Poetry Reviews

What Good Is Heaven

Raye Hendrix
Texas Review Press ($21.95)

A remarkable debut collection, Raye Hendrix’s What Good Is Heaven interrogates kindness and mercy while exploring love’s complicated gestures. In “Animal Instinct,” the speaker remembers finding a squirrel “fallen from its piney drey, eyes still sealed // with birth” while walking in the woods with her father and dog. She jerks the dog’s leash to prevent it from eating the squirrel; her father tells her to “leave it to die quickly— / let the dog have his merciful doggy way.” Instead, she brings it home to “a slow death over days / in the rust of a long-dead hamster’s cage.” The adult speaker wonders how “to know when kindness / means crush instead of heal.”

The animal world often provides Hendrix with fodder for such meditations. In “The Bats,” the father and daughter find baby bats frozen to death. The daughter reaches for them, but her father

says to leave them for the wildcats
             and the dogs that run the mountain

he asks me to be more like
             winter                     beautiful but hard

he says despite my softness
                                             everything must eat

The poem “Mercy” shows the inverse: kindness dressed as harm. Here, child and father find a near-dead raccoon, and this time he “gave me the rifle / said it was time I learned // mercy.” The father’s efforts to push the softness out of his daughter is not an unkindness but an attempt to armor her against the violence of the world.

Just as kindness and harm are intertwined in these natural scenes, so too do they interface in human relationships. As a Southern queer poet, Hendrix understands that people and places one loves can do harm. “Daughter” begins:

I was loved with a Bible
              a belt        I ate Ivory

soap          I was sent out
              to choose the switch

Perhaps even more tremulously, it ends:

He once told me         (made me
               swear to keep it secret

to never tell my sister)
              that he loved me the most

Thus is the recipient of the father’s greater love also the recipient of his greater harm. In “Bloodletting,” Hendrix writes directly about the relationship between care and harm:

if the Greeks can be believed
then opening a vein
is Hippocratic: violence
cloaked in an oath of care

Hendrix also interrogates their own complicated love of a Southern home that has not always loved them back. They depict their hometown of Pinson, Alabama as a place where roads are “pothole-pocked / and going nowhere,” “the people are proud // to be holdout Confederates,” and the corrupt Mayor is replaced by “another reclining in his chair.” “But there’s jasmine here,” Hendrix counters; “There’s light.”

In “Pinson” and in What Good Is Heaven as a whole, the litany of details accumulates with force. Noticing and holding them itself seems to offer a proof of love—who but a lover could write “the algae // a million emeralds sunk just beyond / the shore”—but Hendrix gestures at their own love through these observations as well. Some of the softness the father in these poems had hoped to temper remains, and Hendrix’s readers are the lucky beneficiaries of its survival.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Poetry Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

Near-Earth Object

John Shoptaw
Unbound Edition Press ($25)

by Lee Rossi

Poetry can be personal, but as T. S. Eliot famously insisted, it can also be impersonal. Can it ever be both at once? In his latest collection, Near-Earth Object, John Shoptaw mixes disparate elements—formal and informal, autobiographical and traditional, and, yes, personal and impersonal—creating a work that takes various paths to express the existential crisis of our time: the effects of climate change.

From the outset, Shoptaw offers a guided tour of various disasters and disaster zones: the asteroid Chicxulub, clear-cut forests, the North Pacific Gyre, climate refugees, desertification in the Sahel. It’s not pretty. “Dry Song,” which beautifully reworks some of the basic motifs of Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” reveals the terrifying reality of salmon unable to reach (or leave) their spawning beds because streams are running dry:

But the drought has pierced to the mountain route
and shown me rock under the shrunken mantle
and sand it fed to the river mouths, barring
salmon on their redds from salmon in the sea.

“Back Here” takes the tack of using the patois of “Swampeast” (southeast Missouri), Shoptaw’s boyhood home. “We believe in everything life has given us,” the speaker says—the few good things, the many disappointments. “We believe in you,” he tells the prodigal poet, but goes on to say, “Honestly, we don’t know what to believe. / We don’t believe you do either.” Finally, though, the speaker admits: “We know. The earth is dying. We get that. / . . . / Naturally, we’ll do what we can. / Only please don’t ask us / to change our climate for yours.”

Employing skewed formalisms in many of the poems, Shoptaw emphasizes that resilience and creation are as much a part of our behavioral repertoire as violence and despoliation. He craftily leans into the little-used “Poulter’s Measure” (a popular Renaissance meter) for an antic anecdote about the fried chicken of his youth. The poem begins with memories of a visit to a boyhood chum:

We play with our trucks out back in the dirt, where plump
red hens peck for bugs but keep clear of the hackberry stump.

