The Future Wears Camouflage

by Kate Kingston  

(Middle Creek Publishing & Audio, 2025) 

Reviewed by Shelli Rottschafer

A Spanish version of this review is available following the English.

Poet and Spanish-speaking traveler, Katie Kingston begins her latest collection, The Future Wears Camouflage with a foreword-poem, “Portrait of Mexico,”  in which her words are hornets, ready to buzz, sting, and protect her “hive of vowels.”  The speaker experiences synesthesia where one sense combines seemingly unrelated with another sensorial body part. The iris of her eye “smells of cinnamon bark” and her hair grows like a “forest of coriander.”  Kingston’s synesthetic poetry revels in magical realism, where the ordinary is fantastic and everyday magic is evident.  This conjuring of duende, the creative spark from within our internal shadows, inspires her collection. 

Part I: Día de los Muertos

The first of November sets our stage in the poem “Xoxocotlán Cemetery.”  Kingston observes how the townspeople of Oaxaca, México honor their dead. Marigold petals litter the ground and multigenerational families gather at tombstones. Like a mantra brought on by repetition, they sweep the graves of their beloved ancestors. Everyone is there, the street dogs and wandering roosters included. They all pay homage to those who have passed on to the next realm:

Women bleach tombstones

as the adobe wall crumbles.

I enter a twilight of brooms, buckets,

mops and shovels. Tapered flames

outline bouquets of gladiolas….

I sift between headstones by candlelight,

inhaling the incense of copal, careful

not to step on anyone’s loved one.

In a “Woman from Ayotzinapa,” a mourner “carries a basket of colored corn / to the crypt where we wait for dawn.” Kingston leads her reader on a visual path. Her imagery braids her understanding of an American Halloween with this Zapotec celebration venerating ancestors. The matriarchs decorate tombs while troubadours serenade the living and the dead. These ballads tempt the ancestor-ghosts to linger, a taste from their past lives shared like the aroma of pan de los muertos that shared amongst the living.

It is not just those graves adorned in the village that are recognized here, but also those that are hidden. Kingston turns her attention to women who have been silenced. “Protest for the Feminicidios” eulogizes disappeared women. Whether victims of domestic abuse, sex-traffic victims, or campesinas who have come to the big cities looking for work in las maquiladoras, instead of riches, these women have found only tragedy.  

Part II: Carnival of Reeds

The first poem in Part II, “Write this House,” is an ars poetica. It speaks of her writing process and gathers her experiences together. This house and the creative things it contains are a physical and detailed demonstration of her accomplishments. “Voices filter up the chimney fueled by vowels.” Her hope is to, “Fill [this house] with Spanish slipping through rooms, double r’s revving like motorcycles.” Her, “pen [races] across the living room like a thoroughbred.” This house is her altar filled with “portraits and penmanship,” which she offers up in her hand as a prayer to the sky.

The poems that follow “Write this House” recollect what is presumably Kingston’s childhood. They are dotted with memories of white-picket fences, sandbox deserts, and Cowboy and Indian figurines that populate the wild-West Territory of her imagination. Kingston’s “Summertime” explains her tomboy-self as she wore buckskin leggings and holstered a toy six-gun. This “fierce child” matured into a Viet Nam protester during her early adulthood. Decades later she envies that memorable and bygone girl.

Part III: Miraculous Calligraphy of the Bones

Kingston’s final section is ekphrastic. In “Malleable Clay” she builds metaphors around another art form—throwing clay and molding ceramics. Her intent is to find her center, both literally and poetically:

I think. Kick…. I think

Form…. I think bend….

I think glaze…. Focus. Center.

Kingston builds up protective walls. She applies pressure. And in the end:

When she reaches

out to touch the clay her thumbprint

resembles a navel, her fingerprints,

The cloven hooves of deer.

In “Carol Amber” she recalls a friend who is drawn into the depths of dementia. The friend seems as if she is a porcelain doll, set to the side and unable to make her own decisions. Carol Amber is led to a “home,” one where she can bring her dog, her array of specialty crackers she prefers, and the selection of herbal teas that Kingston hopes provide the calm her friend no longer carries.

The titular poem of the collection, “The Future Wears Camouflage,” cloaks the poet on a road trip to the Four Corners area of Colorado. The poem is pebbled with place-markers. These Hansel-and-Gretel points lead Kingston on her journey. Her stopovers are the Sangre de Cristo Mountain Range, the white powder of Wolf Creek, and Alamosa where sand devils spin. Along the road her gaze is met by other-than-human relatives: magpies, pronghorns, and deer. Instead of the plastic toy gun of her youth as told in “Summertime,” her truck is a weapon. She feels this intently as the thump of the road: 

traumatizes  

my thumbs.  

I clench the steering wheel […]

a crumpled disaster of fur

On the highway’s shoulder,

that margin of asphalt 

between a solid line and 

rooted sage.

An uncanny stillness

fills the truck cab

Kingston excuses herself, “I did not hit the deer. The deer ran into my bumper.” Regardless, she mourns like those in Xoxocotlán,  she witnesses how beauty meets death. The “cranberry-stained snow” is the deer’s grave, which disappears with the melt. Its lingering memory marked only upon the page with her tombstone-like poem.

Kingston’s final poem is a eulogy to those people and places that have passed in her life. Her, “Loss: for those who’ve loved” is sensual. The senses reign as thermal waters run down her neck. The texture of moss rises through roadkill ribs. The edges of cracked adobe knife fingertips and punctuate periwinkle sky. Kingston tastes, smells, and hears the names of her people and places that she pines for. This poem acts like a summary of her life, a poetic map of all the places she has been.  

