Billy Mills reviews John Levy's To Assemble an Absence (2024)

Irish poet Billy Mills was good enough to provide the first review for John Levy's To Assemble an Absence (2024) as part of a group review over at his Elliptical Movements. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here. As Mills writes:

John Levy’s To Assemble an Absence is just the kind of pamphlet I love to get; simple but attractive saddle-stitched, with a dozen poems spread over 17 pages of text representing a report from the front-line of Levy’s work. The absence of the title is, in the first instance, the poet’s late mother:

Mother, I keep trying.

In the title I say “an,” not
“Your.” You

titled me.

This concern with the precise word used, even, or especially, at the level of articles and pronouns, is typical of Levy’s method; he is a poet of small nuance for whom words, and their absences, matter.

Note to Dag T. Straumsvåg (May 5th, 2024)

There are plenty of words
that you will not find

in this note to you.

Let’s imagine pairs of them
on see-saws

around the world, in playgrounds

There are poems that mark both parents’ support for Levy’s early poetry, the lack (or absence) of a sister, and other intimate aspects of family life,  but Levy’s lens widens out to include a broader view of lost childhood:

Raining in Tucson

Rain fills the hollow toys in the front yard of former friends. That was years ago, when they weren’t former friends. That rain has been distributed now, by processes that existed long before toys and our lives, distributed far beyond Tucson, beyond Arizona. Maybe some of the rainwater in the plastic dump truck, for instance, has joined the ocean off the coast of Madagascar, near Sambava. I can still see the faded yellow plastic of the dump truck’s bed, near the dull red of the cab. That toy is surely in a landfill now. Buried deep, never again something a raindrop hits first.

From which I infer that absence is also part of the process; the past can never be recovered, but it can, in some sort, be recalled in words if, like Levy, you have that gift.

Daniel Barbiero reviews Dale Tracy's Gnomics (2024) at Arteidolia

Daniel Barbiero was good enough to provide the first review for Dale Tracy's Gnomics (2024) over at Arteidolia. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here.

“Gnomics” is the name that poet Dale Tracy has given to the twenty-four short poems that make up the content of her new chapbook of that title.

A gnomic utterance is a short, condensed statement of a universal principle or observation, often couched in enigmatic or figurative language that gives it the appearance of profundity. Think, for example, of the aphorisms that earned Heraclitus the nickname “the obscure”: “a hidden harmony is better than an obvious one”; “the nature of things likes to hide”; “changing, it remains the same.” These are pithy statements that purport to speak of universal truths, but do so mysteriously enough that even after twenty-five hundred years there’s no agreement on what Heraclitus really meant.

Tracy’s gnomics don’t share Heraclitus’ willful obscurity, nor do they claim to present universal truths. For Tracy, “a poem is a model for doing rather than an explanation of something” – a way of learning about the world rather than pronouncing on it. Hence her gnomics present her in the process of thinking through the world and doing so in as condensed a manner as possible. They are, in effect, discrete objects in which a thought is totalized in a tightly-bound linguistic enclosure.

Take, for example, “Ars Poetica,” the collection’s opening poem:

You must eat your midnight and roses
or there’ll be no pounder of spices.

This single sentence poem mimics a conditional statement of the “without X there can be no Y” type, recast as a chain of associations. How these associations come into contact with each other is an enigma for the reader to interpret. “Eat” and “spices” may be connected through the implicit but absent intermediary term of “food” (spices make the food we eat palatable); “midnight” and “roses” associate with each other as cliched tropes of sentimental poetry. Are we to “eat” them figuratively, make them and their bland like disappear, in order for real poetry, its more challenging or substantive tropes akin to the spices that give food its pungency and which must be pounded out by the poet, to emerge in their place? Possibly, and a possibility latent in the title. “Ars Poetica” may be totalized syntactically – rendered a complete thought in which each association has its proper place in a sequence of associations – by its logical structure, but its meaning is not. It’s poetry, and not to be exhausted in a single reading. Its meaning resides in the ambiguity of its images rather than in its logical form.

The tension between logical form and poetic content is something Tracy plays with throughout Gnomics. “Logic 3,” one of five poems title “Logic” which play with syllogistic forms for poetic effect, reads:

What can be created can be destroyed.
Knowledge can be created.
Some knowledge nourishes dirt.

The first two sentences give us the premises, which don’t lead to the conclusion we’d expect, which should be “Knowledge can be destroyed.” But this is a poem rather than a syllogism proper, so we have to derive the conclusion analogically rather than logically. Organic matter nourishes the soil as it decomposes (is “destroyed”); transferred by analogy from organic matter to knowledge, the image of decomposition represents the more general idea of destruction which we now can see applies to knowledge, though apparently not to all knowledge.