Then checkers on linoleum in the kitchen
where Chuck’s mom in a red housedress turns: Cornflake fried chicken?

The music is charming, but there are deeper currents. Comparing himself to his friend, the speaker notes:

I grew on the wrong side of the rails but the right
side of the river in Missouri, Chuck on the wrong side

of both.

Shoptaw also likes large canvases; the final sequence in the book, “Whoa!,” revisits the myth of Phaeton in light of the environmental woe already upon us. Throughout the work’s twelve parts, Shoptaw offers many of the traditional pleasures of the long narrative poem, among them learned lists (flowers, decaying glaciers, unrepentant polluters), elaborate similes, and inflated rhetoric. Shoptaw’s list of “wide-waking annuals and perennials,” for example, is as specific and delightful as Milton’s famed list of flowers in “Lycidas” without dispelling the somber and elegiac tone of the whole:

snowdrops, crocuses, daisies and daylilies,
rice in flower and maize in silk,
woozy jasmine and heady grapevines . . .

Of course, all these pleasures are in service to a larger design. As our modern-day Phaeton (here cleverly named “Ray”) courses recklessly, he disturbs the jet stream and sends untimely cold snaps on New England and New York, causing disaster around the globe:

Coulters
and ponderosas, yellowed and browned, engraved
with trilobite grooves by pine-bark beetles
wintering northward, had turned from trees
into tinder.

Notice how Shoptaw’s four-beat lines evoke but don’t slavishly imitate Old English accentual verse, the alliteration deployed almost casually to reinforce the drive of the narrative.

Ray, it might be noted, is clueless, but at least he has the excuse of youth and inexperience. Not so “the fossil lordlings / . . . out / sledding with their kids in Central Park”; “Where’s the heat?” they want to know, their cluelessness a testament to their motivated ignorance. Since this is a mock epic, retribution is called for, so in Shoptaw’s telling, Earth herself fires a lightning bolt at Mister High and Mighty, ejecting him from “his plump white boy’s life.”

What Shoptaw offers readers, then, is not an answer but a fantasy of reprisal, one with no more impact on social policy than the tagging of a freeway overpass has. Perhaps that’s what most writers do—scrawl texts in hopes it might shock us into saving ourselves from tragedy. Few, however, do it with the force and elegance of Shoptaw.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Poetry Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

Here, There and Nowhere

Valery Oisteanu
Collages by Ruth Oisteanu
Spuyten Duyvil ($30)

by Bill Wolak

Valery Oisteanu’s Here, There and Nowhere depicts a life savored intensely in the moment—one that risks everything with every single breath. As Oisteanu states in the collection’s foreword, “My poems are spontaneous recollections of traumatic events, fragments of forgotten dreams, nebulous states of mind, illogical episodes and subliminal sequences of ecstasy and redemption.” These poems offer somnambulant marathons into the unconscious, trances that reach out like embraces of moonlight, sporadic erotic wildfires, and of course, a truckload of unabashed surrealistic provocations.

Like César Vallejo, Oisteanu offers a poetry of committed enactment rather than intellectual contemplation. Take “The Revolutionary Cultural Exchange”:

Struggle is a state off mind, awakened consciousness
Defend your rights, resist, persist, walk to the edge of life and death
The military invaders will hang themselves with tools of suppression
Freedom continues to grow in the harshest terrain
As clenched fists and open brave hearts march on

Clearly, Oisteanu isn’t waiting around for either the revolution or the apocalypse. He advocates a more active approach, as he states in “We March”:

We march and we march some more
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
We march for the end of wars and for better human rights
We march in the polluted streets and demand clean water
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And we march for the women trafficked abroad
And for the workers dying at work
We march in our sleep
We march all night
We march ’til we die.

Extending his vision to all corners of the globe, Oisteanu’s poems about the war in Ukraine are exceptionally moving, and his “Navalny Blues” is simply heartbreaking. But just as he protests the current state of contemptible affairs, Oisteanu is also hopeful about the future. Love is where he grounds that hope, and in fact, Here, There and Nowhere is dedicated to his fifty-year relationship with his wife Ruth (who provides twelve color collages). “My Wife Ruth” contains extraordinary descriptions—“Her breasts move counter-clockwise to each other / . . . / Her hands create the secret greenhouse / Her songs make the flowers sway and shiver”—and praise of erotic love permeates the book:

Sweat on sweat, the lovely lover chanting improvisations;
these love chants remain suspended in the air.
No one is giving up their fantasies,
no one records their salty dreams.

