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Book Reviews for October 2024

Ode to the States: Poems Inspired by the Fifty States and the District of Columbia by Diane L. Redleaf

Visible Evening, 2024 51 poems ~ KindleReview by Gary David
This is a happy book, happy in its own skin, happy to have you along on a long car ride around the country, happy to sit next to you and read you some points of interest from the guidebook, happy even to make little jokes and droll asides for your amusement. Happy to peel you an orange. The author, Diane Redleaf, has been an important and effective family matters lawyer and policy advocate for over three decades, but in the most recent of those decades she has begun writing award-winning poems, essays, and most recently a chapbook. This year the multitalented Ms Redleaf came out with “Ode to the States,” sixty or so pages prompted by her frequent travels around the country. It is what the title says it is, a lucid poetic excursion that starts with Alabama: “You taunt me, oh Alabama. My Bible belt is too loose for you,” and ends a short 56 pages later with “Fair-eyed, square-jawed, big-hatted” Wyoming. At every turn a gentle fondness for her task shows through, a heartfelt assessment and appreciation of the disparate geographic and political corners of this nation, poetry more often arising from the land she walks on than for the cities or the populace she sees. Arizona, for example is “hard to understand: shaded and sequined by your deserts, hiding in thirsty plastic-wrapped cities, giving off torment and refuge from your beating sun.” And Hawaii rates this lovely, whimsical tribute: “I long to pour my black sand into you, dress in your salt breezes, wear perfumes of your Kona coffee, weave skirts of aloha grasses, then crown myself with birds of paradise and pearls.”
Some states evoke personal memories. A Kentucky childhood rekindled is “a dream state of misted memories…Dad and Mom and me, Green Jeans on TV.” Illinois, her chosen homeland, is the “great incubator, second to none,” where her “crossroads cross through you” and “my choices open up in you.” And even with its genteel façade, Virginia is a problem, beautiful but untrustworthy, with “past treacheries…and willful independence.” She feels “torn to pieces over you.” And the coast of Maine, “land of shrouded dark pines,” would reveal infinite depths and spaces she could sense but not see, a turning point where “lighthouses wait for dawn uncomplaining.” And so on, an alphabetized journey through fifty-one in all, plus a nod to the District of Columbia, “full of history and secrets, pokerfaced and blabbermouth, full of unity and splinters.” Here with a resonant appreciation of the language, the deft, natural wordsmithery creates one delicate line of umami after another. I would look forward to a summing up, the grand ode that encompasses the whole sprawling country. Yes, that would be grand. NOTE: You may contact Diane at www.dianeredleaf.com to request a free clickable map version of the book in ePub or Mobi files if you are able to read these files on your system.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER - Gary Davis is the author of the poetry collection, SPF60, and the novel, Butterfly. He lives in California. Posted October 1, 2024

Esemplastic: Many and One by Karian Markos

Highland Park Poetry Press, 2024 44 Poems ~ 56 pages ISBN#: 979-8-9880919-4-3Review by Michael Escouabs
The unusual word “Esemplastic refers to a “blending of opposites,” “or shaping disparate things into a coherent whole.” In a world that, at times, seems more fractured than together, Karian Markos’ collection Esemplastic: Many and One is an intriguing read which offers unique insights into the human condition.
Winner of the 2024 Prairie State Poetry Prize for a first or second book, Markos demonstrates why Esemplastic won: it searches for, and finds, those things which work together for a satisfying life. Markos refuses to be used or manipulated by momentary whims. I’m printing in full, “Atomic Data,” to illustrate this poet’s head-on use of irony to establish her individualism:
 I am not a Tik Tok chattel a series of labels affixed to a profile
 I am not a commodity to be packaged and sold my eye movements tracked
 I am not a Dole banana stickered, bundled, sprayed to force the green out of my skin
 I am more than a random sum of interactions catalogued and housed in a neat box
 I am. You are too. Our aggregate power far exceeds the value of their analytics.
It has been said that the job of the poet is to tell the truth. The goal of this review is to show Karian Markos’ unique ability to tell the truth.
First off, Markos refuses to be manipulated by a world set up to do exactly that. “Atomic Data,” sets the poet’s feet on terra firma.
Among the strengths of Markos’ poetry is her connection to nature’s rhythms in correspondence with the same traits in people. 20th century modernist poet Wallace Stevens understood and exploited the same theme in his poetry. This “Esemplastic” trait is shown in “Summer’s End”: my summer is coming to an end a smolder, skin barely a flush desire’s wily arms slacken and sag the seat of creation from belly to mind
 my summer is coming to an end rose colored, it hangs low in the sky, cicadas decrescendo bees prepare for dearth, emptiness fills the vacancies I am needed less, wanted less
 my summer is coming to an end my autumn is beginning night chews the edges of day mind skips the foreshortened winter sees itself breach the horizon
 my summer is coming to an end a flicker in falling leaves it kneels breathless at autumn’s feet begs a Monarch on a parallel path to extinction to ferry her to timelessness on his velvet wings
The use of repetition in the first line of each stanza, along with the lack of punctuation creates a natural flow connecting summer’s end with observable changes in the poet’s life and by extension universal life. I note a particular nobility within this poem. Truth, embraced as summer, kneels breathless at autumn’s feet.
I lead with these two poems to convey a sense of who this poet is. But there is more: Markos’ Greek American heritage is a study within itself. Poems such as “Sunday,” the Greek meaning of her first name, demonstrates an ironic sense of humor. “Nostos,” a term that means “welcome home,” provides delightful insights about her heritage and the role of women within it. I sense that Markos lives in solidarity with the “bronze-hearted mother, / shading her eyes day and night, / gazes over the horizon. / No man here returns to an empty shore.”
Several short poems averaging in length from six to nine lines each, profile the hope her ancestors had for life in America. “Cul de sac” is typical:
 The door to anywhere was here
 Our asphalt grew jasmine blossoms from apple seeds. Our songs hung in the air at sunset. Our feet made the footprints in the concrete.
 We had nothing and everything as we stumbled, shoulder to shoulder, down the sidewalk where our dreams were born.
At the beginning I referred to Karian Markos having her feet planted on terra firma. Her poem “Seventeen Years Later,” seals the deal. Here, she deals with contemporary society’s obsession with “thin.” She bridges the gap in time from age twenty-one (what she thought then) to her perspective now at thirty-eight.
Karian Markos’ Esemplastic: Many and One is a fresh, wide-ranging, wise, and witty collection which has engaged this reviewer’s heart and mind. For all the poet’s sensitive introspection about life, the capsheaf for me, is the miniature, “Wings”:
 I sprouted wings today and rode aloft on a warm gust of gratitude
 life in panoramic view gives me hope enough to coast into tomorrow

ABOUT THE REVIEWER - Michael Escoubas is Senior Editor, Contributing Poet, and Staff Book Reviewer for Quill and Parchment, a 23-year-old literary and cultural arts online journal. This review is republished with kind permission from Quill and Parchment. Posted October 1, 2024

It's This by Laura Foley

Fernwood Press, 2024 62 Poems ~ 97 pages ISBN#: 978-1-59498-103-6Review by Michael Escoubas
As I began reading Laura Foley’s stunning new volume, It’s This, my mind wandered toward the work of another thoughtful author: Willa Cather. Cather, one of the early 20th century’s most awarded novelists, offers two quotations which inspired this review:
“There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.”And “The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one’s own.”
Laura Foley honors Cather’s sentiments as she paints pictures with words borne on wings from her own quiet center. Foley’s work is intellectually significant, emotionally satisfying and precisely crafted.
“Prayer,” although it appears late (page 85) in the volume, sets the kind of tone envisioned by Cather:
 Give us this morning of wet grass, of geese landing over us, feet dangling as they drop to the rippling pond. Give us this bowl of mung beans, These olives from Spain, this garlic and kale—nourish us, so we may be worthy, this quiet May morning, so we may learn to surrender all of it with grace
This poem speaks to me because of its plea to live in and enjoy the present moment, but also counsels the reality of a future surrender of that moment. Foley’s “life in reality” approach resonates. All of this and more stirs, within the poem, a silent mantra captured by four simple words, Let me be worthy.
In an age where some poets approach their work and their readers with political and social “axes to grind”—Laura Foley’s work refreshes my spirit.
Foley finds poetry in intricate details: “Ode to a Wasp,” a mere six lines becomes a profound meditation on death:
 You dove into my hot chai— I’m sorry you died, though at least it was brief and cinnamon sweet. I wonder if I will be so blessed.
There is sensitivity to pain in Laura Foley’s work. I like her approach: Foley looks pain in the face but never capitulates. “Then” provides ample evidence:
 The human world kicks you in the head again and again—
 so you must seek beyond the No, the song of dried beech leaves ringing in the brittle wind,
 a hollow tone to shiver you like a tuning fork, so the healing bell inside yourself
 will resound, in quietness, with Yes and Yes and Yes.
Among the features that stand out to me is Foley’s skill in using the visible natural as an accurate register of the invisible spiritual world of people. I’m struck by “the song of dried beech leaves,” as a response to the “human world / that “kicks you in the head,” “like a tuning fork, so the healing bell inside yourself / will resound, in quietness.”
In “Spring Treachery,” the poet falls on slippery ice, injured, as she grabs a seemingly innocent hemlock tree—(palms, arms, and legs get bruised)—corresponds to those unexpected hurts delivered by those we assumed trustworthy.
In “Lost and Found,” the poet, on her sophomore science field trip becomes mesmerized looking at crabs, snails, starfish, and other sea-life. She is filled with joy by natural things; they become part of her in moments no words can tell. The intimate experience corresponds to our throw and go world bereft of “losing oneself in the world of tiny shifting things.”
It's This captures the spirit of Willa Cather’s “calm in the storm,” as well as Cather’s self-effacement. Foley’s life is one of ongoing respect that another’s “heart is a dark forest, no matter how close it has been to one’s own.”
I am honored to say that Laura Foley’s profound engagement with life, her generosity of heart, shines forth in a volume I will proudly display on my bookshelf.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER - Michael Escoubas is Senior Editor, Contributing Poet, and Staff Book Reviewer for Quill and Parchment, a 23-year-old literary and cultural arts online journal. This review is republished with kind permission from Quill and Parchment. Posted October 1, 2024

The Unraveling Script by Maggie Kennedy

Pine Row Press, 2024 104 Pages ISBN#: 978-1963110005 Review by Candace Armstrong
Maggie Kennedy shares her perceptions of life’s defining moments in this three-part book. Her poetic remembrances resonate with the reader’s own experiences, recalled or awakened by her voice. I found myself thinking of my own earlier life events in a way that I’d forgotten until her verses touched my memory.
In Part 1, the author remembers a fourth-grade teacher who honored her penmanship with the gift of a fountain pen less for her lessons than the author’s regrettable ridicule, recalled years later. From the titular poem, page 15:
 If I could take it back, Miss Halstead, I would . . .
 The hurt in your eyes was a surprise.
But much later in the poem after world events awake awareness and conscience, the author notes:
That was when I realized that beauty, extraneous as a sparrow, feels like forgiveness.
Penmanship, from fourth-grade perfect to grocery list illegibility, is only the impetus for this touching recollection.
Part II contains a Senyru Sequence, 'A Suburban Winter,' (p 58) and poems that touch on familial Relationships in ‘Home’ for her mother (p 45), ‘The Sisters Part Ways,’ (p 66) and ‘Insomnia’ ( p 56) and ‘Simple’ (p 68) about her husband which ends with the line “Love simplifies.”
'Boogie Board' (p 60) recounts an experience with her son and ends with these lines: How you dote and dare, both pulling him from and pushing him back from the break, same as
 when he stole his first steps from you, lunging for dust petals in a sunbeam.
'Parenting Styles' (p 70) ends with this unforgettable image:
 Humans are more like turf grasses, fibrous roots twined tight. It takes a sharp spade to slice us from our young.
In Part III, the author writes of surprises made of memories revisited and a backdrop of war news barely touching suburban childhood, especially in 'Spotting Hobos' (p 78) and 'Looking Up From the News' (p 99). On page 83 we find a touching poem for her father, 'How to Die Like a Collapsing Star,' which contains a lovely ending couplet:
 You must hang on till the wait is over, And you pull to you every last one you love.
Another gem from Part III is found in 'Shadows,' (p94), which ends:
 Let your shadow rise as for an embrace before evening swipes your image.
The Unraveling Script unravels its poetic value throughout a careful reading of its contents, Poems that encourage, provoke and touch our own memories.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER - Candace Armstrong writes poetry and fiction in the beautiful woodlands of Shawnee National Forest in Southern Illinois. Her poetry has appeared in several publications, both in print and online, to include but not be limited to Quill & Parchment, Midwest Review, The Lyric, DASH, California Review and the ISPS publications of Distilled Lives. Her first novel, Evidence of Grace, was published in 2021. She enjoys gardening, cooking, meeting with other writers and hiking with her husband and canine child, Murphy. Posted October 1, 2024

Book Reviews for September 2024

Abundance/Diminishment: Poems by Ann E. Michael

Kelsay Books, 2024 57 poems ~110 pagesISBN #: 978-1-63980-521-1Review by Michael Escoubas
Ann Michael’s newest book juxtaposes two seemingly opposite concepts: abundance on one hand, diminishment on the other. Without offering precise definitions, Michael achieves something far better. She paints word-pictures that breathe life into these venerable abstractions. “Gardner’s Handbook,” serves as prologue and offers a discreet controlling metaphor. Here’s an excerpt: First, you must learn the attributes of weeds, the ethics of the garden, that the dandelion’s knurled bud and jagged leaf are a rebuke and an abomination— that the plunge and pry of hook and knife were just arbiters, purging the taproot’s sins.
As the poem develops, Michael synthesizes her theme that life itself is a study in abundance and diminishment. There is tension in play. Call it a form of spiritual tension, or light versus darkness. These lines in the same poem push the issue a little deeper:
 That you must slide the hand hoe gently. Slender wand-like sprays of crocus must be left intact; you must finesse loose shoots of furzy, pale-green thistle from between emerging peony stalks furled and maroon in the flowerbed. And learn the matted ways of white clover when it spreads plague-like amid the lily leaves.
These forces share a relationship. As participants in our universal life-experiment, Michael’s wise counsel to “slide the hand hoe gently,” is a perfect metaphor. In case you haven’t guessed, the poet is drawing her initial ideas from the Gospels. Matthew’s account of the Parable of the Tares (Chapter 13) reveals that good and bad, light and dark, weeds and wheat, abundance and diminishment, are both nourished by the same soil. Each of Michael’s four divisions bears its own unique relation to the whole: “Evolutions” contributes contrasts and analogies. For example, “Toad Night,” reveals that all things, even primeval things, like toads, have their rightful place in the scheme of things. Don’t be in such a hurry as to not appreciate them.Did I mention that reading Michael offers an education in natural biology? I feel as if the poet is tutoring me in all things Natural. For example, “The Cockroach,” gave me more info on that dirty creature than I wanted to know! (In a mere ten lines.) Now that I know, I shall never view cockroaches in the same light. Michael has a way of conveying love for all creatures, plants, animals, and fauna. If it is alive, it has value.
In the next section, “What We’re Given,” I see patterns that support and reinforce Michael’s premise. “Markings,” is about ocean tides and patterns of life printed on the sand. In things most people are apt to miss, Michael sees as abundance and diminishment: gulls’ footprints, no pattern to discern, but human footprints are different—she brings her ill father into the poem. The markings of his walker in the sand become a pattern of sorts—signs of her ministry of compassion for him. In the same poem, Michael turns unexpectedly to explorers in Tanzania who find “familiar patterns that “mark our (humanity’s) paths to and from the sea. Other poems of note are “Late May,” “Damage Zones,” and “Apology.”
Section 3, “Semaphores” sends life-signals. For example, “Beginning to Cast Off Unnecessary Things,” signals it is time to take a deep dive into what truly matters in life:
 Our bodies look strange and pale, awkward serpents in a foreign sea; in our nakedness we are unfamiliar even to ourselves. We shiver under birch trees whose white skins burst and peel. You say it is time to go home.
Michael’s conclusion hit me hard. I, too, own extra baggage. This is about more than cleaning out the attic! Look for more “semaphores” in this section; finding them may challenge your thinking.
By the time I opened the last section, “Whatever You’ve Lost is With You,” Michael has come full circle. As with the parable, which avers, that weeds and wheat coexist (always have, always will), I felt a sense of completeness. I felt as if the poet knew me, that she and I shared the human dilemma. I return to where I began, Michael’s closure from “Gardener’s handbook”:
 “ . . . Take up your wire claw and trowel. Tuck your ethics into your leather belt, go forth into the wilderness and into Eden understanding both the plantain and the bluebell.” Ann Michael’s Abundance/Diminishment, unique, original . . . full of surprises: a five-star collection.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER - Michael Escoubas is Senior Editor, Contributing Poet, and Staff Book Reviewer for Quill and Parchment, a 23-year-old literary and cultural arts online journal. This review is republished with kind permission from Quill and Parchment. Posted September 1, 2024