Modeling the progress of a thought in language – seeing it through from its beginnings in a string of words in search of a meaning to its totalization in a completed unit of signification – is one of the aims of these poems. Tracy has described them as “open[ing] up a line of thought” through which “the thinking emerges from the poem as a process.” As we’ve seen in “Logic 3” that process can consist of drawing conclusions by analogy; we can see another kind of thought process in “Pocket Sky”:

A jagged tree is a key to the sky,
which turns around it slowly.

The thought modeled here mimics the apparent turning motion of the sky: it spirals outward from a central kernel consisting of a single image – a tree whose ramified branches resemble the teeth and notches along the blade of a key, as it protrudes upward in a clearing – and expands into a complex metaphor that reverses our expectations through an incongruity in the way it’s elaborated. A key is something that works by turning within a space, but here it’s the space surrounding the (metaphorical) key that turns; this reversal of the conventional order of things heightens our awareness of the way the metaphor is constructed – we follow the path the thought takes as it rounds a curve we didn’t see coming. If the tree is a key the sky is the cylinder containing it; what’s more, the tree provides a key to our noticing the sky by virtue of its vertical orientation directing our gaze upward. The image of the tree has the added effect of setting up an implicit pun with the title of Tracy’s collection: it “rhymes” with the image of the gnomon, the vertical rod ancient geometers used to measure the length of shadows.

The extended metaphor in “Pocket Sky” works by combining the two more-or-less distant elements of the tree and the key. They combine partly on the basis of a symmetry of physical resemblance and partly on the basis of the similar sound profiles of “tree” and “key”: both are monosyllabic words beginning abruptly with hard consonants and ending with the same long vowel sound. It is a method of forming associations that recalls Surrealist poetics.

We can see this again in the riddle-like “Fallacy”:

A mind like saloon doors:
all spur, no horse ride.

We can imagine a mind being like saloon doors – loosely hinged and swinging open and shut with every random stranger passing through – but the linkage from that opening simile to the implicit image of a horse being prodded with a spur but refusing to move requires an alogical, imaginative leap that on the surface produces a mixed metaphor. But it’s a leap clearly meant to elaborate the simile in a different figurative register since, like the stubborn horse resisting a prod, such a porous mind would most likely be one that doesn’t move itself to think, despite getting a push. Rather than a mixed metaphor, we have a complex and wryly humorous surreal metaphor-by-association. It really isn’t surprising, then, to see Tracy, in an interview last year, describing her way of thinking as having a “surreal bent.” With Gnomics, she makes that thinking the meaning, rather than just the means, of the poetry.

Gnomics is Tracy’s second book with above/ground press, following 2020’s The Mystery of Ornament. The Ottawa-based press, which is curated by publisher rob mclennan, specializes in elegantly presented poetry chapbooks like Gnomics. It has published more than 1325 titles so far and celebrates its thirty-first anniversary this month.

De Villo Sloan reviews Angela Caporaso's Wars (2024) at Asemic Front 2

Visual poet De Villo Sloan was good enough to provide the first review for Angela Caporaso's Wars (2024) over at Asemic Front 2. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here (with a bunch of accompanying visuals, also).

Visual artist Angela Caporaso (Caserta, Italy) has been exploring visual poetry. rob mclennan’s above/ground press in Ottawa, Canada, has given us a chapbook of this recent work.

I am set at ease when exploring Wars by the no-frills approach of above/ground press that highlights the work and makes a soft allusion to the gritty, underground visual poetry that took shape in the formerly industrial Great Lakes cities of the USA and Canada.

Caporaso’s emphasis on language materiality, dimensionality and cut-up makes her text an ideal match for mclennan’s editorial eye.  

In Wars, Caporaso tells us the visual poems in the edition are inspired by "some short poems by Wystan Hugh Auden." Contemporary visual poets seem to enjoy anchoring their new work to older literary tradition.

The repetition of cut-up/concrete forms, shifting in constructs of opposing dark and light, suggests to me various configurations of battling armies, military maps. I find myself considering the phenomenon of binary opposition in nature and the human compulsion to warfare. Wars can be read as a visual-linguistic anti-war sequence. The book has much more to offer as well.

Recently John Richard McConnochie, the Australian visual poet and asemic writer, well-known for his diligent admin work at the great Facebook Post-literate group, has been using the term "neo-glyphic" to identify certain asemic forms that he is observing. This brings me to explain why I chose to place my review of Angela's book on Asemic Front2.

Aspects of asemic writing are merging with the new concrete (or neo-concrete). In Angela Caporaso's War is a series of evolving neo-glyphs that move from binary oppositional structures to pieces that are far more non-binary.

Congratulation to Angela Caporaso and to rob mclennan for his keen editorial eye recognizing this great book.

