Facts + Figures

by Rob Carney
(Hoot n Waddle, 2020)

Reviewed by Diane Raptosh

Revamping Creation's Calculus: A Review of Rob Carney's Facts + Figures

In this particularly rough patch of American anti-factual post-reality, it is heartening—if not the keenest form of bliss—to come across a poetry collection such as Rob Carney’s Facts + Figures. We all know those lines from William Carlos Williams: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” So, what is found there, in the poetry? In Carney’s case, a first-rate listening, a strain of gentle prophecy, a full-on process of myth making. Moreover, all of this is true, the poet himself announces in “Fact 1,” the book’s opening poem. And frankly, thankfully, it is.

Divided into five sections, the book traverses earth, ocean, and sky, dealing in the fins and wings of this world while highlighting the scope of what awaits, of what could be. The first section of the book, “Thirteen Facts,” comes in the form of prose poems spun from a voice both humble and wise: “I know what I’m talking about: lightning strikes are memory—sometimes sharp enough to sheer off branches—and rolling clouds are bison.” The poem “Fact 10” exemplifies the section’s leitmotif: the fragile dance between creation and destruction. Here is that poem in its entirety: “Now that orchard is a golf course. Money always wants a water view. If you’re ever there, putting on third green, that’s where we were.” Some of the these “facts” get broken into different parts, splintered into monostich: “No love means no Creation Story.” Or split into a single word against the page-scape, thus: 

    Logging.

         ~

The main heartbeat of the book drums out the difficulties of living in a world insufficiently buoyed by ethics, empathy, and awareness of beauty—the stuff Carney’s work boasts in super abundance. Such a dearth-based society has surely lost its way, the book suggests, and the arc of its poems aims to inform and reconceive, through drafting new, more compassionate calculi. In section II, “13 Figures,” the poem “21st-Century Math Exam” (by my reckoning, one of the strongest pieces in the collection), grapples with, among other things, “7 Payday Cash-Advance Lenders and a handful of stations for Auto-Emissions Inspections, / x   no doctor’s office, no shoe store, nowhere to swim, / + all the neighborhood housing is rental, / – I.C.E. keeps taking people.” Even so, the creator-fervor buried in these words—indeed, some of the later poems’ robust whimsicality—serves to ease our collective despair. Take these lines from one of several fourteeners in section two:

    After They Resurrect the Mastodon,

    I hope I win a golden ticket

    ‘cause rides are awesome, but who likes waiting in line?

    Imagine the view from atop its shoulders—

    all the way to the parking lot,

    And eye to eye with the mastodon balloons

    that pretty vendor is selling.

    In a former life, she was a lifeguard

    but dropped that to be a part of history.

    I want that too, 

    my name below a photograph

    titled “Man as Ice-Age Astronaut.”

The book features sustained figurations of childhood memories and themes, none of which, the poet admits, “comes with citation, of course, / and I’ve had to fill in most of it myself.” Midway through the book, the poet finds the homework of a boy named Jesús Valenzuela. This particular series of poems rings with an intimate, disarming lyricism: “But why was your backpack scattered in my yard? / And where’d you go?” Fueled by wonder, amusement, and dismay, these poems do the difficult work of hearing what is real and making the saying look easy:

    I don’t know where you’ve gone, Jesús,

    but I hope wherever it is

    you get to be a kid,

    and someone is showing you which dot is Mars.

    My own son says he wants to go there,

    be an astronaut.

    He doesn’t know it’s a one-way trip,

    an empty rock without Christmas trees,

    and he’d walk eight years without seeing a river or cat.

The poems in Facts + Figures come to us in varied modes and formations (the blue jay’s Screek!, the “green scents carried from the north”), at myriad velocities (the fox’s zigzag, the bear cub’s future: too soon, too soon), and in a variety of attitudes (“Because Summer Has Fourteen Kinds of Orange,” “It Only Looks Like Leaving to Someone Standing Still,” and “Not Your Olden-Days Wolf[!]”). Even so, the book reads like a whole note struck and held, start to finish—each poem formed, in the poet’s own words, by “the shape of possibilities.”

