A Review of The Incognito Body by Elizabeth-Jane Burnett entitled "Cynthia Hogue's 'The Incognito Body' as Ecopoethics" was published in Readings: Response and Reactions to Poetries 5 (Spring 2010). Published by the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre at the University of London/Birkbeck.

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Stephen H. Sohn of Stanford reviews Chandra Prasad's Death of a Circus.

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Steve Huff's Book, More Daring Escapes

Reviewed in Prarie Schooner

Winter 2009 Editiion

Steven Huff. More Daring Escapes. Red Hen Press.

Dan Bellm. Practice. Sixteen Rivers Press.

Reviewed by Marilyn Krysl

‘‘False words are not only evil in themselves,’’ Plato wrote, ‘‘but they infect the soul with evil.’’ In this first decade of the new century, in which the infection of the lie has become commonplace, I look for sustenance in poems that

body forth our detailed, multifarious, human truths. Both Steven Huff’s and Dan Bellm’s books resemble each other in setting a high benchmark, and the two books are also similar in structure. Both order their poems in

topical sections, and both include a section that is an extended sequence.

http://www.rit.edu/cla/english/newsandevents/event?eventId=55

Alicia Ostriker reviews Judy Grahn's Love Belongs to Those Who Do the Feeling anthology. The review appears in the September/October edition of the Women's Review, and you can read the full review here.

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Advance Praise for Suck on the Marrow:

“Camille Dungy’s important new collection, Suck on the Marrow, explores the lives of African Americans in the 19th century, illuminating parts of slave and free black experience that are often overlooked. Plainspoken and unflinching, these poems enter the interior landscapes of the characters’ psyches to examine the nature of desire and longing and loss. With restraint and wry wit, Dungy shows us these things underscored by ownership and commodity. Foregrounding the stories of people for whom fewer records have been left, Suck on the Marrow offers us a fuller view of our collective American experience.”

–Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Native Guard

“Camille Dungy's Suck on the Marrow exhumes a troublesome history through imagery and focuses us in the modern psyche. The metaphors are so apt and concrete that we not only witness and experience slavery within an artful frame, but also with all the nerve endings exposed. This collection embraces the act of imagining acutely, whereby imagination becomes almost an action. In fact, Suck on the Marrow plots a path back to the Southern soil, to common people, back to a double-binding pathos of pain and beauty through language.”

–Yusef Komunyakaa, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Warhorses

Spielberger's review begins:

"Double Moon: Constructions & Conversations" is one of the best books I've come across recently, and that it can be placed on the "Alaskan Shelf" makes it all the more valuable. I have lingered over this review because I have been lingering over the book, but the list of people I wanted to pass the book on to is growing too long.

To read her complete review of Margo Klass' Double Moon, click here

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Katie Spielberger begins her review:

I first learned about Eva Saulitis last November during the Maritime Grind at Sitka WhaleFest, when I heard this killer whale biologist read from a from an beautifully composed essay about her development as a musician, and she interspersed her reading with oboe interludes. This, I thought, would be an interesting person to get to know.

Read her complete review here

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Although it saw extended periods of minimal contact, one of the friendships that lasted a lifetime for Silverstein was with childhood pal and fellow cartoonist Marv Gold. Gold’s recent memoir, Silverstein and Me, has been welcomed as one of the few first-hand remembrances of Shel Silverstein in the decade since his death at age 68.

Silverstein and Me is not really a biography, but more of an anecdotal memoir, or collection of reminiscences, and a funny bunch they are. The promotional materials state that “Shel’s fans will question this book,” perhaps because Gold pulls no punches in relating the often wild and crazy moments the two experienced together, particularly in their younger years.

Read more at Suite101: Review – Silverstein and Me by Marv Gold: A Memoir of Cartoonist Shel Silverstein by a Lifelong Friend

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Cartographies: Uncollected Poems: 1980-2005, by Maurya Simon (Red Hen Press, 2008)

The cover of Cartographies is a photograph of a bronze by New Mexican sculptor, Katherine Wells. It’s a female torso with arms, but slashed across the neck and one shoulder, and missing one hand. Even so, what stays with you is the beauty and strength of the figure. This oddly broken image is the perfect introduction to Simon’s latest offering, Cartographies, which collects Simon’s “uncollected “ poems from 1980 – 2005. The book is laid out in four parts: The Soul, The Self, The World: Mountains, and The World: City. Simon’s poems make it clear that the maps she is intent on making in Cartographies are body-born and body-bound. They lead us deep into the poet’s life as a soul-searcher, a mother, a wife, a mountain dweller and a citizen of the larger world with its troubling truths and shifting boundaries.

Readers who are familiar with Simon’s work will not be surprised at the abundance of imaginative language and gorgeous imagery in Cartographies. In Simon’s poems “windows open and close like God’s eyelids” and butterfly wings are “a Rorschach smear/ of Spring’s delusions…”

Cartographies is also blessed with a ferocious questioning. The book opens with: “What is the soul, but the self’s lament/Sung quietly to a transparent world?” Simon wonders “Would you know a saint if you saw one?” and she wants to know if “every choice constitutes a loss?” The force of these queries pushes the poet’s attention into the world

of family and nature, and then into her city, Los Angeles, which stands in here for the shared arena of human activity where our ability to hurt and maim require comment from the thoughtful. This poet who loves language, who loves words, feels a little guilty about that: “Sometimes I’m ashamed of using words,/for the gold dish of the moon is more real/than the blue table I set it down on.” Still, she can’t help but notice that in the “City of Angels” “Night…is murderous.” and that even as she is able to describe Rodney King as “like Atlas burdened by the world” she must admit that he is also “Bludgeoned, coughing up blood.” Simon accepts that a poet seriously interested in metaphysical questions must become absorbed by the earthy and the physical, where “The world hurts me with its questions,/with its stupid and true answers.” She knows that for spiritual musings to matter at all, they must have something to say when a friend is dying from AIDS complications, when a daughter is coming to grips with violence and evil, and when we know this truth, “I cannot save you, nor myself.”

There is, of course, much more in Simon’s book: the satisfying sound effects of “All day the day lilies stall in the shade,” the humor of her “Ars Poetrica,” where a poet finds her voice by calling her sister “Sewer-slut! Scorpion shit!” and the clever mind that uses the children’s game of “Simon Says” to tell us “Simon says: Regard the mystery of nakedness,/this womanly house, this temple of bloom.” Maurya Simon is that rare bird, poet of the physical and the metaphysical as well as the territory in between: “Surely,” she says “when we look for God,/God is the look in our eyes.” and just as truly, “I could feel my soul/ Swim up madly through my marrow.” -Deborah Bogen

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)

Preview Stephen Windwalker's review of Safe Suicide, a memoir from Dewitt Henry.

http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/fourth_genre_explorations_in_nonfiction/v011/11.2.windwalker.html

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

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