The Clearing

by Allison Adair
(Milkweed Editions, 2020) 

Reviewed by Natalie Homer 

     

“I didn’t know how to save things,” says the speaker of “Miscarriage,” and this echo haunts the rest of Allison Adair’s beautiful, melancholic debut, The Clearing. Heartbreaking tenderness toward vulnerable people, animals, and landscapes characterize the speakers of many of these poems—concern for “the cornered nuthatch three-quarters dead, still / resisting in the cat’s mouth, still dreaming of flight,” or for the newborn rabbit, drowning at the bottom of its own nest, never to see the light of day. These poems cup hands around the defenseless and hold them, trembling, up to the light. 

This propensity to reach out, to protect, is especially apparent in “Self-Portrait as Cenotaph,” a brilliant merging of both personal and larger, collective histories. The child speaker recalls men coming to search her yard in Gettysburg for Civil War relics—but the way the search is experienced is a clear intrusion, a rape of sorts, where the speaker and her mother “wait for a thick ambitious finger to darken the unfamiliar / bell. The hyacinth swells. A patinaed eagle means more than a good day / of digging and my mother says yes quickly, hand on the knob.” 

From her bedroom window, the speaker watches as they search,feeling a strange sense of violation and an urge to protect what she deems as vulnerable and valuable: 

        [ . . . ] They’re unzipping
        sound to see what’s beneath, probing the soft red mouth of our yard. I want to run
        out and guard the tulips in their beds, the nests underground that no one can
        see: rabbit, vole, yellowjacket. But they haven’t come for these, anything living is  good

        as dead [ . . . ]

The curious ghost-pain of a miscarriage runs throughout the collection: a ruined rug superimposed in place of the child in one poem, a bat cave in another, and—perhaps most poignantly—an  ekphrastic poem which pays homage to an infant’s funeral in a Millet painting, painted over to replace the child’s coffin with a basket of potatoes. The speakers of these poems wrestle with the inevitable “painting over” that occurs after a miscarriage—after a child that never was (yet clearly was) is gone. 

Threats of fire, flood, and most distinctly, men lurk on the edges of these poems. Not unlike the heavily mined landscape of Pennsylvania, women often find themselves tapped into, drained, and left empty. An imagining of a Civil War domestic plundering, “When Horses Turn Down the Road,” allows readers to witness a woman hiding material objects of value—rings inside a clock, candlesticks under the floorboards, and papers behind a hearthstone before soldiers storm her home. Horrifyingly, we realize that the woman cannot hide herself or her children, and therefore the only choice she has is to brace herself: 

        [ . . . ] bring the children
to your skirts. Turn their faces away
from what comes, from what will
be done, stand as these soldiers’ own
mothers would stand. The small

white shoes on the mantel can
stay—some things won’t be taken
no matter how many boots cross
the gate, no matter how wide
you open your own stone door. 

Adair draws our attention to the value of things—how what is most valuable is often least able to be protected. She forces us to look, with heartbreaking tenderness, at the people, animals, and natural landscapes who have been devalued: the dying whale making its slow descent to the ocean floor “toward special humiliation,” the bird on the attic floor “lying just / where the man stepped,” the Colorado woman stabbed to death in an act of violence the whole town saw coming but pretended not to notice, and the river turned to “sallow bile” from mine runoff. 

The Clearing is a book of prospecting, of gleaning. Through the wisdom and emotional intelligence of these poems, the reader emerges with coal in one hand and gold in the other—both the dark, rough-edged bitterness of life as well as the tenderness, empathy, and beauty. 

Ain't Never Not Been Black

by Javon Johnson
(Button Poetry, 2020)

Reviewed by Elisa Crawley

In Javon Johnson’s newest collection, Ain't Never Not Been Black, America is choking on blood. Cops are murdering Black children and Black mothers fear their sons might come home “body-bag beautiful” and “a hashtag,” while America erases them. Whether infused with the lament of Black death or the celebration of Black culture, Johnson’s poems scream:

    I want to live in a world
    where the police do not murder Black children.