Kingston’s The Future Wears Camouflage is both an epitaph and her testament of lessons gained. May readers learn from their own journey like Kingston demonstrates through her poetry.

The Future Wears Camouflage de Kingston

Poeta y viajera hispanohablante, Kate Kingston comienza su nueva colección de poesía con un prefacio: “Portrait of Mexico,” en la cual sus palabras llenan su boca como avispas, zumbando y protegiendo su nido. La voz narrativa invoca la sinestesia donde un sentido combina supuestamente sin relación con otro parte sensorial de su cuerpo. El iris de su ojo, “huele como canela,” su cabello crece igual como, “un bosque de cilantro.”  Aquí la poesía sensorial de Kingston se entrelace con el realismo mágico, donde lo ordinario es fantástico y lo cotidiano tiene su propia magia. Así el duende, la chispa creativa dentro de nuestro ser íntimo, inspira a esta colección.

Parte I: El día de los Muertos

El primer día de noviembre establece la escena del poema, “Xoxocotlán Cemetery.” Kingston se testigua como los del pueblo honoran a sus muertos. Pétalos de cempasúchiles decoran el suelo y familias multigeneracionales se juntan alrededor de las tumbas de sus difuntos. Como un rito repetido, ellos barren las sepulturas de sus queridos. Todos están allí incluyéndose los perros callejeros y los gallos. Todos se dan homenaje a los que han pasado:

Women bleach tombstones

as the adobe wall crumbles.

I enter a twilight of brooms, buckets,

mops and shovels. Tapered flames

outline bouquets of gladiolas….

I sift between headstones by candlelight,

inhaling the incense of copal, careful

not to step on anyone’s loved one.

En “Woman from Ayotzinapa,” una mujer doliente carga un cesto de maíz colorado hacia la tumba donde los demás esperan para el amanecer. Kingston guía a su lector por este camino. Sus imágenes yuxtaponen símbolos de la feria americana de Halloween con esta celebración zapoteca cual venera a los antepasados. Allí las matriarcas de Ayotzinapa decoran las tumbas mientras los mariachis cantan serenatas para todos presentes. Sus mañanitas tientan las fantasmas, un recuerdo de sus antiguas vidas compartido igual como el sabor del pan de muertos que comparten los vivos.

No solo reconocen estas sepulturas adornadas sino también las tumbas escondidas.  Kingston se atrae su atención en la atrocidad de las mujeres desaparecidas. “Protest for the Feminicidios” crea una voz de denuncia para apoyar a las desaparecidas, las víctimas de abuso doméstico, las víctimas de tráfico sexual, y las campesinas quienes fueron a las ciudades grandes para trabajar en las maquiladoras, pero en vez de la riqueza, ellas encontraron su último destino, la muerte.

Parte II: Carnival of Reeds

El primer poema en la segunda sección, “Write this House” es un tipo de ars poética. Kingston se explica su proceso de escribir y la inspiración que son sus experiencias. Su casa y la creatividad que contiene son detalles físicas de sus acontecimientos. “Sus voces son como un fuego que suben por la chimenea. El lenguaje español corre por las aulas. Los RR sueñan como motocicletas.” En esta casa, el bolígrafo de Kingston “galopea por la sala como si fuera caballo.” Su casa es una obra de arte, llena de auto-retratos los cuales ella se ofrece como una oración hacia el cielo.

Los poemas siguientes recuerdan de la niñez de Kingston. Las memorias son de cercas pintadas blancas, cajas de arena cuales fueron sus desiertos imaginados, y las figurinas de vaqueros e indios que poblaron su sueño del viejo oeste.  

“Summertime” detalle a ella misma como marimacha quien llevaba pantalones de vaqueros y colgaba una pistola de plástica. Eventualmente “esta chica feroz” se maduraba en una mujer joven quien protestaba la guerra Vietnamita. Décadas más tarde ella se envidia de estas memorias distantes y esa niña perdida. 

 

Parte III: Miraculous Calligraphy of the Bones

La última sección de la colección es ekphrastic.  En “Malleable Clay,” sus metáforas detallan la bella arte de la cerámica. Como uno se centra:

I think. Kick…. I think

Form…. I think bend….

I think glaze…. Focus. Center.

Kingston construye sus paredes. Y al final:

When she reaches

out to touch the clay her thumbprint

resembles a navel, her fingerprints,

The cloven hooves of deer.

En “Carol Amber” ella recuerda a una amiga quien se cae en la demencia. Esta amiga, se convierte en una cierta muñeca de cerámica, incapacitada, y sin la habilidad de tomar sus propias decisiones. Carol Amber se retira a una casa de ancianos, pero una donde ella puede traer a su mascota, sus galletas favoritas, y sus tés hierbales que Kingston espere provienen la quietud que afuera en el mundo caótico Carol Amber no pudiera alcanzar.

El poema titular de la colección, “The Future Wears Camouflage” guía el poeta por un viaje de carretera con destino a los cuatro rincones de Colorado. Las líneas son enmarcadas con lugares específicos. Las escalas son las montañas de Sangre de Cristo, los picos nevados de Wolf Creek, y las dunas en Alamosa.  

También ella encuentra otros seres como las urracas, los venados, y los ciervos. En vez de la pistola plástica de su juventud, esta vez su arma inesperada es su camioneta. Se internaliza esto mientras un choque por el camino:

traumatizes 

my thumbs.  

