Jordan Windholz, The Sisters

 

The Sisters in the Night

Together, but they didn’t know how they arrived, in the center, or where they could imagine the center, of a dark forest, howls with teeth in them, a grey silence that ate their questions. They didn’t even know if they were the villains, the wayward, the weird, the witches cursed to conjure sprites and devilish curs, if they were an ancient magic feeding saplings into a heretic bonfire, its pillar of wet, white smoke rising like a spell. The sky was black above them, stuck with stars that seemed the pinpricks of a bloodletting, their hot light hissing and steaming in the mists snaking through the woods. The moon was a sister of what they didn’t know. They were not afraid. They had knives beneath their muslin, amethyst charms, a language that bent the world back into wishing. They imagined whatever was next was a perch with a nest of mottled eggs in its maw, a birthing of naked, flying forms or a tender meal for skulking cats.

I am intrigued by this second collection (and the first I’ve seen) by Carlisle, Pennsylvania poet Jordan Windholz, The Sisters (Black Ocean, 2024), following on the heels of his full-length debut, Other Psalms (Denton TX: University of North Texas, 2015). The Sisters is an assemblage of short prose poems interspersed with illustrations, and includes this brief caveat in the author’s “Notes & Acknowledgments”: “Written first as bedtime stories for my daughters, these poems were largely private affairs until they weren’t. I owe almost everything to Erin Ryan for her attentive reading and care, and for her urging me to put them out in the world.” Across fifty-four prose poems, Windholz offers such fanciful titles such as “The Sisters in the Emperor’s Gardens,” “The Sisters as Points of Infinite Regression,” “The Sisters as Two among the Many,” “The Sisters as the History of Blue” and “The Sisters in the Dream of a Giant.”

These are charming, even delightful story-poems that play with children’s storytelling, and a way of narrative and character unfolding through a sequence of self-contained prose poems reminiscent of Toronto poet Shannon Bramer’s full-length debut, scarf (Toronto ON: Exile Editions, 2001), or even Montreal poet Stephanie Bolster’s Three Bloody Words (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 1996, 2016)—one might also be reminded of Berkeley, California poet Laura Walker’s story (Berkeley CA: Apogee Press, 2016) [see my review of such here], Victoria, British Columbia poet Eve Joseph’s Quarrels (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2018) [see my review of such here] or New York poet Katie Fowley’s The Supposed Huntsman (Brooklyn NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021) [see my review of such here]—through shared shades of fable, fairytale and the fantastical. As with any appropriate foray into fable, there are shadows that unfurl, unfold, through these pages, and hardly bloodless, echoing the best of what those Brothers Grimm might have salvaged. “It didn’t surprise them, exactly,” begins “The Sisters as Regicides,” “how cleanly the blade slipped between the bones of his neck, how, with just the slightest heft of their bodies on the hilt, his screaming—like a child’s, really—cratered into a singular whimper, then a wheeze. With his head off, the King—but was it right to call him that now?—was nothing more than what all corpses are: a heap of flesh, a sinewy mess, time’s ragged lace.”

Zach Savich, momently

 

driveway globe

the conditions you need to think about the most make it impossible
have I loved it enough for it to be enough    here    where not even ruin
lasts

an ethics of deciding to see    considered meeting you at the station but
remembered the pleasure of finding another’s home in its instances the
music not cued but playing    the rain of blood was dung from passing
butterflies

forgot to send you the book read it myself again     as in a late sonata not
more beautiful for being late but late and more beautiful    and peace was
a wind from far through the house    the curtains would move from it
but to it the windows are bare