Cary Fagan reviews Lydia Unsworth's These Steady Bulbs (2024) at Word Music

Toronto writer (and above/ground press author) Cary Fagan was good enough to provide the first review for Lydia Unsworth's These Steady Bulbs (2024) over at his Word Music blog. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here.

When I was a kid, so long ago now, we played unsupervised from evening into dark. We hid in back yards, ran from garden to garden, picked up fallen pears from a neighbour’s tree and hurled them at the rare passing car. That time came back to me as I read These Steady Bulbs, a text that both offers and withholds meaning–somewhat in the manner of childhood itself.

The English poet Lydia Unsworth (above/ground is a rare Canadian chapbook press to have an international list of authors) has an interesting premise here. Her book, as she explains in a note, is a response to Ian Waite’s Middlefield: A postwar council estate in time, which I gather is a sociological/cultural study of British subsidized housing. She tells us that “the concerns and nostalgia are in part abstracted,” although I admit to being uncertain as to what exactly this means. The sequence of prose poemns is presented as a looking backwards into childhood, as a visit to places once intimately known, as an attempt to find and understand the past. It is certainly nostalgic, if not warmly so. It is as much exhumation as recollection.

Can anyone else see these streets, their buried gods, the blood from our shins like shadows in gravel, these graves?

Somewhere out-of-focus were the adults, uninterested in such spaces as the empty lot that drew them:

And the adults, they didn’t disobey the signage or peek over walls designed expressly to keep them out. Nothing for them to see but their imagination, creased and left to rot. Wild fear, rumour, grey flowing capes half-seen and blinked away. We lied and camped wherever it looked soft enough. Metal bridges, leftover streams, fat wet furniture, mossy and bright. We wanted rain in our shoes, we wanted to smell damp like the soil of the planet.

This is rather overwrought language, appropriate for an adult reliving the intensity of collective childhood experience. These were places were the dangers were felt, if vague and unnamed, making them all the more exciting. When the poet says “We didn’t want to go home (we never wanted to go home)” it isn’t hard to wonder whether home is now, for the adult looking back, a place that simply can’t be entered anymore.

The voice of these poems is oddly passionate and alienated at the same time. It isn’t always easy to say why one sentences follows another. Near the end we are told that “Everything is here for the taking” but this feels more like a past, a memory, a fiction that has us in its grip whether we like it or not.

Catherine Marcotte reviews Cary Fagan's Fifty-Two Lines About Henry (2024) at The Miramichi Reader

Kingston, Ontario-based reader, editor and writer Catherine Marcotte was good enough to provide the first review for Cary Fagan's Fifty-Two Lines About Henry (2024) over at The Miramichi Reader. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here.

Mourning favourite colours, cooking for dachshunds, and feeding birds gummi-worms: these are the kind of adventures that animate Cary Fagan’s charming new chapbook, Fifty-Two Lines About Henry.

Faithful to its title, this fifty-two-line collection is a fragmented look into the strange and whimsical life of a man named Henry. His is a tale of misplaced energies, unlikely luck, and lasting anxieties about anything from flag-raising and hat-wearing to door-slamming.

And as these small, out of context stories multiply and expand, clarifying our sense of our protagonist, the book ultimately reminds that no one line can aptly convey the absurdity of human life.

Although Henry contemplates dancing to calm an enraged bear, orders enough sardines to fill two bedrooms – I hope they’re canned – and writes an 861-page chapter to a novel, his unlikely battles remain rooted in a world well-recognized where neighbours are suspicious, dinner parties are taxing, and things learned at school are revealed to be alternately fateful (the sousaphone, surprisingly) and superfluous (trigonometry).

Punctuated by unexpected guests like a thorn-ridden lion and existential questions about littering, Fagan’s work engages the surreal and the hyperreal to lay bare the unknowability of life’s many moments. And as these small, out of context stories multiply and expand, clarifying our sense of our protagonist, the book ultimately reminds that no one line can aptly convey the absurdity of human life: “My life, he said into the dark, can’t be reduced to a single line.” A funny, heartfelt ride, Fifty-Two Lines About Henry is a fast-paced, witty, and undeniably charming meditation on the many thoughts and feelings that populate our strange, unknowable days.

Jérôme Melançon reviews Lori Anderson Moseman's OKAY? (2022) and too many words (2022) at The Ampersand Review

I'm not sure how I missed posting this, but our pal (and above/ground press author) Jérôme Melançon, poet, translator and critic, provided first reviews for two different Lori Anderson Moseman above/ground press titles--OKAY? (2022) and too many words (2022)--over at The Ampersand Review. Thanks so much! You should go here to see the whole review. Why didn't I post this earlier?

