Guest Post by Madhuri Palaji

In the Dark, Soft Earth by Frank Watson is a book of poems about love, nature, spirituality, and dreams.

The specialty of the book is the amazing paintings from historic to contemporary presented in it. There are paintings done by Lenoir, Kandinsky, Dali, Somov, and many more. Some poems are inspired by these paintings, though not all.

Each poem is unique and deep. There is a beauty in the way the author has woven the words. I have seen most of the paintings in the book in some art books and exhibitions but when I look at these paintings after reading the poems, I feel like I’m seeing the painting for the first time. The author has brought a whole new meaning and depth to the art. It’s like the author has translated the painting and colors into words.

There is one poem named “Vanished” where the author says:

there was no fish
that day
but even worse
for the fisherman
there was no sea

This made my heart clench, literally. How true, given the kind of world we are living in right now; there is major destruction happening all around and we are left with too little to fix.

In The Dark, Soft Earth has many wonderful poems which I have read again and again because they make so much sense. The magic, love, pain, dreams and hope in the book give a whole new meaning to the way we look at life!

In the Dark, Soft Earth by Frank Watson. Independently Published, July 2020.

Reviewer Bio: Madhuri Palaji is a writer and book reviewer from India. Her book ‘Poems of The Clipped Nightingale’ is available on Kindle. Find her at http://www.theclippednightingale.com/

Guest Post by Preston L. Allen

The poems in Christina Fulton’s exquisite debut collection, To the Man in the Red Suit, are ruminations on a life of the ironic, the beautiful, the poignant, and the bitter-sweet.  Prominent among the memories that are fuel for the fire of these poems are the poet’s childhood in New Jersey and the suicide of her workaholic father.  My favorite poem, an ode called “To My Father’s Confused and Empty Desk,” ends with the perfectly adroit enjambment of lines:

He only came back
to count your rings,

and kiss the scissors

good night.

Sometimes these pretty poems soothe, sometimes they sting, sometimes they fill your mouth with precious stones that you cannot chew but break your teeth on trying.  The poet uses no clichés but masterfully creates them: ‘I saw your lies bend’; ‘That imperfect field / where Jesus / taught the lilies to blush’; ‘You can jiggle / but can you bend?’  Long after you read this book, you will be quoting from it.

To the Man in the Red Suit by Christina Fulton. Rootstock Publishing, May 2020.

Reviewer bio: Preston L. Allen is a recipient of a State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship and author of the novels Jesus Boy, All or Nothing, and Every Boy Should Have a Man. He lives in South Florida.

Guest Post by José Jiménez Vivaldi

Abuse, suicide, abandonment, and enough alcoholism to mimic a Bukowski novel, Chad Abushanab’s The Last Visit narrates his troubled past in a series of seemingly chronological scenes, each depicting the aforementioned themes. With the collection standing as an exploration into the depths of human pain, Abushanab leads the expedition with such introspection that it sets an example of bravery for its readers.

Though a poetry collection, The Last Visit reads like a novel. The pieces are narrative and contain lots of concrete detail. Most of them could stand alone and give the reader an understanding of Abushanab’s story, but to read only one poem is like viewing a complex image from just one angle. The poems tell different stories, and take different forms as Abushanab experiments with a variety of poetic vehicles, such as the ode, the ballad, the ghazal, and the elegy. However, they’re all are connected by their themes, which directly relate to his upbringing, as well as his struggles to cope with the scars of his past as an adult. Therefore, upon reading the collection in a linear manner, the reader develops a three-dimensional perspective of his story and family.

If there’s one message The Last Visit sends to its readers, it’s that the answers to the present can be found in the past, but the future is yours to define. Chad Abushanab did a wonderful job creating such an insightful piece of literature. Not only should writers aspire to shine a light at the darkness within themselves to create material the way he does, but readers should adopt similar methods of self-reflection to aid their personal growth.

The Last Visit by Chad Abushanab. Autumn House Press, March 2019.

Review bio: José Jiménez Vivaldi is part of this year’s graduating class at Loyola University Maryland.

