Uncertain Acrobats

by Rebecca Hart Olander
(CavanKerry Press, 2021) 

Reviewed by Carla Panciera

Rebecca Hart Olander's memories of her father are of a man who “claimed Magician” when her birth certificate asked for his occupation, who was a teacher, a runner, someone equally at home naming birdsong and Motown artists. So it is no wonder that his death at sixty-eight inspires her debut full-length poetry collection, Uncertain Acrobats, poems that memorialize a life richly lived, a father deeply missed.

Hart Olander is herself a teacher, an editor of Perugia Press, and author of a previous chapbook, Dressing the Wounds (Dancing Girl Press, 2019). Perhaps this biography is part of her father’s legacy. But his influence doesn’t end there. Through his voracious tastes, Hart Olander is exposed to Thoreau, Cather, Aesop, Steely Dan, and something called a Beefaroni chess tournament. The poet recognizes that he was “that wide-awake man, / always craving something in the night, [his] appetite / so strong for life and all its delights.”      

When his cancer returns and his prognosis is grim, she can’t help but consider who he has been, the runner “in your sweaty, sun-worn baseball cap, / your skin browned from being in the world,” the “belter of songs / and strummer of chords / backgammon partner,” the man who taught her how to drive and how to do algebra despite his own struggles with the subject. And while her father’s individuality clearly emerges based on her accumulation of images and memories, what is universal in these poems is the complex and long lasting nature of grief.

Amidst the chaos of emotions that is loss, there is a desire throughout this collection to be grounded in the concrete. Hart Olander is a truly New England poet and her images attest to this. Her poems reference Gloucester’s Good Harbor beach, cranberry bogs, yellow farmhouses, Fenway franks, and Heartbreak Hill. She recalls her father “wading in gaiters / through the snow” behind his house. Her poems are full of stone walls, cellar holes, yellow warblers, jelly tooth mushrooms, hawks and crabapples. These missives from the world around her, so present and alive, form a vivid contrast to what she is missing, this person both very real and mythical. In “The Whale,” she imagines her father as “that creature under the cold Atlantic blanket / migratory mammal, singing a complex song, / large heart beating in time with mine.” But whatever she imagines, whatever images from this world stir her memory, she is left with the reality of his absence.

The collection is truly elegiac. Here are the characteristics of the loved one, memories as simple as him tossing coins in toll booth baskets, as poignant as singing happy birthday into his daughter’s answering machine, as painful as him being “rendered speechless, / on a gurney, clutching [his daughter’s] hand.” There is also the consolation his bereaved finds: “my father, in the woods / like stars in the ether, spangling / everything in a wash of light.” Finally, there is the daughter’s struggle between her private feelings and decorum. How does one move forward, resume whatever constitutes normal life? One way is to adhere to what has always guided poets through the most complex emotions. Hart Olander controls what she can control. These are carefully constructed poems of couplets or tercets, of balanced stanzas and measured lines. Free verse, yes, but meticulously handled, a blueprint, actually, for what it means to craft a poem, as in “There’s No Place Like Home,” composed in tercets about the speaker and her father finding a screech owl. Although there is some joy in the discovery, Olander’s speaker is not blind to omens:

Through doubled-glass we focus on the russet

bird, casting her as an avian wizard behind the curtain.

But some things can’t be known until we know them.

 

Like what kind of call we will make

as the predator descends, digs in her talons,

and shakes us until we are still. 

Finally, there are no easy answers in these poems or in the human struggle to live with loss. In “The Acolyte at My Door Asks Me, How Do You Pray,” she writes what we all wonder:

Father, now days go by when I don't think of you. I’m making

a life without, all the clocks ticking the same songs as when

you were alive. How does the world sound the same,

run by its consistent engine, though everything has changed?      

 

How, indeed? Though stumbling upon the words of someone who has felt as we have felt is more than small consolation and still a poet’s most important vocation.