I clench the steering wheel […]

a crumpled disaster of fur

On the highway’s shoulder,

that margin of asphalt 

between a solid line and 

rooted sage.

An uncanny stillness

fills the truck cab

Kingston ofrece excusas para sí misma. “No machuqué al ciervo. El ciervo me machucó.” Ella lamenta al ciervo igual como los zapotecas en el cementerio de Xoxocotlán. Son testigos como la belleza encuentra la muerte. Para ella, el resultado es un desastre de pelos y nieve sangriente. Para ellos, la página donde escribe su poema es una sepultura eternal.

El último poema en la colección es un elogio para las personas y los lugares de su pasado. “Loss: for those who’ve loved” es un verso sensorial. Los sentidos gobiernan mientras los aguas termales corren por su cuello. La textura suave de mugre descompone las costillas del ciervo muerto al lado de la carretera. Un ladrillo quebrado de adobe corta los dedos como un cuchillo mientras penetra el cielo azul. Kingston saborea, huele, y escucha a los nombres de sus seres queridos. Este poema suma su vida. Es un mapa de todos los lugares donde ella ha ido.  

The Future Wears Camouflage es un epitafio y un testimonio de las lecciones de la vida. Se espera que los lectores aprendan de sus jornadas igual como Kingston ha demostrado por su poesía.

Shelli Rottschafer completed her doctorate from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (2005) in Latin American contemporary literature. From 2006 until 2023 Rottschafer taught at a small liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan as a professor of Spanish. She also holds an MFA in creative writing with a concentration in poetry and coursework in nature writing from Western Colorado University (2025).

 

Shelli’s home state is Michigan, yet her wanderlust turns her gaze toward her new querencia within the Mountain West where she lives, loves, and writes in Louisville, Colorado and El Prado, Nuevo México with her partner, photographer Daniel Combs and their Pyrenees-Border Collie rescue. 

 

Discover more of Shelli’s work at: ShelliRottschaferAuthor.com

 

Dream State: A Commonplace Book

by Alana Marie Levinson-Labrosse  

(Unnamed Press, 2025) 

Reviewed by Alan Ali Saeed

Unusually, a useful place to start with this genre-subverting lyric poetry collection is the title.  A commonplace book is traditionally a thinker and writer’s highly personal collection of items of knowledge from books, conversations, experiences and other sources which can be used later to create written texts. The subtitle, a ‘commonplace book’ suggests two meanings. First, that Dream State is both a poetry collection based on Levinson-Labrosse’s time living and working at a university in Iraqi-Kurdistan and a series of translated narratives and memories from named Kurds about Kurdistan. (While Iraqi-Kurdistan was recognised officially in the Iraqi constitution of 2005, it has existed since the 1970s as a de facto, partially autonomous area. The unrecognized Kurdistan is rather more complex to imagine and would include parts of the current states of Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran.) Levinson-Labrosse, however, did more than just teach at a university in Iraqi-Kurdistan, she is highly regarded as a translator of Kurdish to English. She co-translated Farhad Pirbal’s The Potato Eaters and she helped found the Kashkul center, an important Kurdish arts and cultural center in Sulaimani, Iraqi-Kurdistan. Levinson-Labrosse is determined to ensure her poems don’t elide or overpower the voices of actual Kurds which is part of the ethical and political framework of the volume.  

Second, the subtitle A Commonplace Book, refers to the fact that the future Kurdistan often talked about by Kurds, is itself a kind of commonplace book, made from the dreams and hopes of forty million odd stateless people about becoming a nation and which they have been working towards it seems for centuries. In that sense, Kurdistan is describable as an idealized "dream state," albeit in a highly positive sense, functioning in a broad mythic fashion within the Kurdish people’s vast imaginary. It is also a "dream state" for the poet, due to its uncanny strangeness to her own culture. Levinson-Labrosse informs us in her prefatory note (i) that the middle eastern equivalent of a commonplace book is a kashkul, named after the wandering Sufi dervish’s traditional alms bowl, so this volume is also to be seen as a Kashkul. The working practices of writers across the world’s borders are surprisingly similar, despite differences in language and culture.

While this review focuses on the author’s own poems, the Kurdish authored material is interesting and often striking in its own right and plays a significant role in the organisation of the volume, insofar as it puts Levinson-Labrosse’s poems in dialogue with the Kurdish people that directly inspired her. The volume shows considerable variety to match what her interviewees discuss while exhibiting Levinson-Labrosse’s own personal poetic voice. She is always conscious of being in dialogue with the Kurds, sometimes even silently. "The Book Men" is a moving poem, one which dramatizes how the speaker feels while being watched by Kurds when examining their precious archival poetic material, which they risked their lives to preserve against an oppressive regime intent on destroying both their language and culture:

The book men have been 

jailed and beaten

for their libraries, 

used as evidence at trial 

then burned.

[…] 

They read 

as they went blind and after 

whatever they had

learned by heart.

She is acutely conscious of how valuable texts are to these wary, secret librarians who share them with a stranger whose plans they do not understand. The poem concludes with lines suggesting these unresolved tensions and the librarians’ measured fears, which also symbolize the unspoken anxieties that all Kurds have about the continuation of American involvement in their world as "They wait to see /  what I can become."

Baghdad features prominently as it was traditionally the cosmopolitan home to Kurds, Sunni and Shia Arabs, and Assyrians. In "A Series of Suggestions," a visit to photograph the ruins of Baghdad garners an "amused" comment from their driver, a detail reminding us of the huge cost in human life that permitted the overthrow of the Ba’ath regime:

our driver laughs. What were you photographing?

the body 

was on the other side.  