Singing Is Praying Twice: Poems by Marianne Peel

Shadelandhouse Modern Press, 2024 162 pages ISBN # 978-194504-9453 Review by Cynthia T. Hahn Marianne Peel's poetry has an intensity that makes it difficult to put down. What is compelling about the reading experience of Singing is Praying Twice is how Peel manages to circumvent the more predictable chronological telling of the experiences of childhood, motherhood, losses and death, by hooking us with startling images. She deftly intermingles unexpected notes of tragedy and ecstasy, in a constantly revolving palette of the senses. Her visual range of color description keeps us engaged, as does her specific olfactory reminiscence, quoted bits of dialogue and music, evocations of touch, from rough skin to soft wool, at times calling for a sixth sense spiritual transcendance, while grounded in a world of precise color, bound by sun and sky, water and wind, linking conventional tradition and ancestral rite to the atemporal or surreal. This volume is Peel's second work of poetry, after No Distance Between Us: A Journey in Poems (Shadelandhouse Modern Press, 2022) another poetic volume that utilizes a first-person narrator to make connections to a variety of Others in distant places and ultimately, to reconnect with the self.
This 2024 volume, Singing is Praying Twice, is structured by a moment of reflection conveyed in a single, haiku-like poem that invites us into each of the four chronologically-ordered sections. These initial short poems convey an image whose meaning is uncovered in the sequence of free verse or prose poems that follow, as in the entry poem to the third section: "Long before her birth/I touch my daughter's strong hand/arabesque of dawn" (59). This gentle image is linked to darker poems of loss, and resolves thus: "You arabesque between starfish and seahorses" (90).
What often links one poem to the next in this volume is a line of music, a quoted or referenced musical piece as in the poem "Hope": "Aaron Copland's Appalachian spring/when the flute and oboe vine their way/up a white picket fence on a bluegrass meadow" (16), or a reference to Uncle Johnny's accordion, to Baba, "an obbligato soprano", to music-making made sacred ("I genuflect before the sheet music on the piano", 18), or "Full Moon Drum Circle" in which the "tree frogs who churn out the bass line" are coupled with white-haired women who drum "until their pulses become one frequency/[....] synchronize" (20). Beginning with the collection's title, loosely evoking St. Augustine's understanding of sung prayer as highly meaningful, we too are invited to resonate with the string of memories laid out, sometimes sonorously linked and repeated as a kind of auditory incantation: "No counting. No need to think. To overthink. No need [....] ("Trying to Remember, 110).
From the outset, the title of this volume emphasizes singing, in a literal sense but also metaphorical, highlighting the oral power in the telling of the stories contained within. This is coupled with the idea of prayer we may read as an attempt, via poetic recounting, as a way to achieve reconciliatory understanding, or at least acceptance of the complexity of our emotional connections. Uncovering and navigating uncomfortable, sticky familial relationships, the poet or first-person narrator, calls forth objects, cites words and actions that activate all the senses. The importance of story as a path to growth, underscores the theme of awakening to the adult mind. Peel often dates her poems, following striking memories from early childhood to adulthood. Family encounters, relayed from one poem to the next, are littered with details easy to envision due to their visceral nature, alternating between a recall of gritty moments and atemporal, lyrical moments of natural beauty. The four daughters that eventually emerge in the text and become estranged with their mother due to separation from their father exhibit relationships turned to "acidic accusation", and symbolized by a saved umbilical "cord stump", a remnant of lifeline connection, one of many "scars" that link to the wounds evoked in the first two sections of the volume ("Accusation", 82, "Severed", 83).
The accumulation of tangible elements serves as an effective rhetorical device; Marianne Peel revels in enumerating and connecting the natural world, through sky and plant imagery, to food and the domestic sphere, often compiling a list of images or intoning repeated thoughts that lead us to catch our breath in surprise and take us to the hard edge of deep emotions, as when we discover the autistic child, the one whose world is full of the dictionary, and silent signs, the poet using an anaphoric "She doesn't" to start almost each line in the prose poem, "Dictionary Girl, They Call Her" (75-76), to emphasize her unchildlike countenance: "She doesn't daydream about butterfly wings or the color of the sea bottom. [....]."She doesn't wear mismatched socks" [....].
The sensitivity to living things and their fragility is a theme aptly recounted by the autistic daughter, at the end of "A Loveliness of Ladybugs": "Nothing ever dies, she tells me/ if we tend to the business of living." (84-85). This longer third section which includes themes of birthing, connection, separation, loss, reconciliation and attempts to enter the world of the other, culminates in the apparition of the grandchild, the future hope: "She carries my name into startling galaxies she creates", the wonder of continual renewal amidst the acceptance of aging: "I want my granddaughter [...] to connect [...] these liver spots/ with a bright magic purple marker." ("Mapping our universe", 100-102).
The final section confronts and describes mortality in terms of actions; a car accident, the search for a word, literal and metaphorical disappearance, lost memory fused with the act of collection, "like rattling through a pantry full of mason jars unlabelled [....]. ("Trying to Remember", 109).
In the end, the poet asks to be remembered by the "you" continually addressed in this volume, conjured up in a feast of indulgent delicacies in "Death Wish" (129-130): "Scoop on the decadence of gravy. [....] Compose a spanokopita galette." This artist-author encourages us to delight in the colors she will have "left behind" in planted perennial "purple crown of snow crocus" and "laughing face of butterfly jonquil", reminding us of the hope of nature's sacred renewal, while this poetic telling of life and death, of family broken and bound, of powerful spirit singing, sates us. We retain images both heavy and light, from a "red deluge" of blood (61) and the welt caused by "her mother's black onyx ring" (27) to "warm huckleberries collected in coffee cans", Nana's afternoon smell of damp "earth after the sun" (7) and "sunset-orange poppies." ("The Color is Never Blue", 128).
In short, this highly compelling collection of poems infuses the reader with original imagery, and reconnects us to the range of emotional highs and lows that bind us to human experience. We are drawn to read "twice", once filtered through her eyes, and once again through our own. ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Cynthia T. Hahn has authored two volumes of poetry, Outside-In-Side-Out (Finishing Line Press, 2011), and Coïncidence(s) (alfAbarre Press, Paris, 2014). Cynthia is a Professor of French at Lake Forest College, Illinois, teaching creative writing and translation since 1990. Her personal sanctuary is her Japanese garden. Posted September 1, 2024

At Last a Valley by Lara Dolphin

Blue Jade Press 34 poems ~ 41 pagesISBN #: 978-1-961043-02-2Review by Michael Escoubas
A quote by writer A. A. Milne (1882-1956, inventor of the cherished “Winnie-the-Pooh” children’s stories) opens Lara Dolphin’s daring new volume:
“But it isn’t easy,” said Pooh. “Because Poetry and Hums aren’t things which you get, they’re things that get you. And all you can do is to go where they can find you.”
I can’t think of a better segue into At Last a Valley. Lara Dolphin’s poetry finds me—ropes me in, draws me near as with a lasso. My purpose in this review is to offer you, my reader, a loop in the same rope that captured me.
Let’s begin with titles: “HARKing: My Post Hoc Life,” “Whereby the Legacy Robe Recipient Can’t Even,” SCOTUS Van Backs over Mary Richards’ Tam,” “Turritopsis Dohrnii Visits the Woods Hole Science Aquarium,” and “Fancy Dress Race.” Are you out of breath yet?!?! Titles are a strong suit for Lara Dolphin. Her titles are strategic. She entices, she challenges, she dares readers to take part in life . . . albeit the uniquely slanted life Dolphin proffers. When I read such titles, I too, go where they, the poems, can find me.
“HARKing: My Post Hoc Life,” begins:
Consider a motherwho believes that a little time to herselfwill increase her sense of well-being
Most parents have coveted this familiar expression . . . all she’s asking is a moment, well maybe an hour? Perhaps two, but:
Then the unexpected—my sense of contentment fadesI drive down my earlier thoughtsconvincing myself that I knew that I would miss youbut I’ll never tellbecause after all (and all along)I was correct
Several poems relate to show business. “Whereby the Legacy Robe Recipient Can’t Even” is among them. This insightful poem chronicles the work and sacrifices inherent in the performing arts.
When you said goodbyeto your hometownand headed for the city,you didn’t care what people thought.Enrolled in dance classesby day, you waited tables at nighthoping to be readywhen the big break came.
Dolphin’s closing stanza is a study in irony, a reflection of reality. Don’t miss this one.
Dolphin continues her show business motif with “Secret Song.” This must read is about country music legend Dolly Parton. The lady with a voice “small as a country cabin / Grand as the Smoky Mountains” hides “a deeper truth / Kept from the public / Locked in a box / In the heart of Appalachia.” This poem reveals a second strength evident in Dolphin’s poetry: metaphor. Dolly Parton’s unsung lyrics resonate as sweetly as her clear soprano voice.
One of the most popular sitcoms during the years 1970-1977, was the Mary Tyler Moore Show. The iconic opening scene where Mary Richards (the show’s lead character played by Moore) has Mary tossing her hat into the air on a frigid morning in Minneapolis. “SCOTUS Van Backs over Mary Richards’ Tam,” offers Lara Dolphin’s unique take on this scene. I predict you will be surprised, as was I, at exactly who is driving the van and Dolphin’s touch of sarcasm in the poem’s last line.
Lara Dolphin’s latest collection is a journey. She invited this reviewer to join her on a nationwide, indeed a worldwide voyage. With each stop the poet served up a smorgasbord of appetizers, salads, main dishes, and desserts—a diet of wisdom, an artistic experience which nourished the bone and sinew of my mind and my heart.
And yet for all of that, this is a mother, a wife, a businesswoman, an intellectual who, the last time I checked, was wondering what to fix for supper.
At Last a Valley, by Lara Dolphin, highly recommended, underpriced at $15.00. ABOUT THE REVIEWER - Michael Escoubas is Senior Editor, Contributing Poet, and Staff Book Reviewer for Quill and Parchment, a 23-year-old literary and cultural arts online journal. This review is republished with kind permission from Quill and Parchment.
Posted September 1, 2024

Poems for a Restless Traveler by Terry Loncaric

Cyberwit, 2024 71 PagesISBN: 978-81-19654-48-2Review by Maggie Kennedy
Would you like to get away from it all? Travel to a distant city or terrain? No need to buy an airplane ticket or put up with the inevitable frustrations of travel. Simply pick up Terry Loncaric’s latest book, Poems for a Restless Traveler, and you will be transported to numerous locales, from New Orleans to British Columbia.
Loncaric’s love of travel is evident from the very first poem when she tells us “I only know one truth,/to travel where/my soul leads me.” She pulls the reader along on her many adventures around the North America and the Caribbean.
She begins the book with a quintet about her “siren” New Orleans, which is the first place she “visited/to escape the tearing,/twisting knife of grief.” Some of her descriptions in these poems made me feel like I was walking beside her through this intoxicating city, such as comparing dawn to “a fried-egg-of-a-rising sun” and providing telling details, such as “the Spanish moss/that drips from/gigantic oak trees.”
The section on California destinations provides more lovely details. In the poem “California U.S.A,” Loncaric addresses the state as if California was an unpredictable yet often exciting lover: “I do not mind you are/flirty, occasionally shallow.” She then takes the reader along on a scenic yet harrowing drive through the state “over rocky cliffs” and past “crashing waves.” The poem ends with an erotic and joyous scene: “you swoop down upon me,/push me to the edge/of your hairpin turns,/ your killer inclines,/ plunging gently into/ your laughing, murky waves.”
Some of my favorite poems are set in Chicago—and not only because I hail from the Windy City. Loncaric’s Chicago poems are set in working-class neighborhoods and blues bars—not swanky touristy areas—giving the reader a true sense of the city and the people who live there. For instance, Loncaric’s poem “Smiling Virgin Mary,” takes place in the city’s Pilsen neighborhood where “you see survivors,/people who live on love,/ mischief, and prayers.”
In addition to taking the reader on tours of various cities and regions, Loncaric includes several poems about the animals that live in these areas, such as the cats of Jamaica and baby penguins at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. In the poem “The Pelicans of Florida,” she describes watching the “Immense white birds/that crash the waves/at demon speeds,/scooping the catch/of the day …” Loncaric watches this scene from a nearby café, sardonically noting that “We humans order/the catch of the day/that someone else caught.”
Poems for a Restless Traveler is a refreshing read. However, beware that you may not be satisfied simply reading about Loncaric’s travels. She left me restless to get out on the road myself.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Maggie Kennedy's first book of poems, Unraveling the Script, was published by Pine Row Press in late 2023.
Posted September 1, 2024

Book Reviews for August 2024

Family Rattling by William T. Carey

Kelsay Books, 2024 52 Pages ISBN: 978-1639805112 Review by Carol L. Gloor Family Rattling is a generous. thoughtful book. True to the title, most of the poems are about family, specifically the poet’s father, son and wife.
The father is already in the throes and joys of dementia when we meet him. In the poem “Superman,” we learn he is “all hope” and that even though he falls all the time, he survives “danger upon danger, /magic armor shedding threats to old flesh.” And even though he might not recognize his poet son, in “An Empty Throne” we learn that “the moat around his mind/is deep and endless like his giving heart.” As his father declines into hospice, he still gives loves enough that he “rebooted our hearts’ batteries for the final depletion,” enough so that “We were ready to love one last time,/to take the task to temporal completion.” Now when we hear only of the difficulty of dementia/Alzheimer’s, it’s refreshing to see it described as a kind of joyful release. The poet’s father was a large man, in every sense, as the poet notes in “Step Into Them,” where instead of using the usual metaphor that his feet are too small to fill his father’s shoes, he acknowledges he is just a different size, a different person, and his father’s slipper/at least for now,/is a mighty tight squeeze.”
The poet’s relationship with his son is more fraught, a love that he’s not quite sure of, which makes him value the moments with the son all the more. It is when they are alone together that he most feels the vulnerability of that love. In “Shopping for a Son” the poet and his son find themselves together shopping for a piano in a space full of choices, and when they finally settle on a “simpler, less elaborate machine” they are “giddy at sticking emotional necks out/with no heads rolling.” In “Three Sherlocks” they are at home together, watching Holmes on TV, the son becoming more assertive. He “controlled the remote. /He took the reins and led the bloodhounds,/just a reticent smidge ahead of trailing Dad,/who bumbled and huffed…” The poet realizes his son’s growth into manhood means he must adjust to being a smaller part of that son’s life: “he assumed the leading role long before I knew to drop it.” In “My Son Laughed with Me Tonight,” a short story of losing and finding common things, a sense of parental longing pervades the poem:
 Here’s the point: we clicked intimately like gears like synapses like even dad and son, forgot selves and ego and maleness.
The poet’s marriage appears many-sided, like most. The poem “In This New Year,” expresses the poet’s anguish as the sometime uncrossable bridge between them: “I cannot breach her heart’s borders/I can’t even talk to her.” Yet in “Mother’s Day#19,” the comparisons are gentle: “Soft butter, hot knife/her drum, our fife, /comfort, night-light”. And in “Just Spell it Out,” husband and wife manage to mostly survive Covid together: “Evening cooking is more redolent, resonant, / feeding soul not stomach./ This new life is “smaller, more concise.” And in “25,” as they celebrate that anniversary, they understand they are now subject to unavoidable “Entanglement” and promise to try to be happy.
Besides family explorations, there are other clever poems about the poet’s friends and adventures. “The Welcoming Home” details a hard hike in Wyoming, and “Caffe at Cinque Terre” humorously details how hard it is to order coffee when one does not speak Italian.
The primary weakness of the book is too many unneeded and cluttering words. In “Just Spell It Out” the entire first stanza could be shortened to a line or two expressing the difficult closeness that came with Covid, and no reference to Houdini needed. And in “Three Sherlocks,” once again it simply takes too long to get to the third stanza, the emotional center of the poem, The first two stanzas could be made one, just introducing with some punchy images that are already there, that father and son both like Sherlock Holmes and that the poet wants to share time with his son watching some episodes. And in “Made for Heaven,” the whole first stanza. except the first line (“Do you believe in souls? my old friend asked”) and setting the scene, should be cut, as the long references to the party and the appetizers don’t add anything.
Still, in all, these are interesting poems with a clear voice, poems worth reading. ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Carol L. Gloor’s poetry chapbook, Assisted Living, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2013, and her full length poetry collection, Falling Back, was published by WordPoetry in 2018. Her poems have been published in many journals and anthologies, and she is a member of the Chicago poetry collective Egg Money Poets. Posted August 1, 2024