Carla Panciera’s collection of short stories, Bewildered, received AWP’s 2013 Grace Paley Short Fiction Award. She has also published two collections of poetry: One of the Cimalores (Cider Press) and No Day, No Dusk, No Love (Bordighera). Her work has appeared in several journals including Poetry, The New England Review, Nimrod, Painted Bride, and Carolina Quarterly. A recipient of a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant in prose, Panciera’s second collection of short stories, Barnflower, will be published by Loom Press in 2023.

Ladies' Abecedary

by Arden Levine
(Harbor Editions, 2021) 

Reviewed by Jennifer Keith

Ladies’ Abecedary opens with two epigrams. The first is by Thomas Wentworth Higginson from his 1859 op-ed in The Atlantic. Higginson, alluding to an earlier “daring, keen, sarcastic” work by Sylvain Marchal, wonders if women learning the alphabet would grease the skids toward some unspeakable chaos. The second is a blood-tinged spit of lyric from Bikini Kill, a feminist punk band, about lives that can’t be spelled out in any traditional way. Ladies’ Abecedary draws from both energies. 

 

The polite title belies the deep dive of these poems into the real lives of girls and women. It’s rich territory for Levine, whose poems are like snapshots that suddenly extend into a third dimension when you hold them in your hand. “Abecedary” speaks to the structure of the book, each poem represents a piece in a sequence, with Levine titling poems with letters of the alphabet and arranging them in an order. 

 

But there’s more to those solitary glyphs announcing each poem. The letters are initials, substitutions for women’s names like you’d see in police reports, case studies. The poems are introductions to deeper narratives where the reader can fill in the details. From the excruciating-but-healing “tourniquets” applied by “A” to the metamorphosis of “Z”’s brokenness, the subject of each poem is a very particular female identity who lives, breathes, and takes up residence in the consciousness.

 

Two of the poems pair letters, so there are 24 poems altogether in Ladies’ Abecedary, a perfect circle of hours. The book is slim, modest in format, but many of the poems go surprisingly deep, and, taken together, put bright pins in a large map, hinting at the breadth of women’s experience. There’s a child who plays God and is answered by a parent bearing the brunt of being at her mercy. Two teen friends stride into their future with a new sense of physical power and purpose, while a pie baker’s failure and redemption hints at a private loss and acceptance.

 

Some of the poems’ subjects seem recognizable. “M” could be Marie Curie, who suffered public shame and xenophobia when, as a widow, she fell in love with a married man. “L” might well stand for Lilith, a personification of untamable sensuality and dangerous seduction. “U” is a homophone, directed at the reader, a terse warning of assuming 

 

1) that you can find the missing

either with maps or with technology. 

 

2) that words will keep you safe.

 

There is an “I” poem with these lines:

 

… She got

Levi’s blue jeans, too, and wise 

to how fast a girl can go 

when the fabric wraps around both legs.

 

But the “I” of first-person is absent in Abecedary. Whereas other women poets fall to the temptation of trying to define large swaths of women’s realities through their own thoughts and episodes, Levine creates a mosaic of the stories of other women and girls, some fanciful, some terrifying, some difficult, some triumphant—and all believable. Levine doesn’t have just one story about women; she has two dozen, and doesn’t attempt to shoe-horn them into fitting together in a tidy set. The ease with which Levine holds contrasting and conflicting truths reflects both depth and empathy. The poems are free in both content and form to grow and expand as individuals.

The poems dealing with physical vulnerability in Ladies’ Abecedary leave a particular mark. “R” takes on maternal mortality as erasing a fully formed human as well as the mother of a newborn. “E” moves in a circle from subservient calm to the horrors of medical invasion involving blood and the extraction of “a condition,” after which the poem itself, like E’s fingertips, forms a circuit and returns to baseline, emptied and still. What’s happened to E is horrific, but Levine’s control of the poem keeps the reader present and unblinking. 

 

Immediately afterward, “F,” the poem about the pie baker, also touches on blood-like destruction that hints at pregnancy loss. But the poem ends with its subject embracing the cycles that define women’s physical lives and their attendant agonies and hopes: 

 

And what did you do? they ask.

Roll dough. She places that reply so casually down,
as if she had described knocking over a cup of water in her sleep

and waking to find the floor already near dry; this, and not a story

of toil in making, toil in cleaning, toil in remaking, mourning loss.

