Interrupting #PrideMonth posting for some poetry translated from the Danish

the easiness and the loneliness
Asta Olivia Nordenhof (tr. Susanna Nied)
Open Letter Books
$13.95 trade paper, available now

August 2025: 40% discount on all Open Letter titles written or translated by female-identifying artists. (Discount is applied automatically at checkout on publisher's website and applies to all hardcover, paperback, and ebook editions.)

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: One of the best-selling poetry collections of the past decade, Asta Olivia Nordenhof’s the easiness and the loneliness took Denmark by storm with its refreshing honesty and directness about growing up in a challenging family situation. Nordenhof eschews traditional ideas of poetic beauty in favor of poems that double as social critiques, addressing the inequalities in Denmark, the difficulties of living under great financial strain, various forms of abuse, and working in a brothel.

My Review: I've said multiple times in various places that I continue to challenge my reading preferences to prevent them from becoming insurmountable prejudices. I keep trying different, sometimes well-known and other times unknown, YA novels, comic books graphic novels, and even *shudder* poetry *retch*.

I got this PDF from Open Letter, for which I thank them very kindly; until last week, I had no way to read it because I was solely in the Kindleverse. Then I got...hosanna in the highest!...a Galaxy Tab so I could spread the wear on my laptop out a bit. (GREAT for streaming!) It made reading this slim, bilingual edition of Danish poet Asta Olivia Nordenhof's very, very weird poems a breeze.

What was not a breeze was trying to figure out what the hell the poet's talking about:

on the way to the ocean, we pick elderberries

all the love i have can fit in an elderberry

someone should have taken away her meekness

my mother

i should have said:

no one has the right to destroy you

all those fuckheads

youre meticulous with your makeup before we leave for the school program

forget it

just forget it

theres no reason to be kind to anyone unkind

forget it

no one has the right to demand that you be kind to the unkind

No, I didn't remove or forget punctuation; no, I didn't deliberately add spaces or line-breaks; this is how the PDF presented itself to me. I swear to you that, in my quest not to die above the neck before I do below it, I am not looking for examples to confirm my biases...I accepted this offer of a PDF because I'd never heard of the poet in any capacity and knew absolutely nothing about her.

What the actual fuck is she talking about there?! Her abused mother? Okay, I get that; but unless I'm utterly insensible to poetry, that is far from all she's talking about...is it? isn't it? gawd I want an elderberry, where's the jam.

So far, so bad.

But then I hit something that made me squirm, flinch, and regard the page with new and increasing respect:

thomas, his room is small, he has to sit on the edge of the bed

hes just home from iraq

he asks us to smell the sweater he was wearing when he was shot

id rather not have to look at him. id rather not have to look at you

when we head home dulled by menthol-licorice vodka

tomorrow too we will wake up and be witnesses. helpful. silent


on the way down to the drugstore to buy hair dye.

It's excerpted from a longer poem. I was ready to just write off my reading experience, despite the fact that I'm quite fond of several poets and would never, ever go out of my way to hurt them (hi Sven!), as just another dreary exercise in obfuscatory self-gratification before my befuddled old-man eyes. That poem, especially that fragment of it, in such simple and direct language (kudos to you, Translator Nied), bashes the snot out of complacent and dismissive attitudes towards the lived experiences of others. The poet's choice of her tenuous connection's demand for sharing a reality no one else in his life, confined to a narrow and solitary space, would ever once think of requesting. I don't think anyone accepted it, either. But the urgency of the demand...it is like being slapped backhand by a bigger, stronger person, and done with real rage...outrage, is there a superlative I don't know about? I need it.

Moseying on through the Danishness of the alternating pages, I was utterly and finally transfixed:

so we sit at home seeing dead women

maybe hanged in the attic with barbed wire, maybe drenched in honey

then people have to hurry and find the creep who did it before he kills

another woman

and drenches her in honey and has sex with her post-mortem

what the fucks going on

better for people who grew up with violence and sex to turn themselves

into saints and be killed


that way, than for all of us jointly to take on the deeply entrenched

hatred of women

crime shows get off too easy
everyone gets off too easy

So. Yeah. This is why I don't watch TV. I binge on shows via streaming services when I'm already sure they don't use women/queers/children/Black folks as victims, or if they do, it's reparatively handled (revenge stories satisfy me). This is why most "thrillers" are off my list. I really, really don't want that imagery in my head...and here's a poet, of all people (sorry Jean), boiling my angry disgust into two viciously stabby lines:

crime shows get off too easy
everyone gets off too easy

Exactly. And this, my olds, is why I continue to challenge myself to read genres I dislike. There is, not always but often, something to take away the curse of isolation from solitude.

RAIN AND EMBERS, an immigrant poet and artist comes clean and goes clear

RAIN AND EMBERS
ALI NURI
Kindle edition
$8.00 ebook or paperback, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The (Self-)Publisher Says: A poetic story of survival, Rain and Embers touches on far-reaching themes of migration, forgiveness, and love.

An urgent and necessary study in dualities, Ali Nuri offers a migrant's perspective on what it means to be torn between East and West, sun and moon, the past and the present. Following the story of a refugee in a constant state of flux, Rain and Embers encapsulates the human condition--one where a sense of belonging is elusive amidst an ever-changing landscape.

Above all, Rain and Embers is an exploration of fractured identities, acceptance, and finding a place to call home. When all the ashes wash away, beauty remains in the wreckage, waiting to bloom once more.


this dance of you and I
is the flickering of flames
a fire raging in the dead of night

to be yours
is to be entangled
with the source of poetry

the letters shape themselves
line after line they assemble
from a fountain of ink

your love
is a mother to words
a parent to poetic purpose

but alas
what is to remain
of kindling if not ash?

My Review: How does an Arab immigrant to the US, living in Las Vegas...possibly the most American place on Earth's surface, parched and dry and hot and gaudy...process his fragmented identity?

