janet st. john

2021

Forthcoming reviews: Song for Almeyda and Song for Anninho.
By Gayl Jones.

 

Hacker, Marilyn and Karthika Naïr. A Differen Distance: A Renga. Dec. 2021. 128p. Milkweed, paper, $16 (9781571315519). 811. REVIEW. First published December 1, 2021 (Booklist).

Renga is a Japanese form of collaborative poetry in which two poets alternate short poems focused on themes of “this season, this session.” Distinguished poets Hacker (A Stranger’s Mirror, 2015) and Naïr (Until the Lions, 2019) used the form for a songlike conversation that conveyed their experiences of 2020’s pandemic. Just miles apart in Paris, they did not physically meet for seven months. The poems bear witness to what many people experienced, cities shut down and radical changes to daily life. The early poems are especially heartrending because they highlight the natural but stark contrast between spring’s growth and blooming with COVID-19 lockdowns and mounting deaths. As expected, the poems frequently express disconnection from and loss of loved ones in other countries, human contact, a sense of home. Yet each poet’s experience was unique. Naïr coped with health challenges in the midst of the pandemic, and Hacker considered the impacts of venturing out in public and the protests over George Floyd’s murder by police. This book of poetry preserves a written record of the shared human experience COVID-19 forced upon us, forever altering our lives. — Janet St. John

Henderson, Bill. The Family Bible.Dec. 2021. 87p. Pushcart, $23 (9780960097777). 811. REVIEW. First published December 1, 2021 (Booklist).

Founder of the Pushcart Press and the Pushcart Prizes, Henderson presents a first poetry collection that may be structured around biblical concepts but reads like the thoughtful life-review of a man who has traveled far, now reconsidering his journey and trying to reconcile past and current perspectives on faith and life’s hardships. Henderson’s poetic voice is curious, skeptical, and devotional, even humorous, but always real and approachable. It will draw readers in and remind them of universal experiences, from the rebelliousness of youth to the ways we try to make sense of human suffering. Henderson’s poems predominantly explore family history, the legacies we carry, and personal beliefs as they are reexamined over time or altered. These poems will appeal to poetry readers and readers who do not usually read poetry because of their straightforward language and brevity. Henderson may have waited his whole life to publish a poetry collection, but because of that, he presents a debut rich with memories and hard-earned insights.— Janet St. John

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El-Kurd, Mohammed. Rifqa. Oct. 2021. 100p. Haymarket, paper, $16 (9781642595864). 811. REVIEW. First published October 1, 2021 (Booklist).

 

Mohammed El-Kurd was 12 when he appeared in a documentary (My Neighbourhood, 2009) about Sheikh Jarrah, his East Jerusalem neighborhood. As Jewish settlers took over Palestinian neighborhoods and secured court orders to evict Palestinians, El-Kurd’s family was forced to share half of the home their grandmother acquired 50 years prior with Israelis. Naturally, his first poems were born of outrage (“Why is anger—even anger—a luxury?”) and rejection of these religion-based actions (“as if God is a real-estate agent”). His late grandmother Rifqa, to whom the book is dedicated, saw this as a continuation of the conflict between Arab and Israeli states started in 1947. Throughout the collection, it is obvious that El-Kurd gleaned powerful and lasting lessons from resilient Palestinian women. Rifqa was also a poet-mentor to him and no doubt would have been proud of the way these poems deliver a frank reminder that there are always multiple sides to a story and that we need to hear the truth of everyone’s experiences. Rifqa introduces El-Kurd as a voice of Palestinian resistance and a compelling and creative thinker and poet.— Janet St. John

 

Glancy, Diane. A Line of Driftwood: The Ada Blackjack Story. Sept. 2021. 128p. Turtle Point, paper, $16 (9781933527215). 811. REVIEW. First published September 15, 2021 (Booklist).

 

Prolific and versatile Native American poet and writer Glancy tackles the story of Ada Blackjack, an Iñupiat woman who became the seamstress for a two-year expedition to Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean in 1921. Glancy is known for investigating the meeting of new and old worlds, Native and Christian worldviews, and Ada’s story occupies those intersections. Glancy’s diary-like approach reimagines Ada’s days, especially after she was left behind to tend to one ill explorer while the others fled to Siberia for food and help. As the two women’s voices merge in these poems, Glancy sees her engagement with Ada in a larger context. In thoughtfully parsing Ada’s unpublished writings, she notices shifts and alterations: “The old words did not fit the new margins.” The poems’ drumbeat cadence emphasizes certain words and images, creates patterns, and establishes an almost delirious feeling, reflecting Ada’s solitude. Maybe Ada’s “developing consciousness of self and identity of difference from other” was her source of strength. Certainly, her determination to hunt seals and trap foxes, let alone her ability to express herself in writing, saved her life. This moving retelling of a heroic woman’s journey also demonstrates that history lives through an intimate connection between two women beyond time’s borders.— Janet St. John

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Harjo, Joy. Poet Warrior. Sept. 2021. 240p. illus. Norton, $25 (9780393248524); e-book, $20.98 (9780393248531). 810. REVIEW. First published July 2021 (Booklist).

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Musician, visual artist, and U.S. Poet Laureate Harjo continues her personal story in her second memoir, following the award-winning Crazy Brave (2013), in a genre-bending approach that interweaves poetry and anecdotes, memories, and familial and ancestral history. A member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, Harjo grew up where the Trail of Tears halted in Oklahoma, where the U.S. government forcibly relocated her ancestors after brutally stripping them of their homes and land in Georgia and Alabama. Such trauma is carried forward, pain that Harjo views from an expansive, time-transcending perspective that allows her to place it within a larger story. “Does each generation carry forth the wounding that needs to be healed, from mother to mother, cooking pot to cooking pot, song to poetry, and poetry to beadwork, until one day in eternity we will understand what we have created together?” Creativity and imagination helped Harjo escape abusive situations. She was also gifted with the ability to listen deeply and find a place to exist harmoniously between sensuality and physical power and sensitivity and connectedness to other inner and spiritual energies. Throughout this lyrical, beautiful memoir Harjo generously shares her inspirations: family, nature, ritual, music, literature, her life lessons and insights gleaned from her dreams, psychic intuitions, and communications with ancestors.— Janet St. John

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Arvio Sarah. Cry Back My Sea. Aug. 2021. 112p. Knopf, $28 (9780593319505); e-book, $28 (9780593319512). 811. REVIEW. First published July 30, 2021 (Booklist Online).

