Susanna Roxman Review of Ghost Orchid

Ghost Orchid by Maurya Simon, Red Hen Press, USA, 80 pp., ISBN 1-888996-84-6

In earlier poetry collections, such as The Golden Labyrinth (University of Missouri Press, 1995), set in India, Maurya Simon explored the physical world. Now she steps across to the very opposite: Ghost Orchid is wholly devoted to religious and metaphysical questions. Today, such a focus in any writer may seem startling, almost daring. I have read this book in a state of total concentration.

Simon is an unusually thoughtful but at the same time playful, innovative poet. Despite her timeless concerns, Ghost Orchid has a wholly contemporary atmosphere. Serious but never solemn, she is basically a questioner as well as a quester.

She loves words with an almost sensuous passion. I admire the apparently effortless fusion in her work of drastic imagery and intellectual penetration. This is a quality I often look for in vain when reading present day poetry (though not necessarily verse from the 17th century). Rhythm and rhyme are skilfully handled, the latter mostly as alliteration, but also as slant rhymes. Some of Simon’s poems have a kind of quiet breathing that, to me, conveys either spontaneity or calm acceptance.

There is in Ghost Orchid a familiar, very modern preoccupation with the possibility that God may not be there.The conflict between doubt and faith runs through the whole collection. Simon often moves close to agnosticism, even atheism. In this book, both attitudes cause despair, though not for long. And eventually, she reaffirms some kind of belief, if rather provisional and non-dogmatic.

At this point in her book, the divine is no longer conceived as anthropomorphic, masculine, or omnipotent. Rather, it’s described by metaphors such as “this great whiteness unchanging”, an expression borrowed from Beckett (and perhaps with a nod to Melville), and “an unkempt brilliance”. Here, only one step from mysticism, Simon appears to find some peace. There is also a recognition that the divine might be seen as androgynous, “both pistil and stamen”.

But in much of this collection, Simon shows that she is equally familiar with disbelief and the soul’s experience of having been abandoned: “How can I lift my eyes to a gutted sky?” She writes about “God’s scarcity”, and asserts that the deity “has a hole where His heart used to be”. She rails against a conventional God figure, accusing him of being a “poseur, charlatan, chameleon, and chimera”. And elsewhere in this collection, she lets Aphrodite tempt God erotically; the impression conveyed is that it serves him right for being, presumably, hostile to her innocently pagan outlook.

A remarkable poem, “Doomsday”, describes in graphic detail God as a frustrating lover, leaving his partner unsatisfied. This piece, approaching pornography as it does, could be regarded as shocking. However, “Doomsday” is really a brief allegory, with sex standing for (divine) love, and God’s withdrawal meaning alienation as a spiritual state. This is, of course, a time-honoured practice: erotic imagery standing in for some religious experience. The Song of Songs is an obvious example. Seldom if ever can this device have been used as desperately as in Simon, though.

And traditional devil figures, but rather updated, occasionally appear, as does hell. Simon’s Beelzebub wears Armani if not Prada, and sips cappuccino. “Hell has no windows”, asserts Simon, an aptly claustrophobic image, and among the punished sinners there are “whalers”.

Two of my favourite poems in Ghost Orchid are called “Angels” and “Lament”. The former consists mostly of a fantastic, overwhelming, sometimes very funny list of angelic attributes. Simon’s angels

dress in black velvet . . .

powder their noses with pollen . . .

cause vertigo but ease migraines . . .

curl their hair with corkscrews . . .

are without mercy . . .

In “Lament”, poems equal prayers, and Simon modestly characterizes her own lyrical work as “hollow, heartsick . . . Benighted . . . Wishful and wordy”. Her readers are unlikely to agree, however. Despite the monotheistic background to this text, it’s also an elegant pastiche of Old Norse poetry, and, as such, makes me think of W. H. Auden.

Summing up the inner agony of our epoch as it does, in nicely crafted poems, Ghost Orchid is an intriguing collection.

Susanna Roxman

(Lund, Sweden – 2005)

Stephen Windwalker Reviews Safe Suicide

Profile of John Bowers

Chronogram Magazine (Dec. 09 issue.) Profile and Review of Love in Tennessee

Author Tom Pruiksma reads at Vashon Bookshop

http://www.pnwlocalnews.com/vashon/vib/entertainment/69693657.html

Tennessee Waltz: John Bowers Looks Homeward

Chronogram Magazine reveiws Love in Tennessee

Tennessee Waltz

John Bowers Looks Homeward

by Nina Shengold and photographs by Jennifer May, November 25, 2009

American literature has its own railroad map, with tracks that meander from Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, through Willa Cather’s Nebraska to Jack London’s Alaska. Readers can add a new whistle-stop: John Bowers’s Tennessee.