There is always something stunning, surprising, or enigmatic in an Oisteanu poem. Sometimes it’s a startling title (“Landscape of Unfinished Dream,” “The Subway in the Sky,” “Rent My Shadow”); sometimes it’s an astonishing first line (“This is a poem inside a poem”; “Welcome to the end of the mind”; “No more sleeping on the roof of imagination”). As a surrealist, he is no stranger to the marvelous, and his poems abound in striking linguistic transformations. Consider what he does with the image of trees in “The Peace Enigma of Stillness”:

Herds of trees in the distance
Wailing below a dark undertow
Some fall toward the empty sky
Burning with the speed of an invasion
How hard they try to become birds

Perhaps Oisteanu himself best describes what his poetry aims for in “Madness Unlocked”:

We revolutionize clouds from within,
we purge ourselves of sentimentalism,
of avant-clones, of bourgeois culture.
No more brainwash of hip academia
back to the roots of blues and jazz.

What else, after all, should poetry do in the face of disasters of the changing climate, horrors of ever-widening wars, and the stubborn persistence of worldwide pandemics, but “save the holy madness of Life”?

Poetry Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2024-2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

YOU

Rosa Alcalá
Coffee House Press ($17.95)

by Christopher Luna

Rosa Alcalá’s fourth poetry collection is a thrilling masterpiece filled with prose poems that challenge and disturb as they dig deep into the terrors that women face. Throughout, readers are also invited to contemplate the complexities of voice and perspective in literature.

An introductory piece outlines where fear begins for women and girls and prepares readers for the unconventional approach of the text. Alcalá makes an important decision to rely upon the pronoun “you” to tell her story. At first it may seem that this allows her to remain one step removed from the painful memories she shares; “Isn’t the second person a form of hiding?” Alcalá asks. But the poems that follow fully explore the slippery magic of the pronoun “you”—how it can alternate between standing in for the reader, the author, and an ever-shifting cast of characters.

Alcalá tells us from the start that “I was trying to write a book about my mother,” but “that in the absence of her I mothered myself all over again with worry, / which is how I mother.” In this light, the “you” in every poem has the potential to be the poet, her mother, her daughter, another woman, or even womanhood itself, and sometimes more than one of these at the same time. Alcalá seeks to bear witness to the violence committed against women, but “being my own witness was itself a risk. How can / I see events unfolding when the body is completely symptomatic / of other bodies, including / its own.” She continues:

The problem with memory is that only words can re-create it for others.

Each word its own past and desire
for a future.

Each word, each sentence, a fragment.

And how do you untangle from the telling the speaker’s motives?

Later in the book, in “A Girl Like You,” the poet uses the second person to address both herself and a person she wrote about for her first real assignment as a journalist: a thirteen-year-old girl “whose tender body was discovered next to the Cuban bodega where your mother would send you for bread.” In the second half of the poem, the dead girl talks back, taking Alcalá to task for using the tragedy to further her career:

You want to know who did it, how it could have happened to me and not you. You want to weave it into a cross to protect the door to your daughter’s room. Or worse, for a poem. . . . Was your first intention to make my murder elegiac? Remember when you couldn’t pronounce that word correctly, when others saw you as you were, a girl who knew so little but elbowed herself to the front to be heard.

Nearly every poem contains horrific gut punches as well as sentences of such sublime beauty that you may temporarily forget their disturbing subject matter. Alcalá uses her fear as a map, seeking “narrative logic to order the / mess of memory” while never losing her faith in language’s potential to express the ineffable and reveal the truth about our lives. In this bold and innovative work, she has achieved her stated goal to “leave my daughter this book as manual, as heirloom; like my mother’s wedding dress in the unreachable part of my closet, both glamorous / /and warning.” Charles Olson once proclaimed that poems are “high energy constructs”; Alcalá’s YOU contains writing so powerful it may cause your heart to combust.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Poetry Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2024-2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

Poems 2016-2024

J.H. Prynne
Bloodaxe Books ($50)

by Patrick James Dunagan

Most poets deliver the proverbial “brick” of a collected works only in their final years, or else leave it to be delivered posthumously by others. Not J.H. Prynne. Since his 300-page 1982 gathering Poems, which collected all he felt worth preserving at the time, Prynne has delivered three subsequent “bricks”: 1999, 2005, and 2015, the last of which approached 700 pages. Now at eighty-eight years old, he’s added the equally colossal addendum Poems: 2016-2024. It is a magnificent, startling output during what might be the poet’s closing years of writing life.