The end of the poem is somewhat equivocal in terms of how far an American poet can appreciate the gulf of distance between America and Iraq. Mulberries are ripe in both countries at the same time, and she picks a few which in turn remind her of the Iraq she has recently left:

I pinch the stamen and pull

until a single bead

hangs at the opening. I hold

the open flower steady

and sip

An untitled prose poem vividly brings to life both the world of the camps for Internally Displaced Person (IDP), and the considerable gender gap in rural Kurdish society:

Her daughter crawled onto my lap. Some camp sickness crusted round her           

nostrils. She wouldn’t stop touching my pen as I wrote, as her mother spoke. […] Hanna kept apologizing. She’s never seen a woman write before.

"The Plains of Nineveh" recounts the aftermath of the war with Daesh [ISIL or Islamic State], with the burning oil wells set on fire as Daesh retreated, through the use of another strange detail:

This is the season of narcissus, wild and delicate, growing into the miles of trenches the Islamic State dug. Villagers will cut the narcissus in handfuls and take it to the city, standing at intersections, asking 1,000 dinars—75 cents—for each. Drivers will stop for a moment, buy a bunch, and carry it throughout the day, giving each person they meet a few stems until the bouquet is gone.

The imagery here turns on the contrast between the pale yellow of the spring narcissi and the notorious black flag of Daesh, as well as the fact that sociable Kurds buy them to give away as presents to acquaintances and friends. There’s also an implied contrast to the solitary poet amidst the daffodils in Wordsworth’s "I wandered lonely as a cloud." Other poems in the book similarly recall memories of the plenitude of Kurdish life and the poet’s experiences of this. "Glass Tangerine" recalls a morning swim in a mountain lake with a local friend under a Kurdish moon:

We swam our makeshift course

across the vast lake and back.

On our drive home, snacking

on dates, Nab tells me 

how he never really learned to swim, how he 

only wanted to see the seagulls 

hatch, how afraid he was.

Again, in contrast to the episode with the "troubled pleasure" of the stolen skiff in Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Book 1, the emphasis is on sociability rather than the lonely experience of the sublime. The form of the volume overall, with Levinson-Labrosse’s poems in continued dialogue with the words of Kurdish interviewees, shows how she wishes to subvert expectations of both lyric poetry and expatriate writing. Her position as poet is always liminal, neither quite inside nor quite outside of Kurdish society, wishing to speak of Kurdish subjects but not to simply incorporate them into her experience as lyric poets often have done with their subjects, from Wordsworth and Coleridge’s The Lyrical Ballads (1798) until now. 

While Levinson-Labrosse clearly understands the Kurdish situation as well as many Kurds (she also has a PhD on 19th Century Kurdish poetry), she is still acutely conscious that she isn’t a Kurd. The cover design of the volume by León Muñoz Santini is based on a photo taken by Hawre Khalid in 2015 of a child, Abdullah Hazbar, seen through the fabric of a tent, at an Internally Displaced Person (IDP) camp near Kirkuk Iraq. The translucency is a good image of the inevitable distance between poet as observer and the Kurdish people. I understand and appreciate Levinson-LaBrosse’s ethical and political stance and her "deconstructed" commonplace book is a gracious gesture, suggesting she wishes to involve both an international and a Kurdish audience. She is genuinely interested in listening to our narratives and memories to write sensitive, lyrical poems for everyone to engage with.

Alan Ali Saeed is an associate professor of English literature at Sulaimani University, Iraq. He has a BA from Sulaimani University, an MA (London University), and a PhD on Bergson and British modernist stream of consciousness women's writing (Brunel University). See his publications here: Sites.google.com/a/univsul.edu.iq/ alan-ali-saeed/publications.

 

Temporary Shelters

by Grant Clauser 

(Cornerstone Press, 2025) 

Reviewed by Robert Fillman

Part elegy, part warning, part call to action, part escape, the temporary shelters Grant Clauser creates in his poetry offer “momentary stays,” to borrow Robert Frost’s phrase. And readers could do worse than to take up residence inside these poems.

Clauser writes with reverence for the earth and the diversity of life it sustains. The evidence in Temporary Shelters is abundant: “Marigolds,” “Planting Strawberries,” “The Glaciers,” “Weeping Willow,” “Box Turtles,” “Sycamore”—the list goes on. Because Clauser so fully engages non-human nature, one might assume that he dips into a well of familiar symbols. But that could not be further from the truth. Like the world that inspires him, Clauser reveals how the everyday—a creek, a nuthatch, a sunflower—can still be encountered with awe, observed from a fresh vantage. What is so refreshing is how Clauser rouses the reader out of ourselves and into the miracle of what surrounds us. He is a tour guide. He is a sage. But most importantly, he is attuned to the senses, and through his expansive and sharp eye for bare life, our own are heightened. 

The collection opens with “NASA Announces Plans for a Peopled Mission to Mars.” While the title suggests the promise of exploration through space travel, the poem itself is far from optimistic about what this means. Clauser focuses instead on earthly details—a “perfect” brook trout and the “rust red / stripe on a salamander’s back,” “how hard this trout fought” to stay alive. He laments the daily erosion of the natural world: “every day / something beautiful is disappearing.” For Clauser, the earth is “dying under our feet,” and the impulse to flee it—to abandon rather than revere the planet we have damaged—becomes the poem’s quiet indictment of our species. Like he says: “Every day another piece of hope / is bleached or broken or hunted / into history.”

