Florencia Ramirez’s Eat Less Water was listed as one of the 22 Books for Winter 2018 by Food Tank, an innovative team focused on rethinking the food system and alleviating world hunger. Eva Perroni writes, “Each chapter provides recipes to support a less resource-intensive diet and more sustainable agriculture practices.”

Line Assembly applauds But a Storm Is Blowing From a Paradise.-

But a Storm Is Blowing From a Paradise “explodes with dream and bear and body and city and money and no-money and country and race and woman and art and heart and back again so sharp and fast that the spine actually spins in your hands.”

To read the full article, click here.

“Many of Green’s speakers seem to desire to disappear, to re-work the equation for subtraction. It is the frustration caused by a world that fails to allow disappearance which provides this book with a convincing uncertainty. Green’s is a world where one cannot distinguish between the ending and the beginning simply by the sound of the applause.”

–Michael Turner, Growler

“With his mastery of language and eye for detail, Doyle’s characters always feel authentic, and their ups and downs are realistically proportioned. His gift for finding the sublime in even the small and dirty details is alive and gleaming in this short story collection.” —Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

The Bob and Weave Jim Peterson. Red Hen (CDC, dist.), $16.95 (120p) ISBN 1-888996-65-X

Jim Peterson’s poems are filled with the things of this world– its horses, hands, stones, and baseball players–but are not themselves its inhabitants. Rather, this poet moves in a realm where “there is / a space between him and the world and he / tunes it like one string of a violin.” Equally committed to nature, to spirit, to dreams, and to the touch of another human body, Peterson constantly expects “a message / from something that isn’t me / or even like me.” The tensions evolving from this anticipation are by turns erotic, mysterious, and instructively frightening.

Recommended and briefly reviewed by Eduardo C. Corral in Poetry Magazine. The poems in Father, Child, Water by Gary Dop are funny, wicked, and poignant. These three qualities are visible in the titles. For example: “How to Pretend You’ve Read Moby-Dick,” “To My Love Handles,” “Elegy for Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Lite,” and “Little Girl, Little Lion.” Dop’s poetic gaze is wide-ranging and piercing. The poems about his father engage with the violence embedded in American masculinity and the character-driven poems are empathic and quirky. A highly enjoyable and memorable book.

Martha K. Davis’ SCISSORS, PAPER, STONE was recently reviewed by Gertrude Press’ Jess Travers. The novel, narrated in alternating chapters by Catherine, her adopted daughter Min, and Min’s best friend Laura, spans twenty years of love, loss, and the complex reality of female relationships. Seeing similarites between her own experiences and those of Martha’s characters, in “Realizing Queer Kinship,” Travers applauds Martha for creating such a compelling novel and “ruptur[ing] the construct of kinship.” Travers writes, “Scissors, Paper, Stone reminds me to keep putting pressure on my own prejudices about what makes family, and it challenges me to keep rethinking desire. These are not easy tasks for a book to take on, but Davis’ novel rises to the occasion by pointing to the limitations of defining family by way of biology or ethnicity and by inviting the possibility for kinship to be realized in divergent, queer ways.”

“The Chicago poet has spread the good wordings via book, CD, and subway.”

Timothy Lindner of The Literary Review gave a great review for Gary Dop’s Father, Child, Water! Lindner spotlights and relates to how Dop focuses on paternal relationships and their ability to shape our character.

“Luckily for the reader, the humorous images in these poems offset such a heavy handed subject matter, yet both work towards the same emotions. With such clear writing and strong voices, Father, Child, Water encourages its readers to think, question, and imagine their own lives in a new light.”

For the full review, click here.

Scott Hightower reviews Cynthia Hogue’s Or Consequence in the arts review, Fogged Clarity (April 2011). According to Hightower, Hogue is “a poet of extreme precision and no histrionics.”

What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison by Camille T. Dungy. Red Hen Press, 88 pp., $15.95 (paper). Dungy’s powerful first collection recognizes language–“A stranger’s voice echoing through lonely / valleys, a lover’s voice rising so close / it’s your own tongue”–as a lifeline into the past: “Some notes / gather: the bank we map our lives around” (“Language”). For Dungy, human voices are the key: those of beloved family members, of people receding into the past, touched by segregation’s injustice and / or the currents of history….