This volume gathers thirty-six collections ranging in length from relatively brief sequences of a dozen or so pages up to the full-length Of Better Scrap (Face Press, 2019). Across this period the small yet inventive Face Press in Cambridge, England has been Prynne’s faithful publisher, responsible for originally publishing twenty-four of these titles, many of which were slim chapbooks printed on fine paper with care given to best represent the work as physical document. While these qualities are impossible to completely carry over to a larger collection, some attention has been afforded to details of the original publications. For instance, poems from Dune Quail Eggs (Face Press, 2021) appear in a larger print, centered upon the page, with extra spacing between individual words, likely similar to their chapbook appearance:

Green foist   crust mound
                    met
drain plume feast bride
                    eye
nails thumb avoid trail
                    bay
ghost braid prune force
                    toy

Other variances in font and size, or decorative section numbering, have been likewise carried across with a few of the collections, along with an accompanying image from the original versions here and there. For those new to Prynne’s work, this choice offers some awareness of the poet’s initial conception.

Prynne’s penchant for pushing towards the edges of language—often to an opaque abstraction—rarely offers any familiar foothold for readers expecting common levels of coherence, as in “Or But Invaded”:

other-worldly. Even surly toasted double joint dent
scented bell air surfactant lizard, tolerant pink win
arrant count radiant immunise. Into prize, instead
fast ahead confuse at the window endowed likewise
twist, then vaporise.

This might lead unfamiliar readers to charge that Prynne sets one word after another according to some arbitrary ordering. Yet Prynne wagers that there’s depth worth exploring in “the theme of arbitrariness.” In his talk “Stars, tigers and the shape of words,” which he delivered in 1992 at Birkbeck College, London, Prynne explained:

Briefly stated, the theme of arbitrariness concerns the nature of the relation between the sense or meaning of a linguistic utterance (spoken or written) and the forms of its expression or performance. If a language is considered as an evolved set of signs or codes, do the items of its production (words, sentences, speech-sounds) bear any distinct and significant individual relation to meaning or idea; or does the relation of message to medium make sense only within the context of the system, and not at the level of individual items?

Certainly, in a poem such as “Or But Invaded,” punctuation and sentence structure remain intact even as the individual words are often estranged from general semantics—yet the potential meaning of each word has been added to, enlarged. Associations emerge from out of the possibly arbitrary order; “tolerant pink win” might be the dawn or dusk hour at which “air surfactant lizard” emerges from their lair. It’s difficult not to associate some intention, even if exact elements remain murky.

On rare occasion, Prynne drops in an uncharacteristic acknowledgement of a poem’s circumstances, indicating, for example, by the note “34,000 ft.” that a poem was written while traveling on an airliner, perhaps on a flight to or from China as is his wont. There are also what might be taken as outright cheeky moves, like the epigraph for Memory Working: Impromptus: “Always have a point in mind / when you resolve a scale line” is attributed by citation to Pianogroove, an online piano school with the motto “the world’s best piano teachers—at your fingertips.”

In some poems, Prynne hits a decidedly different tonal note: “To catch slant sunlight as cat prowling, in earth warming from cold in browning tints, twigs in fashion with new glints to show upswelled. Light wind in morning, to activate a day aloud, ahead already remembered, chill now but soon declared and voluntary.” Such clearly descriptive lines of beauty are reminiscent more of a passage from Emily Dickinson’s Letters than what’s expected from Prynne. In addition, there are the koan-like “Travellers’ Tales” (note the plural possessive) at the end of Memory Working, which present riddling allegories explicitly set in a natural setting, à la fairy tales.

Then there is the hilarity of Snooty Tipoffs (Face Press, 2021) with jagged rhymes (“Music in the ice-box, music by the sea, / music at the rice-bowl, for you as well as me”) found throughout its five sections, in each of fifty-six parts except for the final section, which ends on:

      57
For you I’d do
    the whole thing through
below, above
    for now, for love.

The expanse of Prynne’s output during these last eight years is astounding. Poems: 2016-2024 shows an unparalleled poet holding forth at the height of his powers, from the sheer jubilance of titles (such as Passing Grass Parnassus (Face Press, 2020), with its epigram “Sing different songs on different mountains”) to the final sentence of “Penance at Cost” from Foremost Wayleave (Face Press, 2023):

Compunction ructions burnous turnabout riotous break
pressure gauge caramel kerbside far and wide intertidal angled
stairway apple crumble cinnamon evenly cloven down to earth.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Poetry Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2024-2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

I Don’t Want to Be Understood

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
Alice James Books ($24.95)

by Oscar Ivins

In Joshua Jennifer Espinoza’s collection I Don’t Want to Be Understood, anti-trans sentiment is both structural and structuring; the atmospheric quality of transphobia affects what and how the poems’ speaker dreams, dreads, desires. A hauntingly intimate portrait spanning a life from childhood to today, the collection is deeply attuned to both the harsh and harmonious pitches that accompany experiences of transition in a society that is hostile to trans happiness.