Who is he, why is he that person, and most of all...why should you care?

Because identity as an American is front and center in the life of the country in the 21st century. Because the answers to those questions matter more than ever. Historically immigration has stirred violent passions in the hoi polloi as the lower classes seek to be better than someone, anyone at all, and the upper classes seek to ensure their fiscal and social stranglehold on the national discourse that it may never be allowed to stray into a real, egalitarian call for justice.

This is what you see before you right now, theydies and gentlethem. The latest salvo in a long-running war against ordinary people by those who profit from their labor. And Ali Nuri, disadvantaged in this country by several layers of identity, has prospered, is contributing to the society that would turn on him in a heartbeat because he's darker skinned than the ideal held up to all who enter this closed and inbred culture. He works to make our American lives more easeful in the vehicle automation sector. People like me will benefit greatly from the increased mobility the eventual rise of the driverless car will enable. And this young poet, this artist with a tender heart and a cold, insecure perch among us, gifts us all with his most intimate thoughts and observations.

Make no mistake: Outsiders are the best poets. Ali Nuri's eyes are looking at the same landscape your eyes are, fellow Americans and foreign readers, but they're seeing what those not here and those whose place here is unquestioned can not see. Then he tells us what we look like, but manages to be kind about it. (Most of the time.) So what drove his family out of Iraq? He tells you directly here, and a more damning indictment of our nation's inhospitable welcome of those in need you won't read soon.

Ali gifted me a copy of his book. He's a photographer as well as a poet, and he understands the human costs of making art deeply and indelibly. His experience of the life of an incomer to a closed world, one whose love and whose life aren't valued by those around him, informs every line and every frame of his work.

I don't like poetry. I do like Ali Nuri's writing. I learned to love his depths and snort tolerantly at his shallows. I learned to think of him as Ali, not as "the immigrant poet guy." Do the same, you won't be disappointed.

THE LICE, fiftieth anniversary edition of Merwin's major 1960s collection, via Copper Canyon Press

The Lice: Poems
W.S. Merwin
Copper Canyon Press
$15.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: This Fiftieth Anniversary edition celebrates one of the most ground-breaking books in American poetry. When first published in 1967, W.S. Merwin’s The Lice was ground-breaking. Its visionary urgency directly engaged the nexus of aesthetics and morality, exerting an immediate and lasting effect on the writing and reading of poetry. Like all great art, this monumental work continues to inspire.

As Merwin discussed in an interview, “The Lice was written at a time when I really felt there was no point in writing. I got to the point where I thought the future was so bleak that there was no point in writing anything at all. And so the poems kind of pushed their way upon me. I would be out growing vegetables and walking around the countryside when all of a sudden I’d find myself writing a poem, and I’d write it.”

My Review: Merwin died in March 2019. I first encountered his poetry in 2010, after seeing him in a documentary about the life of the Buddha. His even-tempered, self-deprecating way of puncturing the Deadly Seriousness of the other talking heads in the film was memorable; his poetic voice had to be as lovely, right?

Um. Rain in the Trees didn't wow me. It's from the 1980s sometime, and permaybehaps forty years of poeting had worn him down. It wasn't for me, as I am informed the polite formulation of "what the actual FUCK *is* this crapola anyway?!?" is phrased.

He died; I ran across that fact on Wikipedia; connected him with the nice old buffer in the Buddha thing and ILL'd this 1967 collection of Vietnam War-era stuff. It's a darn good thing I did. THIS poetry I like! Here is where the fortysomething poet whose professional life was contemporaneous with Ted Hughes, Robert Bly, Sylvia Plath, and Denise Levertov (all friends of his) and the Beats (not friends of his), those slashers-and-burners of whatever rules there were at that point, were working.

Merwin wasn't going to be a Beat, they were too raucous for him. He got Pulitzers (twice!) for poetry, he was the United States Poet Laureate, he translated Neruda, he translated Euripides, he translated Gawain and the Green Knight (Amazon link; no monetization) in 2002; he was a busy professional poet. His legacy will last a while longer, though I doubt he'll be as enduringly popular as Seamus Heaney or Neruda...not enough there, there...and he will find his way into anthologies for a while after that.

But this collection, second of Merwin's that I've read, is worthy of your eyeblinks. It says something deeply meaningful in a personal yet relatable way. Merwin wasn't a groundbreaking iconoclast, and some of his early stuff I've run across was so pretentious and self-important that I am amazed the same man wrote it as wrote these poems. His later stuff was, well, in a word it was tired. Overworked the vein, it collapsed. But this? Prime-of-life, peak-of-powers poetical punditry. Every poems means something, both on its surface and on its interior. Read a poem one way, it's pretty; read it another, it's shattering.

Let me get out of the way so you can see if you agree:

CAESAR

My shoes are almost dead
And as I wait at the doors of ice
I hear the cry go up for him Caesar Caesar

But when I look out the window I see only the flatlands
And the slow vanishing of the windmills
The centuries draining the deep fields

Yet this is still my country
The thug on duty says What would you change
He looks at his watch and he lifts
Emptiness out of the vases
And holds it up to examine

So it is evening
With the rain starting to fall forever

One by one he calls night out of the teeth
And at last I take up
My duty

Wheeling the president past banks of flowers
Past the feet of empty stairs
Hoping he's dead

DECEMBER NIGHT

The cold slope is standing in darkness
But the south of the trees is dry to the touch

The heavy limbs climb into the moonlight bearing feathers
I came to watch these
White plants older at night
The oldest
Come first to the ruins

And I hear magpies kept awake by the moon
The water flows through its
Own fingers without end

Tonight once more
I find a single prayer and it is not for men

WHEN THE WAR IS OVER

When the war is over
We will be proud of course the air will be
Good for breathing at last
The water will have been improved the salmon
And the silence of heaven will migrate more perfectly
The dead will think the living are worth it we will know
Who we are
And we will all enlist again

The thing that makes this book so lovely is that it includes a dozen or so facsimiles of Merwin's hand-written or typed manuscript pages, some on glossy photo paper and two printed inside the paper cover, that really bring the reader into Merwin's emotional orbit. Seeing the pages that he composed his thoughts on makes the typeset version of the poem (one is "Caesar," which I inserted above) that much more meaningful. His presence, albeit in mechanically reproduced form, is *there* and that causes no small amount of spiritual-connection thrums through my non-poetical soul.