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How apropos that the author of dream poems (Night Thoughts: 70 Dream Poems and Notes from an Analysis, 2013) and translator of Federico García Lorca (Poet in Spain, 2017) has injected her latest collection with associative leaps and a nod to surrealism. These poems are an ode to the heart, in which repeating words suggest obsession, while rhymes and wordplay (“peas, please, peace / rap, rapscallion, rapt”) evoke fun and young love. Birds and beaches seem to be dream symbols, not always giving up their hidden meanings. Even the waves in the subtitle are representative of phases in a love relationship, of the collection’s narrative arc. The intimate love described is at times all desire and physical affection, until it becomes disconnection or violence, with an underlying theme of control over a woman (“You knocked my head off when I tried to speak / then knocked me again for being silent”). Arvio’s voice is witty and wise, candid and calculated. Although the poems can read like streams of consciousness, each is distinct, worthy, and shaped with skill and inventiveness.— Janet St. John

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Der Vang, Mai. Yellow Rain: Poems. Sept. 2021. 244p. Graywolf, paper, $16.99 (9781644450659). 811. REVIEW. First published August 2021 (Booklist).

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Der Vang’s award-winning Afterland (2017) brought attention to the horrific murder of the Hmong through the dispersal of a chemical weapon known as yellow rain. Used as pawns by the U.S. in an effort to stop the spread of communism, the Hmong were abandoned after the Vietnam War. Der Vang tackles this history in her powerful, ambitious collection, a multi-genre, comprehensive, and unified work of depth, historical accuracy, and vision. Der Vang gives the Hmong a voice again, brilliantly balancing the “I” of her personal experience as a Hmong American while conveying the “we” of the trauma the Hmong carry in their minds, spirits, and even in their genes: “first born in a new land, daughter who keeps looking back at sky.” The State Department claims just 6,000 deaths from yellow rain, while scholars and human rights groups cite 20,000 to 40,000. Writing, “Hmong, / Keep / Your Dying / To Yourself,” Der Vang refuses to relinquish the dead to a side note in history or, worse, to allow them to be forgotten. Her exhaustive research produced disturbing historical documentation, which she repurposes in collages of facts and quotes, transforming the impersonal and politically and ethically deceitful into a vivid reclamation of the brutal truth.— Janet St. John

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Long, Rachel. My Darling from the Lions. Sept. 2021. 88p. Tin House, paper, $16.95 (9781951142711); e-book, $16.95 (9781951142797). 821.
REVIEW. First published September 1, 2021 (Booklist).

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Coming to poetry a bit later in life than others gifted Long with a confident voice and a wise willingness to generate the fiercely candid poems in this superb debut collection. It is difficult to believe that this is Long’s first collection because it is so exquisitely structured and so rich with poems that convert intimate memories into profoundly moving art. Long is expert at distilling details to their potent essence, whether she’s exposing an awakening of racial and gender differences within a love relationship or capturing with brave honesty the traumatic interweaving of religion and childhood sexual abuse: “I have and don’t have all birthdays / in this one chalked moment wash me / and I shall be whiter than touched”. Through authentic speech and down-to-earth imagery, she explores girlhood and womanhood, especially being a Black woman in London. She injects some poems with clever humor, and beautifully transmutes fury into artful expression. Long makes sophisticated use of repeated short poems and short lines as part of her poetic excellence, which allows for no extraneous word, thought, or image.— Janet St. John

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2020

Heid E. Erdrich. Ebook. Oct. 2020. 112p. Penguin, paper, $20 (9780143135920); e-book, $14.99 (9780525507512). 811. REVIEW. First published October 1, 2020 (Booklist).

 

In Erdrich’s fully alive poems, the speakers refuse to turn away from cruel truths, instead actively investigating and resisting attempts to disguise or hide them. As a Native American, as a woman, Erdrich knows how oppressors operate, preying on the seemingly weak or quiet ones, shouting louder and pushing hardest. She tackles different forms of bullying in these timely poems by interweaving the personal, public, and cultural. “Zeno’s Indians” is particularly prescient in light of George Floyd’s brutal murder when it states, “Minnesotans can be oppressively polite (Minnesota Nice) and racially despairing.” Erdrich’s experiments with language and repetition often produce chant- and rap-like rhythms that evoke rapid and repeated gunfire. Erdrich sees through false promises and gestures, writing “inside every handshake is a fist.” Our current political and social landscape has reawakened cultural and racial traumas as well as memories of personal violation and abuse. This fierce truth-speaker will not stand down or stay silent. Erdrich is willing to reopen every wound with purpose, to shine a bright light into the darkest corner. She recreates real and painful scenes to make us bear witness, as if viewing body-camera video that does not lie. — Janet St. John

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Alexandria Hall. Ebook. Oct. 2020. 96p. Ecco, paper, $16.99 (9780063008380); e-book, $11.99 (9780063008397). 811.  REVIEW. First published October 1, 2020 (Booklist).

 

This debut collection forcefully introduces Hall as an arrived rather than an emerging poet. Listening is essential to how Hall records dialects and translates ideas, how she converts a world of sounds into song. The title poem presents life in rural Vermont with precision and raw truth. Life can be harsh, dirty, even violent. Hall’s experiments with phrasing, tone, and rhythm, along with visual and auditory dissonance, make the poem feel like an avant-garde orchestral piece. The potent last line jars readers awake: “If you keep kicking somebody, music / will come out eventually.” This collection is full of such quotable lines and is held cohesively together by repeated concepts: the idea of falling, hearing and not hearing, what overlays the world, and sensations of being in or leaving the body (“You have to be able to leave yourself before you can truly leave another”). Field Music is a mature collection by a young poet who sees through the veils we use to cover what’s ugly and disturbing. Hall wants readers to be uncomfortable, in the very best sense.— Janet St. John

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Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Nicholas A. Basbanes. June 2020. 480p. illus. Knopf, $35 (9781101875148). 811 pg. REVIEW. First published June 1, 2020 (Booklist).

 

How could a best-selling, culture-influencing, nineteenth-century American poet, novelist, and translator fall out of favor, his work becoming a subject for ridicule? Critically acclaimed Basbanes (On Paper, 2013) spent 12 years working on this thoughtful, investigative biography, drawing upon previously untapped personal diaries, journals, and letters, including those of Fanny Appleton, Longfellow’s smart and talented second wife. Life experiences clearly guided Longfellow’s creative work. For instance, years living and studying in Spain, Italy, France, and Germany inclined Longfellow toward a romantic vision, while European folk stories and classical literature were sources of inspiration. The tragic, early deaths of his wives fueled Longfellow’s prolific writing since it was a way to deal with his profound grief. Although his work has been criticized for not demonstrating an American sensibility like that of Walt Whitman’s, Longfellow himself saw his writing as more imitative than imaginative. While chronicling the fact that Longfellow’s popularity in his lifetime didn’t guarantee his work lasting literary importance, Basbanes’ biography reminds us of Longfellow’s substantial literary contributions: he was the first American translator of Dante’s Divine Comedy, he helped popularize poetry in America, and he proved that people can sustain profitable, lifelong writing careers. Basbanes’ fresh portrait should restore deserved respect for and interest in once-ubiquitous Longfellow. — Janet St. John

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2019

And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories & Other Revenges. Sparks, Amber (author). Feb. 2020. 192p. Norton/Liveright, $23.95 (9781631496202). 

REVIEW. First published December 1, 2019 (Booklist).

 

Few readers will encounter with any frequency such bold, bizarre, and brutally honest content as is in Sparks’ (The Unfinished World and Other Stories, 2016) new collection. From a daughter whose fairy godmother helps her escape a lascivious father in a bloody donkey skin to a mother obsessed with making dioramas of martyred saints, Sparks’ imagination seems limitless, her approaches to style and form without boundaries. Yet there is a cohesive voice and intention here, whether Sparks is using the vehicles of myth, history, and fantasy in her attempts to unravel rather than weave together tales of women’s true experiences. To escape possession, find one’s self, exert force without shame or justification, and tell what really happened—these themes rise like foam on the roiling bone-rich broth of righteous feminine rage. At once timely, wickedly funny, and uncomfortably real, Sparks’ singular stories have the power to shake us wide awake and shatter every last happily-ever-after illusion.— Janet St. John

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Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop. Travisano, Thomas (author). Nov. 2019. 400p. Viking, $32 (9780525428817). 800. 

REVIEW. First published October 15, 2019 (Booklist).

 

As founding president of the Elizabeth Bishop Society, it is not surprising that Travisano has an intimate grasp of Bishop’s life and poetry. What is surprising is how utterly captivating his biography is, let alone his illuminating, interwoven analysis of her work. Travisano considers Bishop’s writing in the context of each life event, from the childhood trauma of her father’s death and mother’s subsequent mental breakdown to the loneliness of being shuttled from Nova Scotia to Massachusetts, one family member to another, and school to school. Other key elements include attending Vassar and acquiring Marianne Moore as a mentor, Bishop’s friendship with Robert Lowell, extensive travels, love affairs, and life in Brazil. Despite Bishop’s knowledge of abandonment and loss, she found a sense of home in different places, a sense of family with lovers, friends, and devoted correspondents, and understanding and acceptance in artistic and gay communities. Just as a young Bishop’s reading of a book about the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley inspired her to seek simultaneous immersion in his writing, so too, will Travisano’s biography spark desire to engage with Bishop’s extraordinary poems. Though not prolific, Bishop perfected her craft and left the powerful body of work so well explored here, assuring her place among the best of twentieth-century poets.

— Janet St. John

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Paris, 7 A.M. Wieland, Liza (author). June 2019. 352p. Simon & Schuster, $26.99 (9781501197215); e-book (9781501197239).  REVIEW. First published May 1, 2019 (Booklist).

 

Wieland’s (Land of Enchantment, 2015) biographical novel, its title from one of Elizabeth Bishop’s poems, focuses on the poet’s 1930 admission to Vassar College and experiences in pre-WWII Europe. The real Bishop was a careful chronicler of her life, yet wrote little about 1937, inspiring Wieland to imagine it with a wider lens, particularly Bishop’s involvement with a resistance movement and part in conveying two Jewish “orphans” to a Paris convent. Wieland’s prose is simultaneously poetic and sparse, much like Bishop’s poems. The chapters are short and often skip through time like a stone across water to Bishop’s death in 1979. Wieland focuses on Bishop’s life-long friendship with poet and mentor Marianne Moore, her sudden losses and lasting grief, addictions and demons, and her love for women. In college, Bishop contemplated what it meant to keep her “eyes open” and attain a deeper vision that could reorder pieces of the past and present into coherence, like a cubist painting or modernist collage, a feat she achieved in writing. Wieland’s rendition of Bishop’s life aptly and beautifully mirrors that process.— Janet St. John

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The Heart’s Necessities. Clement, Jane Tyson (author) and Becca Stevens (author) and Huleatt, Veery (editor). Apr. 2019. 160p. illus. Plough, paper, $19.95 (9780874860818). 811. REVIEW. First published March 1, 2019 (Booklist).

 

Despite living to see the start of a new millennium, poet Jane Tyson Clement (1917–2000) probably didn’t imagine her work would gain a twenty-first-century audience. But chance is a funny thing. Jazz singer and composer Becca Stevens, a Downbeat Rising Star Female Vocalist, was drawn to a collection of Clement’s poems in 2008, a gift from her father that she had shelved, just as she was trying to finish a song dedicated to a dear friend who died of breast cancer. In the poems “Winter” and “February Thaw,” she found words that emotionally and rhythmically matched her in-progress song, now called “Tillery.” Thus began Stevens’ hope of inspiring others with Clement’s words. This pretty collection contains the poems in chronological order with Stevens’ reflections on them. Clement’s life is honored in biographical passages. This beautiful homage to Clement and her poetry, which will continue to resonate with readers and, through Stevens’ compositions, music lovers, also celebrates the kind of artistic collaboration that spans time and opens us to our own “heart’s necessities.” — Janet St. John

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Brute. Skaja, Emily (author). Apr. 2019. 96p. Graywolf, paper, $16 (9781555978358). 811. REVIEW. First published March 1, 2019 (Booklist).

