This spring Anhinga Press published Éric Morales-Franceschini’s Syndrome via the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. Syndrome, chosen as the winner by Juan Felipe Herrera, explores Puerto Rican identity via a rich lexicon that includes code-switching between English and Spanish. Partly lyric, partly manifesto, the poems in Syndrome are political, challenging, and authentic. They build to a complex response to colonialization. You can read one of his amazing poems here…
Congratulations, Eric!
Light Me Down: The New & Collected Poems of Jean Valentine (Alice James, 2024) is a gorgeously produced volume worthy of a major American poet. In her foreword, Anne Marie Macari aptly and elegantly describes Jean as a “once-in-generation poet of the interior life.” Light Me Down gathers all of Jean’s books as well as series of stunning “new” poems written in the last four years of her life, from 2016-2020. The titular poem is the first poem in the collection—
Light me down to the long meadow
to where the new snow taps on the fallen snow
with the fingers of the lost tribe.
Who would want us to listen?
Someone does want it:
Mother of snow
smoking your cigarette ration, your dark
lipstick mouthprint hungry
for the frail paper,
long after the war was over.
While Jean was indeed a poet of interiority, she was also keenly engaged with the world—wars, family life, poverty, injustice. Her daring and mysterious verse, rooted in time but yet timeless, wants us to listen.
Catherine Barnett’s Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space was published yesterday by Graywolf. Grief and farce collide throughout the book, the vertebrae of which are ten exquisite prose poems called “Studies in Loneliness.” The opening stanza of Solutions finds the child speaker asking for her own room, away from her two little sisters. She wants to move to a spare near her “father’s prized ice machine dropping its tiny cubes automatically, all night long.” Solitude vs. loneliness—the dilemna of most writers who want to observe, be apart, sometimes seemingly cold to the rest of the world. In the second “Studies in Loneliness” entry we find “I like to fall asleep and wake up in a cold room.” The sixth ends with “Ash on my winter hat.” By the penultimate installment of “Studies in Loneliness,” we learn the speaker “keeps buying secondhand cashmere sweaters because wearing cashmere makes me feel as if [she’s] wearing another human body.” And in the last poem we are back to the cold, this time refilling a dying friend’s “glass with cold water.” In between these “studies” are more gorgeous poems about living with the knowledge of our singular existence, what we must so often face alone.
Congratulations, Catherine!
Lisa Hase-Jackson's Insomnia in Another Town was published this spring by Clemson University Press as winner of the Converse MFA alumni Prize for Poetry. Claire Bateman, the contest judge, writes in part about Lisa’s “significant courage with grace notes of buoyancy.” Lisa’s poems navigate, among other things, mother and daughter relationships (speakers as mothers and speakers as daughters.) Here a poet-daughter watches her mother with her own dreams of writing…
“MEEP AND MOPE”
Mom wrote a book one time,
titled Meep and Mope,
about two pretend characters
not unlike the two of us.
They lived together alone
far from familiar streets,
walked or took the bus
most everywhere, hitchhiking
when it came to leaving town.
She used her budding drawing skills,
filled their world with watercolors,
finished the story with her own quirk
then sent the book to a publisher
with seldom hope. Like the narcissist
professor who criticized her work
the semester before, the editors
rejected it straight away;
both our feelings were hurt.
I had no chance to reread
or claim it before she threw the book away;
hadn’t known until I asked one day
about the future adventures of Meep and Mope
when they resumed their story in books two, three,
and four. Mom just shrugged and turned back
to her text leaving me to grieve newly lost
found friends, for that is how I saw
those pretend characters
based on her and me.
Congratulations, Lisa! -- Denise Duhamel
Note: All posts by Denise Duhamel under the title "Wednesdays with Denise" are copyright (c) 2024 by Denise Duhamel. All rights reserved.
Tayi Tibble’s second book of poems Rangikura was just reprinted with Knopf. (The volume was first published in 2021 in New Zealand.) Tibble, from Wellington, New Zealand, writes a poetry that blends her Māori culture with the attitude and wisdom of a young Millennial or the elder stateswoman of Gen Z. (Tibble was born in 1995.) Her poems are wildly bold, not shying away from colonialism, climate change, and the banality of pop culture. They are defiant and tender, as illustrated in these lines from “Tohunga”:
good on you babe. / You got what you wanted. / The juicy earth / the factoried women / the rivers / the mountains / all bowing for you. / I’m proud of you / the way you erected / monuments in your image….
