New Books in Poetry

Dynamite (Bull City Press, 2015) is transit distilled. Anders Carlson-Wee‘s poems employ movement as mechanism and movement as reverence in a journey that most dream of making yet few ever do. On a cross-country train trip, brothers Kai and Anders armed themselves with a video camera, a secret language of bird calls, and minds tuned to verse. Watch the coal-dust cook in the wind-eddies. Watch it linger. Watch it spiral thinly as it bruises the blue-faded mind of the buffalo sky. We must be the pupil that swells in the coming darkness. The cargo worth carrying across the distances. There is not a single moment where it is safe to pull yourself from the collection, not a moment to disengage with shifting landscape, memory, and the ruthless bonds of family. This chapbook will make you want to write and remind you of when this country was experienced viscerally, when we refused the lure of complacent stasis and chased pure adventure. Watch their video here and wish them well at the Nappa Valley Film Festival next month: “Riding the Highline.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

When Denise Levertov called Lynn Strongin a “true poet,” she recognized an awareness that transcended the young poet’s age. This very human awareness can come with suffering. Inflicted with Polio as a child, Strongin speaks with a voice that understands states of varied ability, that knows real pain, and has navigated the way relationships change in the face of illness. Composed entirely in singlets, The Burn Poems (Headmistress Press, 2015) pull at strings of understanding until meaning has unraveled and reassembled itself. There is a longing that emanates the pieces, a longing well-learned and well-developed that shifts its focus, but never loses intensity. I want her to stay Close Not paralyzed like me But content in her apron of photography: printed, filmic security The image holy, holy, holy. Bliss comes like flare of lit match And can be blown out as quickly: By word It is rare for one to realize their conversation is inhabiting a moment of history-yet-to-come as it actively engages the present. When speaking with Strongin, I heard a voice that has resonated for generations and will continue to resonate for many to come. She has tapped into the undeniable, fragile force that makes us human and she allows that well-spring to flow. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Alexis Rhone Fancher‘s State of Grace: The Joshua Elegies (KYSO Flash Press, 2015) is not an “easy” collection. This is not a group of poems that you can take on the train for mere entertainment or to pass the time. These pieces demand the reader to be present, open, and willing to inhabit the suffering of another human being. But in this presence of mind, connections are made. Since the death of her son in 2007, Fancher has written fourteen elegies that create a road map of her grief spanning eight years. These poems can be difficult to absorb, I often found myself needing to retreat from their content, literally step away from the page. I think of “poems as process,” meaning the need to express is greater than the need to retreat. I think of “poems as companions,” meaning that these pieces reach out to others deep in grief. I think of appreciation– this poet has contributed to poetry in a significant way. This poet is brave. I liked the pain, the dig of remembering, the way, if I moved the dagger just so, I could see his face, jiggle the hilt and hear his voice clearly, a kind of music played on my bones… She offers this sentiment to her readers, “All life has tragedy, the best we can do is learn from tragedy. And maybe have some sort of shared joy in overcoming it.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

The poem fragments in Hope Wabuke‘s Movement No. 1: Trains (Dancing Girl Press, 2015) function more as meditations than portions of a whole. They meditate on movement’s power over the body and mind. What are the vessels that carry our bodies through cities, from home to beyond? Who are the people inhabiting our thoughts, moving our mind from idea to emotion to dream? the city is color electric, neon; the humming static pulsing further away. and she understands the way a charge moves through air in the meeting of two bodies, but she does not understand the afterwards, the pressing of a thing into the shape of something else. These poems appear gentle but do not be deceived by the calm voice. Trains shudder and jolt, tracks shift and bump. There is a recognition of longing present each time the beloved is invoked, and a reluctant understanding that when in motion, the familiar becomes foreign. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In her macabre pastoral landscape Fiddle is Flood (Blood Pudding Press, 2015), Lauren Gordon conjures up a persona far-reaching enough to grapple with loss, grief, and the shock of intense change. But the poet does not hide behind the personal, instead she allows the speaker to become loss, become grief, and quake at the shock of a life turned on its head. Using colloquial language and the cadence of hymn to a mesmerizing affect, Gordon pulls the reader into a melding of prairie, nostalgia, and memory: …endless, endless prairie for corn and mud and loss and dirt and the seeds and the silky tassel of half truths and how you find God in the middle of a haystack naked and crouching and warm and how you found yourself in love with a doll make out of a corn cob whose skin became your own, dried and sheared and real. Childhood musings of Laura Ingalls Wilder and “Little House on the Prairie” fuel the mixing of real and imagined, of the body before loss and the body after. This collection only appears gentle, it means to wound. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Think of a place you have visited and to which you feel a connection. Now think of that place in utter ruin and devastation mere months later. You feel a pull, a pull to return, to help, and to make sense of the heavy fist nature can bring down on us at any time. Tomlinson personally gathered hours upon hours of eye-witness accounts, conversations, and testimonies. Translated and then transcribed, he pulled the poems directly from the transcriptions, as a sculptor would uncover a human form from within a block of marble. These poems go beyond what we understand as “poems of witness” and become “poems of testimony,” life rendered into verse in the purest sense. we saw the barge as well as the darkening of the world my house was nothing the barge was on top of our house and the houses were gone my house it was nothing anymore a little portion of a steel bar Through the disassociation needed to survive such trauma and begin to reshape rubble into a life, moments of clarity and realization are apparent, he lifts these moments so that we may see them clearly. This collection is labor of devotion and should be celebrated. Tomlinson reminds us that art is life, elevated. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