 

The first line of “Rules for a Body Coming Out of Water” marks the emotional and psychological terrain of this award-winning debut: “In a story, a girl is a tree / is a bird / is a wilderness.” Exploring themes of flying and falling, freedom and entrapment, and death and resurrection, Skaja’s poems are both primal scream-songs and elegies to the end of a relationship, let alone the loss of naïve selfhood. This feels like a poetics of a near-altered state, in which the reader floats in the river of the poet’s thoughts, sometimes buoyed under dark skies, at other times carried in rocky rapids beneath scorching sunlight or even left bereft in murky floodwater. The poet upends logic, deposits us in foreign territory as fish out of water, flipping and flailing, gasping for air, like the speakers of the poems. With relentless, driving energy, Skaja’s poems seek brutal truths while searching for meaningful transformation. The mythological allusions and imagery, the violence, the honest and painful reflections—all travel toward an awakening achieved by being fully rooted in dark, human soil.— Janet St. John

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Walking Backwards: Poems 1966-2016. Koethe, John (author). Nov. 2018. 432p. Farrar, $40 (9780374285791). 811. REVIEW. First published November 15, 2018 (Booklist).

 

Walking Backwards gathers poet-philosopher Koethe’s ample, award-winning body of work. Organized chronologically, it contains a well-balanced sampling, with slightly more weight given to more recent books, such as The Swimmer (2016), and added punch from a section of new poems. Like first-generation New York School poets John Ashbery and James Schuyler, who influenced his work, Koethe writes poems that have a casual tone and refined wit. They ask human, albeit philosophically inclined, questions about time, self, and the human condition. While Koethe shares sentiments tending toward the romantic, the poems utterly resist sentimentality. Instead, they lean into acceptance, whether of disappointment or delight, and that “cheerfulness of disillusionment, the exhilaration of No.” Now in his seventies, Koethe has more than earned the right to reflect on the past, consider the sum of a life, title the last poem in his collection, “Thinking about Death,” and even encapsulate an outlook toward the future, “The parts of it I’ll live to see might matter to me, / The rest of it is unimaginable, which makes it poetry.”— Janet St. John

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2018

Instruments of the True Measure. Da’, Laura (author). Nov. 2018. 88p. Univ. of Arizona, paper, $16.95 (9780816538270). 811. REVIEW. First published October 12, 2018 (Booklist Online).

 

Following her powerful debut collection, Tributaries (2015), Da’ uses the concept of surveying both narratively and symbolically to chart, measure, and locate past and present landscapes of her heritage, homeland, and personal history as an Eastern Shawnee. While examining the enactments and outcomes of atrocious treaties and inhumane removals of indigenous people to other lands in the expanding U.S. during one of the most monstrous times in American history, the poems outline facts and tell the stories of Shawnee ancestors trying to navigate foreign territories and survive by whatever means necessary, including ambition and resistance. Da’ vividly re-creates the brutal wilderness that was nineteenth-century America and tracks the perpetuation of violence: human against human, nation against nation, human against nature. Her poem “Tremors” states, “When deep hurt sears, my fists and abdomen sickle inward,” while other precisely plotted and potently expressed poems remind us how deeply traumas can be held within the body, passed on generation by generation, and even turned against oneself. — Janet St. John

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Barnburner. Hoover, Erin (author). Oct. 2018. 96p. Elixir, paper, $17 (9781932418675). 811.6. REVIEW. First published October 15, 2018 (Booklist).

 

Hoover’s first collection is a fitting attempt to kick down staid, prim, even academic poetic doors. These poems are preternaturally apt in their presentation of voices of rage, dejection, injustice, and fear. Collectively, they feel like a primal scream. But the speaker in “Reading Sappho’s Fragments,” which is almost an artistic manifesto, states it better, “My poems are / a murder story, clear immediately that / someone will kill / someone else.” Through blunt narratives tinged with irony, Hoover captures the violent nature of our world, its past and present vicious acts committed against others and also against ourselves and the environment. “Nobody Wanted Such a River” brilliantly weaves personal history with the tragic nature of events surrounding the Susquehanna River, from the Paxton Boys’ massacre of Susquehannock (Conestoga) Indians to Three Mile Island to how we poisoned the river, and the river poisoned back (“Tapwater isn’t a form of dignity / until it is”). Hoover comes out swinging as she expresses her support for those who courageously fight both obvious and insidious forms of political and personal criminality.— Janet St. John

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After Emily: Two Remarkable Women, and the Legacy of America’s Greatest Poet. Dobrow, Julie (author). Oct. 2018. 384p. illus. Norton, $27.95 (9780393249262). 810. REVIEW. First published October 1, 2018 (Booklist).

 

Scholarly arguments about how Mabel Loomis Todd and her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, handled Emily Dickinson’s work during their years of editing and compiling the nearly 1800 poems discovered after Dickinson’s death will continue. But thanks to Tufts University professor Dobrow’s astonishing new research, readers gain a better understanding of their efforts. Mabel began organizing, transcribing, editing, and publishing Emily’s poems at the request of Emily’s sister, Lavinia, and became devoted to the cause. After Mabel’s death, Millicent continued, publishing Emily’s previously unseen poems and tackling copyright issues. Dobrow’s intimate portrait of these artistically talented and intelligent women, based largely on their extensive, detailed diaries and correspondence, reveals fallible women who painstakingly attempted to share an extraordinary poet’s vision. What is more remarkable is how they balanced that work and the demands of marriage and family, handled the corset-tight gender restrictions of their time, dealt with male input regarding their editorial approach, navigated delicate and shifting alliances within the Dickinson family, and opened public minds to Emily’s singular poetic vision, often through intuitive and savvy marketing. Hopefully, Dobrow’s chronicle will draw readers back to Dickinson, whom Dobrow rightly names as America’s greatest poet.— Janet St. John

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Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart: New Poems. Walker, Alice (author). Oct. 2018. 288p. Atria/37INK, $25 (9781501179525); e-book, $12.99 (9781501179549). 811. REVIEW. First published September 15, 2018 (Booklist).