Diane Raptosh’s fourth book of poetry, American Amnesiac (Etruscan Press), was longlisted for the 2013 National Book Award and was a finalist for the Housatonic Book Award. The recipient of three fellowships in literature from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, she served as the Boise Poet Laureate (2013) as well as the Idaho Writer-in-Residence (2013–2016). In 2018 she won the Idaho Governor’s Arts Award in Excellence. A highly active ambassador for poetry, she has given poetry workshops everywhere from riverbanks to maximum security prisons. She teaches literature and creative writing and co-directs the program in Criminal Justice/Prison Studies at the College of Idaho. Her sixth book, Dear Z: The Zygote Epistles, was published by Etruscan press in July 2020. DianeRaptosh.com 

Child Ward of the Commonwealth

by Eileen Cleary
(Main Street Rag, 2019)

Reviewed by Christine Jones

How to tell the truth when the truth hurts? How to open a wound that’s been scabbed over? Eileen Cleary, author of Child Ward of the Commonwealth, knows. In her debut, autobiographical collection of poetry, she tears at the wounds and traumas of being a child ward of the state.  

It is important, as humans, to feel another’s pain so we may understand the universal connection we share. But it’s also necessary, like a good cry, to share in the relief. Child Ward of the Commonwealth is this poet’s relief.  

She shares with her readers some of her bleakest moments, such as when she recalls hiding under a table in “On What to Forget” while her sister was caught in flames:

Start out four years old

under a table.

A silent movie,

your brother’s legs

rushing past and then,

the afghan he uses to smother

your sister’s flames.

Melting skin in sheets hangs

….

Grow older, grow smaller

because you did nothing, you

did nothing but hide, […]

While doubt and guilt resonate throughout, Cleary thankfully trusts her readers enough to include these devastating times, allowing us to help carry her pain like a dead baby. The clarity with which Cleary writes tells us she understands the sacredness of sorrow and fear. Her stark cinematic imagery forces the reader’s attention to see, really see, what it must be like to feel such loss. She brings us to the scene of when she was taken away in “When the Social Worker Took Me”:

Mom wears a sundress in December,

rocks herself to sleep. I watch…

…poke holes in my tights, pull snarls

from my hair, toss and catch

a puppy on the stairs—

We hear the confusion further on in the poem with the question, “are they scared / by the poor?” and her wondering why the neighbors stay “shut behind their doors,” call her “feral.” 

In other poems, we’re able to walk with her to school, following the “cloud-breaths” to feel the chill through the “double thin shirts,” to slurp noodles “straight from the pan,” leaving the reader, too, hungry for more.

Fortunately, Cleary continues to feed her reader extraordinary images throughout the book. “A sack dress, its jute thread emptied of potatoes,” or five kids stuffed in the backseat of the car “like boots / into bulging luggage.” In “Foster Child” we see her left to “stuff liverwurst through porch slats.” In this poem, we also learn the author lived in multiple homes, shared multiple names. Now, as an adult, it’s obvious she’s found her home in poetry. Steadfast in her writing, she is concise, careful not to take up too much room—an economy it seems she learned being a ward of the state. 

As a reader, it’s difficult not to become attached to the little girl, especially when you read of her yearning in “First Germantown Summer Without My Mother”:

Crisscross applesauce at the lawn’s edge

I want to feel her core, to hold her

soft dough of her. Bring her.

Dear God, let her recognize

me, her littlest one, […]

Yet, this girl, while timid and insecure, is anything but weak, as illustrated in this excerpt from “Sea Wings”:

My shoulder

flint melts to feathers,

myself into myself.

