Swarm Queen’s Crown
Stephanie Adams-Santos
Fathom Books, 2016
Stephanie Adams-Santos’ collection of finely-wrought, barbed, numinous lyric poems weaves from “a few warbled jags of wind” a laurel for all searchers enthralled and menaced by the beauty of a world “full of strange experience.” These are poems composed “in the tight sling of the chrysalid,” “belted to the bolt of being,” where every word sounds “lassoed to a bell.” Adams-Santos pitches her poems between chrysalis and swarm, self and world, I and thou, aware “of the secret lathe / now turning in the pulp / of our living.” “Tongue,” a representative poem from the middle of the collection, reads:
Loin of the skull
who lives
in the bell
of my bone,
little black place
of music—
If you have vespers,
O won’t the toad come?
Swarm Queen’s Crown presents for our inspection real gardens with imaginary toads in them, the voluptuous gasp at the center of a thorny prayer.
Echolalia in Script: A Collection of Asemic Writing
Sam Roxas-Chua
Orison Books, 2017
Echolalia in Script gorgeously collects Sam Roxas-Chua’s asemic writings in a gallery of images contextualized by the title poem. The stunning examples of open form writing in this book are “flawed disiderata,” failed cartographies, “troubled cantatas,” “true languages born of beak & exhale.” As Roxas-Chua notes in the introduction, his interest in wordless open semantic forms of writing parallels his work as a poet and stems, in part, from his personal history: “born to Filipino parents, adopted into a Chinese family, and then later immigrating to America resulted in a number of displacements that prevented me from taking claim to country or language.” Echolalia in Script is a book of elemental, angelic, visionary beauty rendered in the illimitable shorthand of the divine, an austere infinite tracery, a singing Forever composed of untranslatable Nows.
Porous Borders
David Giannini
Spuyten Duyvil, 2017
Each poem in David Giannini’s Porous Borders unfolds as “a gymnast who somersaults from a balance beam, but never lands; instead she becomes that somersault.” These, as Giannini calls them, “vertical prosepoems,” spin out from the mundane, through “a place of lyric dissociation,” “smuggling the invisible over the borders of normative prose.” The poetry in this collection is luminous and strange, as if cribbed from a dream of Paul Valery assayed and translated by Russell Edson. With élan and slapstick precision, Gianinni’s poems bristle like porcupines “in an unlit cellar full of inflated balloons. Porous Borders is a particularly vibrant addition to the history of the American prose poem.
Our Lady of the Orgasm
Nin Andrews
MadHat Press, 2016
Nin Andrews’ funny, buoyant, joyous, and deeply intelligent chapbook, Our Lady of the Orgasm, picks up where her collection, The Book of Orgasms, left off when it was published seventeen years ago. Like her two most recent full-length collections, Why God Is a Woman and Miss August, Our Lady provides further proof of Andrews’ mastery of the prose poem. In Andrews’ work, the vocation of the poem and the orgasm are the same: “it is their job to keep the sacred balance, to keep us all from curling inward like a scroll, never to be read or known.” With great skill, Andrews’ poetry sorts through the disparities between real and potential, between form and freedom, between fiction and nonfiction, between prose and poetry, urging her readers away from solipsism and superficiality, from the theoretical to the angelic. Reading a prose poem by Nin Andrews is like learning how to fly through a blizzard, or like growing gills and remembering how to breathe underwater.
The Thin Wall
Martha Rhodes
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017
Martha Rhodes newest collection of poetry, The Thin Wall, trains the compound eye of the lyric on the burdens of inheritance that constitute selfhood. Through the thin walls of these poems, angles of vision go askew, family histories and relationships snare and fracture, forgotten “greenesses” pop up, and the dead “take all we have.” Each poem in this collection is a door leading to another door, a kafka-esque series of routines “all seen clearly from this place we want to remain / inside forever, place of Etcetera.” The Thin Wall posits all remembering, and indeed all perception, as tenuous, fraught, and wildly shifting. Martha Rhodes’s poetry is uncompromising, febrile, night bound, visceral; she offers no balm. She provokes. She unsettles. She makes you feel the disappointments and disruptions of everyday life flying in your knuckles.
Paterson Light and Shadow
Poems by Maria Mazziotti Gillan
Photographs by Mark Hillinghouse
Serving House Books, 2017
Paterson Light and Shadow pairs the poetry of the city’s finest living poet, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, with the arresting tonalities of Mark Hillringhouse’s photography. The conversation between Hillringhouse’s stirring black and white images and Mazziotti Gillan’s deeply moving autobiographical poems brings to life the vibrant history of one of the first cities of American poetry, birthplace of Allen Ginsberg and muse to William Carlos Williams. In “December Dusk,” Mazziotti Gillan writes: “A precariousness steals over things / at dusk when darkness bleeds the light away / and our shadows stretch their long fingers.” An exquisite precariousness steals over the graffitied factories, the abandoned boxing gyms, The Great Falls, the diners, the side streets, the public schools, the crumbling monuments, and the dilapidated stoops enshrined in the pages of this book. For Hillringhouse and Mazziotti Gillan, Paterson is a place both haunted and sacred; at any moment the drab and ramshackle might give way to memory’s “dizzying panorama, luminous / and vast.” Paterson Light and Shadow is a love note to an archetypal American place unfolding in the dialogue between word and image; to eavesdrop on the discussion between Mazziotti Gillan and Hillringhouse is to understand more deeply their charged and fortifying relationship to this remarkable city.
Just Another Day in Just Our Town: Poems New and Selected 2000-2016
Bruce Bennett
Orchises Press, 2017
Just Another Day in Just Our Town is Bruce Bennett’s second New and Selected, picking up where Navigating the Distances left off in 1999. Throughout Just Another Day Bennett weds his technical mastery to a big-hearted embrace of the quotidian; he marshals sonnet, villanelle, and a variety of other measured forms to explore the ever-shifting and diaphanous contours of his life as a poet, professor, and husband. Bennett’s verse bears the fingerprints of the poets he lovingly parodies in the selection culled from Loose Canon: Christina Rossetti, Poe, Robert Browning, Hardy, Burns, Yeats, Frost, Bishop, Williams, Pound, and Dickinson. In “I Dwell,” Bennett writes:
I dwell in Gullibility –
A fairer House than Doubt –
That gives me lots of Choices –
That I can’t live – without –
Bruce Bennett’s true abode is in the sonorous notes of the poetic line. These poems are proof of a life lived with Blakean exuberance and Keatsian beauty. Whether meditating on the life of his father, imagining swimming in a watering can, or railing against Donald Trump, Bruce Bennett’s Just Another Day in Just Our Town offers a selection of poems both timely and timeless.
Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, forthcoming 2019). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Sewanee Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for the DIALOGIST. Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America, forthcoming from NYQ Books.
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