 

Walker’s (The Cushion in the Road, 2013) new poetry collection is another strong addition to her multigenre literary canon. Her free-verse poems address poignant life experiences, self-assessment, and vulnerability while also reflecting our troubling times. Voicing outrage and leaning into hope, some poems search the past for inspiration and find deep appreciation in the heroic contributions of Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali, and Thich Nhat Hanh. As Walker calls attention to what she witnesses—“We will never regret / having been born in this / cruel time”—she also recognizes the opportunity for us to allow “fullness of heart,” the opening to feel others’ pain and come together because, as one poem’s title claims, “We Are Never without Help.” Walker offers the prodding wisdom of an elder suggesting that we can cope by taking comfort in beauty, friendship, and human kindness; by always expressing gratitude; and by turning inward to hold ourselves accountable for what we contribute. After all, she claims that “Hope Is a Woman Who Has Lost Her Fear.” Adding to the timeliness and reach of Walker’s more than 60-poem-strong collection is the fact that it is bilingual, presented in English and Spanish. — Janet St. John

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Letters from Max: A Book of Friendship. Ruhl, Sarah (author) and Max Ritvo (author). Sept. 2018. 240p. Milkweed, $26 (9781571313690); e-book (9781571319760). 811. REVIEW. First published September 1, 2018 (Booklist).

 

This companion volume to The Final Voicemails (2018),  a moving compilation of the late Ritvo’s incandescent poems, takes readers behind the curtain of his writing to expose his hard-won, well-lived, if sadly brief life, including his painful struggle with cancer, evolving love and marriage, and the tree-bud-to-redwood maturation of an intimate friendship with award-winning playwright Ruhl. Although the two had planned to publish a book of their emails before his death, Ritvo feared it would represent the mere narrative of talented poet dead too soon. But no reader encountering the agile, luminous minds and tender, perceptive hearts of these two writers, who danced, challenged, entangled, pulled down and lifted up one another, could ever reduce this book to a simple tragic story. Their correspondence charts the rare and complex process of two artists coming to truly see and know one another. Whether exchanging poems or discussing soup, the afterlife, or life as a play, their letters are thought-provoking, heart-wrenching, and transcendent. Both Ritvo and Ruhl hoped their correspondence would bring solace to those facing death or losing loved ones; this intimate gift also rekindles hope in the bright possibility of profound human connections. — Janet St. John

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The Final Voicemails. Ritvo, Max (author) and Glück, Louise (editor). 

Sept. 2018. 88p. Milkweed, $22 (9781571315113). 811. REVIEW. First published September 1, 2018 (Booklist).

 

Following poet Ritvo’s death from Ewing’s sarcoma at age 25, former poet-laureate Glück, one of his Yale professors, meticulously selected work from what she described as Ritvo’s “extraordinary undergraduate thesis,” Mammals; his award-winning chapbook, Aeons (2014); his critically acclaimed first poetry collection, Four Reincarnations (2016); and previously unpublished poems. The result reflects Ritvo’s astonishing linguistic agility, singular vision, and thought processes as well as his frankness, quirkiness, and sly humor. It also reveals the potent way he embraced life, despite recurrent cancer and numerous surgeries, clinical trials, and debilitating treatments. Feeling an urgency to make art, Ritvo was prolific; he was also wise and gifted, and he seemed emotionally mature beyond his years, which is probably why he formed such affectionate friendships and mutual mentorships with fellow writers and teachers, including playwright Sarah Ruhl, whose simultaneously published ​Letters from Max (2018)  showcases their poignant friendship. The Final Voicemails may conclude Ritvo’s literary legacy, but it will stand as a testament to the salvation that is poetry, how it lives beyond the page and the poet. — Janet St. John

 

Holy Moly Carry Me. Meitner, Erika (author). Sept. 2018. 104p. BOA, $17 (9781942683629); e-book, $9.99 (9781942683636). 811. REVIEW. First published August 27, 2018 (Booklist Online).

 

Meitner’s fifth collection grapples with gun violence, racial tension, and the fractured state of American communities while also addressing the raw personal experiences of infertility, marriage, and child-rearing. A native New Yorker of Jewish descent who has relocated to West Virginia, Meitner considers the contrasts while riding a Brooklyn train with her Appalachia-born son, or entering a West Virginia Dollar General store during Christmastime. The poet’s daily encounters are genuine and relatable. So, too, is her inner questioning and hope for compassion. But Meitner pulls no punches, as in “Continuation,” which begins: “And the neighbor’s daughter shows my son / the way her father let her hold his gun / with bullets in it. She was on Adderall.“ Or in “Hat Trick,” when buying Girl Scout cookies triggers memories of her mother’s refrain about their uniforms reminding her of Hitler Youth, and of her Holocaust-survivor grandparents’ stories. Meitner has created a keen social record of, and commentary on, our persistent human atrocities, but she also admirably transcends the dire in a search for salvation.— Janet St. John

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Gather the Night. DiBella Seluja, Katherine (author). Aug. 2018. 80p. Univ. of New Mexico, paper, $18.95 (9780826359889); e-book, $9.99 (9780826359896). 811. REVIEW. First published July 13, 2018 (Booklist Online).

 

Reading Seluja’s exquisite first collection feels like a sacred act of gathering. Like an archaeologist piecing together shards of an ancient, shattered pot, Seluja unearths and reassembles memories of her schizophrenic, alcoholic brother, Lou, and all the broken aspects of him with his twinkling, falling-star energies. Seluja deftly offers phenomena and objects—flight, storms, wax, ice, flowers—to serve as clues to stories embedded in memory. Her unpunctuated introductions to the book’s sections powerfully mimic the imagined chorus of voices in the mind of a schizophrenic and make Lou’s presence more palpable. These poems illuminate Lou and offer some small understanding of what he and his loved ones suffered while also highlighting the failings of 1960s parents and psychiatrists to help those with serious mental illness. This is an honest, heartbreaking homage to a brother lost to the world but held tenderly in the heart of his sister.— Janet St. John

 

Other People’s Love Affairs. Owen, D. Wystan (author). Aug. 2018. 224p. Algonquin, paper, $16.95 (9781616207052). REVIEW. First published July 13, 2018 (Booklist Online).