There are also many moments of tenderness in Temporary Shelters. By the end of the volume, readers can be assured they will find themselves feeling closer to their loved ones, their pets, their homes. “Blessings of a Dog,” for example, draws us into an ordinary scene of playful affection between a pet and her human. It is the precision of the verbs that brings the moment alive: chases, dives, slides, trots, asks, gnaws. The puppy feels so near that we seem to be standing in the kitchen alongside her. Yet, a sense of foreboding pervades the interaction—the knowledge of the creative-destructive cycle:

    She’s still a pup, has enough play in her

    for twelve years or so. I know how that goes. 

    You love, they love. Everything goes on 

    like it should until it doesn’t. 

A lesser poet might stop here, at the edge of sentimentality. But Clauser does not. Instead, the poem widens its lens: “She doesn’t / know there’s something broken in the world / that a ball can’t fix.” What follows is more devastating still, and best left for readers to encounter on their own—to feel the distant weight of tragedy bearing down as it creeps closer.

As readers will see, every poem features sure-handed lines that speak with authority, though often on life’s inevitable mutability and to a past that feels close yet remains impossibly out of reach. In “Watching a Flying Squirrel,” the poet finds a fitting analogue for the human condition: “Life is risk, and love too.” And it is the nimble precision of the poem’s metaphors that animates its momentum: 

    When my daughters 

    were born my wife and I imagined

    branch after branch for years within reach,

    not the ones we fell short

    or that left us hanging by a claw.

Formally, the enjambment—the fluid movement of memory itself—carries each detail down the page with the care and alertness of an animal instinctively aware that one wrong move can cost everything. 

Again and again, Clauser leads us into the heart of things. Sometimes that heart is a crumbling structure in the woods, as in “Gunpowder Homestead,” where “ghosts may come and go / like hummingbirds in the afternoon.” This is a story we know: of arrival and departure, of human lives that leave behind “ruins on the one hand, / succession on the other.” What remains is taken back by the natural world—by the coming of spring, by a rising creek, by the steady march of time. Clauser reminds us: for that person, a family, or lineage, to secure a life meant “breaking / oneself against the land until it breaks.” Eventually, the stone walls become grave markers, mere evidence that someone once settled there. And if we are fortunate, the earth is still able to reclaim what human lives once transformed and dominated. 

 

Beyond the physical losses etched into history and the land, Clauser turns to quieter, more internal forms of loss that take place within the self. “Epistemology II” takes us into the digital age, a time when we are shoring up the ruins of our own minds. Here, Clauser recognizes the whittling away of attention spans and those moments when we long to disconnect, to “just be satisfied, at least / for a little while,” perhaps finding solace in the simple comfort of “a dog pressed / against my leg, not worrying / about how long this will last.”  

The end of the collection is elegiac in nature. “Taking Down the Lights” begins: “Every celebration has to end, / lest we get too easy with joy.” In a poem centered on the traditional act of taking down decorations after the holiday season has passed, Clauser opens things outward: “Each year feeds into the next / like small rivers flowing / into larger ones.” In doing so, he moves the reader from the ordinary rhythms of clock time into a deeper, more subjective experience of living. We feel the gravitas of the everyday—the residue of what we touch and carry with us. This poem isn’t merely about “pull[ing] the wires off / the eaves”; it’s about thinking beyond calendrical dates and recognizing that our complicated existence persists across generations, across eons. We experience life and death, joy and sadness, light and darkness. It is this honoring of ebb and flow that gives Clauser’s verse its urgency and relevance beyond these immediate, turbulent days. 

External reality might tell us that we are all, in effect, doomed passengers on a sinking ship veering toward climate collapse. But internally, we have to know that we can still contribute—that if we can’t save ourselves, we may yet save others—and preserve the planet for future generations. Grant Clauser’s Temporary Shelters gives us a place to rest, to look inward, to reassess, and to change. It gives us a space to do nothing but think and feel, which is what humans do best.

Robert Fillman is the author of House Bird (Terrapin Books, 2022), the chapbook November Weather Spell (Main Street Rag, 2019), and his most recent collection The Melting Point (Broadstone Books, 2025). He has received prizes from Sheila-Na-Gig online, Third Wednesday, and The Twin Bill for select poems. He has been a finalist for the Cider Press Review Book Award, the Gerald Cable Book Award, the Sandy Crimmins Prize in Poetry, and the Ron Rash Award in Poetry. Individual poems have appeared in The Hollins Critic, Nashville Review, Paterson Literary Review, Pembroke Magazine, Poet Lore, Poetry East, Salamander, Spoon River Poetry Review, Sugar House Review, Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and others.

 

Quarantine Highway

by Millicent Borges Accardi 

(FlowerSong Press, 2022) 

Reviewed by David E. Poston

In her endnotes to Quarantine Highway, Millicent Borges Accardi explains that it was “written during early and mid-pandemic months,” often from the 30 by 30 writing challenge organized by Juan Morales for CantoMundo fellows. During that dark time, Accardi writes that poetry “drew us close, reunited our spirits and held our souls safely within our own and each other’s isolation.” About three dozen of these poems are inspired by poems or lines from other poets, most from members of the CantoMundo community, including founders Carmen Tafolla, Deborah Paredez, Norma Cantu, and Celeste Guzmán Mendoza. 

These poems are often-painful reminders of the pandemic’s toll on our mental and social health, one still manifested in isolation and disconnection. The opening poems are peppered with words such as terrifying, fearful, and weak-kneed, with images of desperately dancing the Vira de Roda. The poem “Bread” describes a world where the onslaught of “an unseen war criminal” meant that suddenly “life was forbidden and/everyone was an enemy.” Similar images of disorientation and anxiety are found in “We Still are not Breathing.”  

