thinkers. Yet among all the casts of The Thinker, there is only one who has become The Damaged Thinker. The act of violence that renders him immovable, less perfect is the same act of violence that gives him permission to have an identity apart from all the other Thinkers who exist in multiplicity and sameness. It is our “perfectly flawed” Damaged Thinker who rests in Cleveland and dreams of going “back / to Europe for a while” so that he can find his missing counterpart: I would go back to Europe, for a while, maybe find a Greek with both of her arms gone, lost to time & looters, we could try not to lose too much skin as we rested against each other. There is a restlessness and a longing inhabiting both the voice of The Damaged Thinker and the form of Demaree’s tercets, a constant desire to push forward, follow desire, and defeat expectation. It is not the state of being whole or perfect that The Damaged Thinker desires; it is the desire to be connected to the other fragments of his origin, other versions of amputated beauty, that drive him forward. It is a desire also reflected in Demaree’s syntax and arrangement of poems within the collection. In the image of the two fragmented statues resting together, recovering the intimacy of touch after a trauma, we see the echo from “There Was Still A Pedestal,” in which Demaree notes that Cleveland was city that never “needed to own art, but did / because art is always pulling // close to other art, creating a home.” In “The Last Option of Mounting the Sculpture In Its Damaged State Also Had Significant Ethical Implications” Demaree brings us to a truth we often try to avoid: once we “have the pedestal / in place it’s tough to give up / the statue.” In many ways, it is this poem where Demaree distills the essence of the conflict surrounding The Thinker, his bombing, and the interconnected problem of nostalgia, legacy, and violence in America. What we choose to admire – whether it is a sculpture, a person, or a poem – is often caught in an endless cycle of elevation and destruction – vision and revision – but our desire to elevate and destroy appears to be, like the pedestal itself, a permanent fixture in our world. One of the things I admire most in this collection is the precise arrangement of poems within the book. Most of the poems in the collection could fall into one of three categories: monologues from The Damaged Thinker, letters written to Auguste Rodin, and poems written in the voice of witness. Braided together, these voices create a narrative that simulates not only a timeline of events, but also a conversation about violence, loss, and the trauma-induced cultural amnesia that sometimes renders us incapable of fully embracing the purpose of art. Poet Frank O’Hara once said that statues “present a total attention and they are telling you that that is the way to be.” The poems in this collection are indeed at total attention, completely present with their warning: when empathy is not enough, direct experience has to be. It’s what the activists who damaged The Thinker got wrong; it’s what Demaree gets right. No voice is ever abandoned; no fragment ever completed. It is this unmatched openness toward voice and toward the line that makes the collection of poems found in “Bombing The Thinker” so incredibly rare. As Demaree writes “We learned then that / even if you whisper / the conclusion, it doesn’t actually / end anything.”  By: J. David
When you think Phil Levine, you think: narrative, working-class, and a deep sense of empathy. Yet, behind each of these three, on the flip-side of his calling cards, is the capability to world-build around violence. Focusing on the hardship experienced by blue-collar workers, Levine’s portraits of working class America, often centered in Detroit, navigate the traumas associated with poverty and struggle, finding ways to turn towards wonder, meaning, or even joy. In Airs Above Ground, Jill Mceldowney shares this skill of world-building around trauma, but instead finds a way to turn towards strength and agency. She employs the nomenclature of equestrianism and horse-themes in confronting violence and its experience by women (Found): “Woman. / I am better prepared for that surge of contact, / of hand to body. / What I mean is / I thought I knew the silence / that goes on / like a horse after the rider falls.” For her uses, Mceldowney deconstructs the common Christian lexicon and repurposes it into the language of the violence: (Better Talk Now) “From the beginning. I tried to be nonviolent / but this year’s length is measured in trauma / the hound changed to wolf, to a scythe. / Speak / of the devil and he will shatter me at the good…” She takes the common narrative around “victim” and overturns it. Instead of steeping it in a necessity for protection and brokenness, Jill avoids the softness around healing and gives the speakers agency to take up space and reclaim the world on their own terms. She treats trauma not as a bull in a china-shop but rather the same riderless horse in the poem, with the freedom and space to do whatever is necessary. It raises the question: What could women make of violence if given the space and agency to deal with it as they see fit? This is a book about space, what you become when having it taken “a wall of teeth,” “the dog you have chained,” “beaten water;” or when it is given “to calmly go wild, to live yellow eyed and perform.” This is a human book, one confronting the hardness of healing and the terrible instinct we possess inside (Better Talk Now): “There is still plenty of tonight, a part of me that deserves you / that wants to / hurt you like I want to—” With the lyrical deftness of Ruth Awad and the frenzy of a Berryman dream-song these poems uncover want and longing alongside healing and fear, the most human of conglomerances, the most ferocious kind of belonging.
