Guest Post by Elda Pappadà

Sylvia Plath Poems Chosen by Carol Ann Duffy is a well put together ensemble of Plath’s deeply honest poetry. Her writings were vulnerable and held profound personal thoughts. Reading her poetry, I hear the voice of all women.

As Duffy mentions, Plath wrote confessional poems. She represented women and our challenges. Her voice is the voice we hear but quietly dare not express aloud, but still desperately feel and can never altogether ignore. I especially felt this from her poem “Mirror.” It is troubling and candid: “in me she has drowned a young girl, and in me/ an old woman/ rises . . . .”

She explores many motifs. At times, her poetry can be gripping and sad, but she also captures beautiful flashes and makes light of dark situations like in the poem “Last Words.” She has lines that make you smile because they are intelligently crafted even though the context is nothing to smile about, considering what we know about Plath’s life: “I should sugar and preserve my days like fruit!”

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Sylvia Plath Poems Chosen by Carol Ann Duffy by Sylvia Plath. Faber & Faber, 2012.

Reviewer bio: Elda Pappadà recently self-published her first poetry book, Freedom—about love, loss, and understanding. A book about defining life and giving weight to everything we do. Twitter: @poems_elda.

Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson

Bodwell’s Crown of Wild, with its gorgeous cover of an abstract painting (by the poet’s late father), is an exciting reminder of our own moments of wild abandon and others’ wild abandon gone right/gone wrong.  In “Summertime” we get to read a list of pleasurable freedoms: “. . . swim the length of every pool . . . / . . . French kissing Matt Matera . . . .” later becoming abandoned to the larger universe as this poem closes. What are the answers, this poem seems to be asking. Can anything be held and kept, or is even capturing memories an act of abandon as this very idea is also in survival mode?

I’ve been reading these poems with the cover in my mind. Its brushstrokes seem to be a visual companion to the pain of grief and anxiety of what now overwhelms: forest fires, death and abuse, a madman at the helm.

What does abstract art do but tell a story in a different way, a way that leads to musings and fresh starts? There are no easy answers.

In “Where Rivers And Mountains Remain,” one of the poems in Crown Of Wild paying homage to Kayla Mueller, the captured American woman who was held and died in Syria, we see wishes for Mueller: ” . . . silvery dreams” and ” . . . a crown woven from stars” as gentle acknowledgements and gifts of praise.

What Bodwell constructs in Crown Of Wild are sculptures and sketches and shapes so each poem can express what was unthinkable. Where will the brush go? What color will it pick up as it merges and is dragged through what is already there? What is soothed? Stirred?

These poems do not need explanation, they seem to be saying. They stand alone on their base, on that which protects and extends and illustrates what is “wild” to what is really wild and beyond our imagining. They say here is beauty and the redemption that moonlit/starlit rivers and mountains bring because they remain after all that has happened, is happening.

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Crown Of Wild by Erica Bodwell. Two Sylvias Press, 2020.

Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson has work forthcoming from Loud Coffee Press, Sleet Magazine, and Finishing Line Press.

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Guest Post by Courtney B. Jenkins

As I read Samantha Kolber’s poetry debut, I thought of all the mothers I know and hold dear—close friends, my sister, my own mother; I want to give them this book, share with them this gift of understanding.

I paused as I read to absorb moments of “Whoa,” as Kolber’s words reveal what it meant to her to become Mother. I re-read to assimilate every nuance before passing on to the next vignette. Each feeling evoked felt important. Kolber’s words are powerful draws into her world and, somehow, although I am not a mother—a birth-mother, anyhow—I know these feelings. I suddenly understand the patience I see in the mothers around me—browbeaten and screamed at by tiny versions of themselves—who are somehow able to smile in response and reply with patience and logic to the demands of their offspring. And, I realize, through this breadth of written, recorded emotion: this is love. My eyes teared with the fullness of it. And although I have no literal means of comparison in my own life, I understand. Continue reading “This is Love”

Guest Post by Guinotte Wise

I see where the bookmark is in the closed pages of Ted Kooser’s Red Stilts and realize I’ve been reading faster than I meant to; it’s a new Kooser book and I like to savor the first read. It’s like a dish of something especially good and you want it to last longer than it does. Each poem is a pleasure. Even the epigraph at the start is Kooserian, though it’s a Tolstoy quote from “Father Sergius”: “After he’d walked away, she stood in the yard in starlight, listening to dogs bark, each more faintly as he passed the farms along the road.”

I can see it, hear it, feel it. That’s a summation of Ted Kooser’s poetry. The cover of this newest gem from Copper Canyon Press is a rather entrancing painting of an alley by Don Williams, an oil titled Nebraska City Alley and it, too, echoes Kooser charm and clarity.

Once finished with this, I’ll never be finished; I’ll return to it often. I have a shelf of Ted Kooser poetry and whichever book I pull from it, it takes me quietly away from whatever dissonance the outside world is shoveling at me, and into a gently masterful poem that seems so simple, so connected to everyday things we miss in our confusion.

Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Kooser, for this kid you had in 1939. And thank the world for carving his genius. Simply awesome.