 

“F” and the other heroines in Levine’s alphabet don’t dazzle with CGI superpowers. Instead, they endure with quiet dignity. “H” is a portrait of a lonely docent embracing (and embodying) the passage of time. In another way, the solitary exile in “N” abides and even nurtures another, finite form of life:

 

Here, they brought her

the last zinnia and some water 

to hold it for a day or two. 

After that, she will

hang it by its heels

so blood rushes to its head.

 

“K” is a longer poem that reads like a fairy tale. A phalanx of sisters moving as one unit, in height order, carry stones through the carnivorous snow of “a cold land” to test the firmness of the earth beneath their feet. 

 

Levine’s figures include women suffering and strictured by obsessions of mind and body. The fascinating “P”

 

can’t have any part of her 

body touching any other 

part of her body. It’s hard 

 

for more reasons that you’d expect. 

 

“S”’s pretty dress is also a “silken tourniquet”, and the echoing of words and phrases (“drumbeat,” “tongue,” “wings”) creates music while also speaking to the obsessive inner dialog and ritual of her disorder.

 

Several short entries in Ladies’ Abecedary introduce women who are not just at the mercy of nature but engaging with it, letting it inform them with a deeper awareness of how the world works. “O” is a chilling six-line metaphor on the occasional missteps of evolution, and the subject of “V” unwittingly conducts an experiment that shakes up both the cycle of time and the natural order that depends on it.

 

Women’s sexuality appears in the darkly seductive “L,” the bawdy, bouncing “Q” and the easy, watery bath of “W and X.” But the one that induces shivers is “T.” Levine uses white space to create two entities in the poem, bucket seats where “T” and her lover-or-abductor are riding together, their past in the rearview. The tension of the poem captures a breathless, burgeoning female sexuality, where danger and adventure are riding in the same car:

 

There is some place he took her from,    or some place
she left with him, perhaps
they were tossed out

of the sky, lost their lease on God.           So, El Camino
the drive, the unruly asphalt gardens, 
the tailpipe fumes

like a long exhale, the tapering 
of their history.

 

Higginson’s Atlantic essay, quoted in the book’s first epigram, ends with a suggestion: “First give woman, if you dare, the alphabet, then summon her to her career.” In Ladies’ Abecedary, Levine has used her alphabet and skill to create a haunting index of women’s anonymous, yet recognizable, lives. 

Jennifer Keith is a web content writer for Johns Hopkins Medicine. Her poems have appeared in Sewanee Theological Review, The Nebraska Review, The Free State Review, Fledgling Rag, Unsplendid, and elsewhere. Keith is the recipient of the 2014 John Elsberg poetry prize, and her poem 'Eating Walnuts' was selected by Sherman Alexie for inclusion in Best American Poetry 2015. In 2021 her poem “Cooper’s Hawk” was a finalist for the Erskine J. Poetry Prize from Smartish Pace and another poem received honorable mention in Passager’s poetry contest. She lives in Baltimore, MD.

An Insomniac's Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe

by Heidi Seaborn
(PANK Books, 2021) 

Reviewed by Mary Ellen Talley 

From the initial pages of An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, Heidi Seaborn illuminates the life of a public diva from Hollywood’s Golden Age who was trapped in a sex kitten culture. Seaborn brings Monroe to life in lyrical poems that demonstrate knowledge of and sensitive care for her subject. The poem “Marilyn” begins:

 
    She arrives: a gardenia in a cellophane box, 
    petals of honeyed hair radiating.
    Each blade of light travels the bud
    of her dimpled chin. How like a child,
    holding a buttercup to know the future.
    It’s all there, in the corsage of her lips.
 
Lest we forget how this gentle giant of an actress forged her popularity, Seaborn suggests it in “All I Ever Wanted,” a zig-zagged, abecedarian, persona poem, “God gave me a childhood from / hell & no father. But Heaven help me— / I have real talent & work I so love! I will never give it up.” 

