Roberto Bonazzi of My San Antonio reviewed Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s WATER & SALT, saying “Tuffaha’s collection is an extraordinary debut.” Thanks, Roberto!

Appetite Jean-Mark Sens. Red Hen (CDC, dist.), $11.95 (98p) ISBN 1-888996-98-6

Jean-Mark Sens serves us a world that we thought we knew. Each of Sens’ lines twists the lens of language to bring the world into focus, blur it, and bring it back into focus that reveals a world we have never seen before, but one we would like to inhabit. The first line of “Squid,” which opens the book, thrusts a creature “Freckled like a blotter” with “thin pellucid skin / of innumerable Rorschach spots” into our faces. Sens maintains his intensity throughout the collection while examining everything from sardines to Max Jacob to soap.

Appetite restores integrity to the often misused phrase “things as they are.” Sens represents the external appearance of things, but he also delivers the essence of those things to his readers; in “Urchin,” the speaker takes on in his palm and feels “a lightness, not animal, not vegetal / I feel of both realms.” Sens, then, takes us “beneath the spikes” to “one round body / purplish globe like an eye encasing a billion egg sack,” which is indigo, orange, sea amethyst licorice to the taste.” The poem not only allows us to live in both realms, it also lets us taste the world below the spikes, inside of the “purplish globe.” We briefly become one with the world as it is.

In Appetite, the act of consumption unifies the consumer and the object being consumed; they become one creature as in “Catfish” when the fish being eaten “returns small grins of its fins / in the spirit of your smile.” The act of consumption becomes an act of love. Of course, desire leaves an emptiness once the object of desire has been consumed, and Sens renders that feeling with great precision in the third section of the book, “After Love.” He writes, “chewing on desire, your lips move, / silent anagram, / cold opal of the fruit bowl on the table,” in “Tongue.”

Jean-Mark Sens uses words in new and interesting ways throughout Appetite, which the first stanza of “Inside/Outside” nicely illustrates:

Wind gives changing tremors over the island,

shifts leaves adumbrations the sun letters over ground.

Wide and uncontrollable drafts engulf voices from the avenue,

the city speaks shrills along your spine,

spiky as fishbone spearheads. Young Wilfredo,

only a painter in spirit, slumbering in a light blind room:

outside the Cuban sun beats on the streets

full of the din of passerby, and sellers haggling,

“an infernal row” you recall.

These lines offer a fresh experience of both the world and the language and spotlight Sens’ sensitive ear. One comes away from Appetite with an appreciation of the possibilities of language and its ability to provide access to new realms of experience. The poems in Appetite treat common objects with a sense of awe, but never slip into sentimentality. Reading the book is an intensely sensual experience, and it is with the senses that Sens navigates through all the layers of phenomena to reveal a core in the natural world that closely resembles our own. He leads us to “here and the distant here.”

— Jordan Tyler Sanderson

Poet Veronica Reyes’ collection, Chopper! Copper! was recently featured on Advocate.com’s list of “10 Great LGBT Summer Reads.” Check out the full list and Veronica’s feature here!

“In her debut collection, Brown weaves poetic phrases to take her readers on a journey that satisfies from the initiation to the conclusion, as she enlightens about the dysfunctional yet beautiful intimacies of a sisterly relationship. . . . Brown masterfully captures the essence of poetry by meshing equal parts emotion, storytelling, and style. Brown builds upon the rich tradition of Nikki Giovanni and Bob Hickok to craft her unique abilities in a manner that shows and rightfully deserves respect.”

Rain Taxi Review of Books, Vol. 13 No.4, Winter 2008/2009: Greg Sanders’s prose will make you wake up and smell the latte, the Rioja, or maybe the gourmet cat food (“Hearty Halibut”). It’s an especially rejuvenating discovery if your senses have been dulled by one too many short-story writers who just don’t seem interested in language, or whose flat vocabulary appears to be dumbed down in service of their “ordinary” characters. Sanders’s debut story collection Motel Girl inscribes its characters with rich inner lives and appealing texture.