Hector Tobar from the LA Times applauds Eloise Klein Healy’s treatment of the city of Los Angeles, and comments on “what an inspired choice she was” for the first poet laureate of L.A.-

“A Wild Surmise shows Healy to be a disciplined, polished poet with a vision that’s unfailingly open and generous. As Healy cares for the people close to her, or mourns them, her emotions take residence in the city’s natural and built environments, landscapes that feel at once exotic and familiar, cruel and welcoming.”

John Cotter

A Gringo Like Me by Jennifer L. Knox

Soft Skull Press, 2005, 95p, $13.95

Lamp of the Body by Maggie Smith

Red Hen Press, 2005, 69p, $12.95

Some Mountains Removed by Daniel Bouchard

Subpress, 2005, 92p, $10

If you’re looking for poetry that doesn’t talk down to you yet doesn’t require a PhD in Poetics to appreciate, there are plenty of young American poets with smart, absorbing work just waiting to be opened and read.

Jennifer L. Knox, Daniel Bouchard, and Maggie Smith come from the West Coast, the East Cost, and the Midwest. All three have as much coiled talent and formal dedication as any recently-hailed young novelist or essayist, though they still lack the odd half-hour interview with Terry Gross, or the thumbnail review in The New Yorker. When you come to love their work, you find yourself giving away their books to friends, reading them on the subway, proselytizing. It is never condescending, routinely moving, and a few words about background can remove all trace of confusion from their method.

Their work is largely the product of two interrelated movements at the start of the last century: Hilda Doolittle’s imagism and Ezra Pound’s wild collage. While Doolittle invested short English poems with the visual power of Haiku, Pound combined bits of history and philosophy to make his Cantos simultaneously the stuff of real life and re-examined history’s fragments and sketches shuffled with snatches of song. This style of montage has turned many readers from poetry, but it need not. At its best, it makes language more intense, alive, and more able to represent the world we live in, as opposed to the one we think we see. Anthony Burgess summed up the method beautifully when he wrote, “you make an image stand for an emotion and a cluster of images for a complex psychological state.”

Because she makes it look so easy, it’s also easy for the casual reader to ignore the strength and grace in the lines of Jennifer L. Knox’s A Gringo Like Me, as she carries us from one fresh image to the next. By the second read, it grows clear that a deep understanding of form and prosody underlies what are crafted to resemble poems of loose spontaneity. “Love Blooms at Chimsbury After the War” is a modern sonnet, “Mekong,” here, is a traditional Haiku:

They killed all the trees

to see inside the forest

Then the fog rolled in

Many of the characters in her persona pieces see the world out of tiny windows, like the birdcage bars of the doctor’s office in “Of The Flock,” or the stoner’s TV in “The Laws of Probability in Levittown.” They try to puzzle the world together, but they have always lived in neglected places, and find themselves imagining the world eccentrically. They are capable of falling backward into emotion because of tiny trivia, but remain unfazed by catastrophes.

I moved back in with my parents,

And I’m getting really good at watching TV.

Soon as I saw the housewife last night on Inevitable Justice,

I knew her husband was the killer and I told her so and I was right.

There are two short plays in Knox’s book. One, a dialogue between scholarly dogs sniffing one another’s books, is pure fun. The other, “A Gringo Like Me,” is a fantasia on the myth of the West that would be tricky to stage. One of the directions reads:

(Chase Boys, Girls, Whores away/lie down in their place and form Aztec calendar/rotate through seasons/invent the game of basket-ball with severed heads/play keep-away.)

Some of Knox’s absurdist poems, such as “Instinct in the Age of Astrology” and “Saga of the Hippie Sci-Fi Homosexual,” play the brilliant trick of making a half-graspable collage of popular culture into a narrative that can be read as comfortably as a childhood story. Early in the century, European and South American surrealists riffed in the same way, for example, Rafael Alberti, in his poem “Buster Keaton Looks in the woods for His Love Who Is a Real Cow.” Knox’s poems can be just as absurdist (there are times she is just having fun) but they can also be painfully satirical and pointed:

Which one would you rather hear in the news:

The dead stretched from North Dakota to Nebraska.

Or The dead stretched from Disneyland to Disneyworld.

Maggie Smith’s first collection, Lamp of the Body, is informed by a lush and quiet style of imagism. Her eclectic source material is biblical, fantastic, and cinematic. The proper names of her internal mythology (Job, Dorothy, Desperation) visit the darkest places of the mind. They come from “that lonely country / where there are not fields of flowers / no one dusting them with snow.” They live under an open sky, but even the bluest day can be claustrophobic, and “The sky hears what you pretend / not to ask.” These are painterly poems, formally concerned with color and tone:

Your mother’s blue robe

recedes into rooms lit by

televisions, rooms wavering

blue as aquariums minus

the fish.