There is a disorienting quality to Accardi’s syntax as well: halting, incoherent, vague, lacking in time cues, shifting abruptly, changing or omitting referents, oddly capitalized. In the fever dream of COVID isolation, the poem “We’ll Come Down Close Behind” begins 

    And such and we have

    and we need and we want

    and we have and if it happens,

    we couldn’t leave, and there is not a

    never in the universe except now.

In the lines that complete the poem, a variety of plaints blur into a rush of feelings that overburden the strictures of language: 

    And such and such and the homeless,

    and prisons, and why can’t I

    leave my home without a mask.  

    We’d come down close behind

    In the middle of a crowd, as if we

    mattered and as if things were

    normal rather than a new normal,

    which is odious. Then, then, and then

    and could. 

Then, beautifully, the outpouring of negative emotions turns to poems recalling memories and feelings that ring true to the experience of all of us, for good or ill, as if they were rising to haunt one in a dream. “For Truth would be from a Line,” for example, recreates a time when the world seemed controlled and ordered,

    like a poem dealing with

    trees I memorized, along with everyone

    else in Mrs. Virtue’s first grade

    at Luther Burbank,

    where the teacher handed out

    pastel marshmallows 

    when we behaved.

“The Right Measure of their Agony” describing days when:

        We held spiders

    And drank home-brewed absinthe as if we

    Were characters in 1920s Hemingway. We agreed

    to the word double-life as we ventured on the fire escape

    and we were solid, unbreakable and under the age of 30,

    with that unfinished feeling that troubled us,

    like not knowing your lucky number.

The next poem, “And Admits,” recalls:

    [ … ] rolling down the street

    Listening to Beethoven

    And drumming the side of the open

    Window with our feet

    Hanging outside

    As we turned through the fields of

    Almond groves stupidly

    being

The lens of the pandemic allows both poet and reader to see what is most meaningful and dear about these experiences. “With Cascading, Iron Straight Hair” describes familiar teenage angst, with Accardi’s added perspective of being the other:

The smooth dexterity

looking forward to an open gate for a place I never went to,

a Friday dance gymnasium with a fancy backless dress

my parents cannot buy.

The charm of sweet conflict, snarled waves,

my Portuguese frizz waves, a divorce of emotions between what

I see in the locker and who I see far away

in the pages of Seventeen magazine, near

from the teenage experience of greatness, charity,

a catalog of friends I could never connect with. 

Other poems go deeper into the complexities faced by children of immigrants, by Latinx persons, by all persons of color. One that I read and reread, even as others treated the same theme, was “Unlearning America’s Languages,” which ends:

Parents came to California to rise above while

blending inside a fairytale Knott’s Berry Farm where

Old McDonald feeds the chicken and a city where

kids ride bikes and play Pong. It was sleep

and rise and keep damn quiet about anything

different. Tell the counselor you will ride the bus

and stave off the earthquakes, embracing a future

that does not resemble any past you heard whispered

and fought about at night after bedtime

“All Unwavering Survivors,” one of several ekphrastic poems, exemplifies that trust in the value of one’s experience and the artistic cross-fertilization that energizes this collection. The title comes from a line in Gloria Amescua’s poem “Chanclas, Find Our Ground." Amescua won the Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge in March of 2017 with her response to Lisa Ortega’s collage entitled "La Familia." The line from which Accardi draws her title captures the image of the family in the piece: “All unwavering survivors, nameless faces, amid the turbulence of politics that can cut them apart like paper dolls.” Anyone who is at all acquainted with chanclas culture knows the formidable spirit it represents. As Accardi writes, this spirit is “unconditional and sudden,” this family is “remarkable for their stillness and fury” even if “they are outside / a long solo flight of music, / set apart, detained, locked up.”

The conversation that Amescua began with the Lisa Ortega piece is further expanded by the Accardi poem. Another expansion happens in the poem “Holy Waters Heal the Border Scar.” That poem’s title comes from Norma Cantu’s poem “Border Bullets” and like Cantu’s poem treats of the precious cargo that mothers bear on their hips across the Rio Grande in search of a better life.

Similarly, Accardi’s “The Poor Kid with Something to Prove” takes Diego Báez’s poem “American Marine” and extends the source poem into a vivid portrayal of what drives the title character. Borges describe him as “the serenity prayer come to life, the punk with no attitude,” as someone “tight, like a hand-rolled cigarette, someone “solely glorious-rare and in the pocket moment of be here now.” He represents all those “boys who are full of promise,” who are on “the true-larger, needlessly-bold pathway to forever.” Accardi presents this indomitable, indelibly described young man as an exemplar of the spirit that drives one to survive a pandemic, an oppressive system, the journey to find a better life in a strange land.

So where does Quarantine Highway lead us? 

The isolation of quarantine leads the mind to dark places, as in poems such as “While I Count Like I Have Practiced.” That poem draws its title from Raina Leon’s poem about the smothering effects of pervasive racism, “Poetry Anxiety Disorder” and asks “How can we be strong and vibrant when we are not?” The ways we were told to cope with the pandemic—to tolerate rules, to stay in line—remind the speaker of all the lines and borders she has been told not to cross and of the lines she sees on her own face.