Perhaps most refreshingly, the author isn’t afraid of linguistic precision. We find ladybugs “lifting their spotted elytra and unfurling their membranous wings and flying into walls like tiny, drunken biplanes.” Depending on the cut of the narrator, Sanders can move easily from sarcastic commentary to the clean lyricism of “the hill wept where springs broke through the rocky facade, marking their paths with algae and throwing tiny clouds of silt into the clear creek, like smoke.” Like so many New York City writers, he too often resorts to the shorthand of landmarks and neighborhood names rather than describing, but when he does evoke those city settings, he gets it right–like the East Village “tenements whose fire escapes were once festooned with hand wrung garments drying in the sun instead of chrysanthemums, cat grass and bonsai gardens.” A good ear for dialogue and a gift for canny metaphor add glitter and gleam.

Some stories in Motel Girl delve into speculative terrain: a tiny, tormenting imp narrates “Mr. Hallucinosis” and a crumbling doppelganger for the Guggenheim Museum has its own sci-fi properties in “The Gallery.” Most of the stories visit the fantasies and fantastical oddities and intersections of human life. In “Garage Door,” a man steals said door from his childhood home, hoping to find comfort or a touchstone by uncovering the hippy-dippy artwork of his youthful hand. Many revolve around shifting romantic and sexual relationships–sweetly wistful, mired in domestic quicksand, or tinged with violence or despair. In the thought-provoking title story, sexual daydreams lead to violence as the male narrator’s lazy, casually degrading appraisal of a teenage girl is turned against him.

Sanders sharply renders characters, from actuaries to Frisbee-tossing college women, whose inner lives chafe against their outward behavior. Whether dramatic or meditative, these stories are deft, enigmatic lyrics that pivot on an image or insight. Tired of a diet of addiction memoirs? Curl up with this collection “with soy milk but almost no foam” to let the literary senses revive.

–Alicia L. Conroy

Janice Eidus Gives Voice to Adolescent Virgin Vampire

The Last Jewish Virgin: A Novel of FateThe Last Jewish Virgin: A Novel of Fate by Janice Eidus

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Lilith, her feminist mother Beth, art teacher Mr. Rock and fellow student Colin, they could be the regular cast for a Young Adult coming of age story. That is, if it wasn’t for the intriguing introductory paragraph. Soon after I started reading I forgot about the foreshadowing (or is it a flash-back?) of the age-old mystery that surrounds the life and death of vampires. Yes, The Last Jewish Virgin is a vampire story, and if you’re a fan of the genre you’ll probably be focused on that. But on another level, Janice Eidus, who has an uncanny way with the voice of adolescence, presents what could be just another foray into adulthood.

To read a first person account in the voice of an adolescent that doesn’t depend on the all encompassing “like”, is a relief! That the author spices the narrative with adverbs instead, is something even a reader who is usually allergic to words ending with “-ly” can accept as a worthy and useful alternative to run-of-the-mill Ado Convo Lingo.

As for accompanying Lilith to Bennett School for Art and Design, it was as though I got to re-visit the art academy I attended. And again, while fans of vampire stories will look at The Last Jewish Virgin for signs of the undead, I was constantly reminded of memories of mere mortals that live on.

View More Here

Rebekah Kirkman of City Paper praised Elissa Washuta’s My Body is a Book of Rules.

“Though the shifts from one chapter to the next can be awkward and jarring, Washuta sets up this illogical logic that strings together her memories of this particularly rocky period in her life. Her memories, stitched here like patchwork, make something like a story quilt through her manic and depressive episodes.”

To read the rest of the review, go here. 

Thanks to Midwest Book Review for this fantastic praise, saying A HALFMAN DREAMING is “an enticing read that is sure to provoke much to think about… [and] an excellent and fine literary work.”