    Where the police do not murder Black children.
    Where the police do not murder Black children
    Where the police do not murder Black children.

In this collection, Johnson’s America is America, and America has always been cruel to Black lives, a relationship to which Johnson responds in the poem “Blackboys/Cold”: “and isn’t that what being Black is all about / how the world works to reduce you / even if you only want freedom.”

The book is not divided into any sections, though there are many recurring themes: grief, death, displacement, hypocrisy, violence, survival, and family. Some pieces are experimental in form, such as “Black 201,” a poem written as a college course description: “Course Schedule: This course will be mad fluid. This course/ operates on CPT. This is also a lesson in survival.” Others, like “Wishing Well,” look more familiar: “When my mother tells me to get home / safe, her voice is the last coin she owns.”

Throughout the collection, Johnson demonstrates a deep relationship with language and every sentence is masterfully crafted. For example, in the poem “Los Angeles” he combines place with memory: “Los Angeles is a gospel song my grandmother used to sing.” In the poem “America,” nature holds human hatred: “The air was a ‘whites Only’ sign.” The rhythms found in many of the poems is a reminder to the reader that Johnson comes out of the spoken-word tradition. These poems coax the reader to read them aloud, their sounds, and our participation in the poems adding new dimensions to the work. Like in the poem “A Lesson in Proper Sentence Construction,”

    the Black boy could not smile.
    The Black boy could not smile.
    The Black boy could not smile.
    And isn’t that a proper sentence, too?
    Clear and concise. But somehow still
    longer like the sentences
    Black people are given.

Several pieces explore relationships such as that of Malcolm X and his daughter (the night before his assassination), as well as those between uncle and nephew and mother and son. There are many poems that talk about the near, the familial. However, the poems also reveal a consciousness of institutions and power. In the poem “Everything I Know About Gentrification I Learned From My Step/Father, Or When the Cancer Comes,” Johnson infuses the poem with both in his claim that “To gentrify is to take the body / and gut it.”

Perhaps one of the most moving poems of the book is the previously mentioned “America.” In the beginning, the word America is defined as “Black people” and is repeated every few lines accompanied by retellings of (and commentaries on) history.

    America knows that. Knows that
    Lincoln did not free the slaves [...]
    oh, America, the beautiful,
    sleight of hand.

Later, the poem turns to how the country has abused Black people, starkly ending with the lines:

    please remember,
    in this poem
    America was always
    America.

In an age where naming dignity for Black life has become a trendy culture for white liberals, in an age that has been like every other age in our history in which Black people are being murdered, Johnson’s lyrical grief shakes the souls of its readers. The collection contains a series of poems titled “Black Famous (A Faux Haiku Series).” Some carry a more serious tone, such as “Black Famous 4” (“No twitter coffins”). Others, more humorous, like “Black Famous 3,” which begins “One day I’ll show up / to see Cats on Broadway […]”

Nonetheless, many of Johnson’s poems commemorate Black joy and resiliency. “I didn’t want to be sad,” Johnson writes in the piece “Black and Happy,” “didn’t want white supremacy / to tell me how to feel again.” Then, later in the poem, there is the declaration, “You cannot kill Blackness; / too much of it is wrapped in unshakeable joy.”

Fossils in the Making

(Black Ocean, 2019) and Diurne (Tupelo Press, 2019) 

by Kristin George Bagdanov

Reviewed by Dayna Patterson

Kristin George Bagdanov’s first two collections, Fossils in the Making and Diurne, are very different books, yet both speak loudly to the current moment and complement each other in satisfying ways. In both, Bagdanov ruminates over crisis, the body, mortality, and what we leave behind (both private and collective legacy—we are all fossils in the making), as well as the relentless march of time, marked hourly in Diurne with daily poems that accrete, a line added each hour for almost an entire month.     