By: J. David
I enjoy poetry that is murky enough to leave room for the individualism of readership; saving space in the poem for you as you are, inviting you into the world it imagines— what emerges is entirely a matter of self, what has been brought into the poetic imagination mingled with the work on the page. Upheavals is like this, with the potential to inspire whatever conversation is necessary within the reader. Some of the important ones that come to mind: the border between reader accessibility and exploration of content/form, the visibility of male survivors of abuse, among others. Within myself, these poems inspired a conversation about the way the large umbrella of “entertainment” covers mental illness and suicide— “entertainment,” being books, music, movies, art, television, etc. etc. So often in depiction, mental illness becomes a spectacle: something viewed from the outside-in. Pop culture is ripe with examples of mental illness (depression being particularly in-vogue at the moment) being used to further a narrative, functioning as a character gimmick, or the ole tried-and-true protagonist befriends sad person and fixes them (my favorite flavor of this is the “good [insert gender here]” falling for the “edgy” [insert gender here] with generational traumas and substance abuse). This commodification of depression has permeated everything from Thirteen Reasons Why being a tragically destructive and terrible debacle (an aside: I read this book almost ten years ago, for my Freshman English class and it was the catalyst for a great discussion about mental illness that lasted an entire semester, so I look favorably on the book) to all the bullshit indie junk Urban Outfitters rolls out (half of their shirts have some sort of problematic nonsense on scribed across the front, and in 2016 they had the bright idea of selling both flasks shaped like pill bottles and “Shampoo for Suicidal Hair”). To be clear, I have no issue with the attempt at representation in popular culture. What I take issue with is blatant misrepresentation and representation that functions to romanticize mental illness. Let’s be honest, books have a huge impact on people— always have, always will. What you put in your books matters. What you put in your books matters. What you put in your books matters. That includes people with mental illness too. We are responsible for how we engage with and present it also, and some people (hem hem John Green) do a disservice in their presentation of mental illness. I can’t speak for anyone else when I say this, but I will say that what I needed most during bouts with mental illness when I was younger was someone who had words for the feelings and things churning within me I could find no way to name. To know I wasn’t really alone. I preferred this person be older than me— so I could look and see some potential of survival. Name the demon and it shall have no power over you, while that isn’t true, it’s a start. Had I read Upheavals at 16, maybe it would’ve made a difference. I can’t say for certain but I know I wish for some younger self to be able to have engaged with it. Zackary Lavoie captures within it words for the sometimes unnamable- the disconnect from body simmering into a callous indifference to impermanence (take the blood from my willing corpse and boil): “ tell me how / to admit to my body i no longer / covet it ”; the propensity to notice death everywhere, the way in which every facet of your life somehow becomes permeable to it (early October): “ this morning i watched a leaf die i watched / the supple life drain from / its stem and saw rust inhaled from its imperfect edges / i die the same way / from the outside in. ” The titular sequence of poems in the book engage with suicidal ideations and struggle in a way that neither romanticizes or encourages them while still offering no shame or condemnation, my favorite one being upheaval of the ideation: “ i spent this morning on the bridge above / comparing bodies to mountains / and how happiness can leave the body through sublimation if / the surrounding air is hot enough. ” This book is for the sad boys (the sleepy boy) to read and hopefully lead them into moments where they “rise— Unbent” (aubade to rest after abuse).  By: J. David
Medical students at Duke University, as part of training during rotation periods in the pulmonary intensive care unit take an in-ICU poetry course— recognizing the ability of poetry to interrogate grief, sadness, and guilt, common experiences in medicine. Crowd Surfing With God is medical in the sense that it’s interested in pain and healing, a recovery narrative of sorts. However, Adrienne Novy’s book is not a recovery narrative in the sense that it gets from point A to point B by dealing in instructional wisdom. Instead, it is a recovery narrative still in progress, understanding that each person’s tunnel is of a different length and width and holds a different thing at its end. These poems are kind (let make this a game): “you the sick kid, were so brave today, swallowed the hospital library whole, called it taking your medicine." This book is interested in growth, the tough conversations where we allow ourself permission to believe in something better of ourselves (if the honey bees die, then we will die with them): “we will burst with light to greet the world again… a fresh & new & brilliant hope.” She writes for the punk rock survivalists who never managed to get clean after the party ended and the ones they left behind, steady in the pursuit of being (punk pop bible): “& this was the first blessing to Helena that faded out like a song & the prayers ended with so long and goodnight & god stayed alive for another night & then another night & then another night & that meant the night was good” These poems are permission to live, permission to love the rough parts, permission to be comfortable in your skin. These poems are documentation, that if nothing else we were here, and we loved, and we loved so damn hard (if the honey bees die, then we will die with them): “I call Carrie my Space Mom to make myself feel closer to the newest star of grave soil.” These poems are for the longwinded and frantic, whose own voices, they’ve been dying to hear for the first time.