The Alarming Beauty of the Sky Leslie Monsour. Red Hen (CDC

Strong Verse reviews Ernest Hilbert’s Sixty Sonnets.

First let me say that Ernie Hilbert is a sneaky bastard for including the Bauman’s Rare Books Catalogue in the package that delivered his excellent sonnet collection to me. As I am a poor poet and teacher, I include the link in the hope that if I have more well-to-do readers they may buy something and not waste the good Dr. Hilbert’s postage. If anyone feels so inclined to buy something for me, there’s a fine copy of The Waste Land I saw in there.

On to the poems.

Notes on the organization and structure of the book aside (see sixtysonnets.com), what I value in Sixty Sonnets is tension.

There is a tension between poems, sometimes even an internal stylistic tension within one poem itself, as they skate between the pedestrian and the ineffable. This is not to say the poems are pedestrian, they are far from it; Hilbert, however, is unafraid of employing language in its most ordinary to bring it to its most extraordinary.

In “Church Street,” a scene of blasted youth who “needed parties” and “liked company” is revisited in what, but for the rhyming and decasyllabics, would be called mere lined prose; except that the entire sad play is raised by the couplet:

We’d vent, catch any reason not to grieve,

Revel down days torn from the years we’d leave.

Much of the value of Sixty Sonnets is built upon this tension. A lesser (or perhaps “cute”?) poem like “Literary Artifacts” is followed by the strong and quick “Leander Without Heroes” whose conceit of literary death entirely reframes the previous riff on Sammy Peyps’s “grand gallstone.” This is nothing if not a very well put together collection.

I could go on at length about the tension set within these poems and the collection as a whole, and the music that sings from their springs, but as “Cautionary Tale” says, “you can only get away with so much.” Suffice to say that in reading Sixty Sonnets if you think you don’t like something, wait and Hilbert will have put in a peach in the next line or on the next page to pay for the pit you thought you read. Indeed, the only other poet who plies risk against reward so deftly is Pound.

The form of the sonnets bears some discussion (and a bit of criticism). Hilbert employs what has been termed the “Hilbertian Sonnet,” fourteen decasylabbic lines of two sestets closed by a couplet. Unfortunately, the decasyllabics can get in the way of the poems. I don’t know if Hilbert uses the non-metrical line as A.E. Stallings says to “allow for the roughed-up prose rhythms of speech” but when he’s forced to write, as in the final line of the train-wrenchingly fun “Blotter”: “sometimes you will hide when you should have run,” there’s something amiss. Take out or contract the auxiliary verbs and you’ve got a stronger line: “sometimes you hide when you should run.” not surprisingly, the line also becomes perfect iambic tetrameter. As I will say until the language changes, iambic tetrameter is the meter of the American tongue. Syllabics are too artificial and the pentameter is too archaic.

Having said that, there are great poems in this collection which is very much worth owning. The collection starts with a quote from Dylan’s powerful “Not Dark Yet,” a work which in itself looms over the first section, setting that delicious tension before the first rhyme is sprung. The first two poems are both good and exemplary of Hilbert’s work, giving us both his juiced-up verb choices (“roamed up,” “sprawled to,” “propped in”) and his linguistic tension:

I would be fine, and they were quite good hosts

Versus

I am sinking on a soft black balloon,

Dreaming of the break. It is coming soon.

Then comes the first great poem, “William James Still, Drowned in the Delaware River” (many of the titles are on the long side). After reading it, I reread the first two poems with a keener eye. My love and respect for this poem comes from two halves of one line. In the second half, we have the phrase “staring up to the world.” I was, at first, bucked by that “to,” but in light of the collection’s epigraph (“facilis descensus Averni”: it’s easy to get to Hell), “to” makes an all too apt sense. The first half of the line is simply the thick, deliciously sonic “snug in muck,” a line I loved so much I wrote it a few times and said it aloud. Heck, say it now, it floods the tongue. Snug in muck.