Jaclyn Desforges reviews nina jane drystek's Missing Matrilineal (2023) and Sophia Magliocca's Girl Gives Long-Fingered Self-Portrait (2023) in Hamilton Review of Books

Hamilton writer Jaclyn Desforges offers first reviews for nina jane drystek's Missing Matrilineal (2023) and Sophia Magliocca's Girl Gives Long-Fingered Self-Portrait (2023) as part of a three-title review (alongside Ben Robinson's The Book of Benjamin), "The Presence of Absence," over at Hamilton Review of Books. Thanks so much! You can see the original review here, or excerpted below. As Desforges writes:

When I chose the collections to juxtapose for this review, I absolutely did not look for connections in advance. I chose two chapbooks that appealed to me: Missing Matrilineal by nina jane drystek and Girl Gives Long-Fingered Self Portrait by Sophia Magliocca, both published in 2023 by above/ground press. But I was immediately struck by the pervasive feeling of absence in drystek’s collection: The first poem, “i haven’t found the ladle yet,” begins with the image of an empty bowl. drystek creates a portrait of memory, loss and grief by focusing on what remains after a beloved person’s death: “the row of cedars he planted,” she writes. “the quilts she sewed.” drystek’s poems are spacious and vivid, dancing between English, Polish and French. We see wallpaper curls and cupboard-aged whiskey, imagine borscht on our tongues.

In the final and longest poem, “my second sister makes her apparition,” the speaker addresses her sister Isabelle who, as we learn later in the acknowledgements, “lived for the briefest of moments.” Still reeling from The Book of Benjamin, I was struck by the lines “a girl unborn / est une femme fantôme,” “surely there is dust that remembers,” “a body that wasn’t,” and “name that is.” This collection is intimate and tender – full of grief and bittersweetness. It’s about death, which is another way of saying it’s about love.  

While drystek’s chapbook is a collage of objects left behind, Magliocca’s is, as the title indicates, a self-portrait. In the first movement of the collection, the speaker lists details about herself – “I’m a fast talker slow walker average daughter,” Magliocca writes. “I’m a good swimmer for three strokes.” The first poem, “Note,” is made up of a single stanza, but as Magliocca goes on, the poems begin to break apart – the next three contain four quatrains, and as the speaker goes on, revealing increasingly vulnerable details, Magliocca adds white space and staggered line breaks. “I spend my evenings in the bathroom / staring at that face / stretched across the chrome drain,” she writes. By page 11 of the chapbook, the repeated word “memories” snakes across the page, and on page 17, the second movement of the collection begins with what the speaker is afraid to carry: “big boxes up / narrow staircases / rusty knives on flat trays.” Then, after a long gap, the word babies appears neatly in the centre of the page. The final poem begins, “I know nine months is 274 days.” It appears on the page like a series of waves, or the curves of a body, and goes on to explore the complex feelings surrounding the speaker’s abortion. “I know your would-be birthday,” Magliocca writes. “fire sign like your father / imagine soft curls / auburn.” And there again, the immovable presence of absence – that blank space of might-have-been.

Susan Kay Anderson reviews Heather Cadsby's How to (2023)

Susan Kay Anderson was good enough to provide the first review of Heather Cadsby's How to (2023) over at NewPages; thanks so much! See the original post here. As she writes:

The prose poems in How To by Heather Cadsby are hilarious, and their titles are satisfying enough, let alone the bodies of the poems. Some examples: “How to catch flamboyant bohemians,” “How to tell if it’s different,” and “How to look at a broken fountain.” Each one offers its own non-advice and leads me to hunger for more.

I love how Cadsby plays with expectations. These poems offer surprises that are language-based without being frustrating to read. They are LOL poems, as in this line from “How to know if your venn diagram is pentimento”:

Golf is geometry as is burlesque.

These are funny and my mind creates illustrations or comic images to go with them as I read. I am challenged by this as a reader and also immensely entertained. Not a lot of poetry is funny. Many times, when poets try to be funny, they start rhyming or sound like Dean Young imitators (even though that is a good thing). Thank goodness to have read Cadsby’s inventions, I say to myself, wondering how I will manage to set this book down and get my mind back.

Susan Kay Anderson reviews Leesa Dean's Apogee/Perigee (2023)

Susan Kay Anderson was good enough to provide the first review of Leesa Dean's Apogee/Perigee (2023) over at NewPages; thanks so much! See the original post here. As she writes:

Apogee/Perigee by Leesa Dean is about relationships near and far. What is the poet’s relationship to situations, people, and other everyday items? I see Dean’s poems in a creative, concrete way; and see them as points on an astrology chart, which is circular and the connecting points to various houses/states of being. This is a sacred, esoteric book of poems not to be approached offhandedly. Slowly, by studying these dialed-up, circles of potency, there is a lot revealed, as in these lines from “House of Values”:

[. . . ] movies
on repeat. ice cream on repeat.
dinner at bedtime. toys kept in
Crown Royale bags.