The adage goes that the best poetry shows, rather than tells. Poems in this collection brilliantly show how a woman worked within a patriarchal system to gain advantage but ultimately was unable to break free from all its constraints.

In 1951, a pinup girl named Norma Jeane signed with Twentieth Century Fox studios and became the starlet Marilyn Monroe, a breathy-voiced comedic actress the public came to adore as they followed her career and celebrity marriages.

She remains a movie icon some sixty years after her untimely drug overdose death in 1962 at the age of thirty-six. At a book launch, Seaborn said her goal was to explore celebrity culture and create persona poems with pieces that enter into “conversation” between poet and subject. Seaborn demonstrates how deep engagement with a subject’s life can resonate with a writer’s own experience. For example, Seaborn discovered both she and Monroe suffered from insomnia. 

Rather than breaking the book into sections, Seaborn disperses early morning insomnia entries throughout as if someone is being tormented by a luminescent clock face. “Insomnia Diary” begins eleven short poems randomly placed to suggest the speaker’s disjointed anxiety and wakefulness. The entry “1:26am” begins:

    I’m patrolling tonight’s borders
    for a scrap of sleep to roll and smoke.
    I crave Ambien and a limey vodka tonic.
    It’s the middle of the night and Marilyn’s here
 
    without a lick of makeup in my kitchen,
    wrapped in a creamy silk robe. Like mine.
 
The anachronism of a modern era sleeping medication reveals how this poet interweaves subject and speaker in her poems. In a reading through Skylight Books, Seaborn juxtaposed Monroe’s anxiety, insomnia, and addiction to barbiturates with the speaker’s challenges with insomnia. Regarding this interweaving, Seaborn shared that “the speaker also discovers she’s addicted to Ambien.” (https://www.crowdcast.io/e/skylit-seaborn)

In another series of six clock time gems, “Hello, it’s Me, Marilyn,” we read persona poems of Monroe making phone calls on the night of her death: to her physician, to the actor Peter Lawford, to her makeup artist, to her miscarried child, and to her mother. The words are heartbreaking to read as they seem to inhabit Monroe’s pain.
Three selfie poems give Monroe entry into a modern cultural phenomenon she might’ve embraced had she lived. Seaborn excels at persona poems in voices that shift and merge. She also offers acrostic, abecedarian, prose, mirrored pairs, and list poems.

“Divine Marilyn in Paris” is a set of twelve ekphrastic persona poems relating to a 2019 exhibition of Marilyn Monroe photographs and artifacts. Persona poems fit right in with Monroe who created her own public image and provided fantasy for her fans.

Monroe emerged from poverty. One of the twelve persona poems, “[June 19, 1942–Portrait of Norma Jeane on her Wedding Day to Jim Dougherty]” suggests why she married at age sixteen. Aunt Grace admonishes “at the end of my high school sophomore year: / ‘Marriage or the orphanage, your choice / Norma Jeane.’” 

Neither her youth nor her stardom provided Monroe with an idyllic life. A poem with easy flowing couplets, “Sometimes I Just Want to Be Norma Jeane,” begins “I slice myself in half like a lemon, / leave Marilyn in the vestibule.”

The title poem “Insomniacs’ Slumber Party” uses lines from a 1967 interview with Judy Garland about Marilyn Monroe. In the poem, actual insomniac characters— Judy, Poet, and Marilyn—chit chat about taking too many sleeping pills, “Judy: so you take a couple more / Marilyn: sleeping pills to sleep. / Poet: That’s what they’re for—to sleep.” Readers can recognize an all-too-familiar and contemporary dependency on prescription drugs that continues to plague our society. 

If imitation is the highest form of flattery, Seaborn delivers several poems that take inspiration or spin off from the work of several modern poets she admires. For example, in “Selfie with Marilyn Monroe,” Seaborn plays with the list form of a Diane Seuss poem, “Self Portrait with Emily Dickinson.” 