The latest from Philadelphia poet and editor Zach Savich is the poetry title momently (Boston MA: Black Ocean, 2024), following more than half a dozen prior poetry titles including The Orchard Green and Every Color (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2016) [see my review of such here]. “you could do worse    than write a poem to summon wind    or to read / one    and notice wind,” he writes, to close the poem “heights hardware.” The poems in Savich’s momently, none of which extend beyond a single page (although at least a couple are missing from the table of contents, oddly enough), extend into a kind of single lyric; a single, ongoing sentence across fifty pages, held in place through poem-titles, repetitions, threads. “I decide coffee alone will not heal me,” he writes, to open “proposal,” “is there sugar    I returned to / earth for coffee    I saw no need to forgive me    I had to do it and did / it nevertheless [.]” The poems extend, stretch out through the possible and towards the impossible; they move across and attend moments, small items set into a kind of ongoing and accumulative consequence or sequence. “harder to write myself a note,” he writes, to open the poem “luna pier,” “on the back of the eulogy    than the / eulogy    it take a long time to tune    and longer to trust [.]” There is an element of Savich’s poems here comparable to the lyrics of Canadian poet Phil Hall, curiously enough, although Savich’s sequence of hesitations and observations run more fluid than Hall’s comparatively-pointillist accumulations. “though sadly a faith in entropy only gets you so far,” Savich’s poem “showroom” begins, “because some things / do last    at least so far as we do [.]” Built as a rich tapestry of moments, this is a dreamy-scape of absolute specifics set across a very fine lyric.

A ‘best of’ list of 2023 Canadian poetry books

Once more, I offer my annual list of the seemingly-arbitrary “worth repeating” (given ‘best’ is such an inconclusive, imprecise designation), constructed from the list of Canadian poetry titles I’ve managed to review throughout the past year. This is my thirteenth annual list [see also: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011] since dusie-maven Susana Gardner originally suggested various dusie-esque poets write up their own versions of same, and I thank her both for the ongoing opportunity, and her original prompt.

It does feel as though I’ve done far fewer reviews this year than across the prior few, overloaded with a couple of large non-fiction projects and various other book deadlines, etcetera. There were plenty of books I simply didn’t manage to get to yet; or are there simply more books? There is still a handful of titles from this year I have yet to get to, certainly (including the new Judith Copithorne, which looks brilliant), but unless I do a count, I haven’t a clue how many reviews I’ve actually managed. The fact that I’ve “only” thirty-eight on this list (compared to other years) suggests to me that I haven’t reviewed nearly as much this year as I’ve done prior (which I’ve suspected throughout the year, simply busy with other things; and there are certain Canadian publishers that simply haven’t been sending books along, frustratingly), although my count shows I’ve posted some one hundred and forty book reviews across 2023, which is quite a lot. I’m pleased I managed to get a mound of chapbook reviews posted, as well as some journal reviews (something I hadn’t been doing nearly as much across the year or two prior), composing reviews of The Capilano Review : 50th Anniversary Issue(s) : 3:46-3:48 [see my review here], SOME : sixth issue [see my review here], filling Station #81 : Some Kind of Dopamine Hit [see my review here] and SOME: seventh issue [see my review here]. There’s also been a plethora of worthy non-fiction prose reviews I’ve posted, with stellar works including INDIGIQUEERNESS: Joshua Whitehead In Dialogue with Angie Abdou (Athabasca University Press, 2023) [see my review of such here], Gail Scott, Furniture Music: A Northern in Manhattan: Poets/Politics [2008-2012] (Wave Books, 2023) [see my review of such here] and Jim Johnstone, Write Print Fold and Staple: On Poetry and Micropress in Canada (Gaspereau Press, 2023) [see my review of such here].

Barry McKinnon died this past year, so that was a bit of a hit [see my obituary for him here].

I wonder, occasionally, if I should be working similar ‘best of’ lists for chapbooks, or American full-length collections, or fiction, or a geographically-unspecified list of full-length collections, but then I remember that this list takes a full day to compile and post, so there you go. And you know this list always includes a few stragglers from the year prior, yes? I mean, I can only do so much during a calendar year. Beyond that, I always mean for these lists to be shorter, but I couldn’t think of a list without including every book on this list. Is there simply too much exciting work being produced right now?