The collection is inwardly panoramic. As the speaker, “a light in the form of a girl,” travels through courthouses, airports, and a menswear outlet in Hollywood, we are beamed into the neglected—and sometimes purposefully avoided—corners of her mind.

The opening poem, “Airport Ritual,” offers a science fiction twist on the anxiety-riddled experience of going through airport security while transgender. An epigraph stating “The following is a true story” conjures the paradox of security scans: Your body is intimately scrutinized while you’re told it’s not personal. “An anomaly is spotted. A woman is taken aside.” Then a TSA agent informs the traveler that she will need to touch her. When the traveler shares that she is transgender—“unsure if she means this an a warning or an apology”—the poem shifts register into absurdism: “the thing in her pants that set the sensors off suddenly expands” and keeps expanding to fill the terminal, the airport, the city of Irvine, until the military is called in.

By invoking facticity before bursting into the mythic, Espinoza teases and subverts cisgender expectations of what a trans narrative should do. The poem’s epigraph signals a common complaint made by trans people about trans literature: As transgender writers gain relative prominence, often the books that sell the best are the ones that cater to a cisgender audience. Whether that means work that flattens transition into an “it gets better” narrative or work that is overly expository to the point of redundancy, it is a reality of the publishing industry: Sometimes the only way to achieve a modicum of financial success is to fit one’s work into a preexisting box, one constructed by the institutions of cisness.

Reading “Airport Ritual” as a trans person, I feel deeply the truthfulness of this story—the dread and anxiety that arise from this kind of interface with the state. In the poem, while pundits discuss the benefits of forcing trans people into detention facilities,

            The woman at the center of the plasma or whatever-the-fuck-it-is
            just wants someone to say one thing to her
            that doesn’t feel like kite string wrapped around an open wound
            in a warm, strong wind. But it doesn’t happen.

Through this play between literalness and absurdism, Espinoza flips the cultural script that says trans people are delusional and transition is science fiction, instead casting the cisgender state as the true site of hysteria. While cis society turns up the dial on fascism, the woman at the center of the poem is simply trying to live.

One of the most compelling aspects of the collection is the way it portrays transition as transcendently positive at the same time as it is traumatizing. A common trope of trans cultural production is the idea of transition as linear. In this formation, one’s life before transition is rife with confusion and anguish but through transitioning the pain of daily existence is relieved; one becomes stronger, life becomes better. This is not untrue, and Espinoza’s work highlights how transitioning is a way of getting off autopilot and pursuing embodiment on one’s own terms. In “The Present,” Espinoza describes the dissociation of closeted life:

For a lifetime, sensation was
a single thread
in my wardrobe of pain.

It is a metaphor more easily grasped in the reverse: pain as a single thread in the wardrobe of sensation. Through this inversion Espinoza deftly shows how dysphoria can warp and narrow experience and lead to self-alienation. As the poems in this collection express, to transition is to leap into feeling more.

Yet as Espinoza’s speaker becomes more connected to herself and to her life, she also registers the pain that has surrounded her—she can no longer dissociate through it. Espinoza’s attention to the family as a site of violence is particularly affecting. In “To My Parents,” she writes, “I was the mantle above the fireplace, the one that held our portrait. // I was the frame around the photograph, but not the photograph.” Being a closeted trans person can feel like being the one holding it all together while living as a background fixture in your own life. The speaker’s religiously inflected childhood trauma, her youth spent hiding and self-numbing, shape the psychic landscape years after she has left home, come out, and her mother’s gotten a “trans ally tattoo.” In this way, transition can make life feel harder when you are experiencing the pain your mind has protected you from—as Espinoza writes in the resplendent “Return to Light,” trauma “reminds you to forget its presence.” I Don’t Want to Be Understood posits that through this remembering and daily survival, we can do more than find ourselves: If we are lucky, we can create ourselves.

Poetry Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2024-2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

Estelle Meaning Star

Sarah Rosenthal
Chax Press ($21)

by Mary Burger

The pages in Sarah Rosenthal’s Estelle Meaning Star are dun-colored, earthen. The text is collaged, like a ransom note; individual words and letters appear cut from a manuscript and reassembled into short, irregular lines, without punctuation. A slender work, compressed to a potent distillate, the book begins with a procession of women who cradle wounded animals, “walking along / pacific rim”—a ritualized enactment of grief, but also of tender care and nurturance.