At first, I did not get that these were astrology charts. They looked like maps with scroll and script writing. When I went back and examined them, it was plain as can be. In these lines, Dean remembers her grandmother’s teachings:

[. . . ] her eyes lit like
bright swans when her mouth
formed the words.

I love, “her eyes lit like bright swans” so much. I can see and feel this image. The mystery, the sacred, and the overcoming of what was endured make for careful reading. If I read nothing else, I would be satisfied.

Susan Kay Anderson reviews rob mclennan's The Alta Vista Improvements (2023)

Susan Kay Anderson was good enough to provide the first review of my own chapbook The Alta Vista Improvements (2023) over at NewPages; thanks so much! See the original post here. Although: is it angsty to consider the countryside? As she writes:

There must be an angst category in poetry called urban angst poetry when you realize you live in a city but have been feeling and acting like you are in the countryside. Maybe that’s not the case, here, exactly. More like pandemic angst, which the entire planet can relate to. rob mclennan’s Alta Vista Improvements is a place where such a realization occurs and is one of above/ground press’ unique pamphlets churned out in Canada. Here are a few lines in the titular poem in Section 5, which I loved reading:

[. . . ] this through-line
of patchwork housing, outcrop. A craft

of optimism, ignorance. The internet
equally bears each alphabet.

This is delicious writing! mclennan highlights the loss of the family goldfish through multiple fish, multiple losses; something is wrong in the picture of domesticity. What is it? We don’t exactly find out, yet travel the off-road territory with mclennan and enjoy every moment. In “Summer, pandemic,” as he waits for us in the car, his loyalty goes above and beyond to the complicated:

[. . . ] I perch in precooked car
awaiting our cat, in his follow up appointment
to recent dental extraction [. . . ]

Will life get itself all sorted out? In The Alta Vista Improvements, we sit and ponder (and hope) in all the wreckage.

Jill Mandrake reviews M.A.C. Farrant's SOME OF THE PUZZLES (2021) in Geist #123

Thanks much to Jill Mandrake, who provided a first review for M.A.C. Farrant's SOME OF THE PUZZLES (2021) in the spring 2023 issue of Geist! Naturally, there are some copies still available, but be aware that most of the pieces also appear this month in her latest full-length from Talonbooks, Jigsaw!

Billy Mills reviews Jordan Davis' NOISE (2023)

Billy Mills was good enough to provide a first review of Jordan Davis' recent NOISE (2023) over at his blog, alongside a slew of other reviews (including a non-above/ground press title by above/ground press author Buck Downs). Thanks so much! You can see the original review here. As he writes:

Davis’ own Noise is published in Ottawa by Rob McLennan’s above/ground press. Davis is a New York poet, which is to say that he is a poet of hard surfaces, with he shades of Ashbery and O’Hara floating around somewhere beneath them, which is intended as praise; we all have our forebears. Where the comparison is most true is that everything you need to read a Davis poem is in the poem you’re reading.

In many of the poems here, Davis’ language reflects the somewhat random nature of reality as a source of delight:

The Ultimate Team Chart

Given how much of time pearls.
Now, take a walk from the subway
to your last place of residence.
The changes to the roster of local retail.
A couple you always noticed
with a new dog, facial scars.
The thick light of a humid day,
swelling of the river. Love the car
comparing subwoofers. I love
the givens of a neighborhood,
the opportunities (declined) to become jaded.
My art is what’s eating your shoes.

This is a kind of quantum Heraclitus; you both can and cannot enter the same neighbourhood twice, but what marks Davis out as a poet is that refusal to become jaded, an ability both to see and to articulate the extraordinary in the everyday, the aliveness of things. Which is not to deny an innate scepticism that also informs his work:

What separates us from the animals?
I’ll answer with the animals: a fence.
[from ‘Think Tank Girl’]

But then again you cannot celebrate the messy totality of the world without including the warts. It is this acceptance of complexity that drives these poems:

I keep thinking I have something
to show you, like noticing
what I was thinking when I wasn’t thinking
which was partly what you were saying,
something about happiness and sex and something
you wouldn’t think I would think, noticing
how quickly once around the park was becoming
sunrise flickering on the edge of your collar.