But these poems led me to the vibrant, beautiful, and multi-faceted CantoMundo community, founded in 2009 and inspired by the models of Cave Canem and Kundiman. In a 2017 interview for the NEA with Autasia Ramos, co-founder Deborah Paredez was emphatic about the CantoMundo commitment to fostering poetry communities—plural—recognizing the many communities of Latinx poets and the many connections with other poetic and artistic communities. I was welcomed into the currents and crosscurrents of the conversations between these poets and artists.

In one of the last poems, “One Season, my Father Leases Land to Grow Fresno Sweet Red Onions,” Accardi refers to the poem “Onions,” by Juan Luis Guzmán. That poem begins by describing hands carefully lifting onions from the soil, then connects that experience with the speaker’s memory of “pulling out my naked self” while swimming with a girl. Accardi’s poem begins:

    Reading this, I cook Fresno peppers into Piri Sauce,

    red melting the spice to the Portuguese catch-all phrase

    for adding a teaspoon of red flavor into cooking.

    The deception of hot, couched into sweetness

    Mixed among red onions.

    We see the vivid color and forget the trouble

    we are going through endured in the sweet-hot flavor.

    Quarantine, not so unbearable when there is beautiful. 

In a time of unconscionable treatment of immigrant communities, these poems could not be more vital. Through empathy, through memory, through words, through communities, Millicent Borges Accardi shows us how the beautiful we share could bring us all through the seemingly unbearable.  

David E. Poston's poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in North Carolina Literary Review, Pedestal, Cider Press Review, Bull, MoonShine Review, and other journals and anthologies. He is the author of three poetry collections, including Postmodern Bourgeois Poetaster Blues, which won the North Carolina Writers' Network's Randall Jarrell Chapbook Competition. A fourth poetry collection, Letting Go, is forthcoming from Fernwood Press.

 

An Anthology of Rain

by Phillis Levin 

(Barrow Street Press, 2025) 

Reviewed by Abriana Jetté 

 

A chair, a thread, a wooden spoon. A friendship. A flame. A floor of lava. An Anthology of Rain, Phillis Levin’s sixth collection of poetry, transforms objects to memory, moments to matter. Whether in prose poems or traditional forms like tanka, readers slip through cities and mailboxes, moving from personal rituals to communal acts of survival. Taken as a whole, the collection conceptualizes change, as in the way a new chair changes a room, the way a hat changes a face, or the way a place changes a person. Boundaries are drawn, long-stemmed swords crossed, all while Levin delivers internalized rhyme with elegant sonic restraint.

When considering Levin’s oeuvre, change is not just thematic but also structural, as An Anthology of Rain unveils a compelling selection of new prose poems like “Map Makers: A Sketch” and “Secret Rites,” poems which blend narrative and wonder, offering associative leaps appropriate for the vignette’s fleeting qualities. 

“Secret Rites” opens with our speaker recalling a girlhood pastime of alchemizing her bedroom into an archipelago of make-believe. Her rugs become two islands; the oak floor, the ocean. She recalls how she’d sit on one rug and “without standing up, move to the other without touching the floor.” Over and over, day after day. What’s at stake? What would happen if her young body dared touch the wooden sea as she traveled furiously from rug to rug, back and forth, rug to water to rug? Her self-imposed rules are clear: she’d suffer “a death by drowning.” Imagination serves as Levin’s life-vest here and will continue to buoy her through the ebbs and flows of her young adult life. 

Levin moves on from this memory to reveal another childhood quirk of placing stray threads in the pocket of coats while shopping with her mother. With each dropped thread the speaker reveals she felt she “could be elsewhere, live inside that pocket.” She daydreams of strangers reaching into these coats to “discover a thread that didn’t belong.” Throughout the collection, readers are for Levin such threads. We are pulled in and out of coats and spaces and memories, finding meaning in places we did not know we belonged. 

Midway through, “Secret Rites” pivots from reflections on private rituals to the shared experience of choosing and losing a friendship. The speaker is in college when she meets someone with whom she shares a fast and intimate bond. At dinner each night, the speaker and the new friend take up the task of “blowing out the candle” on the table between them, then “holding a lit match as far from the wick as possible to see how far the little flame can travel.” This sisterhood of traveling flames transforms into a symbol of the intense emotions pulsing between the two women. But the friendship, like the flame, is kinetic, brief. The friends eventually outdistance one another. 

“Secret Rites” takes readers into a childhood bedroom, department stores, a college pub, and, at its close, like that thread, drops us off on a Zoom session during the middle of a poetry course our speaker is teaching during the pandemic. Students share childhood memories across screens. It is this conversation that prompts Levin to share her memory of rug island and those imaginative maritime adventures. “‘The floor is lava!’ one of them calls out from a square somewhere on my screen.” Squares erupt in laughter as generations converge. A moment of transformation, of change; what was once private reveals itself as universal practice. Secret rites become communal instincts. We might stitch different patterns, make different rules, but here we are, all of us, using the same thread. 

“Duel of Roses” also highlights the significance of shared play. In the poem, the speaker spends time with Italian painter Veronica Piraccini during the year of the Great Jubilee. Readers are whisked around the streets as the women enjoy pasta carbonara and the grandeur of the Roman scene. It is a reflection filled with the warmth, wit, and the wild ordinariness of an evening with a friend. Veronica is described as “a madonna in a fury,” and the two women, roses in hand, faux-fence with one another amid the pageantry of the Jubilee. Even as the evening ends, a stranger calls out to Veronica, "che bella, che bella / Marilyn Monroe / from a wingèd scooter on the go."