It’s no accident that the railroad looms large in Love in Tennessee (Red Hen, 2009): The narrator’s father, like Bowers’ own, is a night telegrapher at a small-city depot in east Tennessee; his young son carries his dinner down the tracks in an old Christmas fruitcake tin. But Love in Tennessee, overflowing with idiosyncratic town characters whose lives and loves feel authentic as denim, is billed as a novel, not a memoir.

Read more.

Illuminating Fiction reviewed in Publishers Weekly

Among the 19 authors Ellis interviewed for this book, there are two points of consensus. Almost all of the interviewees call revision the most essential element of successful writing, and in general they agree that a love of reading is the best preparation for a writing career. Ellis (Now Write!) is an astute reader. Her questions show insight and sensitivity. Most of her subjects—who include Jill McCorkle, Edward P. Jones, Paul Lisick, Ron Carlson, Margot Livesey and Julia Glass—seem open, candid and eager to talk about their creative process. (Yiyun Li, author of the novel Vagrants, offers the most provocative opinions.)

Read more.

Marjorie Maddox’s review on BookMarks

“Indeed, as Timothy Green claims in Hiking Alone, perhaps all we ever want is a little darkness to climb out of. In American Fractal, he provides the dark, the light, and a rope of words for climbing from one insight to another.”

–Marjorie Maddox, BookMarks, WPSU (Pennsylvania NPR Affiliate), March 2009

(Listen to mp3 here)

Barbara Crooker’s review in Mid-American Review

Opening Timothy Green’s first full-length collection is like entering a fun house and stepping into the room where distorted mirrors reflect back into themselves ad infinitum. The concept of the fractal, which the dictionary defines as a geometric pattern repeated at ever smaller scales to produce irregular shapes and surfaces, is the perfect metaphor for post-modern American life.

–Barbara Crooker, Mid-American Review, Fall 2009

Publishers Weekly reviews Illuminating Fiction

Illuminating Fiction: Today's Best Writers of Fiction Sherry Ellis. Red Hen (Chicago Distribution Center, dist.), $19.95 paper (240p) ISBN 978-1-59709-068-1

Among the 19 authors Ellis interviewed for this book, there are two points of consensus. Almost all of the interviewees call revision the most essential element of successful writing, and in general they agree that a love of reading is the best preparation for a writing career. Ellis (Now Write!) is an astute reader. Her questions show insight and sensitivity.

(read more)

John Sheirer’s Review

By John Sheirer (Connecticut) – See all my reviews

Reviewed for Nights and Weekends by John Sheirer

The nameless young girl at the center of Diane Payne's wonderful Burning Tulips is asked to write about an "important human" for a school assignment. She chooses instead to write about the family dog because, in her own words, "… it seems like all my important humans would make a sad story."

Such is life for Payne's protagonist, who grows from age five to eighteen and must deal with her mother's cancer, her father's abuse, her family's poverty, her growing sexuality, her constant spiritual crisis, her sense of social injustice during the turbulent 1960s-even her poor penmanship. With so much stacked against her, readers might expect a stereotypical self-pitying child/adolescent/teenager. She does experience plenty of anger, fear, shame, and sadness, but Payne has crafted a complex character brimming with humor, hope, strength, love, and a burning sense that her life has an abundant future despite her deprived and isolated present.

Payne's work has appeared widely in print and internet literary publications. In fact, many sections of Burning Tulips first appeared as outstanding stand-alone pieces, usually under the banner of "memoir." Whether this book is a partially fictionalized memoir or fiction based on the author's own experiences is an interesting question. But more important is how Payne deftly employs a memoirist's psychological insight along with a novelist's skill in structure, pace, and narrative voice to create a haunting book that resonates authentic depth of emotion.

Burning Tulips comes to us through Red Hen Press, a lively independent publisher bringing out some terrific poetry, memoir, and fiction that would never find a place with today's megapublishers focused on high-concept bestsellers. Bestsellers have their place: the beach or long airplane flights-situations where passing the time is more important than challenging the heart and mind with literature. Discerning readers will instead be far more satisfied with the excellent Burning Tulips than any garden-variety bestseller. In short, it's a beautiful book well worth reading.