Many fans came to realize that Monroe wasn’t a “dumb blonde” even though she played the part well in many sexy comedic films. Once she was photographed with her copy of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” The prose poem “Reading Ulysses” includes:

    that’s what I was reading when everyone
    assumed I was reading only the dirty 
    parts so that’s what they wrote in the
    paper about me reading my first edition
    that I bought at the Strand and carried
    everywhere so while the photographer
    was fiddling with the film I pulled it
    out to read.
 
In keeping with the title and thread of insomnia, how perfect to end the book with “Then I Slept,” a quiet poem inspired by Ada Limón’s “The Last Thing.”  The initial poem of the book, “1:28 am,” begins on a downbeat, “I’ve taken Ambien every day this week” with the presence of a sleeping lover “flaming a fire.” By contrast, in “Then I Slept” the speaker notes the indentation of “still warm, my love’s body” after having “slept without Ambien’s dark / fist pressing my pillow.”

Seaborn begins this last poem of her collection with the exquisite sour-sweet line, “First there was the lemon peel / of morning,” only to end the poem and the book:

    the heavy perfume 
 
    of daphne drifts through an open window 
    and a hummingbird whirs over the forsythia. 
 
    In the stacked white boxes 
    up the hill, the honeybees doze.
 
 
Mary Ellen Talley’s Book reviews have been published in Compulsive Reader, Crab Creek Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Empty Mirror, Sugar House Review and The Poetry Cafe. Her poems can be found in many journals and anthologies. A chapbook, Postcards from the Lilac City was published by Finishing Line Press in 2020.

Not for Luck

by Derek Sheffield
(Wheelbarrow Books, 2021) 

Reviewed by Anne Haven McDonnell 

There’s a quiet generosity in the poems of Derek Sheffield’s second collection, Not For Luck. With Sheffield’s rapt attention, luminous imagery, and attuned ear, these poems enchant us into intimacy with ordinary moments that are rendered extraordinary. Whether we are witnessing the surface of a sprinkler-filled pool left on the lawn, deer crossing the road with “the silky / pistons of their steps,” a father smelling “the lotion” of his daughter’s sleep, or wild irises “with lines thin as moth legs” growing wild in a ditch, we are welcomed into the poet’s vision like a friend, shown the world peeled back and fresh. 

In the poem “hitch,” Sheffield scatters the stanzas back and forth across white space like the movement of water as the speaker follows a stream “back into the hills” where he encounters “a white dab / of a day moth stuck up- / side down, wings full spread / and legs like sutures / crookedly struggling.” How many times have we encountered a similar sight? There’s a quiet pleasure in focusing the poem on this encounter. As the speaker’s reckons with rescue of this small creature, he confronts his own reflection in the water and considers his own inevitable acts of harm with this one act of rescue, to “divert a little life / for once.” With skilled and patient craft, Sheffield enchants and draws us close into this encounter, and quietly weaves in the larger questions of harm and help that arise. As an eco-poet, Sheffield trusts us to find echoes of our own complicity in a time of so much ecological harm, and question the small acts of compassion in the face of loss. But this larger reckoning is nested in wonder, in a quiet rescue of a drowning moth who is released “onto the bark where it crawls / wing-shivered into one / of the many furrows.” 

Sheffield brings this same generous attention to moments of intimacy, challenge, and loss in poems of fatherhood. In the moving poem “First Grade,” Sheffield opens with a scene where the father and daughter discuss a heads up, seven up game she played in class. From here, Sheffield moves into imagery and imagination that allow us to feel the love and limits of protection a father can offer. After realizing his daughter’s feeling of rejection, the father enters the game in his imagination, “seeing / children in rows, heads on desks, / her big ears poking through sandy hair, / listening for a step or a breath.” All at once, we become both the child waiting to be picked and the father wanting to protect her. The poem ends with a stunning image that captures the impossible poignancy here as the father imagines, “I stand / and walk over to find the outline of her hand / plunging through a white sky.” This last line dangles alone in white space, reflecting the vulnerability of the image. 

In the fatherhood poems, love and care is shadowed with inevitable losses as daughters grow into themselves. “She Gathers Rocks” is a delightful poem that travels on sound-rich short rhythmic lines that explore these woven intimacies and losses. This poem sings and clips with rhyme, alliteration, and rhythm that carry us through “her buckets, / her pockets / already clack-and-bristle / full.” This gathering of memory and time slips away as “it’s gone into her / quickening eyes and stride / that have left us.”