Dark Souvenirs by John Amen

NYQ Books, 2024 88 pagesISBN: 978-1-63045-108-0Reviewed by Bill Cushing
John Amen once told an interviewer that “anything can be inspiring,” a statement that comports nicely with my approach to writing, which I acquired from Philip Levine. Reading his latest book, Dark Souvenirs, appealed to me on several personal levels as well. We are both transplanted New Yorkers of the same general generation; he plays music while I love it.
He begins the volume with “Legacy,” which captures life for those of us of a certain age and is followed by more memories appear in “Homecoming.” Recalling a 1971 memory, “First Date” opens with “my father/(who) wrapped me in his American flag, filibuster of scissors & comb.” With everything in place, the military metaphor of sexual attraction kicks in as the narrator “took a deep breath, pulled the pin/lobbed an I love you.”
“Toward a Genealogy” evokes powerful images of the Holocaust, opening with this image: My grandparents who sailed to New York in ‘38 rarely spoke of the two siblings who arrived ten years later, who in every photo I’ve seen shrouded the ink on their forearms, as if to hide it would be enough.Family matters continue where old country superstitions persist in “Defiance:” There’s a witch—mischievous at best—who always gets a say. which is why our mother taught us to set a place for her at the table lest she show up on her own terms wielding all that dust & fire.
Other pieces of note follow the themes of personal history and family. “Roman a Clef” is exactly that—a personal look at self into which Amen infuses jazz imagery. That poem is followed by “Apprenticeship,” a recollection of how “My brother & I memorized our parents’ epic—their curses & grunts—/mastering that pidgin o volatility.” Meanwhile “Independence Day” chronicles recollections of his grandfather finding freedom to grow in another country.
Dark Souvenirs marks Amen’s fifth collection, and its title foreshadows much of the content. He’s obviously traveled some dark roads. Addiction is referenced in “Relapse,” where the speaker observes, “I’ve seen drama, buddy, & these distractions don’t work on me.” The poem “Addict” brings readers into the tribulations—physical and mental—of recovery itself in 12 lines.
A narrative that follows two fellow-travelers, “Regrets” presents a crosscutting scene wherein you’re sleeping with the copperheads, modulating between silos. waking with your lips on fire.Meanwhile All summer I’ve wandered the heroin streets, visiting every pawnshop in town, hoping to reclaim that hand-me-down horn he hadn’t played in years.
Donald Justice has said that a good poem should be cinematic in nature, and this piece does just that. As a follow-up, Amen presents himself in “After Your Memorial” in raw honesty as an unnamed visitor rang my doorbell, I pretended I wasn’t at home, crouched in stillness, surrounded by photographs—I should’ve known I couldn’t have known, I should’ve known—.That issue of suicide appears on more than one occasion. The narrator in “Arc” presents perhaps Amen’s most powerful imagery of such an alternative as he recalls that still that mocking bird in the dark moans until my heart is stupefied. When I put that gun to my temple, I was playing. You weren’t.
There is history here as well, something that always deserves to be part of poetry. “The 80s” recalls the AIDS epidemic while “Local News” follows that one up by presenting Amen’s personal interpretation of an event journalistically reported. “Remembering Richard” recalls other people and places beside just the titular person.
Besides being a writer, Amen is also a musician, so it is no surprise to see that art form appearing in his work. In the opening poem, “Family Systems,” the narrator recalls someone who should’vebeen the world’s youngest maestrobut spent his years hiding in the valvesof a westside trumpet.In the end, however, both writer and the man honored learn howHope can nail your feet to a burning floor.grief can smoke the dirt under your shoes.
I concur with Amen in his poem “Haunted” as he proclaims that “jazz is woven into the American nest.” Then he follows that up with I sprinkled a sax solo in the backyard where you blared that blood lake, sulfur cloud, where black tomatoes crescendo.
Music even filters into an unlikely scenario in “Recovery,” which observes the bureaucratic lifestyle, when the poem proclaims, “This is galactic jazz, big bang sexy [. . .] like an oboe.” And like a true jazz artist, Amen plays with form and bends it to his will in several places as he writes odes that, technically speaking, are not odes but variations on the form. “Usually when I recall you” attributes musical keys to the historical record as Sharp phrases steam in the grass, G scale like the moan of Judas, your mangled A minor wail the death of crows by thirst.
I find his use of language equally engaging and compelling. Note the play on words as “the sky held its ground” in “At Some Point” or the proclamation that “I’ve made it my life’s work to put words in her/mouth” in “Waiting for the Sibyl.” He plays with visual imagery and especially formation in “Conjugal.” While most of Amen’s work is brief and tight, he still offers several extended and almost Kerouac-like narratives such as “Breathless” or the self-confessional “Poem for Bill B.” In that piece, the narrator relates how the two “met & got sober in May ’89.” The pair blended nicely even though Bill was Catholic, I was agnostic. He prayed to Christ. I listened for the echo. But some days I log to believe those tales of a golden afterlife, the purging of consternation.
There is an Augustinian style of confessional seen in “What I Remember” when the poet admits that he “lived on the sweet pulp of my anger.”
In the end. John Amen’s writing fulfills the true obligation of poetry, being accessible but demanding enough to warrant repeated readings.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Bill Cushing is the author of four poetry collections: A Former Life (Kops-Fetherling International Phoenix Award, 2020), Music Speaks (New York City Book Award, 2021), . . .this just in. . ., and Just a Little Cage of Bone. Posted August 1, 2024

Prairie Roots by James Lowell Hall

Shanti Arts Publishing, 2024135 pages, 61 poems and prose vignettesISBN# 978-1-962082-12-9Review by Kathryn Haydon
To open Prairie Roots by James Lowell Hall is to step over the threshold of a family home-place, specifically of the house depicted in a black and white photo on the collection’s first page. The opening poem, “On Her Birthday,” is a gracious host holding the door wide with welcome as we walk on in.
Hall’s collection of poems, including prose vignettes and photographs, weaves a memoir of family generations that have spent time in this Delavan, Illinois prairie home. Yet beyond the family itself, it carries a relatable history of small-town prairie life in the early- to mid-1900s.
Lowell’s grandfather, Ray Lillibridge, was sent from the Dakotas to this little town in Illinois at age fourteen to become a carpenter’s apprentice. His family could no longer afford to care for him. He worked his way to become the primary contractor in town, courted the author’s grandmother Marguerite, and built the family home with his own two hands.
The book captures personal moments, such as the couple’s first dinner as newlyweds. Food descriptions throughout the collection made my mouth water as I thought about farm-fresh strawberries, corn, and chickens:
. . . strawberry shortcake, which mother madewith soft strawberries from our garden,rose-red, to this day makes my lips tingle.
(“First Home-Cooked Meal” p. 33)
The book also includes researched history delivered through poems like “From the Delavan Tri-County Times” which depicts the magic of a snowy, small-town Christmas:
All trains late Christmas Eve,Christmas Day, clear with a bright mantle of snow.Sleighing and coasting revived,but sleighs have not entirely oustedthe autos, for the latter flounder
through the snow in search of traction,like pigs deep in mud.
Hall also shares moments of humor. I laughed out loud when I reached the end of his poem about the purchase and installation of “the biggest bathtub in all of Delavan” in the poem “Saturday Ritual”:
. . . Ray brought Grams over to see the bathroom, said, Etsie, Dad’s name for Grams, You are going to be the first onetaking a bath in this tub. She loved it, not having a bathroom in her house. And soon, Saturday afternoons, the whole family came—for bath day. (p. 39)
The style and construction of this book brought to mind a favorite of mine, Carver: A Life in Poems by Marilyn Nelson (Wordsong, 2001), a biography of inventor George Washington Carver spun through poems. Hall’s book is similar in that the poems construct a narrative about an individual family in the context of the times in which they lived.
I enjoyed the narrative style of Hall’s poems, though in some cases felt that the author could have been less liberal with filler words and could have taken more care in establishing line breaks. His poems are fairly consistent in form, but midway through the book we are treated to a surprise with “Time to Thresh” in a layout that highlights the poet’s lyrical side. Sometimes I wasn’t sure who was narrating a particular poem—was it the poet himself or a different family member? More than once I had a hard time following the book’s timeline.
Those technicalities aside, Hall’s collection is engaging and relatable. The poem “Black Thursday” captures the shock of the 1929 bank failures as it describes the garden bounty of food the children tried to sell door-to-door as their father’s business dried up. This poem reminds me of my own grandfather who was born several years after the Hall’s mother, in rural Indiana. My grandfather talked extensively about his service in World War II, but one day I realized that he never mentioned the Depression. Why? I asked him. He responded that they had very few material needs that they couldn’t supply from their own hard work and farm, so the Depression didn’t much alter their normal quest for survival.
If you’re a reader who enjoys books like Willa Cather’s My Antonia, this collection is one that will transport you back to a time of hard work, small-town camaraderie, and the importance of family.
The final poem will make you think. It is jarring and stark, contrasting the dirt-on-your-hands farming of Hall’s ancestors with the mechanized, fertilized situation in much of the rural Midwest today. Perhaps it builds on this Depression-era theme of self-sufficiency, contrasting our over-processed food with those juicy red strawberries from the garden. Which world is sustainable? Which version will we steward for our children? The book’s final words may give you a chill, with a bit of hope:
The Sun in the heartland sets far away,unscreened by city lights. Through the night’svibrant stars, a milky sky-riverbeacon, rises like a ladder.
(“Prairie Sunset” p.128)
ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Kathryn Haydon is an award-winning poet, non-fiction writer, and educator. She serves on the board of East on Central and is a member of Illinois State Poetry Society and Poets & Patrons. Her latest book is the poetry collection Unsalted Blue Sunrise: Poems of Lake Michigan.
Posted August 1, 2024

A Time for Such a Word by Michael W. Thomas

Black Pear Press Limited, 2024, 108 pages ISBN:978-1-913418-96-0 Review by Marie Asner Michael W. Thomas is, indeed, a poet of variations. He has written three novels, two collections of short fiction and nine collections of poetry. A Time for Such a Word (“Macbeth,” Act V) is his latest publication. His work has appeared internationally in publications from Canada, Poland and Australia, The Thomas poems have the flavor of the British Isles in word, such as “kerb” for “curb” and “tyre” for auto tire. The poems should be read slowly and with expectations of a sudden change, such as the reader driving on a street and a person suddenly dashing across in front of you. Language twists and turns in the reader’s hands, as in “Middle Ash” and growing up in a small town. Buses to anywhere were twice a day so if you missed them the world hitched its skirts and didn’t know you. The book is divided into eight sections and each with a tantalizing title, from “Each Hour has Held Him in its Needs” to “I’m Not in Control I’ll Never be Safe” to “Fastnesses” that ends the poetry collection. The first poem, “A Year to Speak” is about hiding a word each day and “love is the safest place of all…room enough there for my words to spread.” “ Uffern Gwaedlyd” is a comfortable use of words in describing Welsh grandparents. One of my favorites is “Last and Closest” about the friendship between a person and a flake of paint. “My flake of paint listens snug in the palm or the deeps of a pocket. I hear it understand.” “Late Day Final” is finishing something, what to do and then, an “..instant near paradise…it shook out its feathers and blew on by.” For a religious tone, there is “Advent” about Jesus, and starting with his sandals. Another favorite is “Bright Stars” with two people growing old together, “She strokes his cheek. He smiles. The twilight spreads.”. A dash of humor in this collection with commentary on the British mystery series, “Midsommer Murders.” “DS gives a smile his heart can’t really afford, because already the next case is among the foliage.” The longest poem is “Safe” and covers nine pages. It is a small gem that tells of someone away from home, deliberately, perhaps, and staying with a kind elderly couple for the Christmas holiday. We see what loneliness is like as someone from both sides, tries to adjust to a newness for this holiday. Section 6 is about birds and animals. “The Scarps and Highways” and what you see as you travel along. “Jenga” is the one left behind when a sister cat passes away. “The evening after his sister died he patrolled the living room chair by chair and cover by cover.” The fantasy present in “The Man with no Umbrella” “…lives with a raindrop in his ear, it gossips of tides and oceans.” Humor in making up a bed where the edges don’t come out right. “Ruckled” sheets turn out to be “..ruckless are never smoothed, but pulse away like fish…” “All of Time” is another favorite about two clocks. “One is from the sleepier part of the Sixties…the other is from any time in the last thirty years,,,and has shared a rolled sock with unspent cash.” “Fastness” ends the collection with “..a hand rising to squeeze my age-narrowed arm and somebody saying, never mind, you're alright, you, you’re alright.” The poems do not go the way you think, you may suddenly take a right or left turn. Reading through life occurrences, solitary trips and childhood, there is a sense of melancholy here. A longing for what was. The idea of bed sheets misbehaving or a man with a raindrop in his ear speaking to him will give one pause to reflect. Nothing is impossible in the imaginative world of poetry by Michael W. Thomas. ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Marie Asner is a retired church musician who is also a film critic on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB. Marie’s poetry has been published in The Rockford Review, Grist, The Kansas City Star, Calliope, Guideposts and PBS.org. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Award. Posted August 1, 2024

Book Reviews for July 2024

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Kansas, Reimagined: Poems By Anara Guard