WITH WALT WHITMAN, HIMSELF is a beautiful 200th birthday present to the Good Gray Poet.

WITH WALT WHITMAN, HIMSELF: In the Nineteenth Century, in America
JEAN HUETS
Circling Rivers
$34.99 trade paper, available now

THIS IS A LIBRARYTHING EARLY REVIEWERS BOOK REVIEW

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: WITH WALT WHITMAN, HIMSELF immerses the reader in the life and times of the poet called “America’s bard,” with over 300 period images and text including extensive quotes by Walt Whitman and his family and friends (and a few enemies). Explore the fascinating roots of Whitman's great work Leaves of Grass: a family harrowed by alcoholism and mental illness; the bloody Civil War; burgeoning, brawling Manhattan and Brooklyn; literary allies and rivals; and his beloved America, racked by disunion even while racing westward. The coming year 2019 will mark the bicentennial of Walt Whitman’s birth; this book anticipates the celebration with a perspective of Walt Whitman “in the nineteenth century, in America,” as he himself put it.

My Review: What an extraordinarily lovely surprise this book was to me. It is physically beautiful: Printed in four colors, with Whitman's own words highlighted for the reader's eye by being printed in a handsome shade of Process Blue; daguerrotypes and other photos printed in rich and period-appropriate shades of umber and sepia achieved by using the four process colors; paintings and archival materials reproduced in very clear and obviously carefully proofed separations. The paper is uncoated, but is a top-quality book paper; this means it isn't vividly bleached to an eye-hurting whiteness, thus making the text a chore to read. Instead, the whole package, in its design and execution, is meant to be an inviting visual and tactile experience. This makes its contents that much more appealing to view.

This is a coffee-table book about a poet, not about poetry. It would look very well on anyone's conversation-starting furniture of whatever description. The purpose of the book is to bring a modern reader, perhaps one not familiar with Whitman or, at most, glancingly acquainted with "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" or "To A Stranger" (if a gay man over 40), a sense of Whitman the man and the way he became that man. The 19th century brought huge changes to the USA, as your history class sledgehammered into your adolescent brain. The world Whitman was born into on the 31st of May in 1819—two hundred years ago today—resembled not at all the world in which he wrote his poems or in which he died, in March of 1892, at seventy-two well-lived years of age. Steamships, trains, escalators...a Civil War whose battles we fight to this day...a world that Whitman embraced with wide-open arms and eyes, with reservations he always set aside to be more fully present in his moment. We could all do well to live in imitation of Whitman's way.

If one approaches this volume in the spirit of an interested browser, it will delight and edify; those seeking A Life or, perish forbid!, a monograph on Whitman's poems, will go away dissatisfied, though certainly diverted. I came to the book informed about Whitman, and came away delighted at the quantity of insight I gained from reading it. I loved the images, I knew I'd be sucked in by the 300 or so lovely reproductions, but I was equally edified by the organization of the text into Walt, and his world. It is explicit in the title: You're going to 19th century America with Walt Whitman's life as your tour agenda. As I am a New York City boy, those sections resonated strongly with me; as a Long Islander, Whitman's experiences highlighted for me the unslackening pace of change in this vigorous and vibrant world. Whitman was born in Hempstead, where I spent a decade! Believe you me, if we resurrected Walt and placed him in the Hempstead of today, he'd love it for its vibrant urbanity and be shocked to learn it's his birthplace.

I found Pete Doyle's tale, with whose outlines I was familiar, to be unbearably poignant. Soul father Whitman, 45 at the time, met his 21-year-old life's love on the streetcar where the lad worked. The rest of Whitman's life, and of Doyle's I learned here, they were connected, they were in love. What that means to someone in an intergenerational relationship in this disapproving and minatory world...! The storms of life could separate their bodies, death could knock with her unignorable tattoo, they were in love:

I have Walt's raglan here...I now and then put it on, lay down, think I am in the old times. Then he is with me again. It's the only thing I kept amongst many old things. When I get it on and stretch out on the old sofa I am very well contented. It is like Aladdin's lamp. I do not ever for a minute lose the old man. He is always near by. When I am in trouble—in a crisis—I ask myself, "What would Walt have done under these circumstances?" and whatever I decide Walt would have done that I do.

I hope with all the fibers of my being that my Pete, my Young Gentleman Caller Rob, has occasion to remember as fondly after I am dead.

It was such points of commonality, uncommon to find in a work about a long-dead author, that kept me returning to the book with a curious mind and an eager eye. After reading WITH WALT WHITMAN, HIMSELF, I was soul-satisfied that I had found my spiritual ancestor. No poet I, nor truth to tell much of a poetry consumer; but Walt Whitman, comme d'habitude, pursued me down the street to talk to me.

I am so very glad that I stopped to listen.

THE ART OF DYING and WHAT ABOUT THIS, two collections by two poets you need to know about

Happy Hump Day, everyone! I'm reading poetry books, plural (hence the double review below), on this positively sun-struck breezy day.

Pick y'all's selves up off the floor at your leisure. Meanwhile let me explain.

THE ART OF DYING
SARAH TOLMIE
McGill-Queen's University Press
$16.95 trade paper, available now Amazon link for US purchasers

Rating: 5 stars...yep, all five!...of five

The Art of Dying was one helluva wallop. Y'all might remember that I fell in love with its cover, enough that I used A Dear Canadian Friend's gift to me to procure a copy after an article about the AUP Book, Jacket, and Journal Design show showed it to me.