You can read the whole poem here:
https://lithub.com/tohunga-a-poem-by-tayi-tibble/
Congratulations, Tayi!
Sara Daniele Rivera’s debut collection The Blue Mimes was just published by Graywolf Press as the winner of the Academy of American Poets’ 2023 First Book Award. Rivera is a Cuban Peruvian American poet whose landscapes include Havana and Lima, the sea and the mountains. Her gestures include code-switching and rompecabezas/ puzzles to get at the terrifying heart of her subjects. In these lush and powerful poems, she faces the geopolitical realities of migration , the 2016 election, and mourns the loss of those taken by Covid-19. The Blue Mimes is a tour-de-force.
You can read (and hear Rivera read) “Someone curls into themselves/Al borde del mar” here:
https://www.lamajadesnuda.com/sara-daniele-rivera-2/
Just in time for Poetry Month comes Invisible Mending: The Best of C. K. Williams. This generous (272 pages, Farrar, Straus and Giroux ) volume of selected poems includes work from his earliest (and often hard to find) books up to his posthumous Falling Ill.
C. K.Williams (1936 – 2015) was a prolific, inventive poet whose creative trajectory changed and deepened over time. Alan Shapiro, in an introduction to this volume, charts Williams growth into his characteristic long lines that use “all the tools of essay writing and prose fiction…a poetry that can think about what it’s feeling and feel intensely the consequences of its thought.”
This is an important book for Williams’ fans and a wonderful primer for those just getting to know his work. Here is “Tar,” one of his most famous poems:
Congratulations to Miriam Levine whose book Forget about Sleep was published this month by NYQ Press as winner of the of the Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Award, chosen by José Antonio Rodríguez. This is what I wrote for the book jacket—
Miriam Levine's Forget about Sleep is a love letter to our world, an ode to memory and all she has wistfully stored. “Such terrible things in this world,” it's true, and yet Levine holds on to all that is bright—daffodils, Zebra longwings, victory gardens, the moon, and the sea. Celebratory, clear-eyed, meditative, Levine's poems are mature and honest renderings on our humanness.
You can read three of her gorgeous poems here:
https://www.ronslate.com/exclusion-in-the-park-and-union-street/
Hala Alyan’s The Moon That Turns You Back was published this month by Harper Collins. Alyan is an Palestinian American poet who explores violence, displacement, and loss. She uses a myriad of inventive poetic forms to contain diaspora and resilience in the face of war.
In “Half-Life in Exile,” she writes:
There is nothing more terrible
than waiting for the terrible. I promise.
Was the grief worth the poem? No,
but you don’t interrogate a weed
for what it does with wreckage.
For what it’s done to get here.
For examples of her work, here is a lineated poem “September, a week in” and a fierce prose poem “Habituation” which contains my favorite passage in the book but hasn’t the story already changed because I told it:
https://www.thrushpoetryjournal.com/january-2020-hala-alyan.html
Congratulations, Hala!
Henrietta Goodman’s book Antilla takes its title from a phantom island that appeared on 15th century maps. The lush poems in Antilla (The Backwaters Press) continually question what is here and what isn’t, through ghostly presences. In “What Are We Going to Turn Into?” Goodman even refers to her son as pop culture’s friendly ghost after he has a scary stint in the hospital, thinking:
…how Gabriel’s father used to go around shirtless with huge
muscles and a huge grin calling my son Casper, how we laughed
together, and I’m thinking about that question, based on
the simplest metaphor I know, the only one that matters.
Goodman explores what/who is real again in the wonderfully feverish title poem:
https://www.poetrynw.org/henrietta-goodman-antillia/
Congratulations, Henrietta!
If only I’d had Diane Seuss’s Modern Poetry when I first encountered the bulky textbook by the same title! If only we all had Diane Suess back then—we might have been a little less scared of verse and how to engage with it. Luckily we have her now! Modern Poetry (Graywolf Press, published today) is a gorgeous undertaking. While delving into issues of gender and class and who poetry is meant for, Suess acknowledges her deep love (and sometimes distrust) of it. Here she is channeling Marianne Moore in “Against Poetry”:
There are so many reasons to love Mary Gilliland’s latest book Ember Days, which will be published on March 1 by Codhill Press. Her title describes the light during both the summer and winter solstice, and her poems reverberate with that same golden brightness. Gilliland is a poet of witness and spirituality, grappling with climate devastation while also interrogating world policies and politics. But maybe the number one reason to love Ember Days is the savvy poem “Up with People” which brought me back to that 1970’s singing group of traveling teens funded by corporate America.