After Billy Jim dies, a girl hooked on “kind blue pills” robs a liquor store and dies on the run in Las Cruces. Seriously. Hilbert can do a fine turn in narrative told through sonnet. Being the narrative junky that I am, I wish those sequences were longer. Instead, the collection moves to tackle Edna St. Vincent Millay and Ted Hughes. I don’t know if Hilbert wins, but his work certainly doesn’t lose, either. His interweaving of nature and nostalgia reaches a fevered pitch in “Magnificent Frigatebird” and sounds perfectly in “At the Grave of Thomas Eakins.”

As the collection develops, the works move towards the “couplet as punch” mode of sonnet writing to great effect. This is most pronounced, perhaps, in the wonderfully revisionist “A Suburbanite Briefs a Historian.” After regaling said historian with how “it is fun to be so bourgeois” the eponymous suburbanite goes for the kill with the couplet:

And we can’t go back to what came before,

Ten to a room, half sleeping on the floor.

No, no we can’t. Such honesty about the human condition is refreshing in a world where the benefits of progress are often shunned. Indeed it is this very sense of no nonsense and honest urgency that redeems any flaws that can be found in the work. The collection pulls you through it, delighting and injuring, sometimes with the same word.

Before I end, I do want to mention my two favorite moments in Sixty Sonnets: rhyming “MoMA” with “coma” and the incomparable “Song,” a paean to those who learn and love craft.

But even “Song” can’t escape Hilbert’s love of tension. Its final line: “valued and unwanted, admired and ignored” is antecedentless: does it refer to the “old ways restored” or “those who learn forgotten, slow / skills”? Perhaps both. Hilbert is a practitioner of that slow art, as are all poets. The truth of admiration and insignificance doesn’t escape any of us.

He echoes this in the first poem of the final section, the aforementioned “At the Grave of Thomas Eakins.” The final couplet sums up the poem and the collection’s musings on the nature of art:

Wind rearranges sunlight through the pines,

Sowing and destroying endless designs.

Not only to admit but to embrace the ephemeral along with the eternal nature of our work is admirable in the main. As is the entire collection.

The design notes say the collection is based in the sixty minutes of an hour. Give it more time than that. You and the poems deserve it.

Huge thanks to the Seattle Review of Books for this great review on EAT LESS WATER, saying that these “deeply personal stories, told with love and care” “could not have come at a more perfect moment.”

Elise Paschen’s THE NIGHTLIFE was recently reviewed by the Kenyon Review in their October 2017 microreviews! The lovely Janet McAdams says, “Paschen’s work has always seemed to me infused by something uncanny, uncannily beautiful.” Read the full review here, and pick up THE NIGHTLIFE, recently shortlisted for the 2017 Chicago Review of Books Awards, to add to your collection!

In a previous post called Blogging and the Memoir Community I promised to review DeWitt Henry’s memoir called Safe Suicide because he was the first published author who found me through this blog. Here goes, DeWitt. Hope you come back to read this little review.

Safe Suicide has an internal subtitle which describes its structure and genre–narratives, essays, and meditations. Most of the chapters were published previously in literary journals. The publisher is Red Hen Press. Since publishing individual essays first is one of the routes I am considering in my own writing, I was especially interested to see how a complete set of essays, beginning with a memoir of the author’s father and concluding with a meditation on aging, would either hang together or seem fragmented.

“Residue” leaves its’ readers wondering “whodunit” and what happens next! If you enjoy “humor in absurdity”, look no further

Allison Joseph’s, Confessions of Barefaced Woman was reviewed by Robert Sheldon from MockingHeart Review.

Allison Joseph?s new collection Confessions of a Barefaced Woman is a forthright and unabashed examination of the speaker?s personal lives. From past girlhood to her present as an assured and confident woman, this narrator troubles the idea that self-reflection should?or even can?be nostalgic. Impulses here layer upon one another, with later poems informing ones earlier in the collection just as our futures often inform our pasts; a highly aware melding of form and content.

Read the full review here.