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Library Thing review

Erinn Batykefer’s award-winning debut collection given a 4 1/2 star review on Library Thing:

“The mark of excellent poetry is that it leads you to places you could never find on your own. Erinn Batykefer’s collection of poetry “ Allegheny, Monongahela “ does that and more. Far from a simple collection of poetry, Allegheny, Monongahela tells an interwoven story of growing up in Western Pennsylvania based in part on titles of the paintings of Georgia Keeffe while relating a sometimes beautiful, sometimes violent, often depressing family history.

The pallet of language Batykefer paints with is far broader than most poets. And unlike many collections, never once throughout the interlaced poems does her voice falter. Some poems “ such as Eureka Vacuum “ stand alone using the simple images of childhood. In other cases, two or three poems flow together to paint an overall image of life and death. Three poems in particular speak to the loss of her grandfather, ending with the powerful Death in the Family, which sent me off to call my insurance agent and schedule a physical. The Inheritance bears witness to a fight between her mother and sister. It is done so well because rather than placing you in the room, she is able to make you experience the memory of it instead. While often dark, there are glimpses of the beauty of the region such as in Two Yellow Leaves, describing autumn along the Allegheny River. Anyone who has ever spent any time in Pittsburgh will find instant familiarity in Pittsburgh as Self-Portrait I and II. The Whiteout wraps the feelings of depression tightly within the imagery of a long Northeastern winter. I read Horizontal Horse’s or Mule’s Skull with Feather four times“ and loved it more with each reading.

Poetry collections often miss the mark by surrounding several great poems with groups of mediocrity. Allegheny, Monongahela does no such thing. If you have any interest in poetry and you want a collection that reads like a novella, you need to pick up a copy. I, for one, will be reading it over and over again.”

Check out all the Library Thing reviews of Erinn’s work.

Lambda Literary Review by Jason Schneiderman

Ching-In Chen’s debut collection of poems is a sprawling and ambitious work …. I found myself admiring the book for being so satisfyingly messy, for allowing itself to sprawl and digress and experiment and explore …. I’m always glad to see identity politics become nuanced, rather than abandoned, ”since our differences don’t go away, they just get more complicated. The book presents identity as being uncontainable, with permeable boundaries, ”sexuality rubs up against nationality, ethnicity, gender, generation and many other categories. We can’t return to a easy ideas of who we are, and if there’s one thing that Chen avoids, it’s easy ideas.

Tokyo Bay Traffic

A lot of the most exciting prose published in the last couple years is enlivened by the introduction of non-English elements. The Times Book Review made note of the way Spanish and the argot of geekdom gave wings to Junot Diaz's prose in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Likewise, the pressure of Slavic syntax gives the writing in Aleksander Hemon's Nowhere Man a concrete, impacted quality, an almost granular particularity of word against word. It has gotten to the point, though, where you wonder if monolingual English speakers can write the kind of prose worth talking about beyond the basics of plot, character, and setting.

Read more.

Reviewed by Matt Dube in Diagram 8.2

Interview with Timothy Green by Daniel Rubizzi

6 + 1: Interview with Timothy Green

I introduce a new feature, the "6 + 1" interview. I ask my guests six questions, and they get to ask me one question in return.

My first interview is with Timothy Green, editor of the poetry journal RATTLE. Thank you Tim! His poems have appeared in The Connecticut Review, The Florida Review, Fugue, Mid-American Review, and Nimrod International Journal, among others. Green has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and is winner of the 2006 Phi Kappa Phi award from the University of Southern California. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the poet Megan O'Reilly Green.

Read Interview by clicking on THIS link.

Subterranean Memory by Harry Goldstein

Memory provides the raw material for the stories we tell about ourselves. Or maybe memories are fictions themselves, vague impressions of feelings combined with fleeting shards of images woven together by gossamer threads of narrative that pull one into the next until an approximation of past reality emerges like the tail end of a dream that comes just before waking.

Maybe that's too Freudian an interpretation of what Brooklyn-based writer and psychologist Marc Kaminsky is up to in Shadow Traffic, his latest work published recently by Red Hen Press. Indeed, Kaminsky seems more Jungian in his thinking and his seeming embrace of Karl Jung's concept of the collective unconscious. In Shadow Traffic, Kaminsky is less concerned with his own personal memo¬ries than those that drift on the sea of Jewish memory, which wash up on his literary shore more like seaweed-tangled flotsam than messages stuffed in bottles.

Read full review in the current issue of the American Book Review

May/June 2009 issue Volume 3, No. 4