 

Set in an English coastal village called Glass, the stories in Owen’s debut collection carefully and tenderly plumb the emotional lives of the villagers, whose past secrets and sorrows are still palpable wounds. Through silences and conversations between an aging jazz singer and a club owner, a boy and an adult family friend, a nurse and an elderly man perceived as homeless, Owen’s characters search for connection and reconnection, for answers, and comfort. Owen’s style of expression and unique metaphors can be so beautiful they make one stop and reread. They also punctuate the realistic dialogue and clear, bare description. Each story seems to follow a similar structure, beginning with one character’s point of view and moving to the next point of view and the next. This might seem repetitive, but it creates a tidal rhythm, simultaneously dependable and engaging, and helps build cohesion among the linked narratives. Owen is a subtle and keen storyteller whose focus on love and relationships reminds us that headlines and hot topics hold no substance next to tales of the human heart.— Janet St. John

 

The Lost Chapters: Finding Recovery and Renewal One Book at a Time. Schwartz, Leslie (author). July 2018. 272p. Penguin/Blue Rider, hardcover, $27 (9780525534631). 616.86. REVIEW. First published June 1, 2018 (Booklist).

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Following a yearlong relapse into alcohol and drug addiction, writer and teacher Schwartz was sentenced to 90 days in the L.A. County Jail for DUI with a questionable battery charge. She had been sober for more than a decade but was now thrust into an eye-opening, humiliating, soul-searching experience. Prison forced Schwartz to face painful truths, including the deep hurt she had caused those who loved and supported her. Fortunately, reading helped her transform her difficult situation into a mental- and spiritual-growth process, fostering Schwartz’s ability to seek “the lost chapters” of her story. Schwartz’s prison reading ranged from poet Mary Oliver to Buddhist Pema Chodron to novelist Maxine Hong Kingston, along with some classics. Being incarcerated, Schwartz recognized the feeling of time suspended, which she encountered in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013). Reading was respite but also revelation as it alerted Schwartz to who she thought she was while simultaneously awakening her to the substantially greater suffering of her fellow inmates. A true tale of transcendence and an invaluable acknowledgement of the power of reading.— Janet St. John

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If They Come for Us. Asghar, Fatimah (author). June 2018. 128p. Random/One World, paperback, $16 (9780525509783); e-book (9780525509790). 811. REVIEW. First published June 1, 2018 (Booklist).

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Performer, educator, and writer for the Emmy-nominated web series Brown Girls, Asghar presents a debut poetry collection showcasing both a fierce and tender new voice. The poems, largely based on the experience of living in America as a Pakistani Muslim, reflect Asghar’s keen perceptions about the search for, and inability to firmly fix upon, one true identity. In several powerful poems titled “Partition,” after the division of independent India and Pakistan along religious lines, Asghar explores family and cultural histories; how this split uprooted more than 14 million people and led to bloodshed; and patterns of discrimination, political failing, and violence. As Asghar traces the threads of her experiences, she slowly unfurls the larger fabric of her heritage and, in doing so, honors all who have been pushed aside, divided from country and culture, misrepresented, and misunderstood. Through simultaneously lyrical and frank poems like “Kal,” “Ghareeb,” and “Halal,” Asghar allows poignant contradictions to rise to the surface, like a lotus reaching through mud and murky water to beautifully bloom.— Janet St. John

 

 

Below is a partial archive of reviews prior to 2018:

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2017

July

Where Now: New and Selected Poems. Kasischke, Laura (author). July 2017. 256p. Copper Canyon, hardcover, $30 (9781556595127). 811. REVIEW. First published July, 2017 (Booklist).

 

With the lines “and you were warned that it would be / a happy song followed by a brutal fact,” Kasischke reveals her tug-of-war poetic intention. The poems in this collection, which spans her long poetic career (she is also a very successful novelist), frequently juxtapose mundane daily life with metaphysical ponderings or mythological imaginings. No poem is simply what it appears. For instance, the gorgeous “At Gettysburg” begins with a mother watching a beloved son play soldier at an actual Civil War battlefield before she imagines herself the photographer of dead soldiers. She then turns to a fairy-tale sensibility where time and space are altered before returning to her son playing dead, then back to extraordinary realms, where she is both executioner and creator, then in conversation with God, before being a real mother again, with her son helping locate them on the visitor’s map. Such shape-shifting—freely following contrasting or associative thoughts or symbolism—is the work of a poet who trusts her process, and trusts readers to follow wherever she goes. This large, thought-provoking collection demonstrates Kasischke’s unique poetic vision, where wonder is always delivered with a dose of relatable pain.— Janet St. John

 

June

Lessons on Expulsion. Sánchez, Erika L. (author). July 2017. 96p. Graywolf, paperback, $16 (9781555977788). 811. REVIEW. First published June 26, 2017 (Booklist Online).

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This compelling debut recounts the experiences of crossing borders, whether by force or choice. Sánchez minces no words in challenging accepted notions of femininity, race, religion, and sexuality. Being the sensual, free-thinking daughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants, Catholics with an undeniable work ethic and parental commitment to making a better life for their children, is a complicated business. On one hand, Sánchez expresses appreciation for their sacrifices; on the other, rebellious resentment for being born into hard-edged conditions in Chicago and raised in a roach-infested apartment, begging the question of whether seeking a better life in another country always leads to a better life. Sánchez’s experience living in Spain on a Fulbright seem to free her from family restraints yet leave her still facing the same self. These blunt, brave poems also give voice to the many abused, underpaid, overworked, disenfranchised, and ostracized individuals living at the edges of our awareness. And they reveal how our animal instincts and drives, though stigmatized, will never be as base as the true beastliness of some human behavior. — Janet St. John

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Poems in the Manner Of. Lehman, David (author). Mar. 2017. 160p. Scribner, paperback, $18 (9781501137396); e-book (9781501137419). 811. REVIEW. First published June 14, 2017 (Booklist Online).

