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Year: 2014

In the Kettle, the Shriek by Hannah Stephenson

March 31, 2014 • • Leave a comment

I’ve been enjoying Hannah Stephenson’s blog, The Storialist, for several years. She posts a poem every day, usually inspired by someone else’s artwork. They’re quite good, amazing really, when you consider she does this every weekday. So I was happy to read her collection In the Kettle, the Shriek (Gold Wake Press, 2013).

These poems are full of warmth, wit, and so many questions. I really like the way she asks questions in her work. I found myself stopping in my tracks, sometimes doubling back after a few pages as I realized my thoughts weren’t keeping up with my reading. Go slow, with this book. Too fast and you’ll miss something. I suppose many books are like that, but In the Kettle, the Shriek rewards that doubling back.

Many of the poems seem to throw a bunch of vivid images and intriguing ideas out there, and I wonder what will stick, where is this going, and then I think, who cares, I’m enjoying the ride. But at the end, the poet often manages to both tie it all together and reveal something new in a single line that is often a question. This is the genius of the work, I think, and what I found so compelling, so interesting.

This is a very positive book. There is darkness, death, panic, extinction, in these pages, but there is light too. A gentle reminder that things will often work out if we are strong, if we are brave. I was especially struck by “Pressing Ghosts,” in which the speaker shares her own fears that her work is unremarkable and dull (it isn’t!) and concludes with:

Even so, I keep creating, I am capable.
I will calmly allow its heaviness
and stand when it goes. It will.

Strong work here, and I look forward to rereading In the Kettle, the Shriek one day. In the meantime, I will keep reading Hannah’s work at The Storialist.

In Your Voice

March 26, 2014 • • 4 Comments

Tell me how the fog whispers
rivulets of water down your arms,
tell me of the rushes gently
bent beneath the weight of blackbirds,
and the dust and craters written
on the surface of the other planets
and their moons, tell me
of the fishes drowned in air when
the egret pulls them from the pond,
and tell me of the broken clouds
scattered restless across the sky,
tell me all these things again
so I’ll know in your voice all
the wonders that surround us. 

—

OPP #10: Jake Adam York & We Write Poems: We Wordle #11

Three Poems at CSHS

March 24, 2014 • • Leave a comment

The inaugural issue of CSHS (Clipper Ship Hauling Stories or Can She Hack Sonnets?) is out, and I’m honored to have three of my poems featured alongside the work of several other fine poets in this issue.  Thanks Joseph & Tessa for including my poems “The Rope Swing,” “Here Comes a Twister,” and “Flags of Convenience.”

Weaving a New Eden by Sherry Chandler

March 18, 2014 • • 2 Comments
Weaving a New Eden Cover Image
Weaving a New Eden by Sherry Chandler

Deep roots fascinate me. My siblings and I grew up following the whims of the US Navy. Being of a place, deeply rooted, is foreign to me. As far as I know not many branches of my family have generations-long roots to any particular place either. We’ve always felt a little bit like tumbleweeds.

So books like Sherry Chandler’s beautiful Weaving a New Eden (Wind Publications, 2011) really interest me. I’ve known Sherry online for a while now, and I don’t know why it took me so long to get around to reading her fine book, but I do think books tend to come up in my pile when they are supposed to and this one came up when I needed some inspiration, and, boy, did it deliver.

The poems tell the tales of the women who settled Kentucky, Sherry’s home state, from Rebecca Boone to Sherry’s own family members whose stories are so movingly told in a section called “The Grandmother Acrostics.” (By the way I’ve never seen acrostics so well done).

There follows a long sequence of poems about Rebecca Boone, famed frontiersman Daniel’s wife, that had me going back to Wikipedia to read some of the history behind the poems, but I always found Rebecca’s voice as written by Sherry more compelling than anything I’ve ever read about Daniel. There’s something in Sherry’s work that honors more than celebrates or mythologizes these people and so while Daniel Boone seems as mythic as ever, Rebecca is real, and her sacrifices, her losses, hurt.

Weaving a New Eden is an exploration of place as told by and for the women who built it. Beginning with a meditation on personal loss and carrying through a fragmentary poetic history of the settling of Kentucky and circling back again to “The North Yard,” a sonnet crown, in which Sherry writes eloquently of the cycles of life and death in her own settled yard, often with a scientific understanding of the world that would have been alien to the frontierswomen we met earlier in the book.

This is a wonderful, beautiful, book, worth taking your time with. It took me two weeks to read because I kept going back, rereading, and then letting the poems rest in my mind for awhile before moving on. I look forward to her next book. In the meantime, I will enjoy her twitter feed, rich with her micropoetry.

Stopping by Tharsis on a Dusty Evening

March 3, 2014 • • 2 Comments

When all my days have turned to rust,
The poison wind begins to gust,
And strange colors purely Martian
Fill up the sky with choking dust.

When the air begins to thicken
Like a scene from science fiction
I lose sight of Tharsis Montes,
And embrace this redding vision.

Down in Noctis Labyrinthus,
Cut off, alone, I find solace.
Within the planet’s ancient scar,
I marvel as the sky turns ferrous.

The lovely dust darkens the stars
Then blocks the Earth that once was ours.
And now there is nowhere but Mars.
And now there is nowhere but Mars.

—

Not long ago, I had my students write poems using Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” as a model. I decided to have a go at it too. I’ve been reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy.

Postcard Cover Art

February 13, 2014 • • Leave a comment

postcard2013_cover-kindle-lo-resWhen I made the decision to Kindle-ize and relaunch A Place Without a Postcard, I decided to redo the cover. While looking around Shutterstock, I came across the photo that you see on the book. A UFO flying over the desert is exactly the kind of cover image I was seeking for a book about a photographer who makes fake UFO photos and gets lost in the desert.

This photo led me to try to learn more about the photographer, Michele Cornelius. She lives and works in Alaska, and her photos eloquently capture the beauty of that remote place and her deep concern for its wild spaces.

In addition to selling stock photos, Michele also has a great many of her prints available for purchase, and she has a beautiful photo e-book called A Back Road Traveler’s Alaska. Visit her site, Observations of a Backroad Traveler, and check out her work. It will be time well spent.

Also, if you’re looking for good stock photos, she has a lot more than UFO pictures available on Shutterstock.