“Wooden Spoon” reads at first like a meditation on stillness, until readers recognize that stillness, too, causes change. The speaker considers how "It is good to be a wooden spoon / and not be broken." The line plays with readers, half shrug, half-truth. Its sentiment suggests the power of neutrality, of not getting too hot, not getting too cold. Levin doesn’t romanticize the spoon so much as test it against the rest of the collection’s more emotionally charged transformations. Is it possible to remain unchanged? Is it better? The wooden spoon might not conduct heat, but its soft whirl can change everything. 

In “To a New Chair”, the speaker delights in the arrival of a new chair, and she prepares the space, meditating on the will of the chair’s potential to “carry [her] far.” Levin plays with concepts of both the speaker’s and the chair’s presence and absence. Once the chair arrives, the speaker will be “beside the point”, a striking phrase that offers pause. Is this a desire to let go? To be transported elsewhere? Is it a will for invisibility? To let the new chair take over? Whatever it is, the chair is the reason. And glory to the chair, says the poet, whose grandeur is powerful enough to transform a space.

“Chamber” also explores the intertwined themes of absence and presence. The poem opens with a cummings-esque echo as Levin writes: “The heart at the heart at the heart of the room,” a simple repetition, mimicking the natural iambs as well as the da-Dum-da-Dum of the beating heart. The simple syntax, though, is in direct contrast to the poem's implications. We’re alive until we’re not. In the end the room remains a room, indifferent to whether we are in it or not. 

Chairs become portals, roses become swords, and childhood games resurface on Zoom screens. Has everything changed? Has nothing changed? The rug is still a rug; the rose, a rose; the room, a room. 

An Anthology of Rain hums with masterful musicality and a sophisticated attentiveness. Levin delivers transitions of philosophical eloquence with the straightforwardness of an investigative, attentive eye. The poems are fiercely clear and strikingly original. Like rain, it is a collection that nourishes, reveals, and, at times, reshapes the landscapes of our imagination.

 

Abriana Jetté is an internationally published writer whose work has been supported by the New Jersey State Council for the Arts, the Sewanee Writers Conference, the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, and has appeared or is forthcoming in PublicBooks, Best New Poets, PLUME, Tampa Review, Poetry New Zealand, and other places. She currently teaches for Kean University and lives in New Jersey with her daughter. 

 

 

 Sugar Suggests—Mini Reviews from Sugar House Review Staff

An Exodus of Sparks 

by Allisa Cherry  

(Michigan State University Press, 2025)

In the title poem, Allisa Cherry addresses the America her father grew up in—Southwest, downwind, irradiated: “My father / was so small when you began to powder / his milk teeth and bones with your radiation.” Equal parts family elegy, lyrical spar with childhood faith, and tender croon from a wellspring that feels like a gift, Cherry’s work is both haunting and generative.

—Shari Zollinger

Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics 

by Selah Saterstrom   

(Essay Press, 2017)

Saterstrom transgresses boundaries of genre and the practice of writing in this illuminating book. Having read it, I still hear whispers of the supernatural and its colorful possibilities.

 —Katherine Indermaur

Pelican

by Emily O’Neill 

(YesYes Books, 2015)

I finally pulled Pelican off our bookshelf and was engaged from poem one, “Kismet”: “But. // There is an onion / browning where my heart should be.” Come on—what a way to start a poem and a book. The rest doesn’t disappoint, working through rough emotion and grief with fresh and innovative poetic structure.

—Natalie Padilla Young

Trickle Down Theory 

by Kenan Ince 

(Moon in the Rye Press, 2025)

Kenan Ince’s sole and posthumous book of poems brims with possibility and dynamic intelligence. Educated as a mathematician, he voiced a queerness and loneliness I can’t shake. Lines like, “the worst thing I ever did was live seventeen years / inside my father’s house,” “for once my yellow dress is moon enough / to take the light’s communion,” and “I trace your outline with my words / and never find you inside them” will thankfully continue to rattle in the field of my awareness.  

—Nano Taggart

Sociopath: A Memoir 

by Patric Gagne

(Simon & Schuster, 2024)

This memoir covers a sociopathy diagnosis given in Gagne’s twenties and her quest through the American mental health landscape for viable treatment options. Her sincerity is startling, chilling, and hilarious as she reckons with her personality type and the world’s response to it. This book broadens the dominant narrative of what makes a sociopath and puts a human face on a misunderstood condition that is just one variation of the human experience.

—Laura Walker

Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel 

by Dan Ephron  

(W. W. Norton & Company, 2015)

 

&

 

Killing Mr. Lebanon: The Assassination of Rafik Hariri and Its Impact on the Middle East 

by Nicholas Blanford  

(I.B. Tauris, 2006)

 

Killing a King is a carefully crafted narrative that proves, once again, the truth is (far) more appalling than fiction. Killing Mr. Lebanon displays politics as an exercise in blunting the potential of the many in service of the few. Both books are dense with detail but somehow manage to remain, if not page-turners, hard to put down. 

—Neil Flatman

  

The Key to Everything: May Swenson, A Writer’s Life

by Margaret A. Brucia

(Princeton University Press, 2025)

The Key to Everything: May Swenson, A Writer’s Life is a meticulously researched, emotionally resonant literary biography, centered on the diary entries, letters, and oral histories of a major 20th Century American poet. Diving deep into the Swenson archives, Brucia plucks gems of May’s language that refract the light of her mind, granting readers a glimpse of a brilliant, private, funny, flawed, and fiercely devoted poet. The result is a biography that feels as vivid and layered as the poet herself.

 

—Ben Gunsberg