Not Elegy, But Eros
Nausheen Eusuf
NYQ Books, 2017
Nausheen Eusuf’s protean debut collection, Not Elegy, But Eros, shuttles between elegy and ode, nimbly shifting between formal styles as it memorializes and praises subjects and people ranging from Hitchcock’s Psycho to Northrop Frye. Eusuf bears witness to her own family history and to the political violence and repression in her native Bangladesh. The collection’s title poem delicately honors the life and work of Xulhaz Mannan, an LGBT activist murdered in Bangladesh in 2016: “I fathomed the fall of that abyss, held / only by the thought of one I loved—.” Not Elegy, But Eros also includes poems about selfies, her father shining shoes, riffs on lines from A.R. Ammons and Paul de Man, an “Ode to the Joke,” and an “Ode to Apostrophe.” In lesser hands the leaps between topics and tonalities might seem too jarring, but in Eusuf’s work these leaps appear as the natural outgrowth of a wide-ranging razor-sharp intellect; given this, not surprisingly, the most pronounced influence in Not Elegy, But Eros is Wallace Stevens, who is evoked at every turn, but most directly in “Mind of Winter” and “Nocturne on a Winter Night,” which ends: “if only we could let the seeming be / in love’s endless mise en abîme / until the scraping of shovels at dawn.”
Little Climates
L.A. Johnson
Bull City Press, 2017
L.A. Johnson’s chapbook, Little Climates, takes place at the intersection of fragility and acquiescence, “in a house full of breakable things / and reassuring porcelain we never touch.” In these winter spaces, “foxgloves with their toxic mouths open for us,” and yet, “stars reveal their combustible selves.” Johnson is a poet of passionate inwardness, testing the tensile strength of the silken tethers that bind us to those with whom we live, and fight, and love, and disappoint, in the small strange fickle weathers of our lives. Little Climates holds open its wounds that they might be lustrated by the poems themselves. Johnson’s poems are luminous icicles, dangling on the edge of warmth, want, and danger. Little Climates is a haunting book, full of broken continuums, bi-furcating paths, night passages, and moments of transmutation. L.A. Johnson’s ultimate subject here is impermanence, and its ambiguous blessings: “In the future, this house will become honeycomb / and bees will make clear honey out of all our mistakes.” This is another remarkable chapbook from Bull City Press.
Blind Flowers
Roberta Senechal de la Roche
Arcadia Press, 2018
Blind Flowers ranges from ancient Babylon and Alexandria to the Deep South and back again, blazing forth with elemental, numinous, finely-wrought lyric poems. Roberta Senechal de la Roche writes with a pen of bone, words that “float the world / into the coming tide.” This chapbook recalibrates regret, weaving a requiem to the crowded dirt from a bibliography of absences. From “the floating empire of memory” Senechal de la Roche constructs a “lexicon of old surprise,” wherein, a resting heron becomes “a hieroglyph that conjugates / pond and stubble field with sky.” These poems exist in the space just before the deer finishes its leap. Blind Flowers tugs at the stars and tries to drag them down into streets lined with honeysuckle, lilac, and unending desire. Reading this book is like dancing on the empyrean edge of a strange, unrelenting, barbed, and beautiful horizon. Sadly, this is the last chapbook to appear from the now disbanded Arcadia Press. It is, however, a high note for such an excellent, and unfortunately short-lived, press to go out on.
Gilt
Raena Shirali
YesYes Books, 2017
Raena Shirali’s debut collection, Gilt, begins with a bride and groom harbored under the gilt dome of a traditional Indian bridal procession; the collection ends with a poem in which the speaker imagines herself an extremophile: “…I’m here to burrow, follow the borehole to lake’s / end. Feeding off those that are most like me, I become another link / to remote moons—soar, pitch, shimmer.” The lavish and daring poems in Gilt do indeed soar, pitch, and shimmer as they unravel and restring the intricate brocades of culture and memory Shirali seeks to understand. The best poems in this collection (“Dare I Write It,” “to miss America,” “Between Here & Predictable Characters”) examine gender and race through the prism of the American South and through popular culture. Gilt is an impressive first book, one that presages great things to come.
What More?
Daniel Brown
Orchises Press, 2015
Daniel Brown’s What More? collects a group of tightly-made, affable, quick-footed, and formally precise poems. Brown moves from recollections of childhood to poems about Brooklyn Heights, Godzilla, Yeats, Jesus, Wittgenstein, and, poetry itself. In Brown’s hands the making of a poem is always a “seeing something home.” Brown’s poems exist at the place cello string kisses bow. His short poems are particular diamonds, most notably the ars poetica, “Judo”:
I.e., the kind of verse
That doesn’t try to force
People to their knees
(Seeing as it sees
To people’s being thrown
By forces of their own).
What More? contains many such thoughts, expertly quieted into consequence.
Faces Somewhere Wild
David Giannini
Dos Madres Press, 2017
Faces Somewhere Wild contains a wide-range of lively lyric engagements with the landscapes of Love, Grief, the Berkshires, and Language itself. David Giannini jukes artfully between aesthetic approaches and angles of vision, influenced by everything from nineteenth century transcendentalist prose and Emersonian verse to the Objectivism of Zukovsky, Niedecker, and Williams. Giannini’s Berkshire localism ripples out expansively to contain a cosmos of lived experience, demonstrating the mastery achieved by a lifelong apprenticeship to the art of poetry. Or, as Gianinni puts it at the beginning of the collection: “Because we are here, we ample our vicinity / to the whorl of a leaf.” For Giannini, poetry is “an original blade, not / exactly grass, not exactly knife, / more like some unfound / god’s unclipped nail.” At its best, Faces Somewhere Wild uses that “unclipped nail” to scratch away the veneer of seeming and propel its readers into the realm of true, intense, musical experience. The last poem in the book, “After Writing,” exemplifies Giannini’s light, masterful, touch:
AFTER WRITING
You think yourself its true shadow
but the poem precedes another dark.
Nerves behind the scar suffered years ago
twitch & throb. There’s longing
to be out in the snow.
You take up the maul, split oak. Knock of it
on hard ground. Something clicks.
The crouched outline of a frosted bush
resembles the man who stole your wood,
bent now and saying the poem
you intended,
in the shadow of chimney smoke.
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 (NYQ Books, 2018).
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