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Red Stilts by Ted Kooser. Copper Canyon Press, 2020.

Reviewer bio: 5-time Pushcart nominee and author of seven books, Guinotte Wise’s poetry and prose have appeared in numerous journals. Some work is at http://www.wisesculpture.com.

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Guest Post by Amber Thompson

I discovered Graeme Gibson’s The Bedside Book of Birds while watching Margaret Atwood: A Word After a Word After a Word is Power. The day after I watched the documentary, my husband and I rescued a pair of near-fledgling doves. This, coupled with the fact that I found Atwood and Gibson’s relationship moving and relatable, convinced me I had to get this work for my husband, a lover of both books and birds.

Online it was selling for much more than the original list price, but at a bookstore a week and a half later, I watched my husband pick up a more reasonably priced copy. I told him a little about the book: that Atwood’s late husband had compiled it and that it was a collection of works on the relationship between birds and humans—in a sense, the awe the former has long inspired in the latter. I also told him I’d been hoping to get it for him and that if he liked the look of it, I still wanted to.

As we drove home, he cracked open the book. I peeked over to see the title of the first piece, a poem: “Night Crow” by Theodore Roethke. When he read it to me, I had the sudden realization that it was a poem I’d been searching for for years. These miraculous-feeling events coalesced into an experience of serendipity that we had not felt in a long time. When we curled into bed that night, he read more of the book aloud to me and we looked together at the beautifully included reproductions of sketches, paintings, and scientific drawings of birds. We rested quietly in the knowledge that we, through our friend Carol, the surviving fledgling, had been touched deeply by the avian world as well.

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The Bedside Book of Birds: An Avian Miscellany by Graeme Gibson. Penguin Random House.

Reviewer bio: Amber Thompson is a Pushcart Prize nominee who recently published her debut poetry chapbook. She can be found at www.amberthompsonwrites.wordpress.com.

Guest Post by Christopher Woods

This year, perhaps like no year before, we are thinking about the concept of home. During the pandemic, most of us are spending much more time at home—in home offices, involved in remote teaching or learning, or simply in quarantine. Sadly, because of the economic collapse, many people are now homeless, and there will be more to follow. This year, more than ever, we are both consciously and subs-consciously considering the meaning and importance of home. We are thinking of safety and shelter. We have always been this way, but now it seems much more immediate and crucial, and even life-saving.

Dwelling by Scott Edward Anderson, delves deeply into this subject in the form of a book-length eco-poem. It began as a reaction to Martin Heidegger’s essay “Building Dwelling Thinking” and, in Anderson’s lyrical writing, took on a book-length life of its own. He asks questions such as “Do we carry home within?” Anderson’s poetic probing explores our place, not only inside a home, but in the larger world that is home to us all.

Ironically, many of us now have more time than ever to consider the concept of home, of refuge. Reading this book, I often stopped to look around the room, then out the window, considering the essential nature of everything. Readers might well find themselves doing the very same thing.

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Dwelling: an ecopoem by Scott Edward Anderson. Shanti Arts Publishing, 2018.

Reviewer bio: Christopher Woods is a writer and photographer who lives in Texas. His photography book for writers, FROM VISION TO TEXT, is forthcoming from Propertius Press. https://www.instagram.com/dreamwood77019/

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Guest Post by Chana Kraus-Friedberg

The current political climate is difficult to write about because so much of it seems to be its own satire. Imagine the most child-like, ludicrous system of logic possible, apply it to world events, and you have government policy in the US. Yet real damage is being done to the United States and the world, and that is certainly not funny. In her recent chapbook, Flatman: and Other Poems of Protest in the Trump Era, Cheryl Caesar brilliantly negotiates the line between satire and anxiety or grief, painting a sinister picture of how childish tendencies become destructive when combined with very adult power.

In the title poem, Caesar starts by imagining the president as a truly flat man in a way that reminds me of the popular kids’ character, Flat Stanley.  She describes the physical consequences of this flatness the way a picture book might. The president’s hair, we are told, is “rolled out in weird shapes, like a child’s / misshapen gingerbread man.” His head is square: “He could set his Diet Coke on it.” Later in the book, a spoof on Kipling’s If describes what happens if one can “fake a 4-F due to “bone spurs,”[ . . . ]  /And never go to war and win your own spurs, /But boast of dodging STDs instead[.]” It’s witty and easy to laugh at, but the laughter is uncomfortable. You read in the way that I think a lot of us are currently living, carrying the knowledge that the underlying joke is dark and uncontrolled and future-consuming. In a real world context, even fantastical flatness has consequences, Caesar reminds us: “[The president] can never cross the dimensional border. / And so he hates us (hate being / the flattening emotion), hates us all. Hates the round world.”

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Flatman: and Other Poems of Protest in the Trump Era by Cheryl Caesar. Thurston Howl Publications, 2020.

Reviewer’s Bio: Chana Kraus-Friedberg is the winner of the 2020 Ritzenhein Award for Emerging Poets. Her first chapbook, Grammars of Hope, will be published in February 2021 (Finishing Line Press). Instagram: @chanakf2020