The Pacific Rim is not a single place but the nearly ten-thousand-mile perimeter of the world’s largest sea—the seismic, volcanic edge of the expanse that divides (and connects) east and west, water and land. The women’s walk along this edge resembles ancient funeral ceremonies, such as the procession across the Nile River to the temple of the female pharaoh Hatshepsut or the ceremonial journey down the Avon to the monumental tomb site at Stonehenge, each enacting the passage from life to death. It also brings to mind a post-apocalyptic scene from N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, which finds imperiled survivors in a barren, ruined world trying to save their injured kin, or at least to honor their dead, as they flee from further cataclysm.

Rosenthal has written elsewhere that she composed Estelle Meaning Star from cut-ups of dreams she recorded while going through cancer treatment. The traces of her personal experience are sublimated and reconfigured in this work, where ritual and ceremony face down the forces of pain and grief. The origin of those forces isn’t explicitly named here; rather, we’re given hints of a post-industrial urban dystopia laden with passive consumerism, invasive surveillance, callous wealth:

lethargic
TV-watching
…………………………………..
is a camera
catching me
…………………………………..
bulging leather wallets

Children exist here seemingly just to be disciplined:

order stops kids
wandering through hallways

At times, the menace in this world even betrays a resemblance to the spread of a cancer:

incision squeeze
bitter pellets
from watery pink
tissue

Yet this isn’t a story of the irreversible passage from life to death. There are acts of resistance, pointed and defiant:

a jittery revolutionary
posting messages

More fundamentally, the suffering endured here enacts a transformation. The poem’s speaker—and by extension those she addresses, those who are with her—emerge in a new form, “another self / positioning.” The speaker gives a name to this self, which is not only her own self, but the collective selves of shared experience and survival:

my            name is Estelle I turn
on my center
…………………………………..
                               all names are
different versions of the word star
…………………………………..
try         the word star
provisionally she
who        all of us

This pivoting around the word star recurs throughout the book, an act of affirmation that connects the speaker and those around her to the primal forces of light and energy and regeneration, forces that seemingly withstand even the destruction that mars the poem’s world. This is not to say that suffering and death are erased, for the procession of women with their wounded bundles continues:

they carry mangled
animals to the far
edge put
the creatures to rest

But the water’s edge, the “pacific rim,” is also a place of transformation; the water accepts the dead as if reabsorbing them into the cycle of life. And the women’s attention and mourning are essential to this cycle—the dead don’t return themselves to the sea, but must be carried there. This relationship between individual lives and the collective is at the complex core of this work. In the concentrated potency of Estelle Meaning Star, Estelle survives and reconfigures her name and her self through the recognition that she is one in a vast world, not just of shared suffering, but of shared life,

twinkling with

Poetry Reviews

Worn Smooth between Devourings

Lauren Camp
NYQ Books ($18.95)

by Tiffany Troy

Like the animals that follow the order of nature, humans in Lauren Camp’s latest poetry collection, Worn Smooth between Devourings, follow the order of capitalism—thus, the speaker pays the mortgage “on the trees” and bakes muffins “in the middle of a great / battle we’re having with disappointment.” Readers might identify with that disappointment, which Camp portrays as the overgrowth of weeds, an anathema to a pristine and well-trimmed Victorian garden—a conflict that mirrors the poet’s inner turmoil about needing to pay the bills while wishing for more fulfillment than is allowed service workers, whose fate has been predetermined. Drawing from her own experience, Camp conveys how an unfamiliar landscape paradoxically allows her to become familiar with herself and adopt new ways of seeing.

Throughout the collection, Camp teaches readers how to “tell time” via closeups of personified objects (the “clock at the church kept to its ticking, its bells / with their sticky, poised hope”), and asks us to consider them in the context of the institutions (the church, the workforce) to which they belong. In doing so, she compels us to take a step back and reevaluate the way in which the landscape embodies our deepest longings (“Now I gaze at this / quarrelsome desert: barren / with discipline”). These objects, like the doll in Elena Ferrente’s novel The Lost Daughter, take on a life of their own, their limbs and appendages an extension of the reader’s. Like Ferrante’s protagonist, a middle aged Neapolitan woman who travels abroad and spends the majority of the time on the beach, Camp’s speaker enjoys an environment with a backdrop for free introspection.