So I was reading the short, super-concentrated poems. "Self," I said to myself, "this is the Sh...tuff. This is why all those pretentious pit-sniffers whose only love is self-love (in all its meanings) write their vapid maunderings with silly line breaks."

Most books of poems are far too short.
It's hard to get your money's worth.
How does it make sense in the marketplace

To pay twelve quid for sixty pages?
Or fifteen euros, or twenty bucks?
So poets are shit out of luck.

first two stanzas of poem 22
I know, right?!

Memento mori...and does Doctor Sarah Tolmie, academic, medievalist, un-sniffing poet extraordinaire, ever put memory through its paces. I was, and am, compelled to think deeply about five-line, ten-line, multi-page word paintings. That's not the commonest impulse for me. "You too will die" is my preferred translation from the Latin (pace Latinists with exact translations) of the phrase and that thought is ever with me. I think a lot of people shy away from the idea of Death when what they actually fear is the process of dying. We're divorced from its realities by the medicalization of illness (an issue Tolmie deals with in multiple facets). The process is part of Life, not of Death...and that's a Tolmie thought that I think makes the whole fear industry tremble.

Hate to tell you, but you're going to die.
Quite soon. Me, too.

Shuck off the wisdom while it's warm.
Death does no harm
To wisdom.

It's the very first poem, in its entirety; it sets a tone for this collection that the remaining artistry very much delivers on.

You're not afraid of Death. I can almost promise you that you haven't thought about Death much at all. The pain and enfeeblement of illness are the things that inspire most people to flee screaming from the mere mention of Death. Its reality is possibly more terrifying: The Great Unknown, the place we're all going but no one has ever come back from to tell us about. (I am not religious and I don't believe y'all's bedtime story is in any way factual.)

It continues to be fashionable to mourn the death of ritual.
We miss the Neolithic ochre, smoking censers, silly hats
Cthulhu and Harryhausen prayers, all the mystic flap.

first stanza of poem 10
A Facebook chat with Gemma Files, an author of horror novels, that I participated in very recently made me think again about why horror has no fear for me. The silliness of the rituals surrounding Death has always struck my funny bone. I save my sadness and longing for the living. They can make use of it, they can feel my empathy and my lovingkindness and my appreciation. The dead? I suspect they survive in some form. I doubt very much its a form we'd recognize. But the body horror and supernatural horror of the storytelling world, the world that Author Files (and to an extent Poet Tolmie, though she with an ironically raised brow) and many like her inhabit, have little actual potency and their imaginative powers exert force on our imaginations in proportion to our fear of Death (which, I said above, I believe to be a fear of the process of dying).

Death looks a lot like success.
As in, "I killed that test"
"She slays me" and the rest—

Though it's the act and not the state
Whose power we appropriate,
All us murderous wannabes
In our casual hyperboles.

Poem 42 in its entirety
The attentive will note my approbation of a rhyming-couplets poem.

Pick y'all's selves up off the floor at your leisure.
The New York Times photo
WHAT ABOUT THIS: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford
Michael Wiegers, ed.
Copper Canyon Press
$40.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

So then, after that delight to my literary sensibilities arose from the quantum foam, I read this article from The Millions and was reminded of Frank Stanford, whose 1978 collection Crib Death I found on my then-boyfriend the much older alcoholic abuser's shelf.

The Neighbor's Wife
Four a.m. and she's still gone
But I'm not going to call.
It's not so bad, until just before morning,
When I see a truck driver
Take a smoke out of his lips
And throw it out the window
And I watch it go to pieces
All over the road.

I read that as a teen and was shocked to my still-forming core that someone out there Got Me. The obsessive need for someone's presence. The intense internal fire that only comes to the surface when mundane reality offers a single, fleeting, unremarkable image of one's inner state and thus crystallizes reality in the same stunning, unexpected way that a chemistry demonstration creates shocking clouds of sharpness from water.

I don't mean to give y'all the impression that I can just *poof* summon up a poem from 40-year-old memories. I got the text from my memory of the older book's and the specific poem's title, then checked this book out of the library. This kitten-squisher of a volume...750 pages!...collects a thorough and informed sampling of his magic mountain of work both published and unpublished. I got re-interested in Stanford after reading in the above-referenced article that Stanford had committed suicide at 29.

Twenty-nine.

Imagine the life unlived, the art unmade; the world's loss is incalculable when Death takes some unhappy or unwilling soul away from whatever Reality finally turns out to be. Assuming we ever find out, that is.

So the book...elephantine tome!...slogged home in my shoulder tote on a cold and rainy day. I sat right down to look for this deeply meaningful memory, but being a bookish sort, was unable not to read both the Introduction (by one Dean Young, previously unknown to me) and the Editor's Note by Copper Canyon Press publisher Michael Wiegers. I discovered this unlikely-to-be-memed aperçu in Young's Introduction:

Many of these poems seem as if they were written with a burnt stick. With blood, in river mud. There is something thankfully unexamined in their execution. I say "thankfully" because we have been through a long century of self-consciousness and irony, and while their brand of rigor and suspicion have brought intelligence to American poetry they have also brought rigor mortis, they have deadened the nerves and made poets fear the irrational.

What is more irrational than Death? Dying is rational, can be subjected to analysis and quantification, is possible to construct a schema to slot into one's syllogistic understanding of Life.

Death is the Great Unknown. Frank Stanford got that, and wrote with its reality up front and up close and personal:

Putting Up Fence
I believe the moon wades a creek
Like an albino with a blade
Fixed to a stick.

It rises, red as a place
Where a chigger's been.