The poems here don’t relate narrative so much as enable us to infer a story from a series of images and sensations. Handkerchiefs wave and bones glow. Breasts are so pale “they appeared to be lit from within,” or soft “as fresh figs.” Lamp of the Body follows a growing trend for poetry collections, that of arranging disparate poems to form an arc, or a journey. The poems here begin in childhood, move through loss and pain, end with a sense of renewal, a new life.

Knowledge came

disguised in sweetness

and with such ease, it astonished.

We knew, eventually, we would want

different things. Then

We started wanting them.

Poems on biblical themes appear at intervals, one of which features Job consoling himself that “Worse happens to better than I,” while Lot’s wife watches her city disappear: “The familiar burned bald.” Literally metaphysical, some of these pieces follow the tradition of apostrophes, or poems addressing absent or abstract qualities. Previous poets have invoked the “Muse,” where Smith addresses herself “To Doubt,” or “To Memory.” The best of these poems provide a guided tour of everyday pictures and sets. In “See No Evil,” three young women in a photograph are respectively covering their eyes, ears, and mouth. It’s a joke snapshot like the kind we all have lying around, only this one belongs to the narrator, taken “years ago.” Because the world of the poem exists only in the photograph, the girls aren’t given proper names–only “Hear No Evil,” and “Speak No Evil.” We’re told that “Speak No Evil” is no longer alive. The narrator’s black dog is also long gone. We are observing an idyll that didn’t last. Somehow evil slipped in. The narrator takes her hands from her eyes.

The language in Daniel Bouchard’s collection, Some Mountains Removed, is crafted to resemble jagged, unfinished thoughts, like furniture in the mind. Take “The Ruins of Springfield Walmart”:

Shepards in tattered Nike gear wait

and warm to fire on the filthy sales floor.

Smoke rises,

wisps and firs past an absent ceiling.

These poems are nakedly political and historical in the tradition of Robert Lowell’s “To the Union Dead.” The landscape and history of New England, or “The Northeast Kingdom,” is constantly present: Wellfleet, cannons, Canada geese. The New England of MIT was a whaling capital, and before that wilderness.

Where Maggie Smith takes us inside frozen time, Bouchard’s poems keep moving to remind us that the mind keeps moving, keeps making connections. In the first poem “Leaves,” he spends a late afternoon with his parents and a baby named Jaime, who’s growing up quickly. He remembers climbing trees as a boy himself, “suddenly it’s cocktail time.” Jaime takes his first step at 5:36 pm. As Bouchard’s father cuts squash for dinner, the poet’s mind stops home to Boston:

I imagine it’s warm in the city.

I imagine the single thin

Black road runs quickly

To a roiling black sea

From these fiery woods and farms

In “White Death This Exit”, he drives along a city road at Christmastime. The country is at war. Bouchard hates the war, but reminds us that without imperial wars, the impending snow above the highway wouldn’t fall on cars, but wild grass. “Endicott in Connecticut / waged a brilliant terror campaign / destroying crops of Pequots.” He remembers “flintlock by firelight,” as vividly as “votives and voices, dashboard speakers.”

Bouchard jumps from one pane of thought to another, allowing his sentences to refer to separate times and places. This is what can seem so frustratingly difficult about new poetry, but Bouchard knows what he is doing. If we can understand the associative process of instinct, we can slip into his.

American poetry has rarely been stronger or stranger. Theorists and their movements abound. Post Avant, Deep Image, Black Mountain: they sound like paint samples. Most readers don’t follow the art because they haven’t found the right poem at the right time, like being luckless in love. This is a pity, since the energy inside these books can shock. Snap a rubber band around these three, tuck them into your bag, and you’ll have the full weight of a novel or biography with three times the variety, two hundred times the opening lines, and infinitely more variation. Books talk to one another, and the deeper you find yourself inside the conversation, the more undertones will rise, the more rooms will open onto rooms, churchyards, open fields.

Kristofer Collins, from Pittsburgh Magazine, calls Gainey’s the Gaffer a “treasure trove of backstage stories” refering to her 35 years as chief lighting technician in Hollywood.

Collins had this to say:

“Gainey’s work is at once brash, erotic, violent and tender-hearted. These wonderful poems are lit from within.”