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Since 2002, poet and Best American Poetry series editor Lehman has been writing poems in honor of and in stylistic homage to other poets and literary figures. With a great sense of play, he has created poems that take the reader chronologically through his artistic influences. Many of these poems are humorous, some tongue-in-cheek in approach, but all are grounded in Lehman’s extensive knowledge of poetry and his deep understanding of form and tradition. Although a few poems, including those meant to echo Dickinson and Woolf, fall flat, others, including tributes to Catullus and Plath, ring true. Lehman’s “astrological profiles” of Hamlet and Keats are at once original, witty, and downright brilliant. His centos (literary works made up of quotations from other works) are also clever and should inspire writers to undertake similar experimentation. Lehman’s “in the manner of” collection would be a fun component in both the study and teaching of poetry. It can also serve as an excellent springboard for poets who want to explore and improvise on their own influences.— Janet St. John

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Perception. Pugh, Christina (author). Mar. 2017. 112p. Four Way, paperback, $15.95 (9781935536888). 811. REVIEW. First published June 14, 2017 (Booklist Online).

 

Pugh’s fourth book contains exquisite short poems devoted to focused observation. Although there is a still-life aspect about what is perceived, including flowers, art, and objects, the poems are alive with movement. White spaces and short lines add to the abbreviated, punctuated, sometimes staccato-like rhythms. But Pugh’s use of associations and metaphors also creates lines of uninterrupted flow. The poems contain highly specific as well as specialized vocabulary that can make what is observed feel almost too magnified or abstract, perhaps like Georgia O’Keefe’s flower paintings. Seven numbered prose sections within the book create timely pauses and provide illumination about the poems and the notion of perception. The ending line of number three seems to summarize Pugh’s aesthetic: “Poetry’s work is not to ravish, but diminish.” Through her beautiful approach to minimalism, Pugh offers precise musings on objects while simultaneously offering readers the chance to contemplate the poems themselves, which feel like thoughtful prayers or meditations.— Janet St. John

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Debths. Howe, Susan (author). June 2017. 166p. New Directions, paperback, $15.95 (9780811226851); e-book (9780811226868). 811. REVIEW. First published May 26, 2017 (Booklist Online).

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“So many things happen by bringing to light what has long been hidden in psychic acousmatic toiling moil.” Howe (The Quarry, 2015) makes this statement in her foreword, thus establishing the ground from which her new poems sprung. Reading such an introduction is like witnessing the memory, symbols, words, sounds, and images floating around in Howe’s brain, and what a complex brain it is! Always inventive, pushing the boundaries of language, form, and classification, and at 78, she’s clearly as driven to experiment, create charged collisions, and make us question everything as ever. Part collage, part snippets of literature and history, part investigation of memory, place, the spirit of objects, and things just as things, this mixed bag of words and unconventional typography may stump readers not familiar with Howe’s poetic legacy. But those who embrace her particular originality will be challenged and delighted to encounter new expressions of Howe’s exquisite imagination, that unique lens she holds to the world. — Janet St. John

 

Cockfosters.Simpson, Helen (author). June 2017. 192p. Knopf, hardcover, $23.95 (9780451493071). REVIEW. First published May 1, 2017 (Booklist).

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Two women riding to the end of the Piccadilly line to retrieve lost glasses establishes life’s “stations” and time’s passage as key threads in Simpson’s (In-Flight Entertainment, 2012) sixth story collection. With wit and keen perception, she tackles the cultural assumptions, versus true experience, of middle age in everyday situations. Simpson has a knack for rendering characters’ inner lives while contrasting them with seemingly trivial conversations. She honors the natural course of characters’ thoughts and words, allowing their fears, regrets, and hidden feelings to break through. These nine stories of British middle-class life feel familiar and accessible, even as they are rich in subtext. In “Arizona,” for example, an acupuncture appointment transforms into two women’s conversational exploration of the transition from childbearing age to menopause. So much about this little book is unassuming that one might be tempted to dismiss it at face value, but doing so would be to miss the profound ways universal insights arise out of the ordinary. With Simpson’s gift for expertly capturing our human experience, this is one author never to overlook or undervalue.— Janet St. John

 

March

Ground, Wind, This Body. Carlson, Tina (author). Mar. 2017. 80p. Univ. of New Mexico, paperback, $18.95 (9780826357793). 811. REVIEW. First published February 24, 2017 (Booklist Online).

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Carlson’s exquisite debut feels like a powerful woman has tossed a life preserver to a broken child flailing in the vast, tempestuous ocean of a brutal past. A disembodied sensibility (“to unstitch myself from the harrow of bone and skin”), contrasted with vivid physical detail (“We dig, dig below the marrow / where worms burrow in wet grit”), drives these poems to say the unsayable, as if poetry’s rhythms and imagery are the safest language. Here nature becomes surrogate mother, the only one offering a child a cradling refuge. The way Carlson faces abusive family history, war’s mental ravaging, and the search for transformation is courageous, authentic, and inspired. This collection unravels a life and reveals a woman whose story is a cliff, a house, a war, and violence in her parents, in her, in their home, and in the heart of the world. She writes with clarity and grace, even tackling suicide: “Only I can write that gun out of my own mad mouth.” Carlson’s potent voice will long ring loud and true. — Janet St. John

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February

Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast. Marshall, Megan (author). Feb. 2017. 368p. illus. Houghton, hardcover, $30 (9780544617308). 811.54. 

REVIEW. First published February 15, 2017 (Booklist).