In her first book, Fossils in the Making, the opening sonnet sets the tone for the poems that follow. In “Lines Written After Crisis,” the speaker posits that we are continually in the midst of crisis: “crisis always in medias res.” The poem alludes to bullets, 9/11, the rise of “a tyrant,” indisposable plastics. All this foreshadows an unretractable future of disaster: 

     Oracle that reads
     in glowing teeth a future now

     past
     Orpheus singing into the ears of leaves
     a song to re
     wind eternity.

This poem resonates deeply. We are in the midst of a pandemic, yes, but also a climate crisis, a tyrannical president’s term with November elections just finished, an accumulation of plastics that are choking our oceans and filling the stomachs of whales, turtles, seabirds, etc. We are living in crisis layered on crisis. Readers are faced with the question: how do we go on living? How should we seek to shape or alter what we leave behind?

Bagdanov eschews (easy) answers in the three sections that follow: “Proofs,” “Wagers,” and “Remains.” She presses into the wounds, offering a series of proof poems, presenting sentient existence as a wager, and examining various kinds of remains, the vast “field / of bones” that all the living leave behind. So what claim or claims does Bagdanov’s proof poems prove? The key is in the titles, “Proof of Harm,” “Proof of Parasite,” “Proof of Sorrow,” and “Proof of Hunger.”  Bagdanov, in poem after poem, presents what might be construed as poetic evidence of humanity’s muddied legacy. A single poem can contain an oil spill, the accidental violence against seabirds, and the violence we inflict on each other, in particular against brown bodies. Other poems focus on calving glaciers. Felled trees. An accumulation of grievances proving humanity’s harm. 

Besides the content of Fossils in the Making that speaks so poignantly to anxiety over embodiment, mortality, crisis, motherhood, and private/public remains, what stands out in Bagdanov’s work is her playfulness with language and commitment to experimentation. I appreciate the consecution that transforms “carcass” to “caress” and “from” to “form” in the initial sonnet, and the final poem’s echoing (“turn” becomes “urn” and the last “hello?” ripples out to “lo” and a solo “o,” reminiscent of Joyce’s final “.” in Ulysses). The entirety of Diurne is built on the premise of experimenting with form, as the first page indicates: “A line each hour of waking / A poem each day of making.” While Diurne is a long-term relationship with its method, Fossils in the Making is more akin to speed dating; Bagdanov displays an astonishing range of experimentation with line breaks, punctuation, cleave poems, white space, etc., throughout the book so that, despite the heavy subject matter, there is a constant source of delight to be derived. 

In both Fossils in the Making and Diurne, I’m in awe of Bagdanov’s recursiveness, how lines and phrases from poems echo within individual poems, but also across (and even between) the manuscripts, lending both books an almost dream-making, trance-like quality that I admire, and which reminds me pleasantly of work by Carole Maso, C.D. Wright, and Julie Marie Wade.

Bagdanov has received much deserved attention for Diurne, winner of the 2019 Sunken Garden Chapbook Poetry Prize. Diurne (like “diurnal” or daily) contains a Lucie Brock-Broido-esque poetry of ellision, enticing onelets or verse paragraphs that house enough mystery to invite reading and rereading. Bagdanov’s non-sequiturs exhibit an astonishing range, from humorous to profound, lyric to prosaic, intimate to stand offish, deeply thoughtful to wryly shallow. Having participated in several years’ worth of NaPoWriMos and feeling entirely wrung out after a month’s poem-making, I cannot imagine a month’s worth of hourly line composing. Bagdanov writes “This requires more effort than you’d think. A constant waking.” I believe it. 

Clearly, both of these books are the products of the same brilliant mind. Added to concerns in Fossils in the Making of microplastics, DDT, calving glaciers, and impending apocalypse, in Diurne readers encounter nuclear catastrophe and waste, cancer, abuse, a growing carbon footprint, and more. In both, Bagdanov broods over an uncertain future, one that rests tenuously in our fallible hands. 

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 

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.