By: J. David
In most thesis courses the professor sends out a survey at end of the semester. Typical questions included: What do you intend to do with your degree? Have you secured placement with either a full-time job in your field or a related graduate studies program? Where do you see yourself in 5 years? What do you see yourself doing in 10 years? The point of this exercise being to provide enough data for your college to list headlines like “98 Percent of graduates either employed full-time or in grad school within six months,” “[X] ranked for the third straight year as one of the top research schools in the country,” “For the past forty years our alumni have been changing the world in big ways, join us in wishing our newest grads luck as they continue this tradition (followed by a long list of the students all the other kids wish they turned out like).” I don’t answer the questions. I close the survey and open a new document: Most days I have a hard time. I haven’t thought about tomorrow in weeks, folks like me don’t get that luxury. Our brains never let us. We’re stuck in survival mode, always fighting today, always meeting whatever grief waits at the door without any say in the matter. I never imagined making it to 23. In fact, I thought any number past 17 to be too large, and had I not failed so miserably at suicide the few times I tried, I could have been right. I think the problem is we’re too compartmentalized; we like to pretend one aspect of our life doesn’t have an impact on the others—pulling the rug out from underneath one foot always throws your balance, no matter how many rugs you’re standing on. Whether it be mental illness, poverty, grief, or any other member of the litany, some of us don’t get to dream about tomorrow—we’re far too busy with today. I email this to my professor instead of filling out the survey, and close my computer. After, I pull The Afterlife by Larry Levis from my bookshelf. Critic Steven M. Wilson said of Levis “his [poems]… are moving, insightful meditations on living. Levis uses his life, but also looks outside himself and beyond the events he remembers to find connections with broader truths… [considering] the issues involved with being human.” Poets like Larry Levis and Phil Levine have always appealed to me because of their attentiveness to the present. Their poems often stay rooted in the moment and care about the complexity of humanity, as if genuinely reaching out to know and welcome you—regardless of where you are at the moment. Surprisingly, you’ll find yourself in their poems time and time again; and maybe this isn’t surprising—Phil Levine cared deeply about correspondence, to young poets driving trucks, or working on farms, or waiting tables, or college students. He frequently got into trouble for letting older poets who couldn’t afford college tuition to sit in on his classes, and firmly believed in having more than one kind of poet with one kind of background. Steve Abbott’s book A Green Line Between Green Fields follows in the footsteps of Levine and Levis. Steve, like them, pays excruciating attention to what’s going on around him and acts as a gentle listener that asks of you: what have you been meaning to say? Done with the full intent of making your voice heard. (Pulling Yourself Up By Your) : “ bootstraps will do nothing but leave you where you are, knocked on your ass… // a form of hyperbole describing the impossible. Which explains why those on top keep telling everyone else that’s how they did it. ” He is interested in our shared griefs and joys, the threads that have been running between us for years, but what makes Steve special though, is his interest not only in meeting you in your today but also in the things we take for granted. Not just as humans in the broad sense but also as individuals. In doing so, his poems sometimes meditate on the ways we each store joy where it is accessible for when it is necessary (Shells): “ At the nursing home, others brought only distress or annoyance, claiming to be daughters or nephews, most looking—for all her squinted effort-- like faces in a stranger’s photo album… // On a nightstand I found a fishbowl shaping a collection of seashells culled from both costs… // When I carried it to her, she studied the globe like a child, frenzied beyond containment of a miracle. Her fingers traced the open face of the jar as she named what seemed parts of her own body: scallop, mussel, cuttlefish, cowrie limpet, retrieving a vanished litany trapped beneath the barnacled surface of her own voyage. It’s years. ” If nothing else, this book is an ode to the journey; an ode to reaching today (Arriving at This Point): “ In the end, it’s everything you expected. The animal instinct told you… // the words you said to yourself in the dark are pouring out of you. ” and no matter where we go from this point, whether we have planned the road or are walking hands-first though the dark—this life, all of its joy and pain and wonder, is going to be so worth it. |