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Pulitzer Prize winner Marshall (Margaret Fuller, 2014) presents an enlightening look into the life of the private, meticulous poet who wrote such perfectly polished poems as “The Fish” and “A Map of the World” in this hybrid biography-memoir. Though Marshall interweaves brief chapters about her time with Bishop and such key players as Robert Lowell, Bishop’s story can’t help but prove far more engaging. From Marianne Moore’s mentoring to her soulful friendship with Lowell, we glimpse Bishop’s literary influences and gain better understanding of the ways writers of the time nurtured and challenged one another to innovate. Thanks to recently discovered correspondence with Bishop’s psychiatrist and lovers, we glimpse sources of her loneliness and constant search for “home.” Her childhood losses and emotional abandonment no doubt played a role in the somewhat parental relationships she had with some strong, artistic, self-sufficient women. Yet her clinging to the feeling of being “in love” seemed often to dampen her artistic drive. A biography of Bishop is long overdue, and Marshall illuminates the poet’s life with fascinating and inspiring details and insights. — Janet St. John

 

No One Is Coming to Save Us. Watts, Stephanie Powell (author). Apr. 2017. 384p. Ecco, hardcover, $26.99 ( 9780062472984). REVIEW. First published February 15, 2017 (Booklist).

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Watts, author of a short-story collection, We Are Taking Only What We Need (2011), and winner of a Whiting Award and an Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, explores The Great Gatsby’s themes of yearning, loss, hope, and disillusion in her powerful debut novel. Set in today’s South and delving into African American family life, the story primarily focuses on Sylvia, a middle-aged mother, and Ava, her thirtysomething daughter. They live in the same house and occupy complicated marriages that reveal both the tenuous and tenacious bonds of love. Other life-weary, imperfect characters reflect the economically depressed, near-ghost town, which somehow beckons Gatsbyesque JJ (now Jay), to return with his accumulated wealth and dreams of recapturing the best of his past. Watts’ lyrical writing and seamless floating between characters’ viewpoints make for a harmonious narrative chorus. This feels like an important, largely missing part of our ongoing American story. Ultimately, Watts offers a human tale of resilience and the universally understood drive to hang on and do whatever it takes to save oneself.— Janet St. John

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Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma.

Brooks, Melanie (author). Feb. 2017. 224p. Beacon, paperback,  $18  (9780807078815). 808.06. REVIEW. First published February 3, 2017 (Booklist Online).

 

Writer Brooks had a secret: Her respected surgeon father had been infected with AIDS but did not disclose it to anyone beside family for fear of the stigma attached with the disease during the mid-1980s. Having participated in this painful situation, she knew she had to write about it to better understand it. But how does a writer work through fear, shame, and the reliving of traumatic memories to best tell such a story? This was the impetus for 18 thoughtful interviews Brooks conducted with renowned memoirists who shared their traumatic stories in authentic, unique, and transformative ways. From Andre Dubus III to Sue William Silverman, Kyoko Mori, and Mark Doty, Brooks’ interviewees share insights about the writer’s role, the simultaneously distinct and universally connected backgrounds and experiences of writers, and the power of owning one’s story. Writers of all genres will glean golden nuggets of advice about writing and living from this book, while all readers, because they, too, have unique personal stories, will be comforted and inspired by the everyday and creative struggles of some of their favorite authors. — Janet St. John

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January

Coming in to Land: Selected Poems 1975-2015. Motion, Andrew (author). Jan. 2017. 192p. Ecco, hardcover, $27.99 (9780062644077); e-book (9780062644091). 811. REVIEW. First published January 11, 2017 (Booklist Online).

 

Former UK Poet Laureate Motion showcases his lyrical and narrative abilities in this cohesive, thoughtful retrospective collection. Early poems are grounded in landscape and the everyday, as the poet ponders life, death, loss, and the inherent grief in the passing of moments and memories, revealing his insights into human existence.Though Motion uses direct language which embodies his signature clear-water aesthetic, readers can see the murkier depths of the poems, where rich themes fester and bloom. Like the light and shadow in drawings, Motion both states and withholds words and feelings for more meaningful impact. In the second section, his poems often tackle war, from WWI to WWII to Iraq and Afghanistan. While partly commemorative, they drive home war’s tragic toll throughout history. But persona poems also imaginatively draw readers into personal realms—the minds and emotions of soldiers and nurses, heroes and ordinary people, all brutally altered by war—thus creating a powerful, ghostly chorus. Motion is a major poet with the distinct ability to strike a true chord of human connection.— Janet St. John

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I Was Trying to Describe What It Feels Like. Holland, Noy (author). Jan. 2017. 384p. Counterpoint, hardcover, $28  (9781619028463). REVIEW.  First published January 1, 2017 (Booklist).

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In “trying to describe what it feels like” to read Holland’s new collection of published and unpublished stories, words like “fast-forward,” “succinct,” and “biting” come to mind, and Holland’s direct, authoritative style is as unique and instantly recognizable as it was in her debut novel Bird (2015). For new readers, it’s a style that might take time to get used to. But the diversity of forms and intriguing story lines will keep both fans and first-time explorers on their toes, wondering where Holland will lead them next. Whether novella length, like “Orbit,” which anchored her first collection (After They Dragged the Lake, 1994), or short, like “Monocot,” which resembles a prose poem, these stories largely revolve around family relationships. Holland presents emotional lives behind closed doors, but after those doors are kicked in. Basic needs go unmet, cravings are only temporarily satisfied, dreams dissolve into disillusion. There is always a visceral sense of something wild and untamable beneath the surface of Holland’s stories, moving her characters through scenes and moving plots toward sharp conclusions. — Janet St. John

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Cinder: New and Selected Poems. Stewart, Susan (author). Feb. 2017. 256p. Graywolf, hardcover, $25 (9781555977634). 811. REVIEW. First published January 1, 2017 (Booklist).

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With lines like “for I have been reading the same story over / and over of the breakdown in the fullness of the world,” MacArthur fellow Stewart’s first, career-spanning collection represents 35 years of thought-provoking poems and proves that she continues to rekindle the fires of her creativity and perception, along with those of her readers. Although Stewart playfully experiments with form and language, what most resonates in her poems, which are organized from the newest to the oldest, is an underlying mindset, a balance between intention and allowance. The way a wave machine’s rocking rhythm can produce a meditative state, so too, Stewart’s poems evoke wonder by building layers of knowledgeable observations, only to let them all dissolve and begin again. She explores natural, human, and artistic encounters as well as stages in time, age, and viewpoint, often leaving traces of her scholarly sensibility in historical, mythical, and philosophical allusions, though she also offers many levels of meaning. Stewart’s poetry inspires by virtue of the poet’s seeking discovery yet resisting final answers.— Janet St. John