The interweaving of the personal and what, for want of a better word, we might call the philosophical, is made possible by the syntax and rhythm of the lines. In particular, the stop/start stress patterns frame the process of thinking through:

I keep thinking I have something

to show you, like noticing

what I was thinking when I wasn’t thinking

which was partly what you were saying,

Of course, others may read differently, but however you parse it, the language of prosody, of metrical feet and regular patterns, is inadequate to the movement of these lines, with long runs of unstressed syllable bumping up against paired stresses. And his musical range is wide, as evident in these taut lines from ‘The Moon Outshined by Cigars’:

Two arcs joined at the ends
a thin scree. The sink
gills up Bromeliad
unabridged

Or these more relaxed, but no less intricately patterned, ones from ‘Periphrase’, one of the longer poems here:

People are like plants; I’m trying to get you to propagate,
But I can’t do it with just poetry –
And by the way unless you have a child nobody’s going to believe how beautiful I say you are.

But enough. He’s a poet. Go read him.

Emily Breitkopf reviews Leigh Chadwick's Dating Pete Davidson (2022) in The Ampersand Review

Emily Breitkopf was good enough to provide the first review of Leigh Chadwick's Dating Pete Davidson (2022) in The Ampersand Review. Thanks so much! You can see the original review here.

LEIGH CHADWICK, DATING PETE DAVIDSON.
OTTAWA: ABOVE/GROUND PRESS, 2022

Leigh Chadwick’s chapbook Dating Pete Davidson published by above/ground press is such a refreshing and fun read. Every single page had me grinning from ear to ear and giggling to myself at the sheer concept of this chapbook. For anyone who might not know who Pete Davidson is, I highly recommend looking into it in order to properly appreciate this collection. All the small call-outs to Davidson’s dating history, especially his recent breakup with Kim Kardashian, and other people he has had a run-in with like Kanye West, were what made this chapbook so hilarious. It felt like an inside scoop to this fake relationship Chadwick has built just for this piece with such great comedic tones. I found myself rooting for Chadwick and Davidson and hoping that Pete Davidson would finally have a relationship that sticks. Dating Pete Davidson is a comedic masterpiece from front cover all the way to the acknowledgements. If you have even the slightest clue who Pete Davidson is you’re going to want to read this. And if you don’t know who Pete Davidson is, you’re going to want to find out just so you can read Leigh Chadwick’s chapbook.

Scott Bryson reviews MLA Chernoff's SCRIED FUNDAMENTS (2022) in Broken Pencil

Scott Bryson was good enough to provide the first review of MLA Chernoff's SCRIED FUNDAMENTS (2022) in Broken Pencil. Thanks so much! You can see the original review here.

Chapbook, MLA Chernoff, 20 pgs, above/ground press, abovegroundpress.blogspot.com, $5

The poems in this collection defy conclusive interpretation, but they appear to record a reality that’s now very familiar to most of us: life in lockdown, trapped at home, adrift in thought.

As the “SCRIED” of the title suggests (future-telling via reflective surface), we get a distorted view of this narrative. It’s bent by the crystal ball we’re peering into as much as by the off-kilter discourse of the person who’s speaking. There are enough instances of “our,” “we” and allusions to sex in these poems to suggest that someone is there with Chernoff (assuming Chernoff is the speaking “I”), though we don’t hear from or about this other — only of their shared role in these circumstances.

Chernoff’s mood is somehow both manic and dour, sometimes feverish: “six long months of constant clickery… Every day rides the mucus of a snail… every night is Friday night and Monday / morning put together, burnt out and without end.” Compound words are regularly invented (“hornyscared,” “givingspread”) and a complex vocabulary is employed — you’ll find plenty of obscure terms to look up. A lone snippet of text is repeated here, in the first poem and the last: “I gotta make a decision / leave tonight or live and die this way.” It’s the plainest bit of speech Chernoff uses — a recurring moment of lucidity that never resolves.

SCRIED FUNDAMENTS is attention-grabbing, clever and regularly baffling. It’s sometimes recognizable and sometimes foreign, and though it often seems impossible to decipher, there’s never a dull moment.

Graham Sigurdson reviews Amanda Earl's a field guide of fanciful bugs (2021) at Broken Pencil

Graham Sigurdson was good enough to provide a review of Amanda Earl's a field guide to fanciful bugs (2021) over at Broken Pencil. Thanks so much! This is actually the second review of such, after Bryce Warnes reviewed such over at The Pamphleteer. You can see Sigurdson's original review here; although I should mention that, while this is the ninth chapbook above/ground press has done of Earl's work, it isn't the ninth chapbook the press has done of her visuals (this seems an important distinction).