Voyeur in the loft, leaving your gum
Stuck to a fork in the barn,
Like a porter paid to listen
With his head in a portal
Of a ship returning before it's due.

Then I come down the road with ice.

An unpolished scream of a betrayed husband, a howl of the pain of being unwanted and still alive, a rage-filled hate-fuelled moment in time that Stanford lived and left uncollected on his paper alp. He's dead, he's dying in front of our horrified eyes always and forever.

Or is he the moon.

Or the chigger.

The reddener of millions of feet, ankles bending to bring them within frantic scratching distance of fingers long ago rotted away. The annoying, irritating, sometimes sickening (in all its senses) reminder that we're alive and Life is a Death sentence. Irrationally clawing at the reddened surface of our living corpses, we read poems by artists like Frank Stanford who just couldn't endure the long way home.

These poets spoke to my unpoetic Poetry-hatin' heart because they practice poetry without the dead, deadening blanket of Poetics across their faces. Their mouths, unmuffled, speak and can be heard by this Death-addled dying man. Since y'all're dying too, I want you to know we can listen to what the souls of our compatriots feel without unnecessary intellectualizing complications.

PINEAPPLE, a comic novel about the end of civilization told in verse...wait! Come back! It's good!

PINEAPPLE
JOE TAYLOR
Sagging Meniscus Press
$22 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Welcome to Los Alamos, where the big-brained boys and girls are at it again. But atoms have turned passé: now it's the Higgs boson, which they are using to develop a clean, efficient weapon of mini-destruction, mysteriously dropping bodies into junior black holes within a fifty mile radius. Moreover, they're accomplishing this perfidy in comic rhyming quatrains. Can an intrepid group of six amateur do-gooders resolve the mystery and prevent the unleashing of this new WMD?

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME A REVIEW COPY. ALSO, I'VE KNOWN THE AUTHOR FOR A QUARTER CENTURY.

My Review: But anyone who's ever had a chance to hear my mouth on the subject of poetry knows that the best a friend who commits versification can hope for is silence from my general direction. It's better than what I'm likely to say, I assure you.

The sharp-eyed among y'all will note that this is a review, and carries a star rating, and isn't a bad rating at all. What gives? Well gather round, kiddies, and let Uncle Daddy tell you a little tale.

Waaaaaay back in the Mists of Time, I was a literary agent. A manuscript sailed over the transom one day, a humorous and bitter comedic romp about the North American Executive council of witches and their attempts to come to grips with a very, very bad madre of a witch in Florida (where else?) who was upsetting the cosmic balance in a big, nasty way. I was hooked. This was a decade before the paranormal book boom and I was sure the sheer verve and delight of the novel could ignite a movement.

Publishers disagreed.

It was Joe Taylor's manuscript that I couldn't, to my eternal chagrin, sell. But never mind, Joe was publishing good books via Livingston Press! Maybe I could, you know, movies or...but no. Sad to say, nothing ever eventuated except my snarky correspondence with Joe and a number of laugh-out-loud funny phone calls over the years.

So one fine day not so long ago, I got a missive from Joe telling me about this wizard idea he had for a comic novel about quantum mechanics (he's prone to saying things like that, I wasn't especially worried) where the End of the World was going to be brought about. Uh-huh, sounds cool, I said. Then Joe said IT: "I'm going to write it in rhyming quatrains."

"Are you out of your MIND? Joe, do you not WANT people to read your stuff?!" I shouted at my computer screen as I typed those very words.

Having heard the identical sentiments from me before about his dialect novel Oldcat and Ms. Puss, Joe tinkled a merry laugh and went about committing versification concerning quantum physics and the End of the World.

It's a darn good thing he doesn't listen to me. This is a comic novel of sharp, biting wit. This is poetry *about* something, not just its own pit-sniffin' self. This is what Daniel Defoe would be doing were his rotting zombie corpse to get access to a PC and a blogging platform.

It's impossible to quote poetry in a review. Well, damn near. And narrative poetry? Fuggeddaboudit.

It was a dark and bleary night. Which means,
I s'pose, Ol' Sol done gave it a rest.
Dave's dad, bandanna in teeth, was last Sol'd seen.
Now Ms. Moon watches two Hansons, a harsher test.

Do you think, by the way, sun and moon
communicate? Morse code? Telepathy?
Ah, but I promised no spiritual loony tune.
Still, it'd be nice to think they share empathy.

Nice layers of humor in there, doncha think? Suns and sons and moons and loonys...Joe knows how to make a word nerd grin, always has, and bless his cotton socks for it.

Will this book light everyone's fire? Nope. Will it light yours? If you're reading my blog, chances are it will. *I* liked a book of poetry! Even Joe was gobsmacked about that. Go on, be a devil, try out a small indie press's big indie author's seriously weird novel-in-verse. Hey, even if you hate it, you're gonna score big on the cooler-than-thou meter (see what I did there? haw) just having it on the coffee table.

ARE YOU AN ECHO? stuns with its poetical economy and perfect pitch

ARE YOU AN ECHO?: The Lost Poetry of Misuzu Kaneko
DAVID JACOBSON
SALLY ITO
MICHIKO TSUBOI (editors and translators)
Chin Music Press

The Publisher Says: In early-1900s Japan, Misuzu Kaneko grows from precocious bookworm to instantly-beloved children’s poet. But her life ends prematurely, and Misuzu’s work is forgotten. Decades later her poems are rediscovered—just in time to touch a new generation devastated by the tsunami of 2011. This picture book features Misuzu’s life story plus a trove of her poetry in English and the original Japanese.

**CHIN MUSIC PRESS OFFERED ME AN ARC OF THIS TITLE IN EXCHANGE FOR AN HONEST REVIEW**

My Review: Whenever a package arrives from Chin Music Press, I know that everything else has to go to the Later pile. As always, I was *so* richly rewarded when I opened these covers.