  

Despite the sadness that’s present throughout, there’s a confidence in Cleary’s craft that is admirable. This is evident in her trilogy of “Child Ward of the Commonwealth” poems—“The Removal,” “The Living Through,” and “The After”—which serve to provide subtle section breaks to the collection’s chronology and illustrate the dynamic voice that Cleary sustains. This is also observed in her series of “Jane Doe” poems, taking on the persona of a girl without an identity. The repetitiveness of these titles anchors the reader and provides safeholds amidst the disturbing content that follows.  Her use of the persona poem is apt, as in “Come Back Jane Doe,” where the desire to forgive is clear:

into that sky in which some small plane has written Marry Me

above Missing Child posters plastering the Equinox.

Jane, forgive us. Come home.

There’s comfort, too, in her lyricism, often because of her prosody and rhythm. They are, however, so subtle you might miss them, hiding within the disturbing scenes, such as this one from  “Jane Doe Becomes That Which Surrounds Her”:

If found in the grasslands or the wild,

her given name’s as blameless as the skies.

She’s the bluest iris if she dies with child.

If no family claims or tries to find

her afterwards, the cypress names her kin.

If she’ll never grow to woman, she stems

from scented pine and soft wood resin.

No matter her address, no wren condemns

her or the carefree yarrow where she lies.

Or in the mushed sounds of “Hurricane Provisions” that create a sense of togetherness:

Me and my little sister

    out in a flood,

to buy food with nickels Dad

     missed in his rummage

through the couch to buy his gin.

Or here, in “Leenie’s Ginny Doll Speaks,” where her choice of mixing hard with soft vowels allows space to feel both the heaviness of despair and the lightness of hope.

God calls me by name

Just under my paint-brushed hair.

A refugee from the state of empty air.

Though quiet in voice, this verse calls attention to the forlorn, the neglected, and the abused, but also to the survivor. This voice has been silent for too long and is ready to be heard. Resilience resonates on every page. The reader is taken from that scared child hiding under a table, to the hopeful little girl in “Dear Mummy” asking her mother to come get her, to the woman who has become a hospice nurse helping others process loss in “Rounds.”

Child Ward of the Commonwealth will haunt the reader with its composed and graceful spirit. Cleary had no control over being taken away as a child and placed in foster care, but these poems, now, are hers and no one can take them away. Fortunately for us, this poet is here to stay.

If Mother Braids a Waterfall

by Dayna Patterson
(Signature Books, 2020)

Reviewed by Star Coulbrooke

A poet’s vocabulary is more than a tool, more than personality. Its origin and culmination are familial and cultural. Dayna Patterson grew up in a bookstore, a devout reader, a Mormon girl of polygamous ancestry who served a mission for her church and who was thirty years old when her mother came out to her.

It slips from your mouth, Mom,

hits, finally, in the clothing store,

one seismic word—

bisexual.

Although her mother’s truth is vital to this collection because it leads, as Dayna says in her virtual book launch on May 23, 2020, to her own “de-conversion from Mormonism,” only two poems of 52 in the book are for and about her mother. They are enough. The plain speech of “Revision” (above and below) lays out a daughter’s confusion and sorrow:

Thirty years of Sunday lessons learned,

rules for heaven, hell,

made me a person you couldn’t tell.

“Revision” describes the coming out as an “earthquake,” with “whole mountains / made low.” In the next poem, “Dear Mom,” vocabulary builds and the mountain metaphor contracts to a musty cave, wherein a clawed beast avoids the bleak, white season of not yet knowing.

December lady, the day you came out to me I was in my 

hibernacle, so comfortable in the warm smell of my own 

pelt and the cave’s dry envelope where I slept in a ball.  

Teeth and claws bared, the “startled” daughter-beast does not want to hear the “news,” but her mother “took me by the paw,” taught her daughter “to forage / for winterberry,” taught her about pain and compassion and forgiveness. “I took off my thick coat, felt cold’s blow, what you’d borne these / hush-mouth years,” and knew “no need to devour your heart.”

“Hibernacle” seems to be a melding of the words “hibernate” and “tabernacle,” both steeped in cultural meaning. Many words in this volume seem as though they might be coined from the author’s trove of words and concepts, but look them up. The most interesting and mysterious are real artifacts from early Mormon history, such as the architectural terms, “hunky-punks,” “oubliette,” “claire-voie,” or terms from Star Trek, such as “Betazoid empathic powers” or “Pon Farr,” the Vulcan time of mating, veiled in mystery and secrecy, much like Mormon temple rituals.