A field guide of fanciful bugs

Originally published as an ebook in 2010, a field guide to fanciful bugs is the ninth chapbook of Amanda Earl’s visual poetry from Ottawa’s above/ground Press. The fanciful bugs in question here are several visual poems made up of single letters or small words. A group of M’s are arranged cleverly, labeled as “The Gnasher.” Several V’s make up “the vampire mosquito.” It’s a playful idea-and indeed, ‘whimsy’ is one of Earl’s stated goals in her bio. But the relationships between letter form, image, poem, and name are rocky and inconsistent, prompting unease. A group of V’s are “the snow bugs,” while later an arrangement of the name ‘Max’ is “the small butterflies of Max Ernst.” The central idea of these visual poems is revealed at the end of the chapbook, but rather than building out a logic to justify it, it feels like a sudden gear shift toward the end. On her website, Earl notes that she has grapheme synaesthesia, where in colour and text often blend together in her perception. Considered through this lens, things make a little more sense, with the folding text and interplay of shapes likely looking significantly different to those who experience this. In this sense, a field guide to fanciful bugs serves as a strong example of synaesthesic art at work. I only wish I’d been able to enter the experience a bit more.

Susan Rukeyser's Whatever Feels Like Home (2021) reviewed by Alice Kaltman at Heavy Feather Review

Alice Kaltman was good enough to provide a review of Susan Rukeyser's Whatever Feels Like Home (2021) over at Heavy Feather Review. Thanks so much! This is actually the third review of Rukeyser's collection of short prose, after one posted to the Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library website, and a further posted by Al Kratz over at his blog. You can see Kaltman's original review here.

Susan Rukeyser’s new chapbook may be short in stature, a mere twenty pages, but there is nothing slim about the rich, emotionally resonant prose within. Whatever Feels Like Home reads like a songbook, each of the ten stories, melodic and masterful, ask that age-old query; What truly is home? With Rukeyser at the helm, the answer comes in fresh and alarming ways.

Here are tales of longing for belonging, of place and displacement, of family and estrangement. Each story is awash in wonder, regret, envy, and disappointments. Home is where the heart is? With Rukeyser’s sober and honest perspective, that’s not always the case.

This unusual collection showcases Rukeyser’s impressive range of narrative style. She’s as masterful in humorous first person as she is writing in a deeply mournful third. Some stories are no more than a paragraph long, lengthier ones barely brush past two pages. Still each story has heft.

Poetic lines are dropped in just the right places, always without pretense. At times I gasped at their potency and beauty. For example: “Everything shellacked with filmy silence” from “Stuck Shut,” a story about escape from disappointment and domestic claustrophobia. Or “Forgiving slacks were armor. Her smile, a shield,” from “Hers,” Mrs. Anderson’s brief but powerful story which sits in the very center of this marvelous book, across the page break from “His,” Mr. Anderson’s companion piece, as if on the opposite side of a bleak, marital divide.

There’s also a quiet humor threading its way throughout this book, even when a story is anything but funny. The first piece, “Yes, You Can Eat Your Goldfish,” starts with “Yes, you can eat your darling goldfish. He is most likely a form of ornamental carp, and he will taste as you expect: muddy and full of bones.” From there, Rukeyser leads us (in one brilliant page no less) from what appears to be a funny list of instructions but is ultimately a sobering tale about impossible romantic notions of love, of squashed expectations, and ultimate loss.

Really, every story in Whatever Feels Like Home is a winner. There’s the laugh out loud “FOR SALE: Galloping Horse (brass wall art)>>>Mint<<<,” where heavy wall art wreaks all sorts of violence and relational mayhem.

And then, the alarming “You Were the Girl Who,” chronicling gushing adoration in unrequited youthful friendship (you were the girl who made our town interesting), a cautionary tale which takes a surprising, devastating turn, setting the idea of the safety and comfort of ‘home’ completely awhirl.

Rukeyser writes in “Human/Nature”: “I want to be that rock, she thinks. I want to be yielded to … I want to be that rock, she thinks. I want to be pushed.” Read Whatever Feels Like Home. Yield to this book and guaranteed; you will be pushed along by the solid, sumptuous, powerful prose in this startling collection.

Benjamin Niespodziany’s The Northerners (2021) is reviewed (alongside an interview with the author) by Evan Williams at The Chicago Maroon

Thanks to Evan Williams for providing the first review of Benjamin Niespodziany’s The Northerners (2021), alongside an interview with the author, over at The Chicago Maroon. The review is posted below, but see here for the whole piece, including the interview.

Ben Niespodziany’s The Northerners (above/ground press, 2021) is a collection of 37 short, numbered poems written while watching Alex van Warmerdam’s 1992 film De Noorderlingen on mute.

The Northerners is episodic, like watching a movie in a theater cast in violent strobe-lighting. The divisions between each poem are extreme, and yet, there are always two on a page and, save for the 37th poem, there’s always a degree of visual continuity. Threading the episodic bursts into, if not a narrative, then at least a form of textually-depicted progression, is The Northerners’s cast of characters. Most present are the saint, the boy, the forester, and the butcher. Appearing briefly are the two monks, the neighborhood, the postman, the glutton, the pond, the coat rack, and the forest. While the primary four actors in Niespodziany’s project provide a sense of stability in an otherwise fluid world, the ephemeral background players allow the book a sense of rapid motion through their whirlwind entrance and subsequent exit.