Poetry Box, 2024 46 PagesISBN: 978-1956285598Review by Ann Malaspina
Full disclosure. When I was in the fourth grade, I played Dorothy’s dog Toto in a school production of “The Wizard of Oz.” I wore a furry costume handsewn by my mother, and prepared for opening night by practicing the barks that were my only lines. So when I opened Kansas, Reimagined, (The Poetry Box, 2024) Anara Guard’s entrancing new poetry collection, and discovered it’s a deep dive into L. Frank Baum’s classic fantasy, I quickly turned to “Dog,” her poem about Toto. She starts with a question: “who would have ever chosen me/for a Kansas farm dog?” Already, we are inside Toto’s forlorn soul. In Guard’s empathetic revision, Toto was abandoned by his “city owners,” and ordered to jump out of the car. He then “hobbled down a dirt road/ until I found her/girl of my dreams.” No more fit to be a farm dog, he’s a “dustmop animal/too dumb to herd sheep/too little to guard the chickens.” Toto is waiting to find his true self. The search for identity—as well as love, and home—is part of both Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, first published in 1900, and Guard’s poetry. She reimagines, not Dorothy’s trek down the yellow brick road, but her roots on a hardscrabble Kansas farm—the cows, drought, laundry, thunderstorms, grasshoppers, and people. We already know her world was upended when the cyclone hit. In some of the poems, reality merges with the hallucinations of Oz. No familiar retellings or cliches here. Guard’s poems, often in the first person, bring fresh revelations. In “Tin,” Guard describes the Tin Man as a confirmed bachelor who has a heart but is forced to hide it. “It thumps inside my hollow chest/when the fiddler—he alone—/comes near./I have carved/his name into the handle of my axe...” In “Leo,” she explains the lion’s nickname and his moral code: “Cowardly, they call me/for I refused to go to war. /No shooting for my supper,/I scorn the use of guns…” And her poem “Scarecrow” shows a man “all skin and bone,” and yet filled with self-knowledge. He knows that he’s combustible (“I gave up smoking long ago—"), and that children “stare, mock and throw stones.” But one day they, too, “may need a stick to lean on.” Meanwhile, he has a purpose: to “shoo away the blackbirds/that flap about my eyes.” Similarly, in “Spinster,” the “unmarried woman” on the bicycle, who’ll become, in Dorothy’s dreamscape, the Wicked Witch of the West, shares her secret life. As she rides down the road on her bicycle, “Hidden paintbrushes clatter in my basket. At night I paint flowers of ruby and emerald. And when I pass your gates I imagine that I fly.”
As in other poems, Guard uses keystone words – here, “ruby” and “emerald” – to connect Kansas to Oz. With its bright cover of upside-down sunflowers, the collection shows Guard’s grasp of a worn Midwestern landscape, shaped by droughts, thunderstorms, and brown-eyed Susans. She is an established poet and alumnus of Kenyon College in Ohio (second disclosure: Guard and I graduated in the same class). Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and won the Jack Kerouac prize and the John Crowe Ransom prize. This is her second collection. Now living in Northern California, Guard and her sister perform poetry and run writing workshops as Sibling Revelry. Guard’s voice is conversational and accessible. Her rhythm and occasional slant rhyme, confident and nimble. In “Corn,” she writes, “Grist for the mill, grits for the bowl,/polenta, masa, I can do it all!” With an eye for details, she explores the harshness of farm life. In “Laundry,” she breaks down the tedious chore: “The water must be pumped Poured into the tub still boiling hot Add soap made from lye and fat Scour stains, grime, and sweat”
She adds, “This is no task for hands that are soft.” In fact, Auntie Em’s hands, for one, are far from soft. In two poems, we learn that the endless work has left Dorothy’s aunt bitter, unable to understand her adventurous niece. And yet, in “Em, Again,” she remains proud of all she’s done: “Even in the years of deprivation,/we ate alright… our root cellar, lined with pickles,/dilly beans, succotash, and jar upon jar/of bright tomatoes.”
Guard’s mastery of language gleams in the poem “Red Shoes,” like the shoes, themselves: “red as roses, tomatoes, salvia,/a cardinal pecking at winterberries,/iridescent vermilion, scarlet bright,/more tempting than Eden’s apple…” “Who wouldn’t long for such slippers allowing you to slide across time, shoes that take you elsewhere until— click, click—they bring you home again?”
With so much richness amidst the bleakness, we can’t help but to be drawn in. Fretting about Auntie Em’s irritation over her niece’s “tall tale(s)” of witches, the emerald city and a wizard. Mourning the grasshoppers “ravaging fields/down to the/stalks.” Fearing for the neglected farmhouse, “…uprooted and flung,/twirling and gyrating/through inky skies.” And so, what to do with all the troubles? In “Dot,” one of the most moving poems, Dorothy is as determined as the young Judy Garland in the 1939 Hollywood film, but less naïve. She is willing to risk everything to grab her life: “Bring on the wild winds!/I’ll never retreat to the root cellar/My will is all I own.” Her strong will is going to lead Dorothy (and Toto) to Oz and back home again. But she will not return unchanged. As Auntie Em laments, “How many times do I have to tell her/there are no flying monkeys and if there were,/not in Kansas, that’s for sure.” Good for Dorothy. Her imagination is fired up. Droughts, grasshoppers, and fences won’t stand in her way now. Weaving the poems together is the thread of self-determination, from the Tin Man’s acknowledgement of loving the violinist to Auntie Em’s denial of what she’s become in everyone else’s eyes: “Worst of all, they show me as afraid…” Let’s be clear: Em is not afraid! Even in the worst of times, we can recreate our lives. Perhaps we’ll do it like Toto, by forging a meaningful connection. In “Dog,” the bond between girl and dog becomes unbreakable — “we belong only to each other”— and that’s all that matters. As for brave Dorothy, “…my mangy dog/taught me to snarl and snap.” Snarling and snapping can work, too. ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Ann Malaspina writes children's books and poetry. Her new middle-grade verse novel is Liam and the Giant Eels (West 44 Books, 2024). Her poem, "Last Trip to Birch Farm," is included in our Summer Muses' Gallery about Road Trips. Posted July 1, 2024
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A Sphere Encased in Fires and Life By Jared Smith

NYQ Books, 2023108 PagesISBN # 978-1630450991Review by Ed Werstein
Jared Smith’s latest collection of poetry, A Sphere Encased in Fires and Life (NYQ Books 2023), is a call to action. As the title implies, Smith is deeply concerned about our endangered planet. But it isn’t just climate change and its implications that concern Smith. These poems reveal a lifetime of activism, and an acute awareness that not only is his own remaining time limited, but that time is running out for all of us.
In the poem “Of Winds and Clocks,” Smith lays out one of the main themes of the book: so little time to get nothing done it all comes down to who sings best most convincingly of the small to all darting in and listening to the clock.The clock is ticking and our time is running out; this warning appears throughout the collection.
Another relevant quote (and one of my favorites) on this theme of urgent time is in the poem “Where the Murders Take Place”: ...that’s what a paycheck is a recording of everything you’ve lost.
This is a book for everyone. For baby boomers like this reviewer, it is a remembrance of our active youth spent advocating for peace and against war, for civil rights and against racism, and for free speech and against repression and corporate control of the media. The very first poem “Bone Soup” mentions the Kent State tragedy during anti-Vietnam protests. And for younger readers these poems will serve as a history lesson of memories of a life well spent, and full of purpose. Smith’s use of simile and metaphor is adept, creative, and at times surprising. In “The Paper Butterfly” he describes a woman he observes at a coffee shop: She prances vapid around the brew shop orbited by her two blonde toddlers, her purple paisley slacks pressed tight … her makeup smooth as a baby’s bottom, she rounds them up at last and heads out her face the shape of parking lots…
And in the poem “What He Became”, which describes a multi-car accident, Smith doesn’t come right out and say police cars were everywhere. He merely mentions the flashing bubblegum machines.
Smith’s poetry is philosophical, provocative, and deep. He closes my favorite poem, “The Memories We Reach For” with this stanza: we people are like vagabond windstorms that leave brief shadows on sunlit alleys as the towers of our knowledge crumble transfixed by brief clutch of flesh on flesh, fingerprints that wash away in one winter and words that are hollow caves where memories fill our dreams of what will be. That’s a stanza worthy of a Shakespearean character’s soliloquy.
This book is Jared Smith’s sixteenth collection, and it left me surprised that our poetic paths had not previously crossed. But I’ve got plans to rectify that by ordering more of his poetry. ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Ed Werstein, is a Board member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. In 2018 he won the Lorine Niedecker Prize for poetry from the Council for Wisconsin Writers, judged by Nickole Brown. He lives in Milwaukee. www.edwerstein.com.
Posted July 1, 2024
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The Unknown Daughter by Tricia Knoll

Finishing Line Press, 2024 40 Pages ISBN# 979-8888384794 Review by Joan Leotta
This collection is both a deep dive into being an outsider, in one’s own family , and in the world. From the beginning this sim collection calls out with a fierce yet gentle force to thrust the role of the outsider into the light, not to magnify Knoll’s own experiences, but to hold it up as a mirror to the reader so that each reader can discover their own sense of “being different, an outsider,” while at the same time revealing both the intimacies of hurt and help which derive from such a status. The book itself is different from most other chapbooks in that it was published all in one piece, no poems saw print independently. The effect of Knoll’s genius in this is that the reading of the collection is more connected than in most chapbooks. In fact, for me it reads like a piece of theatre—incredibly vivid, full of imagery, emotion there is also a story that that calls out for it to be performed on a stage, as well as in the mind of the readers. Yes, all poetry has a life in oral tradition as well as written but in this case the entire group of poems , I feel , would make a wonderful and piercing to the heart stage production.
I first became aware of what I thought then was the full force of Tricia’s particular genius of being able to construct masterpieces with carefully chosen words and phrases in her chapbook, Checkered Mates. However, in this newest chapbook, The Unknown Daughter, Knoll not only reveals her own depth of life experience but also reveals an even greater depth to her ability as a poet.
For me it is the poems by the watchers that struck most deeply—especially the one where her brother speaks and says he was her first watcher—he is one who noticed her when others did not. Reading the dedication of the book we discover that she names her real-life brother and knowing this deepens our experience with that brother who is a Watcher.
Usually when I review a book of poetry, I select a few poems and quote a line or two but in this case, such separation from the whole seems almost sacrilegious. As I went back to the book time after time, I realized the only proper way to quote from this book would be to line up a cento of sorts, quoting from every single poem—such is the wisdom and exquisite beauty of each poem and the sacrosanct nature of each poem’s place in the whole of the book.
I will make an exception for the line “How could I think I would be other” in the last poem in the book because it heightens the mirror experience for the reader and when reading it we read with her and realize we need to hold up the mirror to our own lives. On reading this, I exhaled, realizing that for the last few poems I had been holding my breath at their astounding beauty. For in the course of writing this deep personal dive. Someone watching does know us, understands, and even wants to help us grow into the artistic persona we unknown others need to be. Being an “other” , being unknown to those around us, is not a role to be disdained. Knoll’s poems not only uncover hidden pathways and facets within herself , her past, present , and even future, but also with structures the words, phrases, elements so that all readers, can understand their own “outsideness”, see how being different is a gift even when it seems a burden and she offers with this, even with its hardest poems, a soft cushion of understanding. ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Joan Leotta is an author and story performer. Her work was nominated for Pushcart and Best of Net in 2022. Publications include Feathers on Stone poetry chapbook (Mainstreet Rag Press) and Languid Lusciousness with Lemon (Finishing Line Press). Posted July 1, 2024
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Echoes in My Eyes By Kelly Sargent

Kelsay Books, 2024 42 Pages ISBN# 978-1639804986 Review by Whitnee Coy Kelly Sargent’s poetry collection, Echoes in My Eyes, is a soulful exploration of what it means to navigate the world as a deaf individual while celebrating the profound bond of sisterhood. In this enchanting work, Sargent artfully intertwines imagery and compassion, immersing readers in a realm where silence speaks volumes and connections transcend the confines of spoken language. Through themes of identity, communication, and resilience, Sargent weaves a deeply personal and universally relatable narrative. What struck me most about Echoes in My Eyes is Sargent's ability to capture the intricate nuances of being deaf in a world primarily designed for hearing individuals. In poems like "Handheld Voices," she paints a vivid picture of the sensory landscape of silence, where vibrations and visual cues become the language of connection for babies and their family. She shapes imagery of toys playing and motions that evoke language between humans. Her imagery is not just descriptive but palpable, transporting readers into a realm where silence isn't absent but rather a canvas for a unique expression. Central to Sargent’s exploration is the theme of sisterhood and the unspoken understanding that transcends words. In poems like "One," she celebrates the power of shared experiences and the deep connection between siblings, although they end up separated as one moves to a residential school. The poem reflects how one sibling was able to live a “full” life - backpacking in Europe, educational opportunities, bicycle riding as only “one”, even though she had a twin. Her poems resonate with warmth and intimacy, prompting readers to reflect on their relationships and the rippling effect that life gives us whether wanted or not. What sets Echoes in My Eyes apart is Sargent's ability to evoke empathy and understanding in her readers. Through poems that delve into themes of isolation, discrimination, and resilience, she sheds light on the challenges deaf individuals face in a society that often overlooks their experiences. In "Outside the Lines," Sargent confronts feelings of nostalgia from looking at coloring book pages from when she was four years old with her sister; remembering her softly and gently as a folded piece of paper. Sargent’s writing exudes a sense of pride and empowerment throughout the collection. In the poem “Fruits of Labor,” the sisters share the experience of signing and feeling the vibrations of speaking. The sisters practice with fruits and in the moments of silence and signing they grow closer to one another. Echoes in My Eyes isn't just a collection of poems; it's a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the power of language, whether spoken or unspoken. As I read Echoes in My Eyes, I felt deeply moved and enlightened. Sargent's ability to blend personal narrative with universal themes is a testament to her prowess as a poet and storyteller. Her words serve as a reminder that communication extends beyond mere words; it resides in the spaces between, in the gestures and expressions that bridge the gap between silence and sound. In conclusion, Echoes in My Eyes is a symphony of poetry that delves into the complexities of deafness, sisterhood, and human connection with grace and insight. Kelly Sargent's voice resonates as a beacon of empathy and understanding, inviting readers to embrace the beauty of diversity and the power of shared experiences. This collection is a must-read for anyone seeking to broaden their knowledge of language, identity, and the limitless possibilities of human expression.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Whitnee Coy, resides in the Black Hills of South Dakota with her kids and loving husband, Jesse. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the Bluegrass Writers Studio at Eastern Kentucky University and has various literary and chapbook publications. Posted July 1, 2024
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The Seven Streams : An Irish Cycle By David Whyte

Many Rivers Press, 2024 59 Poems ~ 167 Pages ISBN# 978-1-932887-57-0 Review by Michael Escoubas
In commenting on David Whyte’s The Steven Streams: An Irish Cycle, Pat Conroy, author of The Prince of Tides, writes:
In this collection, David Whyte’s poetry becomes a hand held out as if to say, “Life is a path we both can share; let’s take a walk beside the sea.” Note to the intrepid reader: If you walk with David Whyte, you risk changing your life; you risk becoming more than you might imagine.”
The Seven Streams is portioned out in eight headings: I. Return, II. Griefs, III. Pilgrim, IV. Islands, V. Thresholds, VI. Mother, VII. Mythic, and VIII. John. Each has its own unique emphasis; each contributes to Whyte’s cycle of life.
Among the many poems that spoke to my inner-spirit, “Coleman’s Bed” (III. Pilgrim), swept me into a Stream of Contemplation:
Find that far inward symmetryto all outward appearances, apprenticeyourself to yourself, begin to welcome backall you sent away, be a new annunciation,make yourself a door through whichto be hospitable, even to the stranger in you.
The poem continues with gentle language about giving oneself over to becoming a child again, to listening with attuned attention to rain falling, to birds singing, being conscious of “each falling leaf.” The world, within its natural tendencies, became for me, unspoken prayers:
Above all, be alone with it all,a hiving off, a corner of silenceamidst the noise, refuse to talk,even to yourself, and stay in this placeuntil the current of the storyis strong enough to float you out.
By the end of the poem’s 70 lines, I felt reborn. I felt empowered to: “walk on, broader and cleansed / for having imagined.”
While the poet has assembled an Irish Cycle, I found myself challenged to apply the collection’s emphasis on streams and cycles to my personal context.
In RETURN, I am on a plane and catch a vision of “an old man walking on the wet road.” Whyte’s detailed description, “He has a stick, a hat, old shoes, / a gait that says he will walk forever.” The poem “What it means to be Free,” captures freedom, in such simple things. I want to reexamine my priorities in view of Whyte’s Stream of Simplicity.
From GRIEF, Whyte’s Elegy for the late Mícháel Ó Súilleabháin, I found a Stream of Appreciation for a dear friend. In a touching retrospective, the poet sees and hears Michael’s music . . . the music of his life. It visits him in “The Music of the Morning Sun.”
The set of four poems from ISLANDS calls forth, in me, a Stream of Self-Renewal. Where “ you realized—part of you / had already dropped to its knees, / to pray, to sing, to look—to fall in love with everything / and everyone again, . . .” These poems have the “feel” of journey, of hard-fought victory, a return from exile. I emerge knowing where I need to be.
In her book, Open House for Butterflies, Ruth Krauss writes, "Everybody should be quiet near a little stream and listen." This wise saying seems a perfect fit. David Whyte writes about “streams” that flow, meet, and cleanse, baptizing one into the recovery of life.
At the outset, this reviewer cautioned the “intrepid” reader that there are risks involved. Taste and see, perhaps, you too, will pray:
I thank you light, for the subtle wayyour merest touch gives shapeto such things I couldonly learn to love . . .
ABOUT THE REVIEWER - Michael Escoubas is Senior Editor, Contributing Poet, and Staff Book Reviewer for Quill and Parchment, a 23-year-old literary and cultural arts online journal. This review is republished with kind permission from Quill and Parchment. Posted July 1, 2024
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Pink Moon by Tina Barr

Jacar Press, 2024 38 poems ~ 92 pages ISBN# 978-0-93681-55-5 Review by Michael Escoubas
In a famous quote Emily Dickinson defined the essence of poetry, "If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry." While Tina Barr would, no doubt, eschew my comparison with the venerable Dickinson, her poetry shows insight into the human condition and many factors that contribute to where we are as a people. This collection faces and raises challenging questions. No doubt, Dickinson would approve. My goal in this review is to display Tina Barr’s thematic acuity and poetic skills.
Arrangement & Design
Pink Moon features five headings: I. Beyond the Holler, II. Extinction, III. Contagion, IV. Histories, and V. Births. I allowed the headings to serve as tour guide through the poet’s world. There are thirty-eight poems within a page count of ninety-two. Poems are of varying length with several covering two to three pages. This arrangement allows space for thematic development.
The title poem opens the collection. Barr uses vivid descriptions of conditions in nature described by Algonquin Indians as “April’s Pink Moon.” Colors such as lilac, fuchsia, half-moon of orange and more, permeate Barr’s work. Barr, in the poem, suffers from a virus that “like pink moss, has outcroppings all over my white matter.” That same poem describes a storm over the valley so violent that “I stared over the slope into my fear; the buzz of pinks, oranges; the wrangling wire lurched, like a snake with its head cut, still jerks and curls.” Barr’s juxtapositions are original and provocative.
Tina Barr’s Style
Primarily a free verse poet, Barr’s work is full of arresting metaphors: “Like a snake with its head cut,” which exemplify her visual skill. Da Vinci has said, Poets paint pictures with words. This is an apt description of Tina Barr. I remember vividly, from my youth, a dead snake continuing to writhe long after death.
Continuing in “Beyond the Holler” (Holler, being a place with mountains, forests, and valleys, not screaming at the top of one’s lungs), “Smoke,” lifts me beyond the holler, to experience smoke in exotic places. I found this stanza especially vivid:
In front of the Jokhang Temple, scores of pilgrimsprostrated themselves, dressed in yak skins, turquoise,carnelian beads braided into their hair. All along theriver, under trees flaming with prayer flags, coracles.Along the road, fires, meat roasting; that smokesmelled of yak, but before the temple, juniper baked into incense sticks swirled, paintbrushes of smell.
Through seven stanzas of varying length, “Smoke” exhibits Barr’s diligence to detail, cadence, and lineage.
Other Significant Themes
Barr’s concern for the environment surfaces in Section II, Extinction. Among the tough questions raised: What can’t be killed? The poet avers: crabgrass, dandelion, and ground ivy. The poet’s convictions about the environment find expression in three powerful pieces: “Extinction,” “SOS,” and “Viral.”
In Section III, Contagions, Barr draws from artworks authored by great painters. These include such luminaries as Édouard Manet, Paul Cezanne, Joyce Thornburg, and others. Barr’s unique approach to describing “infections” ranging from the physical, relational, and spiritual dimensions of life is impressive. These poems touched my emotions and my intellect through their thoughtful perspectives.
Seductive titles captured my attention in Section IV, Histories: “The Joker,” “Mirror, Mirror,” “Crime,” “New Year’s Eve, and El Dorado.” This excerpt from El Dorado displays Barr’s ability to combine her personal history with American history:
[Zebulon] Vance, in Congress, said that forthe slave that is his normal condition.After our state seceded, he raiseda company, The Rough and Readynearly drowned swimming Bryce’sCreek to get boats for his men; theymade him governor. He sold saltso people preserved meat, used blockaderunners to send North Carolina cottonover the sea, kept mills open. He mayhave been the KKK’s Grand Dragon.
The “normal” condition for slaves, of course, was as property for the aggrandizement of the privileged. Barr’s personal history, throughout this set, reaches into present day contexts which cry out for rectification.
Barr, throughout Pink Moon, reminded me about the complexities of life, the heartaches, injustices, and anomalies of life. Her poems caused an inner-stirring akin to Emily Dickinson’s definition: If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. ABOUT THE REVIEWER - Michael Escoubas is Senior Editor, Contributing Poet, and Staff Book Reviewer for Quill and Parchment, a 23-year-old literary and cultural arts online journal. This review is republished with kind permission from Quill and Parchment.
Posted July 1, 2024

Book Reviews for June 2024

The Feather Variations: Poems By Jane Richards

Cardinal Lane Press, 2024 38 Pages ISBN#979-8-9901390-0-8 Review by Marie Asner Jane Richards begins The Feather Variations with “Wolf Moon.” A title one would usually find at the end of a poetry collection. However, no matter what time of the year you are reading it, watching the brightness of this moon, as it is closer to the reader at night, is haunting. What next you wonder? And then comes: following trails, eclipse of the moon and even The Mariana Trench. Rich ground to cover in Part One, not to mention what is in Part Two and the last, Part Three. The separation between the poetry sections are works of art, similar to a tintype. In Part One and “Wolf Moon,” we see people awakening in the brightness of the moon and “her canescent embrace.” “The Bluebird Trail” is watching baby birds mature, “open yellow beaks a bouquet in full bloom.” “Liminal Space” is a description of the aging process, “hands sheathed in tissue-thin skin.” “The Mariana Trench” describes coffee you won’t forget. Part Two begins with “Ice Storm” and the sounds one hears when giants fall to earth. There is “Lion Sister” and watching a lioness on the Serengeti get ready to search. “The Text on Malicious Magic” is an October-style poem of deciphering codes and “gather my enemies around me like a shawl.” Then, the last in this section is “The Feather Variations” in five musical sections from Doloroso to Jubiloso. Well thought description of gathering feathers that are unwanted. Part Three goes around the world from the Serengeti to aging to a dandelion seed to music to climbing in clouds. Though “Lament of the Dandelion Seed” may indicate a garden, it is a lament on life. “Art in the Time of COVID-19” says all in the title. A chuckle at traveling in the tropics and “Tropical Wonderland.” (“…guacamole crunch with grasshoppers”). The earlier poem on the lioness, has a companion here with “Serengeti Pilgrimage” about Twenty-one elephants and “long tusks brushing dry grasses.” Words can make the book tremble. “On Turning 71” concerns aging being as “autumn winds wiggle and fidget.” My favorite is the last poem in this collection, “Cloud Forest.” Climbing in a mountainous area with “mists wafting like shades” and “rounding a corner I am embraced by a cloud” and “the breath of mists…a life measured in the rhythms of a cloud.” Jane Richards lets the reader relax with her poetry and go easily line by line into the subject. Sit back and read page by page as the author shows you different viewpoints. You can go on a world tour to the Serengeti and animals there, or climb into cloud layers, or enjoy music phrases as they pertain to life. Something different on each page is described to the reader with the use of words, such as “wiggle and fidget.” You may think of these words as used with children, but here it is the wind that is described. Or the word “embrace” usually means a love embrace, and here it is walking into a cloud while hiking. Words can be just letters on a page, or they can be picturesque and meaningful. This is what “The Feather Variations” is, a collection of meaning. ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Marie Asner is a retired church musician who is also a film critic on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB. Marie’s poetry has been published in The Rockford Review, Grist, The Kansas City Star, and PBS.org. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Award. Posted June 1, 2024

How I Went Into the Woods By Lennart Lundh

Kelsay Books, 2024 70 Poems ~ 89 pages ISBN# 978-1-63980-485-6 Review by Michael Escoubas As if the title of Lennart Lundh’s ekphrastic collection isn’t enough to capture one’s attention, consider the cover image: it is John Bauer’s Princess Tuvstarr Gazing Down into the Dark Waters of the Forest Tarn (1913). Bauer’s painting is “evocative,” “mysterious,” and open to immense “speculation.” Each of these elements provides a creative banquet for Lundh in his latest collection How I Went into the Woods.
Layout and Style
There are no images in the book. Most poems reside on a single page with the artist’s accreditation placed at the bottom of the page. Lundh draws inspiration from diverse sources: I counted thirty paintings, over twenty photographs, and a variety of drawings, posters, film shorts, a statue by Franco Vianello, even fragments of newspaper articles from 1971 editions of the Chicago Tribune. All of these find their way into a collection that offers something new with every turn of the page. Googling the referenced art, lingering with it, then returning to its corresponding poem gave me a satisfying read.
Stylistically, Lundh is a free verse poet. His eye for details and his skill at arranging them into tight narrative flows is superior.
Exhibits
The digital work Summer Day, by Christian Schloe, a study in surreal art, led to this poem by the same name:
Garbed in gentle shadesof beech bark and lilac,she sits on sturdy privets.
Her cheeks are sun-kissed.Breezes weave dark hair.The clouds hold no rain.
A curious bird observesthe platter’s rotationon the old gramophone.
The sound they hearis the ancient songof flowers praising light.
Note how scene and word become a unified whole.
Who would think that an old scrap of newspaper could lead to poetry? It does. “More Mysterious,” gives the fragment a human voice:
Being a scrap of newspaper found in a library book. Will anyone knowing the full story please get in touch.
The poem depicts the impossible-to-determine meaning from the fragment. Indeed, I was left wondering about the fragment’s flesh-and-blood people. Who were they? What became of them? Were they mere fragments, too?
“The Bride,” based on a painting by abstract pioneer Wassily Kandinsky, begins:
She sits alone in her wedding gown.
Through the device of irony, the poem, in successive stanzas of couplet, tercet, and quatrain describes the bride, who now sits alone, unsure of where her husband is, or if or how he will return. Nevertheless, She sits alone with all the possibilities.
Thinking about Subjects and Titles
Lennart Lundh’s subject range is of special interest to me, as is his choice of title. In preparing this review, I spent hours scratching my head, trying to figure out what is meant by How I Went into the Woods. Authors frequently offer a “title poem” which serves as an umbrella for the whole collection. Nothing here. About his cosmopolitan range of interests: I am thinking that this is a poet’s work shows a heart for people, for their sufferings, their backstories.
Just as the bride in Wassily Kandinsky’s abstract painting, “sits alone with all the possibilities,” so, I conjure Lennart Lundh exploring, through his poetry, the “woods” that represent the full range of life experiences. These weigh heavy on his heart.
In “Lady in the White Business Suit,” the poet draws from a broadside poster seen in a post office at Long Beach. The poster lays bare attitudes often held by professing Christians:
Listen, Christian: I was homeless,and you preached to me about theSpiritual Shelter of the love of God.
The poem is in the voice of the coffee shop owner:
She was a lovely woman, not just in bodybut in spirit. One of my favorites, each daystopping for the Journal and A coffee, black,please. How’s your day? Thanks. See you tomorrow.
Happy, successful. Well dressed and light perfume.And then she was wearing the same outfit two,three days in a week, with shoes looking worn anda whiff of alcohol instead of Parisian citrus.
Passing on the Journal, spending hours at a timein a chair in the café, drinking water, staring far,far outside the window at her old skyline. Finally,blushing when I brought her coffee, Lost my damned job.
After that, she came by once or twice more. Stayed outon the sidewalk, caging money and cigarettes. Sleepingin the park with one eye open through the summer, oninto winter, when they found her asleep forever.
How I Went into the Woods will stand the test of time because it is about life . . . life, with all its possibilities. ABOUT THE REVIEWER - Michael Escoubas is Senior Editor, Contributing Poet, and Staff Book Reviewer for Quill and Parchment, a 23-year-old literary and cultural arts online journal. This review is republished with kind permission from Quill and Parchment.
Published June 1, 2024

Losing Streak by Paul J. Willis

Kelsay Books, 2024 128 Pages ISBN# 978-1639805167 Review by Gary Davis I have read that in his poems Billy Collins puts the “fun” in “profundity.” That said, in Paul J. Willis’s new and interesting mix of poems “Losing Streak” there is not only fun to be had amid the quips and jingling wordplay but some excellent “ditties” to be found as well, along with some achingly beautiful longer poems. It all comes together in 77 poems over 118 pages. Fun and ditties abound, and profundity is where you find it. Willis teaches at Westmont College in Santa Barbara and when not advising young poets he contributes to a variety of poetry journals, edits, and writes novels and essays. This is his 8th published poetry collection, titled as it is with a rueful sense of our toxic disregard for the planet. It is a pleasant, rewarding mix from start to finish. The introductory “Annunciation” builds upon lines of Byron, that “one small drop of ink that falls like dew upon a thought makes fertile what was clay, to root the tree of longing, groaning ripe.” To my reading it is one of the finest poems in the collection, setting the tone for the mix of fertile clay that follows, from long, lyrical constructions to witty two-line quips in meter and rhyme as well as amusing doggerel on seemingly random topics, including some devoted to the author’s friends and compatriots in Santa Barbara. Some rhymes are very energetic. There are a few limericks. One poem or poemlet, really, consists of eight words, total. There are jingles of 4 lines or 8 or 12 or 13 lines, all in meter and rhyme. Some others start with lines like “What’s Up, Buttercup” or “Oleander! Take a Gander” or (God forbid) “Pittosporum Makes a Quorum.” Not all English professors are didactic metronomes. And then, turn the page and for no particular reason you’ll find a densely layered sonnet lamenting the death of Sir Philip Sidney at Zutphen, or the unexpected lyricism of “Extemporaneous Effusion at Golden Trout Lake” in the Sierras, where “I am a part of all I am apart from.” Litle nuggets stand out—the Isle of Innisfree makes an appearance, and later he asks to “live with me and be my love.” Other classical references abound. “In the Aspen Groves” harkens back to Yeats in tone and brevity: “I smelled the sage in the silver sky/and heard the stream that was rushing by/to sink in the desert sand like thought,/and she was not.” “O Calloo” brings the sweet taste of Carroll to Southern California. The longer “Puzzle of America” reminded me of MacLeish’s “Empire Builders.” But there are also some longer, unrhymed poems I found exquisite, some simply in awe of the natural beauty of the Sierras and Yosemite or of the Juneau icefield, where “some memories are sacred to the mind” and “peaks speak like silver in the lasting night.” Some, like “The New Leaf,” stand by themselves with their heart and their lyric touch: “I am gentle since I wounded you/for cruelty exhausts and hatred dies.” The final poem, a narrative about a chance encounter with another hiker in the Cascades range who becomes a lifelong friend, celebrates “the small assist, a little gesture…a way of being.” That is how I would characterize this slim, entertaining volume, as a small assist and a way of being. ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Gary Davis is the author of the poetry collection, SPF60, and the novel, Butterfly. He lives in California. Published June 1, 2024

The Shape of Wind on Water: New and Selected Poems By Ann Fox Chandonnet

Loom Press, 2023 73 Poems ~ 1 Essay ~ 204 pages ISBN #: 978-0-931507-52-6 Review by Michael Escoubas I remember with great fondness going on fishing trips with my Dad and brothers to Minnesota. (We flatlanders from Illinois have nowhere near the lake selections offered by our neighbor to the north.) Much to the consternation of my Dad, I was less concerned with catching fish than with the remarkable acrobatics of the natural world . . . the way the wind did magical things with water. I was enchanted by waves and whitecaps, swirls and curls, dips and dives that captured my fancy more than landing a three-pound walleye ever could.
I thought about such things as I wrapped my mind around Ann Fox Chandonnet’s The Shape of Wind on Water: New and Selected Poems. An intriguing question began to form as I sat and as I thought: “Is the shape of wind on water to be taken literally or spiritually? Or perhaps a little of both? More on this later.
Structure
“New” poems are gathered under four headings: People, Places, Correspondence and Harvest. “Selected Poems,” are drawn from six of Chandonnet’s previous collections: The Wife & Other Poems (1976), The Wife: Part 2 (1979), Ptarmigan Valley: Poems of Alaska (1980), At the Fruit-Tree’s Mossy Root (1980), Auras, Tendrils (1984), and Canoeing in the Rain (1990).
A word about The Octopus, An Essay
Reviewers seldom advise their readers about how to read the books they review. Notwithstanding this cardinal rule, I offer a rare recommendation: Begin at the back of the book. In this captivating essay Chandonnet describes the people, places and experiences that, in her words, “made me, me.” You won’t want to miss the very last entry which explains the octopus.
At the risk of seeming to “run the poet into a corner,” I perceive Chandonnet’s work as being born out of the crucible of the natural world, maturing and evolving into the world of the human spirit. She looks for and finds correspondence between the visible outer world and the inner, invisible world of human experiences. One of her poems, “The Poet as the Letter P: Stevens Requests More Prunes,” sounds like the man himself, writing in tedious detail about prunes: the time of year for them, how much they weigh, how they should look, their numerous uses, and how Elsie, in her peignoir, will enjoy them on Sunday morning. Wallace Stevens excelled at writing poems which merge Nature and Spirit. So does Ann Fox Chandonnet.
Chandonnet is a poet of “people, as well as a poet of “place.” Her fascinating life with roots in Massachusetts (on a dairy farm), Alaska’s rich landscape (34 years), and Wisconsin (where she published her first book), provide a deep well from which she draws her lyrics.
Her lead poem, “Snow Water Under Culverts,” is perfect given the foundation laid above. “Snow Water,” is about her father and begins:
Everything is hard, gray, frozen here,but in his country snow water trickles in culverts,caching bits of bone swept from fields,nutrients hard won—the first scent of spring (wet dirt),and the tooth-numbing, palm-tingling ditch draught,spicules of ice in it still,refreshing as a McIntosh.
It is as if Chandonnet devotes her opening octave to contours which shape the fascinating man she loves. But he is something of a mystery to the young girl who marvels at what she sees. This poem of 109 lines never flags as the poet merges elements of “her world,” into a profile of devoted love. In poignant lines she pays tribute to a man of few words:
Deeds were Dad’s speech:his sixteen hours of sweat a day,his neck eroded into arroyos by weather,his shoes like Leninist bronzes of shoes,his shins knobby from cows’ kicks,the trim body he weighed every morning,his handsome hands tough as the emery wheelthat honed axes and scythes,the sound of that wheel,and the hard water dripping onto itfrom a rusty can.A workman and his tools—a diligent cathedral mason.
Get a Kleenex ready for Chandonnet’s gentle closure on this one.
Moving into “Selected Poems,” a different tone greets me. Drawing from works going back to 1976, we experience the poet as a young wife and mother. These poems resonate in memories of where my wife and I were in the mid-70s. For example, from, “The Wife”:
Sitting on her desire,which throbbed like an alarm clock,the wife tried to concentrate on Time.Or standing on it,a white square in a ring of black onesdappling the supermarket produce sale,artichokes and Muzak tugging at her panties,she tried to decipher a suddenly meaningless list:squash,ammonia,tuna fish,nutmeg.
Throughout “Selected Poems,” Ann Chandonnet weaves a fascinating web of life, “as it is,” when Nature and Spirit merge and converge. In “Peas” I hear the pings as they hit the bottom of the bucket:
Sitting on the screened porch,cane seat cool against the backsof hot knees,the crisp crack of green dorsal linesunder thumb,and the low spreading thunderof peasinto big aluminum pans.
Is The Shape of Wind on Water to be taken literally or spiritually, or perhaps a little of both? This reviewer trusts his readers to decide. As for your reviewer, his life will never be quite the same again. ABOUT THE REVIEWER - Michael Escoubas is Senior Editor, Contributing Poet, and Staff Book Reviewer for Quill and Parchment, a 23-year-old literary and cultural arts online journal. This review is republished with kind permission from Quill and Parchment. Published June 1, 2024

Book Reviews for May 2024

Wild Apples by Tricia Knoll

Fernwood Press, 2024 96 pages ISBN 978-1-59498-116-6 Review by Marie Asner Tricia Knoll is a poet of many talents. This not only includes writing but being able to transplant oneself from the west coast to Vermont. Forests, animals in those forests, nature still at ease and quiet all-around, leads to writing poetry with a flourish. Then came How I Learned To Be White (won the 2018 Human Relations Indie Book Award for Motivational Poetry) and Let’s Hear It for The Horses (won the third-place award in The Poetry Box 2021 chapbook competition). Wild Apples is Tricia Knoll’s latest publication. In reading through this poetry collection, one will find three styles of writing. There is giving the reader a story without paragraphs, such as “Thirty Things A Poet Should Know” and “some poets are buried in cathedrals, some are laid to rest in pauper’s fields.” Then there are two-lines-at-a-time poems, where two lines may be separate in thought. “Alonely” and “Alumni makes you realize how many friends have died.” Or:” Questions” and “How much closure can you expect from sewing on a button?” The third style has, four-to-six-line verses such as “Why Move?” and Vermont is where my daughter is the girl Who brought home the first deer one fall When the men drove north to deep camps She tagged unblemished roadkill’s pathway. Freshest deer the butcher ever skinned. Wild Apples is easy to follow, easy to understand, easy to picture in one’s mind what the writer is telling you, and easy to go back and read again and again. The title poem, “Wild Apples” compares oneself to a ripening apple. The aging process is “…sweet, then tart…. before it vinegars.” Short and sweet in size, but large in life. One can sense the awe of the writer as she melds into a new life with snow and ice, a new style of house to live in, having relatives nearby and then – joy- a grandson is born. This poem was written about watching an infant being fed. “Celestial Milk” and “His mother is his star and this season’s constant moon. I’m a secondary, hovering Milky Way.” Once again, it takes only a few words to form a picture. Wild Apples certainly makes Vermont a place you would want to see for yourself. Up in the north eastern part of America, one can only think of maple syrup. Such is not the case here, and the poem descriptions of life there is picturesque. There is no mighty ocean nearby such as one could have in Oregon by water’s edge, here is the edge of the edge of forest and its mysteries. “In Praise of Silent Wing” speaks for itself: My forester explains owl silence On hunt as stealth in wing beat Mix of serrations and velvety Down fringe feathers than Suck up turbulence. And noise. This poetry collection is well structured so the reader doesn’t have to spend time looking for something, it is all there in order. A multitude of diversities to choose from. What a delight.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Marie Asner balances a life of being a poet, freelance writer, church musician, book reviewer and entertainment reviewer. Posted May 1, 2024

Aligned with the sky Poems by Kathy Lohrum Cotton

99 pagesCover Design & Collage Art: Kathy Lohrum CottonPublisher: Independently published ~ poetry.deepwellbooks@gmail.comISBN #: 9798866560677Reviewed by Michael Escoubas
Recently, I called a plumber to the house to inspect a clogged basement drain. The technician explained to me that my basement drainage system was broken due to age. The couplings holding the pipes together had broken, and consequently, the pipes were out of alignment. After extensive excavation and great expense, I was assured that all the pipes were back in alignment, and henceforth, would be “clog-free.” This incident came to mind, as if on cue, the moment I retrieved Kathy Lohrum Cotton’s latest project from the mailbox. Your reviewer, like the clogged drain, finds himself in occasional need of a “life-inspection.” A revisiting of priorities, a spiritual “sit-down” to take stock of life and life’s priorities. Aligned with the Sky, arrived at just such a moment.
The work is organized into four interrelated sections: “Aligned with the Sky” (20 poems), “Aligned with Each Other” (18 poems), “Aligned Within” (18 poems),” and “Aligned with Nature” (21 poems). Cotton’s original collage art, which introduces each major division, exercised my mind as I entered each new phase. By “interrelated” I mean that Cotton is not a slave to categories. There is an ease about her work. Subjects and emphases overlap, integrate, touch and go, then return.
Cotton’s cover art depicts, in miniature, the collection’s theme. A girl about 6 years of age is perched on the top step of a ladder. She wears a pilot’s leather headgear, holds a toy airplane as she embraces the vast blue sky. The girl (perhaps the poet herself) isn’t looking for some deep theological or scientific explanation about why things are the way they are. She inhabits a world, her world. She IS the sky. She IS the wind. She IS the billowing clouds and swaying grass.
Titles such as “Where Will You Take Me Now?” “The Heavens,” “Eclipse,” “Night Song,” and “Leaving Like a Star,” spoke to my inner-child:
Hands flung wide, I whirl and twirl,a six-year-old toppling intothe green margin betweenour Lithuanian neighbor’s fenceand Audubon Avenue. Dizzy drunkon school vacation freedom,I like sprawled face-up in wild grass,aligned with a wide blue expansecrowded with cumulus clouds.
I don’t yet know cumulusfrom cirrus or stratus,but find shifting face-shapesin the billowy clouds,give them sky-people names,and compose little rhymesmetered like Sunday School songs.
Such is the beginningof my life as a poet.
The best poets retain vestiges of childlike wonder. “The Heavens” reflects upon Sunday School lessons which depicted heaven in terms of “its mansions and gold-paved streets, / an ever-listening ear to every prayer, / the reunion of departed loved ones.” With that said, an adult Cotton avers, “a poet can still fall speechless / at the sight of / sunrise, sunset, starlight.”
In other poems such as “Rainclouds Over the City,” she shifts from “Today’s leaden sky is heavy / as Monday-morning traffic— / snarled and clogged” . . . to the rain beckoning “peach blossoms, open petals / of forsythia and blue violets.”
She prays:
So bless this weighted-blanketdrowse of grays and thissleepy Earth who will awakento the music of falling rain,the percussion of thunder.
“Aligned with Each Other,” flows seamlessly into more complex personal relationships. “Connected” is Cotton’s welcoming poem:
Stars buttonedto galaxies
Sky hingedto Earth
Rivers loopedon mountain hooks
Sunlight braidedwith clouds and wind
The thread of youin the fabric of me
Everythingconnected.
Emotional and spiritual maturity are hallmarks for this poet. To write poetry, poets must protect their quiet time. They must love solitude. Some poets take this too far. For Cotton, however, I sense an down-to-earth life-balance. In “Frayed Edges,” Cotton touches on the complexities of marriage: “No page-turn / heralds a thirty-first night / of one month passing into / the first morning of the next.// And no gap / lies between my frayed seams / and yours. Our edges / are forever tangled together, / beyond unraveling.”
She is sensitive to moments spent with good friends. Such moments are indispensable, as attested to by the sonnet “Fragrant Day”:
From scent to heady scent, we three friends walktogether through a little candle shop,inhaling tiny samples as we talkof soy and beeswax, drip and jar. We stop
to breathe-in deeply old familiar scents.Patchouli, cedar, lilac. Lemongrass,verbena, lavender. Each representsa time, a place: the stories we will pass
along while strolling to another store.We breathe each other in—the fragrant blendsthat we had barely recognized before:bouquet of sisters, confidants, close friends.
The mingled scent of us now fills each roomand turns our simple day to sweet perfume.
Your reviewer has only superficially touched upon the treasures contained in Aligned with the Sky. The other sections: “Aligned Within” and “Aligned with Nature,” produced within me equal portions of inspirational wisdom and delight at Kathy Cotton’s mastery of poetic-craft. “Just Because” reveals the spirit of the whole:
Just because it’s today.Just because a sunI never touchedtouched me
and a sky I couldn’t holdheld me
and a love I didn’t understandunderstood me.
Just becausethe sunand skyand loveare free
I rejoice.
Little wonder that Aligned with the Sky won second place in the Illinois State Poetry Society’s prestigious Book of the Year competition, for 2023. ABOUT THE REVIEWER - Michael Escoubas is Senior Editor, Contributing Poet, and Staff Book Reviewer for Quill and Parchment, a 22-year-old literary and cultural arts online journal. This review is republished with kind permission from Quill and Parchment. Published May 1, 2024

What Shines by Sydney Lea

Four Way Books, 2023 181 pagesISBN 9781954245587Review by Tricia Knoll
I’m grateful that What Shines, Sydney Lea’s fourteenth book, came into my hands. I too live in Vermont; I too am aging. His collection of sixty poems explores wisdom accumulated over decades of writing. His poetry has earned a long list of honors including his service as Vermont Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2015 and the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts.
Published in 2023, What Shines includes a poet’s experience with the pandemic. As he waited for spring he describes “hours in which we are sealed in rooms foursquare and flat.” Time to dive into what Lea does so well – describing the natural world and telling stories. Many of his narrative poems describe with empathy the lives of people he knew: Steve who died of cancer, a man who fell to his death in an eldercare program and folks who were there discussed the sound of the thud when he fell; grandchildren at play; his neighbor Faye who tends the garden and her husband Glen smiling from his tractor; a woman he pulled from a burning car after an accident. There’s knowing tenderness in so many of these poems. In a memory of his mother in “My Mother’s Bed Jacket,” he writes:
I forgive her, after all,I had a part in every storm
Lea is known for his poetry of the natural world. “Drum Ice” celebrates the sound of ice over water when the water begins to flow but the ice on top remains solid. In “Affirmation” he considers the out-of-hibernation bear who rips three boards off the woodshed to eat a rodent’s cache of seed hidden inside. Lea writes,
I granted the bear the easy judgmentI’d offer a child, who, perhaps knowing better,defies the civilized world’s proscriptions, making off with something she considers
essential to sustenance – or pleasure.
The bear is forgiven. Lea finds it a bit harder with some of the people and violence he observes. Four men rowdy with drink tow a boat and drive across an irruption of frogs. He witnesses to the yard with a couch the color of mixed-breed brindle dogs sitting in a downpour with a sign in graceless scribbles announcing “Free Couch.” Some politics sneak in too. Well, Vermont is a blue state.
This collection shines for me with essential Vermont-ness. “The Rural Sublime” describes craftspeople, maple foods, 80-pound squashes, potbelly hogs with cutesy names, the whiff of corndogs and funnel cakes. “Winterberry” is a tribute to the red that accents a stark white winter. There’s tributes to fishing, kayaking, watching the leaves change color. In “Fall” he writes:
There’s no need for me to talk out my reveries,I think: Observe. Revere. Adore.Poetry, vexing chore,
feels as naked as next month’s tree.
The heart of this book is in the marriage of love and aging. Lea reflects his deep love and gratitude for his wife of many decades. He calls upon the fond wisdom that comes from many decades of living, some of it with a wistfulness. Studying a photo of his grandson, he writes in “Standard Time,”
the cold comes on at a pace nobody can keep outside of forever,and the darkness shows up early.
In “Maturity” –
He’s tried to forget the hero who would fix the world as well as the singerwho’d rock the house every night.He prefers his house unrocked as he ages. It is.
In “Blessed,”
Yes, blessed, we’ll stay as long as we can. We sit here in sun as earlier, every day, it dies. We hold on while the planet spins.
Whether you have followed Lea’s poetry career over many years or come new to his work, these poems offer a panorama of a life lived thoughtfully and with keen observation. I read and reread many poems, enjoying the journey. Part meditation, part narrative, and always great poetry. ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Tricia Knoll’s seventh collection of poetry, Wild Apples, came out in February 2024 from Fernwood Press. Website: triciaknoll.com Posted May 1, 2024
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Making Invisible Visible Again by Maria Bellefeuille

Independently Published, 2023 77 pages ISBN- 979-8870830780 Review by Carol L. Gloor Like many beginning poets, Maria Bellefeuille in her book Making Invisible Visible Again too often slips into familiar generalities so often used they have no meaning, like “Living Life to the fullest/With Imagination and Purpose” in the poem "Underneath the Image,” or “No room for a/ Broken Heart” in Yesterday, or “Your Feelings of hurt/Hit my soul deep in Scars.
Yet sometimes she avoids that trap for at least parts of some poems. In the poem "In My Shoes," the poet details physical ailments in a light, ironic touch: “Lungs of an elder at 27/ Liver of an Alcoholic by eighteen.” And in "Purse," she gives us a nice extended metaphor: “A purse is like a crowd of friends . . . /The zipper closes the pocket sides/holding privacy in our lives.” And in "Layda," the poet’s cat is described as “Pounced on my desk/Attended video calls . . .. /Particular about her snacks.”
One can almost see where the general could become specific and thus strengthen the poem in question. For example, in the poem "Scars," about separation, the first line is “The words cut deep.” The poet needs to give us these words, like “bye, bye,” or “bitch,” or “I never loved you.” Or in the opposite poem, about connection, Open Door, the poet tells us she has “fantasies in the sand.” This interesting phrase needs to be expanded to give us concrete fantasies to power the poem, maybe something like getting drunk and falling asleep or waking alone in bed. Obviously, one cannot write the poem for her. She needs to give us images to hold onto.
All that being said, Ms. Bellefeuille is brave enough to try rhyming parts of some poems, as in "Friends Without Faces" or "The Picture." She also uses the repetitive form well in "Spoons," a poem simply about getting through the day, and in "Bonded," a poem about sisterhood.
My favorite poem in the book is the last, "Sock and Flops," about wearing socks with sandals, and not giving a damn what anyone thinks.
Please, Ms. Bellefeuille, you have had an interesting life, and you have an original perspective on all of it. You need to give use specific, concrete images to make us care. And also, for your next book, get an editor to correct the numerous punctuation and grammatical errors in it. They did not stop me from reading the book seriously, but that may be the effect on some. ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Carol L. Gloor’s poetry chapbook, Assisted Living, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2013, and her full length poetry collection, Falling Back, was published by WordPoetry in 2018. Her poems have been published in many journals and anthologies, and she is a member of the Chicago poetry collective Egg Money Poets. Posted May 1, 2024

Poetry Book Reviews for April 2024

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Democracy ~ Ever Fragile By Terry Loncaric

Independently published chapbook20 pagesEmail artsimmersion@aol.com to purchase a copy Review by Julie Isaacson
During an era in which our minds and souls ache from the loss of normalcy, from the predominance of the unprecedented, and the myopia in which our world feels out of focus, we struggle for words. Yet, Terry Loncaric has bravely gifted us with valuable words for our times. She places Democracy under a microscope, helping us to see the tenets that were part of our Civics education, our fiber as Americans, and our existence which we could not have anticipated to be put to daily tests. In Democracy-Ever Fragile she awakens her reader to take a close look at our reality.
Loncaric invites us to the highest calling, the Keepers of the Truth. From her opening lines in her Introduction, throughout each thought-provoking poem, she demonstrates her love and respect for democracy. Her work challenges us to look at ourselves and determine if we have been among the populace who has taken this gift for granted. In Safe and Secure, Loncaric outlines what democracy is, as well as what it is not, using examples of occurrences in our daily experience. She concludes in a sentence, “Democracy is the right to exist.” With a beam of hope and perspective, A Land of Contrasts, Loncaric declares that “Democracy has yet to reach its glorious potential.” While some may merely wish for what was the “good run” of democratic principles, this poet suggests that we haven’t yet reached the pinnacle.
The wisdom of Abraham Lincoln and Emma Lazarus wafts through us by the poets’ quoting “of the people, by the people for the people” and “give us your tired, huddled masses.” We yearn to be free, yet feel shackled in a time in which we are unmoored. Always in Intellectual Motion recalls our roots, sense of community, and purpose from the perspective of immigrants.
In trying to assess who we are as individuals and a nation, Loncaric brings us important terms in her titles which we must confront. Privilege, Betrayal, True Freedom. We must define who we were, who we are, and the call to action of who we want to be. True Freedom reads like a pledge, to include all of the societal ills that we desire–and must– shed like a snakeskin.
On Loncaric’s educational journey, she brings her reader back to ancient Greece in Love Letter to Athens. This poem with its lyrical alliteration and recalling of who we are and how we got here, reminds us of all the elements that raised us to lofty levels, ones that should never have been questioned, compromised or diminished. Loncaric thanks Cleisthenes for providing the “blueprint for the most representative form of government.”
No one can question that our democracy is at an existential crisis point. We are being tested every day, with every affront, with every challenge, with every nuance that can weaken us. We must act upon Loncaric’s appeals: “There is no room in democracy for hatred” and “We are the keepers of the truth, the champions of democracy.” Loncaric challenges us to open our eyes, our hearts and souls. Her Final Thought in this chapbook is a strong reminder and appeal:“Let history remember this/ as a time when democracy was tested, /but the Republic prevailed.” Terry Loncaric has penned a critical reminder to courageously live in a manner consistent with whom we claim to be. Words from her heart drive us, and we cannot settle for less than the Truth. Key’s lyrics, “land of the free and home of the brave” rang throughout this important book.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Julie Isaacson is a regular contributing poet to Highland Park Poetry and East on Central. She authored The Angry Chef: Satisfying Recipes Inspired by Unsatisfying Relationships. Julie thrives in Highland Park along with its expanding literary and arts community. Posted April 1, 2024
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Silent Marshes by Tom Moran

Cyberwit. net 37 pages ISBN: 978-8119654567 Review by Gary Davis Chicagoan Tom Moran believes that poetry is creation. Here he has published a small collection of 25 brief poems, a scant 34 pages in all, entitled “Silent Marshes,” the title arising from the author’s belief that a marsh, muddy as it may seem, has cleansing and filtering functions, thereby promoting ambient “new growth.” The trope is that he would attribute these salutary functions also to poetry, an artform which may come across to many as muddy and marshy, of course, but rarely can be called silent. Whether poetry promotes new growth in even the best-intentioned reader is anybody’s guess. These 25 are economical poems of energy and imagery, punchline poems of observation and story meant to be spoken in a noisy coffee house, not savored quietly by the fire. Readers who relish delicate Yeatsian constructions of lyrical diction, rhyme and meter will be tempted to put down the volume after the first several pages, but more brawny readers may well find many scattered pinpoints of white light in the relatively few pages that follow. The first few poems relate to important personal losses and disappointments in the author’s childhood, clearly setting the stage (and format) for growth and realization in the poems yet to come. The language is direct and unaffected, as are the topics of choice. Niceties of meter and rhyme go by the wayside while diction and rhythm do not; often he evokes the Imagism of early William Carlos Williams and perhaps Pound. In similar fashion, with “Dialogue with a Muse” the author channels another New Jersey poet, Allen Ginsberg, in both tone and spirit, or in this case, muse. “2 Poems and a Table” is so similar to Williams that by its end I almost expected a cat to appear and delicately step onto a red wheelbarrow. In the haunting “Departure,” to me the best poem in the volume, Moran waits at his mother’s deathbed for “her flight to be cancelled” as time passes “like wet cement,” and by its end we have returned to the childhood disappointments, the cold absences, that opened the book. These flashes of arresting imagery are the high points of the chapbook. Other poems, all too many of them, never really get started or fairly quickly seem to lose their way. But then, de gustibus non disputandum. That said, my harshest critique of the collection is not a quibbling like or dislike of any particular poem; rather it is that the book as a whole needs editing, with too many examples of aberrant punctuation and questionable grammar, perhaps an inborn hazard of zealous self-publishing. ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Gary Davis is the author of the poetry collection, SPF60, and the novel, Butterfly. He lives in California.
Published April 1, 2024

Hunting for Shark's Teeth Poems by Renee Butner

Lulu Press 36 Poems ~ 45 pagesISBN #: 978-1-312-48589-1Reviewed by Michael Escoubas
Seamus Heaney, (1939-2013), a leading light in the world of poetry, had this to say about poets and their craft:
“A poet is someone who feels, and who expresses her feelings through words. This may sound easy, but it isn’t.”
This quote came to mind during my journey through Hunting for Shark’s Teeth—Poems, by Renee Butner. I asked myself, “Why hasn’t this poet been on my radar screen before now?” Already an accomplished writer, Renee Butner’s work has appeared in a variety of fine journals. Sharks Teeth displays these poems plus new poems that highlight her talent.
The book is organized into four untitled sections: I. 11 poems; II. 8 poems; III. 8 poems; and IV. 9 poems. Butner opens each section with a modern haiku, a haiku bookends the work.
Butner’s title speaks to me on different levels: the first is “sea-level.” The opening 11 poems take me specifically to the beach. My nostrils breathe salty air; aromas, sights, and sea-textures abound. On another level, I read Butner’s poems at the level of “hunting.” The title is catchy. But there is more. As poets we are constantly searching for life; we want to unearth life, we invest ourselves in life in and through our words. This is the work of poets.
At Sea-level
The poet “had me from hello,” with “Ocean Pier”:
She meanders down atwilight street;digests the sweet, thick air.
Cicadas and crickets sing theirsummer evening lullabies.
The heady thrill of salt meldswith balmy trade wind currents.
As they play a final game of tagchildren’s voices hover
alongside he eternal backgroundreverberation of the sea.
She comes upon aweathered pier projectingover the bruising water . . .a welcome provider of respite in the dusk.
The air around Butner’s twilight pier is “thick and sweet.” Crickets and cicadas sing, I hear the sea’s “reverberations” rattling the pier. She puts me in the action. She does more than experience the air; she “digests” the air. The poet is fully ensconced in her surroundings, satisfied, whole and complete. Butner’s work shows skill with poetic devices: alliteration, consonance, internal rhyme, simile and metaphor abound. Her poems are predominantly free verse; without end-rhyme.
“Five Senses” imbibes “grains of sand” that stings, / a thousand needle prickles.” “Waves roar as they fold over / and crash against the shore / then fizzle back out to sea.” Other titillating titles in this section include: “Dirty Sneakers,” “Glorious Moon,” “Lavender Skies,” and “Sea Glass,” none of which disappoint.
Let’s Go Hunting
Butner is never far from the sea, which I sense is her first love. However, her interests go beyond the sea as primary metaphor. For example, “bits of blue eggshell” capture her attention and result in the poet contemplating morbidity. Is the baby bird tragically dead or might the shell fragments indicate some “natural progression / hatching, downy feathers” of a young bird learning to fly? Shark’s tooth #1.
“Butter” is about` the poet’s self-perception. What lies beyond the “Buttery golden path” . . . “Does the aura surround me / Or has it fled / Into the bare branches / of the trees.” Shark’s tooth #2.
In “Daybreak Thunderstorm” Butner awakens to “rain gushing down the drainpipe / near my head / pounding on the roof / in sheets.” The eerie light flashings and thunderclaps frighten her puppy, but “her senses relish this abrupt awakening.” Shark’s tooth #3.
Finally, “Jazz Notes” circles me back to Seamus Heaney’s dictum:
“A poet is someone who feels, and who expresses her feelings through words. This may sound easy, but it isn’t.”
After a hard day, art, in the form of jazz captures a “mood,” brings the poet to herself within herself . . . where
A lone horn sings outEdgy and soulfulLeading the session severalGolden shimmering moments before backing offTo allow a bebopwalking bass line solo
Notes wrap around one anotherEntwined in a dancefor the auditory sense
Jazz beat lines up with heartbeatI relinquish myself tothe new pulse
This poem, akin to unearthing that coveted shark’s tooth in the sand, the quest for something deeper, sparkles as she revolves its sharp edges in her fingers. ABOUT THE REVIEWER - Michael Escoubas is Senior Editor, Contributing Poet, and Staff Book Reviewer for Quill and Parchment, a 22-year-old literary and cultural arts online journal. This review is republished with kind permission from Quill and Parchment.
Published April 1, 2024

The Storm by Mark Lipman

Vagabond Books, 2024 53 Poems ~ 19 Illustrations ~ 112 pagesISBN: 978-1-958307-02-1To Order: www.vagabondbooks.net/2023/02/the-storm.html Reviewed by Michael Escoubas
Mark Lipman’s new collection displays one of the ripest minds among social critics writing today. About Lipman, Dan Speers, Poet Laureate of Haverhill, Massachusetts, writes: “Whether you are searching for answers to questions about life, or maybe even just hoping to make sense out of each day in the face of constant stress and turmoil, . . . The Storm, is your must-read book of the year.”Indeed, in case you haven’t noticed or have been living underground in recent days, a storm is circling all around us. Lipman’s mission is to “get into our collective faces,” to wake us up, to shake us from our complacent selves and state:
We have known this for quite some time.The question before us is how do we weather it?
My goal in this review is two-fold:One: Provide a context for where the poet is coming from, and,Two: Suggest a perspective on Lipman’s solutions.
Mark Lipman is no complainer; he is a truth-seeker. Solutions, for this poet, derive from a clear mind and clean heart. A Word About Style and Aesthetics
Among the appealing features of The Storm, is Lipman’s creative skill. His poems are conversational. If I were with him over coffee, his in-person voice would differ little, I suspect, from his poetic voice. He is comfortable with who he is, with where he is in life. His poems bear witness to a developed skill with poetic devices such as imagery, alliteration, internal rhyme, and end-rhyme skills. His original style dovetails with his convictions. Lipman is also a skilled ekphrastic craftsman. Nineteen judiciously placed artworks elevate and expand upon the themes Lipman wishes to accentuate.
Titles are important to Lipman: “An Act of Resistance,” “The Day the Guillotine Smiled,” “To Love Like a Poet,” “At the Edge of the World,” and “When They Came to Break the Sticks,” enticed me to feed on the banquet after tasting the hors d’oeuvres! The serving line is long indeed.
Context
Lipman’s preface sets his tone. “The Perfect Storm,” descibes lessons learned from a year-and-a-half of traveling the world. As Lipman states: “It was cheaper to go on an endless adventure than it was paying rent.” During his travels, Lipman discovered fresh insights about cultures and peoples, built new friendships through music, poetry and the arts. He grew spiritually and intellectually in the process. Most importantly, the poet discovered that everywhere he went folks he met wanted similar things out of life: basic necessities, respect and dignity based on our shared humanity. A note of sarcasm is evident as well: the poet states, “no matter what government you live under, it’s always the rich oppressing the poor . . . some things are just universal that way.”
Perspectives
Although, Lipman is razor sharp in his criticism, his heart shows love in the midst of it all. “If for Nothing Else,” is one example:
Some things are just eternallike the stars and timethey have no beginninand they have no endand thoug I’m herefor just a momentonly a dropletin the ocean of everythingtemporal and impermanentI take solace in the knowledgethat I was put here for a reasonthat somehow I’m connectedto that great infinitythat what happens in this lifeis no accident, that it has meaningand even if I don’t understandall the how’s and why’sI know that some thingswere just meant to bethat some thingswill just go on foreverfor if nothing elsewe were madeto love each other.
As a person who loves his country, I appreciated this poem. Depending on party affiliation, individuals and news outlets, are devoted to finger-pointing and blame-placing. They delight in human failings that can be used as sharpened spears to discredit their political opponents. I have not described Mark Lipman.
In poems such as “In the Name of . . .” Lipman’s concerns, punctuated by anger, reach the page:
They bomb hospitalsThe bomb schoolsThey bomb seed banksthreatening the very survival of this worldAll in the name of peace. . .
They call for warand ever expandingmilitary budgetswhile leaving their peoplehungry and poorAll in the name of profits
Key words in this poem of 48 lines: peace, freedom, profits, god, justice and democracy, for Lipman, are merely excuses designed to justify the narrow political-power interests of a few. While there is room for disagreement on his premises, Lipman has a point. We do ourselves a diservice if we turn a deaf ear to his entreaties. Virtually no aspect of American life escapes the poet’s keen eye and erudite analysis.
I return to goal #2 at the beginning of this review: Suggest a perspective on Lipman’s solutions. My perspective streams seamlessly with Bansky’s provocative painting above. Note the figure of a child. Note the shovel and plant potted in soil. I recall a saying in the Bible . . . unless you become like this little child . . . note the wise saying inscribed on the wall. Yes, folks, we have work to do. Let’s do it together. ABOUT THE REVIEWER - Michael Escoubas is Senior Editor, Contributing Poet, and Staff Book Reviewer for Quill and Parchment, a 22-year-old literary and cultural arts online journal. This review is republished with kind permission from Quill and Parchment. Published April 1, 2024

Poetry Book Reviews for March 2024

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Defying Extinction by Amy Barone

Broadstone Books, 2022 88 pages ISBN: 978-1-956782-11-0 Review by Patricia Carragon Amy Barone, author of We Became Summer (NYQ Books, 2018) and Kamikaze Dance (Finishing Line Press, 2015), is back with her latest poetry collection, Defying Extinction from Broadstone Books. Each poem is like a travel log, encompassing respect for various cultures and their environments. We travel into the author’s past, learn about her need for love and remembrance. Never boring, she soldiers on through life’s predictable and unpredictable moments and records the challenges that are endangering both the planet and humanity. Her journey is divided into five sections: Sacred Places, The Wild, Heirlooms, Love and Family, and Anima Protection.
In Sacred Places, hindsight and preservation are highlighted. Barone observes Nature at her best. On Bermuda’s Nonsuch Island, cahows emerge after three hundred years. On Manhattan, the same moon blushes as it did for the Algonquins who gathered strawberry roots and leaves.
Nature is revered in its simplicity as exemplified in Sanctum:
Where an emerald carpet
studded with hundreds of treesand blueberry bushes
is rolled out for heart-weary visitorslike an ethereal shrine.
We visit The Wild, a section that delves into wildlife and the music scene. From Abruzzo’s Brown Bears, a Bronx butterfly in an Italian American neighborhood, a yellow canary in Alabama, “it girls on and off Philly stages, and bad lovers, Barone keeps the beat moving.
Life, even when untamed, is music and how we react is like a dance as we read in Twilight Flight:
find safety in numbers, reach for partnersas they sway and pranceEmboldened by a twilight dance,they grow larger beneath chameleon heavens.
In Heirlooms, Barone explores the meaning of her section’s title. She looks at the classical face on a cameo and wonders if Medea wore one on her journey. She cherishes exotic spices while moving to the Motown beat. Jazz fills her soul. She recalls her father singing a Tin Pan Alley song. Mementos and music are all heirlooms.
The Bell Museum touches the sensitivity of the past in the material but even more in recollection. Bells have a history in communication but in the author’s case, more poignant:
In 16th century England, handbells were used to send messages, as my mother communicated in her final years.Etched with feathers and teardrops, the bell now sits on my desk.
Barone takes us to her family and relationships. Like a photo album, we view her past. We see her startled by a praying mantis and watching The Edge of Night. Barone grows up, carries the burdens of adulthood.
In Secret Flight, Barone reveals that secrets are best kept undercover. She learns the meaning of regret, one of the many lessons we learn in adulthood:
A tale of infidelity, indiscretion, lustthat I should have kept buried, but instead confided
when trust and longing triumphed.It came to rest on my mother’s ears as she lay dying.
In the final section, Anima Protection, Barone strives to keep memories alive. Ancestorial history must not be forgotten. The people who had lost their lives at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory must not be forgotten. Friends who have died must not be forgotten.
However, she must brace herself for betrayal and move on as in Forgetting:
Friends and lovers should be stampedwith an expiration date to forewarn uswhen the end is near.
I struggle to remember the magic . . .And stay locked away until I erase
the how, the why forever.
In summary, Barone handles her journey with grace and elegance. Her emotions are in balance with her observations, allowing the reader to embrace her words, thoughts, experiences, and wisdom—even relate to Barone’s poetry. Defying Extinction is a triumph of words, a masterpiece that deserves to be on everyone’s reading list.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Patricia Carragon’s recent publications: Five Fleas Itchy Poetry, Fixed and Free Quarterly, Jerry Jazz Musician, Out Loud, an LGBTQA Literary Arts Anthology (Red or Green Books), When Women Speak Poetry Anthology, Vol. 1, among others. Her poem, “Wild Is the Wind,” received a 2024 Pushcart Nomination from Poets Wear Prada’s The Rainbow Project. Her book Innocence is from Finishing Line Press. She hosts Brownstone Poets and is the editor-in-chief of its annual anthology. Posted March 1, 2024
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weatherman by Dan Fitzgerald

Kelsay Books, 2023 62 Pages ISBN# 978-1639804627Review by Marie Asner Dan Fitzgerald is a poet who lives in Pontiac, Illinois and observes the weather around him with descriptive poetry. He has won awards for his poetry including being nominated for the Pushcart Award not once, but twice. His poems have been published in “The Writer’s Journal” and “Origami Press” to name a few. “weatherman” is his latest publication. The first poem in the book is called “weatherman” and tells of what could happen when taking a walk during rain when legs may be unsteady, “…I must find balance in a world that can change.” As you read, the poems can be divided into the four seasons of the year, spring, summer, fall and winter. Their description puts them into categories, such as “weatherman.” and spring rain. Summer comes and in “A Moment,” one of the longest poems in the collection, “Give me a moment or two…the chance for love to find a heart.” There is also “I Hear The Rain Singing” and water wanting to continue a journey “…wanting the sea.” Then there is “Wind Gust” who hides and comes for “…the lust of skirt against leg.” In-between seasons, there is also the earth to contend with, as in “Earth Morning” where “Earth’s lungs freeze in mid-breath.” Entering fall, is “A Matter After All,” when the sky begins as blue and then becomes “…boiling and angry.” Just as people can change from friendly to angry. “Sun Code” has the sun asking for attention before it is gone, “…what I am offering today may not be there.” “Winter is “Not Yet Over” when the dark of winter comes sooner each day and “night may have come, but life still claims the day” “Visionary” and words touching like sun, but in December, instead.. Dan Fitzgerald uses sparse words in writing poetry. There is an old newspaper tale about a lead story “…being one short sentence and then expand from there.” In this poetry collection, there are short lines, sometimes sentences for each poem and well-thought out. Why embellish with multiple adjectives when a few distinct words will do. In the line, “…the lust of skirt against leg,” we don’t need details about dress or pleats, six words give you a picture for your mind. The same with “Storm Clouds” and “…the hues of bruises” gives you the picture of what is happening over your head during a storm. Fitzgerald’s style of poetry is what I call “easy reading.” Sit back, relax and let the author describe situations or places or memories in short lines that let you think over what you just read. His writing reminds me of the poetry of Mark Strand and his “Keeping Things Whole” with an ending of “I move to keep things whole.” Or, Charles Wright’s “The Daughters of Blum,’ and “…once on a dresser, gloves waiting for hands.” In “weatherman,” Dan Fitzgerald offers a gentleness that carries one through the book with ease and a chance to see that fewer words have greater meaning. ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Marie Asner balances a life of being a poet, freelance writer, church musician, book reviewer and entertainment reviewer. Posted March 1, 2024
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Even the Dog Was Quiet by Margaret R. Sáraco

96 pages ISBN#: 9781948521185 Review by Michael Escoubas I was first drawn to Margaret Sáraco’s new collection because two of my three adult children give family-like love to four dogs. That is enough dogs for a lifetime! We have no pets. Even the Dog was Quiet, segues into Sáraco’s world of memories. Her second full-length collection in as many years is tender and provocative. She savors life. She has opened a fresh world of “seeing and savoring” for me.The goal of this review is to illustrate Sáraco’s world of savoring.
Format & Writing Style - The book is set up in eight segments: Swoosh!, Tall Ships, Fruitful, To Whom It May Concern, Wish You Were Here, Part I, Dear So and So, Breaking Waves, and Wish You Were Here, Part II. Each heading highlights either four or five poems which develop special moments related to each. Sáraco is good at capturing moments. She seems to know where I live!!
Margaret Sáraco puts the “free” in free verse. I didn’t find any poems that rhyme. What I found was an engaging narrative style that alternated between poems with short line breaks living comfortably with prose poems. Her prose style accommodates themes that need a more expansive approach.
Free & Easy
From “Swoosh!” Sáraco draws from her Italian background to portray the love of a devoted Dachshund named Poppy. They have a daily routine in which:
Seeing her,he coils himself on the sofaas she back ends into him.Understanding the routinehe stretches himself outso that his head pokes outon one side of herand his tail the other.
I gave this poem extra time. The way Sáraco develops the relationship between Poppy and Grandma is a highlight to be savored. She paints pictures. The poem is “Devozione,” (Italian meaning “Devoted One), and is a clue to the collection’s title. After reading this poem I recalled, from my youth, a devoted cocker spaniel named Mac. Mac was fulfilled in life just being with me and my brothers. Thank you, Margaret.
Exquisite black and white drawings, by Alex Polner, are a nice touch. (Polner also illustrated the cover.) A chiaroscuro illustration precedes each division. Each division features its own poem.
Fruitful
A bottle of wine and plateof watermelon piled high.
Taste the sweet pink fruitand the bitter seed.
Drink, drink, drink,
Eat, then come back and havesome more.
This delightful precursor is followed by “Bricks, Curtains and the Sunday Comics.” Autobiographical, “Bricks” aptly illustrates what being “Fruitful” means to Sáraco. Both she and her ancestors understood the meaning of suffering as they struggled to belong in their new country. These hearty souls did not wallow in self-pity. They were tough and remain so today:
I come from immigrant grandparents, bricklayers and stone makerswho built their own church when no others would welcome them.
Where men left their sweat in stone and priests implied Heaven’sGates would open for loved ones if they worked for free,but no one could test their theory.
As the poem develops “Fruitful” takes on rich dimensions of love, suffering, loss, and triumph. The ending couplet reveals a touch of irony:
I come from families who accepted their place, men workedwomen worked, and everyone knew their place, except me.
In “Wish You Were Here, Part II.” Sáraco’s overall cheerful outlook toward life is impossible to suppress. Maragaret Sáraco’s latest collection is about life distilled through hardship, yes, but punctuated by a keen eye for those moments when Even the Dog was Quiet. ABOUT THE REVIEWER - Michael Escoubas is Senior Editor, Contributing Poet, and Staff Book Reviewer for Quill and Parchment, a 22-year-old literary and cultural arts online journal. This review is republished with kind permission from Quill and Parchment. Published March 1, 2024
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Double Stream Poems by Ellen Dooling Reynard Paintings & Drawings by Paul Reynard

South 40 Press, 2022 21 poems, 24 illustrations, 53 pages ISBN #: 978-1-7923-9747-9 Review by Michael Escoubas The title suggests the overall thrust of this superb collaboration. The artistic talents of Ellen Reynard and her husband, French painter, Paul Léon Reynard (1927-2005), when streamed together, converge into a triumphant double-stream of physical and spiritual beauty.
Overview - I was struck by the book’s austere cover. A subtle message emerges: One must open the book, turn the page, get engaged, to experience the powerful mix of art and poetry within. Indeed, isn’t this true of life?
Double Stream features the visual genius of abstract artist Paul with the equally vivid poetry of wife Ellen. Organized into four parts: Creations Stories, Water, Life of Christ, and Impressions, the work features art and poems juxtaposed on facing pages. This design allows for moments of contemplative linkage between visual and poetic treatments of themes. Double Stream is not a book for speed readers. Be prepared to wear two types of lenses: one set for stunning colorations, the other for poetry that challenges the mind and spirit. At the end, I appreciated reading interesting bios of Paul and Ellen. It is as if everything in their past served to prepare them to produce Double Stream. Additionally, the “About the Art,” page serves as an appendix documenting each drawing and/or painting as to composition date and medium used.
The Journey - This book is about a spiritual journey. However, it is not a journey scripted from an ivory tower of Biblical clichés filled with “all the right answers.” This journey is sensitive to hard questions, respectful of doubt, and compassionate about life’s complexities.
Progression - It’s first-things-first as Creation Stories opines on how the universe began. In “First Movement,” amid the inward fear that even the best science may not know, Reynard draws on a common life-experience:
The woman gazes up at the night skyand, spreading her palmsover her belly, she feels the firstflutter of the child in her womb.
A shooting star draws it silver pathacross the sky, and the woman smiles.She is not afraid to know,the great beginning was as gentleand as magnificent as this.
Three additional poems in this section: “Space Wind,” “Double Stream and Separation of the Waters,” and “Luminaries,” set the stage for Water. In “Alluvions”:
the rains poured downforty days and forty nightsand the waters rosefrom their beds in the sea
tides that did not ebbclimbed over the shoresacross meadows and desertsto submerge the foothills
until the only dry landin the midst of the global sea was a single mountain top
Paul Reynard’s paintings of both the rain pouring down, accompanied by a rendition of Mount Ararat ensconced in water and dark clouds, puts the imagination to work:
Ararat
were they able to seefrom the highest peakthe vast expanse of oceanthat spread across the earthand was still risingtoward the heights?
did they hearthe pounding surfecho across the endlessexpanse of waterand fear that tomorrowwould be their last day?
The Life of Christ is considered in three poems: “The Three Magi,” “The Cross,” and “Icon.”
Icon
Luminescent, transcendent over suffering and grief,outshining the glow of the crossbar, the wounded head risestoward the vertical reach of the cross and beyond.
The flow of tears, blood, and sweat dries in the sun.His cascading tresses, tinged with gold as thoughthe sun rose here in this great mind.
Through the troubled clouds gathered to witnessthe sacrifice, blue sky emerges to promisethe glory and hope of a new day.
Following up on ideas of “glory,” “hope,” and a “new day,” which close out the previous section, Impressions contains seven poems that are more speculative in nature. When dealing with the nature of God, or with God in terms of daily life reality, Reynard knows that:
To seek wordsfor the nameless,you dip deep withinthe pool of your beingwhere impressionsshift and blend.
The slant of a sunbeamthrough tall grasses,the song of the thrushat dawn, the curve of a perfect rainbow,the whisper of rainon the window.
Light and shadow,song and silencedance across the synapsesof your brain,and a poem is born.
Just as poems are born through the evocations of sunbeams, tall grasses and thrushes testing the reality of misty fields before they fly, so, in Double Stream, Paul and Ellen Reynard offer a taste of the divine through poetry and paint . . . as “powerful wings beat / the evening air / shatter the sunset / in headlong flight / to the other side / of night.” ABOUT THE REVIEWER - Michael Escoubas is Senior Editor, Contributing Poet, and Staff Book Reviewer for Quill and Parchment, a 22-year-old literary and cultural arts online journal. This review is republished with kind permission from Quill and Parchment.
Published March 1, 2024

Poetry Book Reviews for February 2024

How to Become Invisible: poems By Mary McCarthy

Cover art by Mary McCarthyKelsay Books, 202364 pagesISBN#: 978-1-953447-35-7Review by Joan Leotta Mary McCarthy alerts us that we are going to encounter something different, perhaps unexpected on these pages with the first lines of the first poem, Misfit: “Before we start, I have to punch a few holes in normal…” Many poets will recognize in themselves the idea of being different from others because of the way we see life. McCarthy’s poems, however, open up a world beyond the usual differences. She takes us into the realm of bipolar depression. We journey with her in her skiff of words through her roughest waters.
The trip is far more than a tour. This collection of poems is a guide to the inner self. Even if one has not experienced severe depression or bipolar highs and lows, learning how she deals with these is a template for handling any of our own problems and for realizing experiencing lows helps shape us, and that we, like McCarthy, can, through struggles, become stronger in compassion for others. To accomplish this, she applies not only her considerable skills as a writer and visual artist but also the super precise descriptions of an experienced nurse to her own experience , bringing them forth in poetry that is both artful and amazingly descriptive, so much so, that we feel we are there with her experiencing her suffering along with her.
The title poem, How to Become Invisible, (and the cover’s wonderful Chagall-like artwork, McCarthy’s own creation), reveal her own struggles with the invisibility that deep suffering brings. She reveals how becoming unseen is rooted not only in our diversity from the world, (in her case magnified by suffering deep depressions and struggling to overcome them ) but also in a propensity to speak out. She is speaking of the swings of bipolar, but as one who is socially awkward and too ready to speak what should remain inside my head, this line from “How to Become Invisible” resonated deeply with me: “Walk too close to the edge of every conversation, answer the words behind the words they say…”
McCarthy’s next series of poems draws on her keen poetic observational skills, expert and spare creative expression and her training as a nurse to allow us to experience her suffering and rejoice with her at the hope she’s found in waging her numerous battles. Lines like “My tears flow endlessly down, a salty river where like a new Ophelia, I barely keep afloat…” ( Metamorphoses and Mood Swings) and “You can’t prepare for catastrophe the way you studied for exams…” ( Challenges) and “I taste fear bright as metal on my tongue..” ( Symptoms) take us deep into her experiences. One of the best descriptions I have ever seen of the times of mania in bipolar comes in the lines of Talk, Talk, Talk where she says “I watch myself effervescing like an Alka Seltzer table in a glass of plain water…”
With these lines she leads us gently through her ungentle suffering and guides us out of it. She applies her sharp eye and mind to medication, to treatment , to bad medicine, to doctors, and electric shock, time in the hospital and more. She has written these poems to help heal herself and so that we, like her can shoot up through the waves of depression—that sometimes become a tsunami—and emerge better for it.
We leave this collection understanding that she has, through her own suffering, become more cognizant, empathetic, compassionate toward the suffering of others. “Such grief is not contagious; you were always safe..”(Your Apology Dear Friend) to the collection’s final poem, Invitation, which asks us to “come to me when you have wrestled with the angel no one else can see..”
I was struck by the beauty and simplicity and power of McCarthy’s work and the deep love for her readers manifest in every line where she reveals herself not simply to us, but for us, so we can, as she has, reach into our sufferings to become strong by caring for others. It’s a beautiful and powerful writing and well worth the reading.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER - Joan Leotta is an author and story performer. Her work was nominated for Pushcart and Best of Net in 2022. Publications include Feathers on Stone poetry chapbook (Mainstreet Rag Press) and Languid Lusciousness with Lemon (Finishing Line Press). Published February 2024

Late Epistle by Anne Myles

Headmistress Press, 2023 92 Pages ISBN: 979-8987763605 Review by Gary Davis Breathes there a person with soul so dead that never to themselves has said, I wonder who will share my bed? Who are we when first we feel love, and with that, or despite it, whom do we become? The feminine love that famously dare not speak its name continues to spawn volumes of poetry, if not overtly sumptuous and sapphic, at least lyrical and, in this slim volume, exceptionally thoughtful and well-crafted. With 52 brief poems of awakening, yearning and realization, in her “Late Epistle” Anne Myles guides us through her personal journey into the nooks and crannies of homoerotic love. The slim volume from Headmistress Press flows easily through three sections corresponding to the author’s childhood, early adulthood, and maturity, what she sees as stages in the growth of human affection. It starts with the beautiful lines of “Bane,” which begins “Even as a girl” feeling a subtle ache and ends casting out lines on emptiness. And emptiness there is, the inner tumult of adolescent yearning to express a myriad of inchoate realizations. Childhood is “held and safe” but also private and alone, “the weed smell of emotions left unspoken” in “the catch and release version of life.” In haunting portraits we meet her mother and father, each significantly, fatally handicapped in their own way, as well as her childhood housekeeper and even her Uncle Eddie, “the unmarried one, who went in and out of psych wards.” The tight cadences of “Ferryville” close out the first section as the young Myles begins a journey west, her parents dead and her future unmoored, “wondering what kind of woman I was and what my flourishing was meant to be.” We find out, as she falls in and out of love, makes a career in literature, and (in her own words) explores her personal journey from silence to expression. There is nothing voluptuous or hedonistic in the narrative, no breathless upheavals or quivering thighs. The wonderful lyric poignancy of “Fever” calls for a “faceless vast beloved to behold me now” in her adulthood, and the carefully crafted “Late Epistle” delights with its strong, sometimes obscure images: the “covenant of dark grace, the long tap root to what I couldn’t say.” That short poem, addressed to her therapist, serves as the emotional center of the volume. So by the end we come to a kind of awareness more than a certain knowledge, a vague sensibility rather than a passionate refrain. The volume that begins with imagery of something unknown and portentous ends with the insistent song of a mature woman who knows herself and accepts that person, revealing in the strong imagery of the elegiac “I am Waiting,” the person who, in her words, is waiting to learn to conjugate the language of desire. To her credit she does not hesitate to show herself ignorant of how to do precisely that, saying “There is a formlessness past rules…So vast, a world of blue.” Indeed. ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Gary Davis is the author of the poetry collection, SPF60, and the novel, Butterfly. He lives in California. Published February 2024