This gorgeous and extremely touching sampler of Kaneko Misuzu's poetry is perfectly illustrated. It is introduced by a brief recounting of Kaneko's unhappy life. While I would most definitely want my grandkids to read the poetry, I'd want to read Kaneko's story to them, and make sure I was fully present to gauge their need for explanation and/or comfort as the tale unfolds.

Even if you have no kids, grandkids, nieces, nephews, or strange kids you can borrow, buy this beautiful object for your coffee table. You will be the coolest kid on the block.



Big Catch

At sunrise, glorious sunrise
it’s a big catch!
A big catch of sardines!

On the beach, it’s like a festival
but in the sea, they will hold funerals
for the tens of thousands dead.

MY TALL HANDSOME, a collection of poems in the key of love, lovingkindness, and power

MY TALL HANDSOME
EMILY CORWIN (Mineral Point Poetry Series #4)
Brain Mill Press
$9.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The fanged fairy of Emily Corwin's forest-mud-stained collection asserts and sings with short rhymes and glitter-spells, and just as you've followed her into the deepest and darkest part of the woods, terrified, you're asked to run away together / and promise to never / do this heart-skipping thing / with anyone else.

Don't be surprised when you find yourself answering yes, yes, yes.

Confronting and darling, every word a perfect warm circlet of pink blood, My Tall Handsome raids every crystal jar on the lace-topped vanity for truth, poison, and song until you can't remember why you ever thought pretty was better than powerful, sugar was better than bitter medicine, or dancing needed more music than your own voice.

**BRAIN MILL PRESS PROVIDED ME WITH A SIGNED AND NUMBERED COPY OF THIS COLLECTION, THANK YOU**

My Review: Kiki Petrosino, the editor of the Mineral Point Poetry series, says this of My Tall Handsome in her introduction to it:

These poems are unabashed in their enjoyment of the grotesque, but there is always intentionality behind Corwin's choice of imagery. Her speaker is inextricably, even ecstatically, bonded to her "tall handsome" lover, but she struggles to share the language of her rich inner life within the bounds of this relationship.What language is public? What is private? What tokens, allusions, and talismans belong only to the ardent pair?

I am reasonably confident that this paragraph puts into elegant words the central problem of any writer attempting to capture the inner flame of love by outlining its shadows on paper. It's a testament to the potery series' editor and the poet, Emily Corwin, that this collection both demonstrates the problem and shows a satisfying example of a successful solution to it.

"meet me tomorrow/in a brittle field / the stalks dry, ash-white/ rippling. / Look for me in a gingham dress. / I'll be holding blackberries / and a small axe / crooning in my arms." I can't recreate the effect of the typesetting myself, since I don't have that kind of tool-kit in these posts, but I can tell you that the *look* of the lines is as important to the reading experience, to the comprehension of the poet's purpose in selecting those words and interrelating them just so, as their existence on paper itself is. This is not to say that these are concrete poems, perish forbid!, that relic of the 20th century is (happily, at least in my opinion) as unfashionable nowadays as confessional poetry (much less happily) is. The look of a poem has always had an affect on how readers both understand and respond to it. It's one way in which the literate world attempts to hold on to the once obvious effect of poems as songs. After all, Homer (composite character that s/he is) was an ancient Greek rapper, singing his goddess-filled phrases before the communal fire and holding her/is audience enraptured and ensorcelled. Had that not been the case, The Iliad and The Odyssey wouldn't be remembered today.

Corwin is working in the unjustly maligned as unhip, devant garde Confessional furrow started strong and true by Sylvia Plath and Sharon Olds and John Berryman (among so many others). Her confessions are, as were most particularly Olds's, the love-chants of a cisgender/heterosexual woman working out a reasoned response to the power dynamic evolving between her inner and outer selves, as well as herself and her beloved: "my tall handsome, you are always / hydrangea in my rib, popped open / always dazzle of salt on my punched lip"

I don't know how better to explain my pleasure in this read than to say that, in a properly ordered world, Emily Corwin would have a gorgeous retreat provided to her by a grateful music industry for her gift of the perfect text for hugely popular Lieder that would hold massive audiences spellbound for an entire evening of divine song.

FAIR DAY IN AN ANCIENT TOWN, poetry that's *saturated* with yearning

FAIR DAY IN AN ANCIENT TOWN: Poems
GREG ALLENDORF (Mineral Point Poetry Series #3)
Brain Mill Press
$14.95 trade paper & eBook bundle, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: It’s April now, complains Allendorf’s speaker, and still no desperate gift of unreturned yearning.

The poems of Fair Day in An Ancient Town subvert the glorious, Romantic pastoral into a voice easy to imagine as Walt Whitman’s darkly clever younger brother. The object of affection is fake-tanned and an idiot but still crashes a dozen lush masturbatory fantasies—or the speaker and his lover meet as shepherds only to eat M&Ms and abandon each other on bingo night. O, the way his mouth confounded me / and folded on my mouth there in the fold, slyly sings one of Allendorf’s shepherd’s songs, O, the glory of his hairy arms, / the way they lit my eyes a little then.

Layering complex form, rhyme, and craft over lush horniness and hard wit, Allendorf effortlessly upends romantic poetry and exposes it to the twenty-first century. This is a collection to make the reader laugh out loud and think deep—and then find a way to be alone under the covers.

**BRAIN MILL PRESS PROVIDED ME WITH THIS REVIEW COPY AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU!**

My Review: Alone hell! This collection could honestly be subtitled, "Inducements to Cruise for Action"! "I'll paint the memory/of you on my closed coffin lid and lard/my arteries with your untamed beauty." That's some hot longing goin' on there.