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Guest Post by Kelly Williamson

In her remarkable debut, The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, Molly McCully Brown revisits the history of a state-run institution that sterilized patients without their consent, offering readers the opportunity to confront the dark realities of the eugenics movement. With a documentary approach, Brown bases the poems on the historical evidence she gleans from archival research. Exploring the perspectives of the colony’s caretakers, and patients, Brown pays tribute to an unacknowledged chapter from our nation’s dark history.

This collection serves as evidence of Brown’s curiosity and bravery in facing what she considered unknown and scary. Similarly, it can be an act of discovery for the reader as well. Readers might be alarmed to come across such wreckage that they once failed to notice. However, Brown invites readers to understand, rather than rebuking them for not knowing. Brown’s collection reminds us that poetry builds empathy that can raise the awareness needed to foster change.

Readers may have never heard of the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, a blind room, or known of the sterilizations posed as appendectomies in the state-run institution located in Virginia. Brown’s book allows readers to recognize that this lack of knowledge is a privilege, for the painful history that took life away from innocent girls is a history that must be known. Although much has changed, these poems can encourage us to understand ways in which our current society can do better. While it’s easy for readers to see the title and feel far removed from history, this collection of poems works to close that gap of separation, to use these imagined patients as windows into a haunting past.

The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded by Molly McCully Brown. Persea Books, 2017.

Reviewer bio: Kelly Williamson is a senior at Loyola University Maryland minoring in writing. She has published poems in her school’s literary magazine, Corridors.

Guest Post by Lynn Levin

Maggie Paul’s Scrimshaw gifts us with superbly crafted poems of graceful statement and gentle wisdom. I sense here a soul making peace with the near past and distant past as the speaker recollects mother, father, children, a lover, and others. Paul writes in “Linguistics,” a poem about some unspecified but insurmountable conflict between lovers: “So much goes on beneath / the surface that the tide never washes up.” Conflicts here are discreetly remembered and slantly alluded to. This is an approach I particularly admire as it counters much of the graphic rhetoric of pain we see in poems today.

A water motif runs through many of the poems, referencing ponds, streams, and the sea. There is both delight and melancholy in these poems, and the melancholy glows as burnished gold. Take for example the opening lyric “Trochilidae.” The poem compares a diminished girl to a tiny fragile bird who comes to “bring fire to the world.”

One of my favorite poems in the collection is “Watershed,” a metaphysical poem about the flow of life and time. This prose poem tumbles forth in a rush of figurative language describing the flow of water, which is “fragrant as a season, forthright as a calendar.” Paul has the ideal sense of an ending, landing her poems neither too definitively, nor too ambiguously. In “Looking Back,” a poem about doubt and written in a series of couplets that capture paradoxes and contradictions, she writes, “We thought we came for one thing / but really came for another.” The lyric ends, “And that thing we would have died for? / We’ll not die for it again.” These are poems of wise beauty. Wade in them.

Scrimshaw by Maggie Paul. Hummingbird Press, 2020.

Reviewer bio: Lynn Levin’s most recent book is the poetry collection The Minor Virtues (Ragged Sky, 2020).

Guest Post by Shin Yu Pai

In Page Hill Starzinger’s Vortex Street, the poet explores many different kinds of loss, to resist squandering what is given. In her revisions of complicated grief, she takes up the subjects of unborn children, the ending of fertility, and becoming an orphaned adult after the death of parents. The fleeting life cycle of a mayfly which only endures for 24 hours is held against the cognitive decline of an aging father. In this act of ongoing “rentrayage” or remaking, the poet turns towards locating the quiet harbor where grief can be held—through the senescent body, its memories, and the exterior dwelling places that anchor us to the past.

Vortex Street by Page Hill Starzinger. Barrow Street Press, May 2020.

Reviewer bio: Shin Yu Pai is the author of AUX ARCS, Adamantine, Sightings, and Equivalence. In March 2020, Entre Rios Books published Ensō, a 20-year survey of her work across disciplines. For more info, visit www.shinyupai.com.