The Many Golden Bees that Hum Inside My Heart: 3 New Books

[3 Book Recommendations by Dante Di Stefano]

The Last Orgasm
Nin Andrews
Etruscan Press, 2020

In her own words, Nin Andrews’s new collection is a “book of poems of gratitude, admiration, memories, grief, and love.” The Last Orgasm accomplishes what Andrews has accomplished throughout her body of work: to consistently write a poetry of complex intelligence, empathy, and humor; no one else in American poetry combines quite so seamlessly the metapoetic, the allusive, and the mirthful. Andrews displays an ecstasy of influence everywhere in The Last Orgasm, as she evokes, honors, and queries the likes of John Ashbery, Jorge Luis Borges, Denise Duhamel, Antonio Machado, Maureen Seaton, Tim Seibles, Walt Whitman, and many more. This is a book to be read and reread for its delights, for its wisdom, and for its acknowledgement that poetry (and the poetry of a self-unfolding-in-time) is far more heady and far more elusive and far more omnipresent and far more fleeting than any definition of it might imply. The first stanza of the poem “Last Night” conveys some of the beauty and strangeness to be found in these pages:

    Last night I dreamt
    that the bees—the many golden bees
    that hum inside my heart—
    were leaving, one by one,
    flying through a hole in the screen
    and into the night.

Every page of The Last Orgasm hums with such mystery, such sweet lack, such release.

Naming the Lifeboat
Justin Gardiner
Main Street Rag, 2020

In his essay on Robert Frost, W.H. Auden invokes Samuel Johnson to explain the aims and impetus of Frostian poetics: “The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.” Justin Gardiner’s debut poetry collection, Naming the Lifeboat, recalls Auden’s Frost-by-way-of-the-good-doctor. Gardiner, who has lived in Antarctica and travelled through many remote wildernesses, writes the kind of poetry that has everything to do with joy and survival. The poems in Naming the Lifeboat traverse the South Pole, the high seas, Laos, Bolivia, the suburbs, the small towns, and the remotest regions of the United States. Gardiner explores the interior landscapes of grief, love, and pain, detailing family mental illness, romantic relationships, and everything in between. These are poems of pilgrimage, poems where a finely-calibrated wisdom leans into deep longing: “Given the traveler’s lot, / all arrival is invitation / to future loss—.” If you want to read the kind of poetry where epidermis meets bark and the mind loves the heart, this is the book for you.

Bone Chalk
Jim Reese
Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2019

Poet Jim Reese’s nonfiction debut, Bone Chalk, contains two dozen essays filled with the careful attention to detail and the emotional intelligence that characterizes his poetry. Reese draws his subject matter from a lifetime in the Great Plains and he assays the people and the landscape of this region with clarity and nuance. Formally, Reese variegates his approach to the essay, providing straightforward narrative memoirs, braided narrative essays, short lyrics, and incorporating epistolary elements; Reese also echoes poems he has written, composing essays from bumper stickers as he did in his poetry collection, Really Happy (NYQ Books, 2014). The essays' subjects range from a loving portrait of a mother-in-law to a lighthearted memoir of being a college mascot, from a lyric observation of teenagers in line at a pharmacy to a deep exploration of crime and violence in the Midwest. Perhaps the most notable essay in the collection, “Never Talk to Strangers: Twelve Years in Prisons and What Criminals Teach Me,” details Reese’s experiences teaching poetry in prisons, while exploring the personal ways violent crime has shaped his life. Even when writing about the weightiest of issues, Jim Reese employs a warmth and a humor that forms the amiable core of his aesthetic. The essays in this collection feel like affable prose poems stacked one on top of the other. If you want to feel the pulse of the heartland, Reese will guide your hand to its wrist.

Comments

[David Lehman]

Thank you, Dante, for this excellent post.

[Dante Di Stefano]

Thank you, David!