UP WITH PEOPLE
I remember the opening salute, the hours
of taping and reshoot, our show’s chief sponsor
Bab-O. I’d had to apply. It floors me now:
the ticked questionnaire on American
history, the patriotic essay I composed so
eagerly, a stalk among the standing waves of grain.
During commercial breaks for cleanser, I tended
my tender self-regard, inked in every anacrostic
in the book, won all spelling bees. Deadlines colder
than zero Kelvin in the outer regions before sleep
carried dust I could not fathom. Three. Two. One.
and camera rolled, the rest of the cast singing out.
They could not work me into their permanent
Youth Corps. Some they did, gathered at
the 30-year reunion, unbroken on the moving
belt of hearty cereal, furtive sex, and overtime.
I would have failed at reminiscing between
dances, blank on what I’d looked like, what I’d said.
For those of you too young to remember, you can hear the group’s signature song here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skK1CKKlc0M
Congratulations, Mary!
In January, Knopf published Gregory Pardlo’s Spectral Evidence. “Spectral evidence” is an actual legal term referring to “witness testimony that the accused person's spirit or spectral shape appeared to him/her in a dream at the time the accused person's physical body was at another location.” Huh? Yes, I am serious. And so is Pardlo. This kind of evidence was accepted during the Salem Witch Trials. Pardlo’s poems brilliantly explore this notion as he brings forward the fear of “the other” not only in terms of gender but also of race—America’s continual projection and demonization. Pardlo’s poems takes us through history, the big injustices alongside the microaggressions of today. Here is his wonderful poem “Theater Selfie.”
https://yalereview.org/article/gregory-pardlo-theater-selfie
Congratulations, Gregory!
Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone! Sharing my favorite love poem.
TO X
Somewhere in history
Somewhere in untold ages
Somewhere in the sands of time
Somewhere in the vast seas of eternity
There is one person
Only one
Who could understand me and love me
And you're it
So get with it.
Bill Knott (1940-2014)
Just when you think Dorianne Laux’s poems could not get any better—more beautifully sonic, more profound, more YES!—she gives us Life on Earth. The title poem begins: The odds are we never should have been born./Not one of us. Not one in 400 trillion to be/exact…
From there, Dorianne praises the miraculousness of what comes next for each of us, including our pain. Published by Norton last month, the poems in Life on Earth give a domestic nod to “Bisquick” and “Singer” (the sewing machine), elevating and complicating the life of women and mothers. You can get a sneak peek of just how connected she is (to life, to poetry, to the past) in her poem “Spirit Level”:
https://aprweb.org/poems/spirit-level
Congratulations, Dorianne!
WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: January 31, 2024 with graphic
Yesterday Scribner released Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Root Fractures following her 2018 debut book Ghost Of. Diana once again uses her skills as a visual artist—this time her poems are superimposed on silhouettes of family photos. Her work concerns itself with generational trauma and boundaries—boundaries of countries (Vietnam, after the fall of Saigon, and the U.S.), the boundaries of our bodies (mothers and daughters, the living and ghosts), as well as the very boundaries of poetry itself. An exciting, haunting collection. Here is an example of what she’s up to:
https://www.kwelijournal.org/poetry-1/2018/11/19/beside-by-diana-khoi-nguyen
Congratulations, Diana!
Holly Iglesias writes a kickass prose poem! Here is one of her many delightful offerings.
The Day I Was
Radioactive at Mass, I sat behind a young man who exhibited symptoms of acute devotionalism—bowing at the waist at each utterance of the word Jesus, kneeling on the stone floor, tap-tap- tapping his chest, raising his arms, palms up. The doctor had warned me to stay at least six feet away from other people for two days and to use disposable utensils and plates and to not have sex and to not get close to pregnant women and to not sleep in the same bed as children for a week. As we finished the Our Father, it struck me that I should not shake the man’s hand, nor that of the woman down the pew from me who had re-arranged the contents of her purse during the Kyrie. Nor did I want to say, Sorry, I’m radioactive. What a pity I had no asbestos glove to serve as a barrier so that I could extend my hand in earnest and say, Peace be with you. But the man did not turn around to face me, and the woman did not look up from her missal, so I wrapped my arms around myself instead, an embrace to limit the isotope’s range and to keep the fearful parts of me from flying out.
You can read more of Holly’s prose poems here:
https://www.holeintheheadreview.com/txtv1i4-1/holly-iglesias
Radio
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman
