Collin Kelley’s Render

I was introduced to Collin Kelley’s work when we did multiple readings of his poem “Wonder Woman” for Nic Sebastian’s Voice Alpha site. So when Collin’s book Render was released from Sibling Rivalry Press, I wanted to see if the other poems were as charming as both “Wonder Woman” is and Collin seems to be. (I only know him in the virtual world, but we share many interests including music and Doctor Who, so I’m sure we’d get along fine in person.)

The collection is firmly rooted in the turbulence of the 70s and 80s – early mentions of Vietnam and Three Mile Island hint at the domestic and personal implosions that will follow. The reader is whisked into the family album and shown not just the best photos – the ones in frames or carefully-pasted scrapbooks – but the candids, the blurred shots, the ones that company usually never sees. These narratives of descent into family disintegration and of the wild upward splash of emerging sexuality are firmly rooted in popular culture – a Barney Rubble bank saves the day when the car breaks down, the Members Only jacket means belonging, and Pam Grier and Wonder Woman are role models. No details are spared, although some of them may be a bit folded, faded, and rounded at the edges like old Kodak prints from the 70s.

The opening poem “A Broken Frame” sets up the idea of the narrator as outcast as its refers to a relative “marked/out, maybe with black wax,/which runs to the bottom corner/where the frame is cracked.” The manuscript is divided into sections – in the first, called “aperture,” we read of a childhood and young adolescence marred by the infidelity and illness of the speaker’s mother and an awakening sexuality in the speaker. In “blowup,” the speaker’s sexual life (from first crushes to one-night stands to hustling to acceptance of his bachelor life) is both simple and explicit enough to be real. And the last and title poem provides us with a “resolution” that uses photography terminology in a more experimental form.

These poems give us narrative scenarios that function much like scenes from a movie. Kelley is also a fiction writer, and those skills show in this collection of poetry. Each poem has a narrative arc and, more often than not, loops back to the opening detail in some way. My favorite piece in the collection is “Broken Things” which begins “My mother hovers now, whipping this world/with damaged blades, her selective amnesia/is rudderless, requires a stabilizing hand/from my father, the elephant who never forgets…” The poem revisits many of the themes in earlier poems and ends “and even from this distance I can hear/her distress call, waiting for a message/that I have forgiven her, and I have./Even broken things can still fly.”

You can find the book at the link above. If you are a child of the 70s or like your poems with a strong narrative bent, then Render will be a collection you want to read.

Poetry Mixtape 41: Braiding the Storm by Laura E. Davis

I was so pleased to receive Laura E. Davis’s chapbook Braiding the Storm in my mailbox last week, and even more pleased to have time to read and digest it over the past week. In Laura’s book, the body reigns. These are visceral poems in both the literal and the figurative sense – poems of the body making sense of the larger physical world in which it lives and also making sense of the infinite internal landscape of emotion. There is both trepidation and embrace of the aging and failing of the body, both tenderness and anger in recalling relationships, both uncertainty and fearlessness in facing the inexplicable or the unknown.  In other words, this little book packs a big punch. One of my favorite poems in the collection is “Remedies for a Long Winter.” Take a moment to go read it at qarrtsiluni.

*

Welcome back!  This poem is certainly one to learn from in terms of using image to drive a poem. I especially love the “human measurements of time:/dusk, a jiffy,a teacup of fallen oranges.” I also like the marriage of natural images with images of the home and the body. Throughout the chapbook, Laura combines images in a way that is new and fresh and sends the reader back into the poems for second, third, and fourth helpings along the way.

You can visit Laura’s blog Dear Outer Space to read more of her work online. Or, better yet, go to Finishing Line Press to purchase her fine chapbook. You won’t be disappointed.

*

If you want to write:

1. Write a remedy for spring, summer, or autumn, using Laura’s technique of focusing on images to reveal insights to your reader.

or

2. Use the following words from Laura’s poem as inspiration for your own: millipede, artichoke, atmosphere, pinecone.

Shine by Donnelle McGee: A Review

“What’s up with the name Shine? 

His eyes, man. You never seen his eyes?”

Shine by Donnelle McGee is the story of Bray “Shine” Philips, a street hustler with a voice that immediately draws the reader into his world. A new release from Sibling Rivalry Press, McGee’s story defies categorization: is it a novella, an extra-long short story, a little of both? However you label it, this work of fiction is affecting and original in its approach.
The short fragmented sections of the narrative – the longest at two and half pages, the shortest at one word – vary in tone, length and voice. One section may be Bray’s internal dialogue and the next a poem written by his ailing mother. All sections work cohesively to create a picture of not only the main character, but the other planets orbiting around him in his universe.

*
It is remarkable in that, despite its economy of language and lack of extensive exposition, the reader connects with each character well, from Bray himself to a detective named Armstrong who circles the edges of the drama. For all of its compression, it covers a sweeping emotional landscape of identity, sex, disappointment, confusion, illness, empowerment, discovery, and love. When I finished reading, I was left with the feeling that Shine’s story is both uniquely his and a part of the larger human narrative.

*
I admired McGee’s ability to convey all of this in these short (mostly paragraph length) segments of chapters. There are seventy-nine of them, but the book is easily read in one sitting and pulls the reader forward with cryptic pieces of conversations, tight descriptions, and frequent point-of-view changes.

*
McGee’s stance of writing with an observer’s indifference, of letting the circumstances tell the story, heightened the impact of the emotion for me. Although there were moments toward the beginning that were disorienting – I wasn’t exactly sure who was who or who was talking- those quickly passed and changed to a need to find out the fates of these characters.

*
If you are frustrated that I am talking around the plot or not giving more of Bray’s story, all I can say is that it would do the book a disservice – McGee’s structure and storytelling method are so different and engaging that to tell you more would ruin your reading experience. And that is something I don’t want to do.

Bigger Than They Appear: A Review

The moon. Blackbirds. Shaving. Fruit. Bacon. Illness. Aging. Incest. Death. Black holes. Big ideas. Small moments. All in 50 words or less.

This is the idea behind a recently released anthology of very short poems called Bigger Than They Appear: Anthology of Very Short Poems, edited by Katerina Stoykova-Klemer. This 270-page volume packs a lot of poems and more than a little bit of punch. The collection in divided into sections that are loosely theme-based, and the poems in each section do cohere in terms of tone and topic.Some of the poems resonate like traditional haiku, offering a moment and a reflection that takes the moment beyond the moment. Some are beautiful small lyrics, loving descriptions of nature and the world. Some are little narratives with “surprise” turns at the end.  Some are written in rhyme. Some in stanzas. Some are single sentences. All try to provide a glimpse into the larger world in 50 words or less.

The collection in the anthology is successful as a whole. Some poets were represented by several pieces in the book – I don’t know if this is a positive, a negative, or just the preference the editor showed in choosing the selections, but it did seem odd to see some authors so heavily represented in an anthology. In terms of individual poems, I felt that some succeeded at this better than others. Favorites included “Moving” by Ruth Foley, “Thirteen Blackbirds Looking into Something New” by Kate Manning, “Fishing” by Keith S. Wilson, “Tourist” by Albert DeGenova, and the single sentence poems of Kate Angus. These poems gave me a moment and an idea on which to linger . (I don’t provide excerpts, as the poems themselves are so short.) Some I felt disappointed by – they seemed to be simply observations that didn’t move into the realm of the poetic for me.

I must admit that I found the anthology a little difficult to read in one sitting. When I pulled it down for a couple of poems at a time, I enjoyed the individual pieces more. I liken it to eating sweets. If you sit down and stuff your face with too many chocolates, they all blend together and you can’t savor or enjoy the individual flavors or intricacies of each one. However, if you choose one or two and take small bites, letting them melt in your mouth and slide down your throat, the richness is more satisfying.

So savor this little collection piece by piece. Let the flavors dance on your tongue.

Addressing the Divine: A Review

Prayer beads. Broad plains. Mountains. Birds. An inexplicable yearning for what cannot be seen. An inexplicable joy in discovering a hidden face of the divine. Fifteen short poems give us glimpses into all of these in Nic Sebastian’s new chapbook Dark and Like a Web: Brief Notes On and To the Divine (Broiled Fish and Honeycomb Nanopress).(Cover image above).  Spirituality can be a tricky terrain to navigate in writing, as every reader brings her own prejudices and beliefs to bear. Nic explores and even exploits this broad range of ideas in her collection, using recurring motifs such as animals and colors to explore the inner landscape of spirituality as something that is deeply rooted in the natural world. Animals figure prominently in nine of the fifteen poems in this collection, a motif that is certainly significant. Whether used to illustrate the earthly –

my days are flocks of starlings

wheeling dark waves

of loud chatter

 (from “my days are flocks of starlings”)

–or the divine –

I am the golden snake

gliding into you, my inside

is wider by far

than my outside

(from “the boy and the plain”)

animals here represent much more than creatures. They are symbols of our own struggles to define our connection with something larger than ourselves. Whether ominous (“the olive sheen of mamba/noiseless in the acacia”) or innocent (“nesting swallows in the belfry”), the inclusion of these animals can help the reader to reflect on the instinctive, animal part of the self that is required to maintain any sort of faith.

The colors and shapes of the natural world serve much the same purpose. The reader is drawn into the mountains (the majestic, imposing face of the divine), through forests (the confusing, unnavigable journey of belief), and over the plains (the broad, flat expanse of unknowing) in these poems. These landscapes are alive with color, especially in the poem “the girl and the hours” where the first hour is rich/blue salt, the second/emerald oboe.

My favorite poems in the book are three that contain prayer beads as an integral image. Prayer beads are concrete, physical manifestations of a very private communication with the divine, and they counterbalance the other focus of these poems, the beloved. In each of these poems, the relationship with the beloved seems ephemeral, but the associations with the beads connected to each one are profound and lasting, almost equating the beloved with the divine. These poems also each occur in a very specific place: on Bangkok’s Chao Phraya river at the gold-shot pain/of sunset, on the Plaza Mayor as the tall hills of Villa de Leyva/hulk blue all around us, and inside a souk at Muscat where the fingers of Hassan’s blind grandmother/are cobweb breath and leaf fall. These provide direct contrast to the mysterious, more vague landscapes of the rest of the poems in the collection, and they came alive for me in a more visceral way.

The book is published through the nanopress model, making it available in print, audio, and downloadable e-pub/pdf formats. Nic is a forerunner and a promoter of this publication model, and it is successful here. Beth Adams, the editor of the collection, has done a fine job of steering it into cohesion with a subtle touch. A different arrangement of the poems may have shown the motifs to be too obvious or heavy-handed, but the collaboration between author and editor weaves them through the collection deftly, like mantras or refrains.

The only thing I might have changed about the collection would be the placement of the introductions. Both Nic and Beth have written front matter that explains the evolution of the poems and of the collaborative process. I found this information interesting, but I wish it were placed at the back of the collection along with the biographical information. This would have allowed me to read the poems without any preconceptions. Could I have skipped over the forewords? Of course, but I tend to read a book front to back (as opposed to Kristin Berkey-Abbott, who likes to dip in and tread around a bit, as she mentions in part one of her review, which also gives links to many of the technical aspects of the collaboration). This is certainly a minor issue in such a lovely endeavor, and I highly recommend you go here to download, listen, or purchase and have your own conversation with the divine.