At the core of Niespodziany’s project is the recognition that the illogical exists but is always just beyond our reach. He writes in “[17]”, “The real challenge is not/ lassoing the moon/ but reeling it in once caught.” Each of Niespodziany’s characters encounters this dilemma at some point or another; each of them is able to feel the moon in their grasp but is able to bring it no closer than that. The saint, forester, and butcher have become either so disillusioned by its hardness (“They catch the butcher in bed with/ weaponry and a pint of ink./ Feet of feather, tethered time.”) or so hopelessly optimistic that such an awful thing isn’t true (“The saint/ waits up late/ for a sign./ The moon/ does the same.”) that they have been dissuaded from chasing this magic. Or, perhaps, they are too afraid to do so for fear that it’s just sand.

It is the boy who seems most able to hold at once in his head the fact of worldly limitations and the presence of otherworldly wonder, the boy who seems able to convey both in a single stroke (from “[30]”):    

The boy suspects

a world outside

the neighborhood.

He is a radio

reporting in the forest.

A simple lump in the throat.    

The mode in which Niespodziany has written The Northerners contributes to this sense of just-almost-magic, each poem offering its reader a glimpse of the moon, the illogical, the impossible, or the fantastic, only to leave us on the edge of wonder for the next poem. No poem exemplifies this impulse better than the book’s final numbered piece, “[36]”:

The director

refuses to discuss

the ending. He’s busy

in his pool, writing

something new.    

Niespodziany’s project is novel in method and tantalizing in message. It seems to implore its reader to listen for a radio signal in the forest, to really hear it in its nuance, then to cast a lasso 'round the moon, just to give it a go—maybe it’s ready to be reeled in at last.

some author activity: Naughton, Boyle, Rukeyser, Iijima + Scroggins,

Katie Naughton has a poem up in the Tuesday poem series via the dusie blog; Frances Boyle has a poem in the Poetry Pause series via The League of Canadian Poets; Susan Rukeyser's above/ground press title gets a curious (and positive) review/mention by Gabriel Hart as part of Echoes from the Bear Creek Lending Library via the Bear Creek Gazette; Brenda Iijima has a new piece in collaboration with Janice Lee up at Annulet; and Mark Scroggins writes on Jack Spicer for Hyperallergic.

Ryan C reviews two Billy Mavreas titles: B V A (2019) and drop (2020)

Billy Mavreas recently discovered two reviews of his above/ground press chapbooks we weren't previously aware of, as "Ryan C." reviewed B V A (2019) over at his blog here, and drop (2020) over at his blog here. Thanks so much! Especially given that these are the first reviews of either, we are even that much more grateful. And did you hear that Mavreas has a full-length forthcoming from Conundrum Press? That's pretty cool.

the first review of Whatever Feels Like Home (2021) by Susan Rukeyser

The first review of Susan Rukeyser's Whatever Feels Like Home (2021) is now online at the Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library website. Thanks so much! You can read the full review here. As the reviewer writes:

I love the poetry Susan includes in her fascinating flash fiction. For example, this line about a goldfish: “His translucent fins fanned like the scarves of an old burlesque dancer still going through the motions.”

These ten stories take us deep into the lives of the characters, and not the normal fiction characters of politics and fame. Susan instead focuses on our friends and neighbors, and manages to reach in and expose my own foibles to myself. My gut tells me that you too will find yourself in at least one of these stories, and members of your family in other stories, and for sure your next-door neighbor. And, those characters whose stories are unique and new to you will become life-long friends due to Susan’s love of her characters. I know Hank now has a soft spot in my heart, and I wish him a long life with good friends.

Susan’s descriptions of events are precise and vivid: “And wasn’t this what you did, when you lost a guy who probably wasn’t your forever guy but what if he WAS? You go crazy. You rage. You weep. You break into his trailer and sit on his couch with a knife across your lap, so he will shit himself when he opens the door after a long shift, sore and beat, and all he wants in life is a shower and to be left alone.” Another story paints a colorful picture of living together full-time, “Resentment, old as this marriage, sticks to doorknobs and window sills. It gums up the corners.”

I marvel at how Susan seemingly effortlessly embeds seventeen syllable micropoems into her stories. I just stare in wonder at and savor the skill, and admire the work that goes into this precision. From two different stories: “Mrs. Anderson stretched as birds chittered, a brook sputtered over stones.” And “You were the girl who could never leave. How did they know you slept through it?” With this careful, pristine writing throughout, I highly recommend this book for your reading pleasure. The stories I have seen previously live just as strong with re-reading, and I know this will be a small book I’ll return to with pleasure.