The “devourings” in the book’s title refers to ecological concerns as well as the speaker’s personal struggles. Camp invites the reader to think about the body in motion, to see the way the reader must “leave the calendar” of our busy lives “to find sun familiar again,” contrasting a man’s ominous cat whistle with the coyotes “whistling about their beautiful lives.” Wildlife and the desert terrain recur as motifs throughout the book: As the speaker gets acclimated to the solitude of hearing “no one but pages,” and as “every inch / of our property dried out” in the “long stretch of knuckled nerves” of the landscape near her home, she considers the “absolutely unknown” of climate change’s effects. Camp chooses poetic forms that mimic our acculturation to the “slow mountains”; in “the river” we find “a yearning, a small seep, a lowest door” that we can step through so as to see eye to eye with “the mountains’ ashen edges / and ambition.” The powerful suggestion is that we might behold nature not as a metaphor, but in its reality of wildness.

Poetry Reviews

Into the Good World Again

Max Garland
Holy Cow! Press ($16.95)

by Catherine Jagoe

Poet Max Garland’s quiet and profound fourth collection uses themes of the pandemic—isolation, distance, time, breath—to approach the existential question of how to live with the knowledge that we and everyone we love will die. Into the Good World Again is haunted not just by the “lethal math of plague,” but by the brevity, fragility, and loneliness of human life. “Soon enough,” Garland writes, “the breath of air that shaped itself / into the syllables of my name will be elsewhere / and otherwise.”

In a way, Garland is a contemporary Metaphysical poet, and indeed he alludes to Andrew Marvell while keeping vigil in “What’s Left For You To Say?”:

this slag of earthly light, this world
enough and time to watch the one
you’ve loved the longest raft away.

Alongside his preoccupation with mortality, love, and religion, Garland’s cosmic vision encompasses both the galactic and the infinitesimal, the “300 million worlds / in the habitable zones of sunlike stars” and the “outer shell of the carbon atom.” Grit as a motif resurfaces throughout Into the Good World Again, a grit connected to both the small life forms that often operate in darkness (worms, zebra mussels, crayfish, morels) and to the “grit of the ongoing” in the human world, where change and suffering “may be the Bible.”

Time in this book is elastic and nonlinear, compressed to a mere blink (an image Garland uses in several poems) and infinitely expansive. It is destructive and consoling at once, since it softens jagged shards into “the rounded shape of the shining world.” Each human life contains ongoing pasts—and Garland’s own memories are conjured with extraordinary cinematic clarity in poems such as “Morels,” which uses mushroom imagery to link the shape of the now-dead elms of mid-century America, the atomic bomb’s mushroom cloud, and the “small dark churches” with “convoluted steeples” of morels writhing in a pan.

Garland’s vivid evocations of place and time sometimes resemble those of Dylan Thomas; he works with controlled use of alliteration and judiciously chosen line breaks:

But there was no crossing the river without dead-
dragging home behind—caved-in creekbank,
brick thick Bible, the habit
of hunkering in the presence
of whatever glittered godlike and won.

His style is notable for a lucid musicality that feels hard-won, achieved by distillation. Fittingly, he lives in a city named Eau Claire (“clear water”), and his writing is similarly deep and crystalline, returning again and again to light, water, bedrock. The tone is typically controlled but illuminated now and again by glimpses of gorgeous lyricism: “Kingfishers, like exiled gods, / patrol the varieties of glitter”; “the landscape shook loose like a ribbon”; “light / through the windows was briefly honey.” There are also flashes of humor, as when Garland notices his peers’ aging skin “randomly splotched and riddled / as if scrawled by a drunken cartographer” or the mouse in his trailer who every night “climbed his sink pipe, / and sank his teeth into the soap.”

The closing couplet in “Ocracoke” encapsulates Into the Good World Again: “The deeper the listening, / the richer the world.” We are fortunate indeed that Garland is listening.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Poetry Reviews

Diary of a String

Mark Francis Johnson
Spiral Editions ($18)

by Eric Tyler Benick

“Je est un autre” wrote Rimbaud, famously suggesting the writer’s inherent split as well as the larger aporia of selfhood-as-construct. It’s a split that is reflected in the literary reader: “Many readings are perverse,” Barthes claims in The Pleasure of the Text, “implying a split, a cleavage.” Barthes continues to explain that this cleavage rests in the paradox of literacy to know and unknow simultaneously, to both familiarize and estrange. Yet if reader and writer are doubles, and if both are cleaved not only in their solitary interaction with the material but in their spectral engagement with an other through the material, the bodies of literacy begin to fractal quickly.

In Mark Francis Johnson’s new poetry collection Diary of a String, the lyrical I is obfuscated not only by the relational estrangement housed in the act of writing but also in the quotidian estrangements of labor. In “Woody Excrescences,” Johnson writes, “What all is missing // and I have forgotten my life, / it.” Here, the poet explores a double loss (both missing and forgetting) as well as the inaccessible subsistence of this “it.”