As pleasing to the eye as it is to the ear the contents of Meta Sama‘s le animal and other creatures (Miel Press, 2015) remind us that creativity takes many forms and seeks many tributaries out to the sea of expression. The divisions apparent in this chapbook actually function as bridges from one creative process to another. Just as Sama’s poems take surprising lefts and rights to form a winding map of a given poem’s voice, the entire collection juts out and dips in, in such a way that a pattern is formed. Each deviation from this pattern heightens the experience of the poem while adding additional depth to the whole. This is all to say that Sama’s work is functioning on multiple levels, stimuli absorbed through multiple senses, and textual conversations taking place independent of the text– and you need to read up to keep up. tantrums are failed objects broken over the italicized moon… hold until shatter poppy or pollen until pixelated or love… the back waxing and waning… the raised eyebrows of clouds… the weary hips of mountains… some waters rip and tear… sometimes lit is just the shake of air pressure… and a stranger’s knee adjusts to meet you What animals do we depend on for survival, for protection, and for love? How do we project the different versions of ourselves on the creatures in our lives? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

When I first read Suzanne Bottelli‘s The Feltville Formation (Finishing Line Press, 2015), I was struck by the quietude and steadiness of the poems. Often in tercets, the stanzas stand like columns seeking to rebuild what was once strong. What do lovers of history do but seek to shore up foundations of the past so that the present may tread upon them? Bottelli not only researched this 19th-Century utopian town-left-derelict, it is also part of the landscape from her New Jersey childhood. The poems straddle the block of time from Feltville, to ruin, to the nostalgia of looking back 30 years and 3,000 miles. — for the moments marking the standing still of time, even if time does not stand still, or it does, and we move through it which is the incomprehensible fact of it, or at least one small pebble of fact in the face of it. The larger question these poems wonder after is, what do we do with what has been left behind? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

With air-tight verse and talent for the surreal, Ross White invokes a sibling version of our world in his new collection How We Came Upon the Colony (Unicorn Press, 2014). By tilting our view slightly to the left, he allows us to ask necessary questions of the familiar. How entitled are we to our many geographic and spiritual colonies? Has our idea of Manifest Destiny merely shifted from Westward Expansion to industry in a world that has stretched far beyond “local” but retains the individuality loaned to us by Capitalism? Can history itself be colonized? These are the poems of a mind at work sorting out an individual and shared history. That White could contain such worlds in clean and steady lines, speaks to his mastery of craft. He seeks to illuminate rather than explain, and to offer possibilities rather than moral solutions. In proof that we should still sit in wonder at these strange real and imagined worlds, the reader is left with this final image: When there is no light, the farmer smokes his pipe and waits patiently to be possessed by hope. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Does form make the poem? Robert Frost claimed that writing free verse poetry was “like playing tennis without a net.” Ryo Yamaguchi‘s poetry challenges the notion of imposing our will and wonders after the permeability of content. This poet understands the subjectivity of perception and does not insist on form, but instead loosely allows the verse to be contained. These are the experiences of a wandering poet–one who has known many containers, natural and man-made, who knows how little the natural world tolerates containment; how felled redwoods will sprout new life from up from their horizontal trunks and wisteria will climb and reach with the wide berth of the sun’s rays. But Yamaguchi does not write rainforests and plains, he writes the internal life, the interactions, the “urban sublime” and gives it the reach the natural world. He finds amazement in all versions of beauty. Say I never understood the definition of purpose, why bore, flux, revise, tender, ensconce, or what have you– never to think the metallic fires were in that much need of improvement when this pear is sweet over here in the single day of my life. Purchase this books to enjoy the groups of poems that create systems and conversations within the larger system of a collection. This will be the first of many collections by Yamaguchi and I look forward to reading the future compressions and expansions of image, container, and experience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry