Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson

Brian Matta’s superbly inventive Stuck, Stutter, Persist is like stepping into a room only to have a secret door open, revealing an entity who will communicate with you, maybe bonding with you forever and ever. This entity is expressed as a stutter, but is the inexplicable making itself known. What is signified by a glitch, a pause, a repetition, or an echo is really something very different. But what?

In the poem, “Check out that breech” the main character is the stutter (sound) “—ch” and it is heard throughout in a list of material items; “chest . . . brunch . . . chapel” which seem ordinary and unsuspecting but invoke a stutter near the end of the poem. The stutter asserts itself here and in each poem in this marvelous and tantalizing book, not as “—ch” but as a different stutter sound in each poem.

These stutters (these poems) slowly become fodder for existential contemplation. Much like the world Gregor in Kafka’s novella, The Metamorphosis, experiences, we see that this world also needs no introduction once you start reading. The stutter does persist to draw out and slow down the experience of dramatic life events and serves to underscore and even lead the poems away from simple explanation.

When I first began reading Stuck, Stutter, Persist, I was intrigued because it seemed weird and a sort of strange homage to anger or patience or both. But it is much different because it is masterfully poetic in its unblinking regard of the parts of life which fly by so fast that only a stutter can catch bits of them before they are lost.

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Stuck, Stutter, Persist by Brian Matta. Black Centipede Press, 2019.

Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson’s first book of poems is Mezzanine. Anderson was the poetry editor of Big Talk, a free publication in the early 1980s featuring Pacific Northwest punk bands. She has a poem forthcoming in Sleet Magazine’s Winter Issue, “The Inside Edition II” and Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast, Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, will be published by Finishing Line Press in 2021. Her recent work can be found in Calibanonline, Gnashing Teeth, Lily Poetry Review, Mojave River Review, NewPages What Am I Reading?, Panoply, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Porter Gulch Review.

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Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson

Witness.

Fred Marchant views the inexplicable and gives us the air it breathed in his poems in Said Not Said. I have been looking at this book, reading it, studying with Marchant, and looking at it again for the past three years. Most of that time I worked as a graveyard-shift custodian cleaning university buildings. Now, I live at my parents’ and take care of the both of them during the days of the pandemic. What Marchant sees in his life is revealed in this book. He sees what is not fair. He sees reality but events he cannot control. Here we are in 2020: sitting ducks. Marchant’s poems get into the feeling of this but also access the profound stability of peace and understanding. In “Fennel” he writes:

At the end maybe you were thinking
of Whitman and his claim that dying
was luckier than we had supposed.
Or not. Or not. Here is the bee . . .

Marchant shows us that nature with a capital N intercedes, maybe not to change the course of events he witnesses, but to carry an event to another place, a different emotion. Continue reading “Witness. Vulnerable. Mystery.”

Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson

Rereading The Intangibles by Elaine Equi, during the pandemic, it suddenly reads like a meditation, yet it was published “before” in 2019. Well, it matches the feeling of ennui of the pandemic, police brutality, and the more overarching panic of the climate crisis. This is also true of a lot of poetry I read now, Because of my state of mind, and I am sure others would agree (desperate/bored/searching/hopeful/raw/terrorized), we are also mesmerized by poetry and what poets have to say.

What Equi has to say in The Intangibles is as straightforward as she’s always been. From her titular poem: “Prove you’re not a robot / Answer the question: / What color is the silver basket?”

Her poems are directed outwards but also fold endlessly in on themselves. They are playful in their sense of what it feels like to be confined, in quarantine, yes, and even before the quarantine period we are currently in even happened. From her poem “Faces” we see ourselves and others in a bleak, yet hopeful way: “I love to watch / the dough of faces / flower.”

This book slays with amazing titles. Here are some:  “Deep In The Rectangular Forest,” “Ode To Weird,” “Ghosts and Fashion,” “Home On The Range” (okay, not such a weird title, but a very exquisite and wonderful poem), “Granular Time/Granular Distance,” and “Looking Out The Window In A Novel.”