The Georgia Review‘sRobin Becker focuses more on how Gainey describes her work through poetry and “deftly illuminates a scene and its several meanings.” Readers not only get a look at her work life, but Gainey’s childhood and growing up. Becker ends her review from the speaker’s perspective, “high in the air, she merges cartoon, graphic design, film, and lighting; the poem builds to a dangerous ‘swoon.'”

Finally, Scott Silbe from The New Yinzer notes that the poems of the Gaffer “pop and jump off the page with an eloquence and style reminiscent at times of that great 20th century master, Frank O’Hara.” Gainey brings to light the topics of sexuality and sexism especially in connection with her work.

“Gainey has a strong voice and it feels like she pulls off some magic tricks in this book. I like that she can take the act of buying a pair of second-hand jeans and turn it into a transcendent moment. In some ways, this is a poetry collection like I’ve never seen before. It delicately combines Gainey’s very unique view of the world of film from her vantage point with her inner and outward struggles and with her wise observations of the greater world around her.”

For the full review, click here.

Click here to purchase “the GAFFER” by Celeste Gainey, Arktoi Books, $18.95

Reading the poet Jeannine Savard’s latest collection My Hand upon Your Name (Red Hen Press, $12.95) is like entering a dream world. The poems are full of fantastical images, strange scenes and unexpected metaphors — a cat with a cloud in its belly, and a bishop imagining himself a woman. Many of the stories Savard tells are actually framed within the context of dreams or deep meditations, related sloyly and carefullyl. She writes with a painter’s delicacy but in three dimensions, elaborating on all the sensual aspects of her scenes, revolving around them with both mystical aloofness and motherly sensitivity.

Motherhood is one of Savard’s primary preoccupations. In “Visiting the Stone Mansion of a Dead Hindu Saint” and “Recurrent Dreams of Being a Mother,” she imagines having a child of her own. For another selection, “The Walking Mountain Meditation” she elegizes the suicide of the mother of a childhood friend. This latter poem is an ideal instance of Savard’s ability to blend dream and reality.

In this entry, Savard evokes life before the mother’s death as an idyllic existence, as distant and pure as a dream, a world in stark contrast to the harsh reality which succeeded it. It is a world she wants back. She writes: “I want to see once more/the bee on the lip of the white and red milk carton,/a pure balance of life in my hand,/ green and blue marbles/rolling into the cracks, into spring days/of the early 1960’s, more life/racing in space, and I’d like it all /to stop right there — not hear/the words ‘shot’ or ‘suicide’ attached/to your mother’s name.” This poem’s details are evocative — the fragile delicacy represented by the bee on the milk carton, the equilibrium signified by the marbles balanced in her hand — and the harsh reality of death bursts sharply through this world.

One of the epigrams which opens this collection is spoken by the Tibetan Buddhist master Dzogchen Ponlop. He observes, “Yesterday was a dream and today is also a dream. This is also a dream.” Here, even what is real is often depicted as surreal. Savard first envisions the reality of the mother’s death — “the impossible chaos / of bone and a phlegm-like pit of blood / you must have found on your hands” — and then changes it, reinvents the scene, takes control of the chaos by rewriting it — “Once, it was a bear trap. I wished she’d eaten off / her paw, limped a little, and returned to feed / her children.”

Savard’s great accomplishment in My Hand upon Your Name is her ability to redefine the world. Time d does not apply, since the past can be brought to the present, as can the future. Reading her poetry is much like entering a universe without laws in which we are free to float and observe, not bound by physical or mental restrictions. Her poems are odd and inviting, full of all the human emotions expected of the best poetry — sadness, love and passion — and yet magically surreal, mystical and charming in their strangeness.

As a poet, Savard’s voice is tender, and she approaches her readers with the same sensitivity that she does the stranger in “Slow Waves,” who falls asleep on her shoulder on a plane. She does not wake him; instead, she watches him, admires his humanity, and lets her presence comfort him. In the end, the man wakes and, although embarrassed at his own vulnerability, he has been changed nevertheless by her acceptance of his weakness. This is the effect My Hand upon Your Name has on us: It leads us, dreaming, onto weirdly beautiful grounds, letting us grow at ease there, then awakens us. Savard’s poems leave us staring and surprised. They leave us reconsidering reality, seeing things slightly differently, seeing things anew.

Jeannine Savard

My Hand upon Your Name

Red Hen Press

80 pages

March 1, 2005