Ritual is a recurring element in the collection, as are the earthly elements of Mormon culture. Precious metals and everyday minerals are as varied as diamonds to motes of dust or golden nuggets to salt crystals. In the first poem of the book, “The Mormons are coming,” ancestors “donated their / china for crushing to make the temple’s stucco sparkle.” They “pass silver plates of torn / Wonder Bread.” Or “they arrange a / room of plinths with the bronze busts of their prophets.”

Ancestors are as prevalent in the poems as minerals, some of them recurring in a series of letters from the author, others appearing only once, but with lasting impressions. In “Contrails,” a deceased grandfather causes Dayna (the author is the speaker in many of these poems) to ask “What is the truth?” She speculates on the idea of a “gentle, pearlescent heaven” that pretends to “soften thoughts of oblivion.” She wonders if elements of her grandfather might somehow remain, “leave / pieces in our memories like glowing stones?”

The “glowing stones” call to mind the Urim and Thummim, said to be ancient seer stones through which Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon. They recur later in the book, in the culturally and historically expansive poem, “Former Mormons Catechize Their Kids,” with “Joseph Smith peering into a dark hat at the / peep stone, words floating up to his eyes in / phosphorescing light.” 

Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum Smith get death masks in the book, and Brigham Young, another early prophet of the church, is named only in reference to a chronological list of his 55 wives. The real punch in the collection is not its rightful dressing-down of a strong religious patriarchy, but its rebellious matriarchal revelry in regard to the “Heavenly Mother,” of whom Mormon prophets say their members must not speak because she is “too sacred.” This rebellion begins with poems of reverence toward her pioneer grandmother, “first kin to convert.”

In “Dear Ellen, 1852,” Dayna imagines trying on her four-great grandmother’s essence by trying on her clothes. 

I know

my feet wouldn’t fit your winter 

shoes, my waist would burst

your laces. Still,

I slip on your secondhand cotton,

whalebone,

          shoehorn into your leather.

Imagining her grandmother’s life means imagining why she would convert to a church that asked her to travel far from her home country. With “better marriage prospects” and the promise of no more “whiskey prints on your wrist,” along with “golden plates,” “and the spillway of heaven,” Dayna asks, “what part of you could resist?”

In “Dear Ellen, 1855,” the impact of pioneer life leads to more questions about Grandmother Ellen from Dayna, whose middle name is Ellen. 

On the clipper ship Charles Buck

I wonder if you carried a spider

in a walnut shell for luck, or if your new faith

was enough.

…

Did you keep your children

close, below deck, sewing tents

and wagon covers for the trek?

At least you and yours were whole—

until Mary Ann tumbled from the wagon.

The oxen pulled the first wheel

over her chest, puncturing lung,

the hind wheel over her jaw, shattering bone.

Did her disfigured face make you ask,

What are you up to, God

Almighty?

Questioning the faith in which Dayna Ellen spent the first three decades of her life, has given rise to a book rich with doubt, resolve, and praise. The Heavenly Mother, of whom Dayna was forbidden to speak, is now named “Eloher,” a feminine god. She is “Mother,” who “has a Degree in Exterior Design,” and she is “a shrine,” “a book,” “the One and Only,” who 

Braids a Waterfall 

in a country where no one speaks

Her language.

Except for Dayna, whose extensive vocabulary and lyrical narrative dares the mystery and secrecy of a religion she has cast off while it embraces the quirky, sexy, comforting, and exasperating culture in which she still quite happily belongs. 

As she told attendees at the book launch, she began writing poetry in earnest as a young Mormon wife, when she and her husband could not conceive a child. But she did not write as therapy (and they did eventually have children), even when they left the church together. Through it all, she says, she hoped her writing was “elevated to the moment of art.” Oh, yes. Every page, every line.