Each of these poems blossoms into a novel (and not a virus).

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The Intangibles by Elaine Equi. Coffee House Press, 2019.

Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson’s first book of poems is Mezzanine, from Finishing Line Press, 2019. She also has work forthcoming in Sleet, and another book from Finishing Line Press. She lives in Oregon.

Guest Post by Lynn Levin

Poet and writer Chris Bullard is blessed, or maybe tormented, with a brilliant and surrealistic muse. In his new chapbook Continued, Bullard graces us with a comedy of lost souls and a range of humorously morbid imaginings.

The poet delivers his meditations and perturbations in a range of quirky and hybridized forms perfectly paired to the content. The prose poem “Cartoon” satirizes a New Yorker-type cartoon of a person stranded on a desert island. And if being shipwrecked were not bad enough, the cartoonist draws himself a hole and plummets through it into the sea. In the flash fiction piece “Miracle,” a man runs over a herd of migrating abalones as he drives to a job interview. He hides this awful secret from his wife who is sympathetic to the mollusks and later turns into an abalone himself, much to his delight. Bullard’s humor is so desperate that it becomes hilarious. I laughed aloud at his crossword puzzle poem “Down,” the word “down” evoking both the direction of the crossword clues and the speaker’s mood. Sample clues include “4. A slipping away of consciousness” and “9. The phenomenon of chaos.”

The list form is one of Bullard’s favorites. “More Prompts for the Writer” is a send-up of workshop exercises, and each evokes the tormented mindset of the instructor. Number 13 invites the writers to “Imagine a car, a ship, a flying saucer, anything for chrissakes, taking you away from here forever.” Some of the pieces in Continued are more morbid, some more hilariously absurd. I often found myself laughing aloud at the author’s deconstructions of normalcy and the self. I could go on tantalizing you with snippets of Bullard’s work, but I think you should explore these comic and disturbing poems for yourself.

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Continued by Chris Bullard. Grey Book Press, July 2020.

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

Guest Post by Emily Cinquemani

Megan Fernandes’ collection Good Boys takes a fresh and brilliant look at the anxieties and violence of our world, as well as the stories we create to accept them. These poems are both vast and personal. In them, I ran in the suburbs, visited Paris, and imagined what I would miss about the earth. Fernandes’ speaker is both vulnerable and bold. She gleans revelation from each new experience, including tarot readings, goat miscarriages, and knocking on the metal of an airplane before taking flight.

In this collection, mythology is an intimate part of the present moment. The speaker imagines herself stuck between Scylla and Charybdis and hears Virgil sing in her ribcage. We are asked to look at our own stories critically: what narratives do we have of our reality, and which of them are true? Which of them are harmful? Fernandes recognizes the stories we condone while unweaving them, and she does so with precision. She writes, “Only white people // can imagine a past / that was better // than now.” In the poem “Regret is a Blue Dive,” the speaker insists, “Things that are brave are often painful,” and wrestles with the possibility of being alone. These poems have an insistent, challenging, and beautiful honesty. They ask us to face uncertainty and let it linger, rather than running away.

Fernandes’ work also gives language to experiences I have previously been unable to name. For example, in her poem “Fabric in Tribeca,” her speaker refers to her sadness as “very adult” because it “will not make a scene” and asks, “Who makes curtains to give their sadness a perimeter?” Fernandes writes that, on earth, “everything is a portrait of gravity.” In every poem, I discovered something new or rediscovered something familiar. I am grateful for Fernandes’ voice and for the company these poems afford me as I move through the world.

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Good Boys by Megan Fernandes. Tin House, February 2020.

Reviewer bio: Emily Cinquemani’s poetry is forthcoming or has recently appeared in Ploughshares, Colorado Review, 32 Poems, and Indiana Review. She is a poetry editor for The Adroit Journal. 

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