This year’s list includes full-length poetry titles by Dale Tracy, Khashayar Mohammadi/Saeed Tavanaee Marvi, Manahil Bandukwala, David Dowker, Erin Robinsong, natalie hanna, Jason Purcell, ryan fitzpatrick, Milton Acorn and bill bissett, George Bowering, Dennis Cooley, Jen Currin, Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, Kate Siklosi, Gary Barwin and Lillian Nećakov, Camille Martin, Matthew Hollett, Laila Malik, Emily Osborne, Meghan Kemp-Gee, Weyman Chan, Alycia Pirmohamed, Amy Ching-Yan Lam, Kate Cayley, Jake Byrne, Natalie Rice, Tom Cull, David Martin, Erín Moure, Adam Beardsworth, Jim Johnstone, Amanda Earl, Shane Book, Sandra Ridley, andrea bennett, Nikki Reimer, Ben Meyerson and Matthew Gwathmey.

See this year's full list here.

Ben Meyerson, Seguiriyas

 

Tekiah Gedolah

Wind through the ram’s horn. Bone-stench,
a blast from the varicose canal. Stillness
slants the swaying crowd—I await the lengthened
tone even once it spills into my ears:
the breath is sapped of air before it ever fills,
stretched and pale to be preserved, dead but not—
time is a leech that lets the note like blood,
a year milked out into the swollen abdomen of history,
its woolen pulse that ebbs from organs out to breath
and back, our corner of Toronto in a holding pattern
of sleep cars, finery, forgetting. Blithe assurance
that we are special. Wind through the horn.
The call, a muscle wrenched beyond
its axis of return. Time is a leech.

I’m intrigued by this full-length debut by poet Ben Meyerson, a poet who currently splits his time between Canada and Spain, the collection Seguiriyas (Boston MA/Chicago IL: Black Ocean, 2023). Following on the heels of four poetry chapbooks—In a Past Life (The Alfred Gustav Press, 2016), Holcocene (Kelsay Books, 2019), An Ecology of the Void (above/ground press, 2019) and Near Enough (Seven Kitchens Press, 2023)—Seguiriyas is expansive and ambitious: composed around a particular musical structure, one with deep cultural ties to the Gitanos (the Romani population) of Andalusia. To close the three-page “Al Cante,” he writes: “To live is to be buoyed / without knowledge of the buoyancy: // a cry that gives and refuses to give. // A cry that accompanies the cry.”

As his “Author’s Note” offers, the “Seguiriyas” of his title “is derived from the flamenco palo (or ‘song form’) of the same name.” Structured with opening poem “Close” and closing poem “Open,” with four numbered sections of poems in between, Meyerson composes an assemblage of poems that fit together as thoughtfully as individual puzzle pieces, or possibly a quilt, all assembled through and around the larger musical structure of the song form. “Take dawn and make it a hinge,” he writes, to open the poem “Daybreak Translation,” “as if night is a shutter to be tugged / up or down / in the talons of a rock dove, pulled / from above, where the pulsation of wingtips / warps air into pillars banished sharp / against the empyrean cliff, whose summit / is a vertex in the fold / of a face averting.” The poems write elements around and through the large subject of placement, displacement and history—a perspective from and a tether between his Toronto upbringing to larger conversations around diaspora—and how cultural memory is held, passed on and preserved. His opening “Author’s Note” goes on to write:

The seguiriyas palo is known to draw on solemn subject matter— poverty, displacement, incarceration, mistreatment, and lost love are among the most commonly recurring themes across the extant collection of traditional lyrics, which have emerged out of the historical memory, social life and material conditions of the Gitano community in the Iberian Peninsula. Though the vast majority of flamenco’s oldest lyrics within palos such as the siguiriya and the soleá (another fundamental song form in the tradition) can only be dated back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they often showcase an awareness of events in Andalusia that occurred centuries prior, detailing aestheticized interactions with Muslims and Moriscos, who were formally expelled from Spain in 1609, making reference to the historical presence of Jews, who were expelled in 1492, and alluding to the heavily discriminatory policies that the central authorities imposed against the Gitano population between 1499 and 1783, which led to waves of incarceration and the forcible conscription of many Gitano men as rowers in the galleys that carried out the state’s imperial affairs.