Kiki Petrosino edits these collections of work by poets from the middle of America, but does not find middlin' poets. This signed copy, #18 of 100, is a lovely object to hold as well as a pleasure of a trove to read. I'll give you a whole poem as a sample of the aesthetic at work here:

SOBER
Never so great the shiftlessness. The rest
of the night, I'll stare into the wall
and think a poem about alcohol.
I'll write about the luxury that's failed
me so far this month. It's April now,
and still no desperate gift of unreturned
yearning. Usually, I'm writing reams
of crushy ones each day. Lush, bitter birds
that soar into the window one by one.
I just can't muster it. They hurt me some,
the poems and their people, all the pearl
of torture. I confess, I am afraid;
It's hard to sleep without a tiny veil
of pain to puff with breath and call a sail.

You'll find this to your taste, or not; but the collection is well represented by this poem, so make your purchasing decisions accordingly.

DEAR RA...dear gawd!

DEAR RA
JOHANNES GÖRANSSON
Civil Coping Mechanisms (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$7.00 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 5 shellshocked stars of five

The Publisher Says: Back in print in a newly revised and expanded edition, Dear Ra is an exhibition of an inimitable literary talent. The text therein is an assemblage of letters reminiscent of that daunting and delicate space where prose and poetry collide. Göransson’s cult-hit may in fact be a the sort of literary spell conjured from the ether to be as much your demise as your greatest dream. There are few genocides as important as the ones that reside in the human imagination.

My Review: What did I just read.

Seriously. What the hell did I just read.

315 consecutive and unpunctuated iterations of the phrase "take back your land" for one thing; a great number of non-sequiturs, eg "If Sir Phillip Sydney's Astrophil and Stella is about masturbation, then this poem is about imperialism." and:

Dear Ra,
Forgive me for telling you this: You need to lower your prices and open your windows. I have to go now. My grandfather is here and he wants attention.

for another. Poem? Poems? Stories, prose, what? I'm just going to call Dear Ra a text and have done with it.

Anyway, I'll tell you a secret: (apparently turn-of-the-century poets used and possibly still use "confessional" as an insult when describing the work of fellow poets, who knew) I bought this book because 1) I'm loopy about Swedish men and b) this cover is so beautiful and so perfect and so amazingly aesthetically aimed at my Sweet Spot that I want to have unprotected sex with it. Hey, that confessional moment felt good, here's another: I read this text twice, the first time with mounting irritation, the second imagining naked Alexander Skarsgård reading it to me, and that has made all the difference.



An immigrant's love letter to words, to how they feel in your mouth and your eyes, a soft critique of pretentious poetasters, a hard look at the obsessive nature of wordsmithing.

Would it be too much to ask you to go buy it? Funds are tight; poetry is like nostrils, your own are okay but other peoples' are kinda gross; but really, when you get to the root of the problem, admit it!, you just don't want to feel stupid because you don't "get it."

Poets, like Homer-era poets, were rappers. Everything they spoke they sang. Do that here. Or, if like me you're visual, make the sounds into movie frames or photos that could never really exist on film. But listen to me, I am the last person to say good things about poets or poetry, and I'd like to see dozens of you (I'm a realist and I know that's a major stretch goal) interact with this text and emerge from the bout knowing, securely and unshakeably knowing, that poetry does not defeat or demean or dismiss you. It demands you engage with it. Your ideas and your take-aways from it are completely your own, and owe nothing to the poet. You owe nothing to the poet. (You'll owe $15.95 to the bookseller and that's the end of the financial, moral, aesthetic, intellectual entanglement you have with others about the text, or really any writing, singing, painting, photographing.)

I've known the publisher for a goodly while on social media. I've read his own writing (The Fun We've Had is on my life-list of excellent books that changed me). I don't always like his stuff, published or written, but I admire his gonzo aesthetic and his willingness to Make Art in a world that would much rather you didn't thank you please even when I don't always love the results. Here's something I do love, always and in all ways, adventurous thinking living creating in every way. Far better to be wrong than safe. Be wrong with Civil Coping Mechanisms, buy and read this text, love it hate it be anything except bored!

I, THE SONG is 4 stars good and will teach important lessons

I,THE SONG: Classical Poetry of Native North America
A.L. SOENS
University of Utah Press
$19.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: I, the Song is an introduction to the rich and complex classical North American poetry that grew out of and reflects Indian life before the European invasion. No generalization can hold true for all the classical poems of North American Indians. They spring from thirty thousand years of experience, five hundred languages and dialects, and ten linguistic groups and general cultures. But the poems from these different cultures and languages belong to poetry unified by similar experiences and shared continent.

Built on early transcriptions of Native American “songs” and arranged by subject, these poems are informed by additional context that enables readers to appreciate more fully their imagery, their cultural basis, and the moment that produced them. They let us look at our continent through the eyes of a wide range of people: poets, hunters, farmers, holy men and women, and children. This poetry achieved its vividness, clarity, and intense emotional powers partly because the singers made their poems for active use as well as beauty, and also because they made them for singing or chanting rather than isolated reading.

Most striking, classical North American Indian poetry brings us flashes of timeless vision and absolute perception: a gull’s wing red over the dawn; snow-capped peaks in the moonlight; a death song. Flowing beneath them is a powerful current: the urge to achieve a selfless attention to the universe and a determination to see and delight in the universe on its own terms.

My Review: That this book exists at all is damned near miraculous, considering the holocaust brought to this continent by European diseases; the racist contempt of European settlers for the "savages" they found here after Columbus "discovered" the Caribbean; and the sheer magnitude of a task such as this, listening and writing and listening and questioning and listening and revising all the writing already done. Field anthropology, though that term is far from the concepts in thinking of the era in which most of these poem/songs were collected (eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), is damned good and hard. Adapting yourself to the rhythm of an alien society, learning the place of each person, identifying multiple sources of information, earning their trust; never-ending tasks that, with a single careless comment or a mistranslated word, can have dire consequences for broken trust.