As the Johnson lines quoted above might suggest, the pronouns used in Diary of a String are rhizomatic and irresolute. Just as Rimbaud’s I is an other, the poet’s selves show up in the conglomerate experiences of the outer: “‘They’ is clearly the voice of self-love,” he writes in “Also and Too.” By inverting the impressions of the pronoun, Johnson shows that the “inner life” is actually a breezy dialectic of further estrangements. He closes this section with an attentive apostrophe: “O sensitive parrot aware you / never encountered language.”

It’s a key point: Ecological wonders, subject to destruction by the Anthropocene, are spared its logocentric tragedies. In contrast, we know at this very moment there are microplastics in our oceans, intestines, and genitals, yet the shock of this knowledge is readily absorbed by language rather than by our actions. Johnson’s inverted pronouns and attention to the outer unfold this order of things; the aforementioned parrot is both “aware” and saved by its own illiteracy—not from death, because death is certain, but from suffering the slow termination of value we are daily subjected to, which we render and materialize through language.

Diary of a String is wrought by these questions. In “Date of Last Attack,” Johnson writes that “every hemorrhoid was first an idea,” which brilliantly takes the material effect of stress and strain and dematerializes it. We are no longer talking about the hard facts of the body but about the imperious design of language to impersonate experience. If Stein’s “rose is a rose is a rose” tautology works to unify word and object, Johnson’s ideated hemorrhoid exploits a more painful aspect to the realization that reality inheres in naming: Language is neither empirical nor consistent, and yet our understanding depends on it. The section ends with another shift to the exterior: “Take new little // fishes, destitute upon arrival no / recollection of offense. O fishes! // your use is to teach us / a fish is better off never / encountering its troubles.”

Interestingly, in this context “destitution” would appear to be more of an asset than a lack. The fish’s instructive value is expressed by its freedom from language, which constitutes a paradox: The fish is illiterate yet elocutes a model existence through that illiteracy. Note also how the notion of “encounter” is rooted in logocentric failure. Would many of us even notice the hemorrhoid without its semiotics, or does their very creation offer us access to an interiority that the hemorrhoid itself is entirely estranged from (leaving aside the question of whether the hemorrhoid is separate from “us”)?

Poet Ted Rees says that Johnson’s collection contains “the palpable sickness of the plaintive.” Yes, and worse, this sickness resists clear diagnosis. It would be easy to launch a polemic against the sickness of global capitalism in light of its demands on the body, its egregious contributions to war, genocide, and climate change, its molecular infections of commodity, etc.—but we would also be fabulizing a convenient bogeyman. Still, no part of the “world” is untouched by this illness, which at times feels moribund. If Édouard Glissant is correct to say that “every poetics is a palliative for eternity,” then might we see Johnson’s poems as addressing these miasmic illnesses of modernity, a mode by which to make sense of subjugation, exploitation, and destruction? Aren’t we who reject the frameworks of capitalism forced into some kind of palliative care against the terminal diagnosis of its forces? If the Industrial Revolution marked the decline of the sublime, how might we subvert the mechanized and colonized systems of our era to nurture all that it has taken from us?

Diary of a String offers constructive ways to consider these questions. Take the poem “One Hot Afternoon”:

Very far from
day and night

due to wind? And the next “morning” I
-a spontaneous production of the earth

;no memory
disputes this-

am requesting a transfer. It’s given,
I speedily perish,

the
spontaneous productions of the earth get rarer.

Even while shattering the spatiotemporal, Johnson still cannot shed the language of labor, a language that continuously haunts his poems. His speaker is fully uprooted as a “spontaneous production of the earth” forced into the nihilism of commerce, where even the permission to die must be sought from some arbitrary superior. This final line—one of the most affecting in the book—is our diagnostic moment, our chance to reckon with the forced obsolescence of the sublime. One might recall William Carlos Williams’s observation “The pure products of America go crazy”; they certainly have, and they are no longer pure but beaten to shit by we who are also daily beaten to shit, who in order to be beaten slightly less must beat others to shit, until absolutely no part of us (and by us, I mean everything) resembles its natural state. There is no option of return, which anyway would present its own ethical problems.

So yes, “the / spontaneous productions of the earth get rarer,” and they will continue to do so until our collective illness is no longer tenable, our palliative efforts futile—until, as Williams’s “To Elsie” portends, there is “No one / to witness / and adjust, no one to drive the car.” Meanwhile, books like Diary of a String make a laudable effort to focus our attention and our will on this dilemma.

Poetry Reviews