The Davids Inside David
by Sarah Wetzel
(Terrapin Books, 2019)

Reviewed by Deborah Bacharach

Art permeates poetry in Sarah Wetzel’s third book, The Davids Inside David. But if you think that means you are going to get oversized marble statues, or every depiction of Jesus’ suffering in painstaking detail, you are mistaken. These poems dig in and explode out, seeing artworks from new angles, tangling ancient art with modern life, and finding new wisdom in the interaction.

Wetzel’s poems take place in Italy and Spain, at the edge of the sea, and with people you meet in a bar. But mostly they take place in front of art. In addition to the titular David, St. Bartholomew, St. Thomas, Mary, Eve, and many others confront the speaker with their beauty, boredom, and their complex choices. Wetzel vividly brings those characters and objects to the page, as in “The Marble Fawn and Other Anecdotes of Excess,” where Wetzel writes of “Muscled calves and overworked thighs, neck thick with the / weight of wineskins and ferrying baby goats.” First, she brings what she sees to the page—the muscles. But as she imagines the neck straining under all the wine he carried, her poem becomes a commentary on the excess and sexuality in the art. In “A Case for Resurrection,” Wetzel vividly shows us catacombs, “six vestibules / of ulnas and humerus, hundreds of skulls architected / into arches,” so we can see the bones she sees, but the line actually starts “This might be what Nabokov meant when he said art / is equal parts beauty and pity.” That sentence layers moral weight on to what she describes.

Often, Wetzel finds new meaning in art by weaving in personal and modern-day associations. “In Caravaggio Copying Caravaggio,” the speaker notes:

    The guard beating Christ seems incompetent; he's not putting his back into it.
    Like the middle-aged man who bagged my groceries this morning at Kroger.
    I've just been released from prison, he told me.

Two types of incompetence, the beating and the bagging, form an intersection of art and life, but then they cross back as the bagger's life story makes the reader wonder about the guard, why he holds back. The real world that Wetzel brings to the art encourages a slow, recursive, and rewarding read of her work.
 
Worlds become even more entwined in her poem, “Of Myself a Basilica” when the speaker becomes a cathedral:

                                        my hips
    and buttocks, coarse-crystaled and my waist
    serpentine, circumscribed with mosaics, ribboned
    in gold-layered tesserae.

The dream logic of surrealism that Wenzel uses here, combined with the alliteration of words like “serpentine,” and “circumscribed”—emphasize the image of a person becoming art, the language swirling around the reader like an incantation.

There is a wide spectrum of tones in the voices in these poems—calm, practical, awed, surprised—but there is a wisdom to the speaker in some poems that is particularly effective. Wetzel makes big announcements, “I have to start paying attention,” "There's always confusion about / who to blame,” and "I suppose, I'm terrified too," that come as a surprise in the midst of rich description and yet feel earned. She does this again in "Regarding the Beauty of Cockroaches" (a title I feel plays off the title of the book) where the poem opens with children looking at a box of mummified cockroaches at an art exhibit in a museum. The poem moves from setting, description, and dialogue, to background information about cockroaches and then leaps to the Wallace Stevens quote: "How does one stand / To behold the sublime?” For me, this poem holds so much of what I appreciate in Wetzel's work: grand pronouncements grounded in the real and infused with art.

The Davids Inside David is a well-crafted book. This is true of not just the sections, which have a helpful coherence—a section on divorce, a section on a father—but in the transitions between poems. Wenzel ends one poem with a father on his knees and the next poem starts with a daughter on her knees. Another poem ends “like the face of a first love appearing / in a crowd and then gone” and the next one begins “They are here. All of them.” So, what was lost at the end of the last poem comes back in the next. The transitions create flow and dimensions that leap between the divides.

This book considers silences, family, thoughts on the meaningful life and the creation of empathy, but it does so mostly by examining art’s role in our lives. How do we touch art and how does art enter us? As Wentzel writes in “Like St. Thomas,” “you’ve got to reach your whole hand / into the body.” Wentzel reaches far into the body art, and we all come up richer for it.