As one would expect in an academic press's book, the poems/songs preserved and translated here for modern urbanites to enjoy are thoroughly organized, the organization is completely intuitive and easy to use, and the material translated is fascinating. Unlike many an academic book, I, THE SONG is also very beautiful. Many of us are familiar with artist George Catlin's many paintings and drawings of the even-then vanishing Native American material culture and people. His painting, Double Walker, a Brave, dated 1832, is the cover image of the book. It is a magnificent painting of a magnificently attired man smoking a beautiful decorated pipe. It is also such an astonishingly present image that I expected to smell the pipe smoke and hear Double Walker speak. It is a perfect cover image because it sets the entire tone of the volume. This is no ordinary, familiar poetry in a moderately pretty package. This is a rare and privileged view into the minds and hearts of peoples either dead and gone, extinct from the earth, or so marginalized by the modern world as to be invisible unless one is looking for them.

I,
the song,
I walk here!

In this shaman's song, song and singer merge. The song, visible in the singer's breath on chilly mornings or after ceremonially smoking, wears the breath and the singer. Sometimes, song, singer, and the Holy Person who gave the vision, and the song that sprang from the vision merge. Walking about, the shaman becomes the song.

From these very first words, the tone of the explanatory text is set. The spiritual beliefs are presented in real time, that is as facts of life, simply unquestioned reality. The song, this song, can morph as the shaman receives new visions: dogs, gods, warriors, anything the Holy Person sends into the shaman's mind. It's a different relationship to the universe than that of modern Western culture. If for no other reason, that is a reason to spend a very reasonable $19.95 on a pretty book. It will look both beautiful and hoity-toity on your coffee table. It will give people an accurate index of your intellect without your needing to say a word.

How many books can claim all that?

Fifteen Months Away, and the FIRST review is a poetry book!

A MAP OF THE WINDS
MARK STATMAN
Lavender Ink
$15.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Mark Statman's recent books are Tourist at a Miracle (Hanging Loose, 2010), poetry, and the translations Black Tulips: The Selected Poems of José María Hinojosa (University of New Orleans Press, 2012), and, with Pablo Medina, García Lorca's A Poet in New York (Grove Press, 2008). An Associate Professor of Literary Studies atr Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts, he has received a number of awards and fellowships from, among others, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Writers' Project, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Columbia Scholastic Press Association. His work has appeared in nine anthologies, and such publications as Tin House,Hanging Loose, South Dakota Review, and APR.

My Review: This being a book of poetry, it's astonishing I'm rating it over 2 stars. This book earns every one of those stars. It's made up of simple language, simple structure, and simple images. As is the case in the very best writing, that very simplicity results in crystal clarity. Statman adds beautiful, prismatic cuts, startling the attentive reader with dazzling moments of grace:

X. when you get caught
deny the part
that makes you sad
look me in the eye
and say
so now I know
who you really are

The last part of a poem called "Listener in the Snow." It cost me a bit of time to process the fact that this Brooklyn-dwelling, New-School teaching ambulatory example of why I don't like poets has just seduced my aesthetic brain. I'm a fan now. No one is more surprised about it than I am.

Book-A-Day #24: A book that reminds you of your English teacher

THE INFERNO OF DANTE
DANTE ALIGHIERI
translator: ROBERT PINSKY
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
$21.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: This widely praised version of Dante's masterpiece, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award of the Academy of American Poets, is more idiomatic and approachable than its many predecessors. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Pinsky employs slant rhyme and near rhyme to preserve Dante's terza rima form without distorting the flow of English idiom. The result is a clear and vigorous translation that is also unique, student-friendly, and faithful to the original: "A brilliant success," as Bernard Knox wrote in The New York Review of Books.

My Review: The Doubleday UK meme, a book a day for July 2014, is the goad I'm using to get through my snit-based unwritten reviews. Today's prompt is the twenty-fourth, a book that reminds you of your English teacher.

Ninth grade, or freshman high school year, was The Odyssey, and tenth was The Inferno. We used, in 1974, the then-newish Ciardi translation, made in 1954; it was quite an event, since Ciardi (a poet of some renown) translated it as poetry instead of as Italian-to-English words.

Pinsky's translation attempts the damn-near impossible feat of preserving the terza rima (aba, bcb, cdc, etc.) rhyme scheme invented by Dante for this cycle of poems. The result is a noble experiment, one marked by many successes. There are some weird things like quotes flowing over multiple stanzas, and there are some...odd...rhymes. But hell, the man tried a damned near impossible feat! Italian is a language in which it's harder *not* to rhyme than otherwise, and English resists rhyme with all its might and main.

So what is any reviewer to say about a 700-year-old poem? Nothing hasn't been said by now. I am anti-christian. The theology behind the entire Divine Comedy appalls and repulses me. I speak rudimentary Italian. Pinsky's efforts to reproduce terza rima are, to my ears, clunky and unnecessary. But in the end, rating a book like this is about what the take-away is for the reader. I take away a sense of Dante as an intelligent, desperately lonely man, attempting to make a Universe in which his existence matters and is of some moment. I stand in awed amazement at his gloriously baroque imagination. I am gobsmacked by the sheer audacity of a medieval poet writing in the vernacular. If Dante was alive today, he'd be writing raps.

Ugh. Horrible thought.

But nonetheless, I am wowed at a root level by the joyous, exuberant viciousness and the unapologetic cruelty of Dante's score-settling fates for his enemies. What a guy! Those raps he'd be writing today? They'd inspire Wes Craven to make movies and Clive Barker to write gore-fests!

Try this exercise: Imagine a beat-box under the terza rima stanzas. Read a piece aloud imagining hand-claps at the end of each stanza. This is what I think we, in this relativistic age, should strive for: to interpret the classics of literature and poetry by standards relevant to today, in addition to the standards that we know were applied at the time of the work's creation.

Many more layers to this work that way. After all, a literary classic is a work that's never finished saying what it has to say.

And here one is.


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