These poems don’t hide behind tricks of language, but rather trust that lyric language and a faithful looking can bring us closer to the wonder of encounter in the world, to love and to the inevitability of loss. In “The Seconds,” one of my favorite poems in the collection, Sheffield masterfully unfolds an act of discovery in a woodshed where “Something had curled here in the gasoline nights / all winter as snow and more snow made a world / of white mounds.” What is found there weaves a creature with a beloved dog who has died, with daughters who are growing out of childhood, with collecting the “rain-colored seconds” of what is held close. Such is the generosity of trust and transparency in the close encounters of these poems. The poems then become gifts and guides, allowing us to trust and turn towards our own rapt attention to the ordinary/extraordinary moments of our lives. I’d call this a poetics of love.

Anne Haven McDonnell lives in Santa Fe, NM and teaches as an associate professor at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her chapbook Living with Wolves was published in 2019 by Split Rock Press, and her full-length collection Breath on a Coal is out in September from Middle Creek Press. Her poems have appeared in Orion Magazine, Terrain.org. The Georgia Review, Narrative Magazine, The Hopper, and elsewhere.

House Bird

by Robert Fillman
(Terrapin Books, 2022) 

Reviewed by Jennifer Judge 

Robert Fillman’s debut, full-length collection House Bird is a book about living, dense with the kind of imagery that grounds the reader in the landscape, but throughout the book, another sort of other world appears that Fillman writes about with equal intensity, a ghost world populated by dead cousins, a grandfather, and even a repairman.  In the final poem, “The Blue Hour,” Fillman writes, 

    

    I remember the steam whirling

    from chimneys like hundreds of souls    

    lured by stars, stretching their new wings

    beneath the moon’s hollow shiver

    one chance to cross over from this

    realm and sail into the flute song

    of silver light […] 

This is just one example of the careful rendering that makes us cross over into Fillman’s world, one that is filled with fierce moments of light and joy despite the hardness of day-to-day living.

House Bird spends at least some of its time exploring childhood and innocence lost. A friend crouches beneath a porch, black eyed and tears flowing, having been the first among a friend group to lose his rattail in the poem “Rattails.” In an earlier poem, the speaker’s father smashes a video game beneath his shoe in front of his sons and is remembered as “the cold, bright force / we feared and loved.” Moments of violence ripple throught these poems—a baseball teammate abused by his own father, a friend discovers his dead rooster—but ultimately the men in this book want to do the best they can, and sometimes fail. There's the uncle who has just been kicked out his house by his wife, who sits with the young speaker as he rambles on and on about things unrelated to the uncle: “The empties lie on the lawn / like a thousand cuts.” The book is filled with men like this trying to figure out how to be, finding a clumsy sort of tenderness. “He was always careful / with the giving,” Fillman writes about the father in another poem, “his hands / like a slow, warm current /feeding another.”

Poems about childhood serve as a natural springboard into poems about the speaker’s present life, whether that means getting a ring sized because marriage vows “are easier to honor / than they are to forget” or engaging in serious doubts about life choices in the poem “Toast.”  Here Fillman writes, “should I / tell my family […] that I never / asked for buttered toast, or a cup / of instant coffee and cartoons / for my life.” But it is those earlier experiences that prepare the speaker for tenderness, the touch of the father’s cool hand on the speaker’s hungover neck, the things the father “guided / into me with his hands.” Poems like “For Snowflake,” about the speaker attempting to keep alive his son’s dying kitten, echo earlier moments such as “Starling in the Furnace Room,” where the father accidentally kills a trapped bird in order to protect his family from a perceived threat, and “When Kurt Cobain killed himself,” in which the mother must share the news with her son that his idol has died.

Ultimately, House Bird makes peace with its ghosts, both living and dead, and settles into moments of joy: the wife and children returning home from the store after a snowstorm, the careful gesture of walking each person to the house, the knowing glance shared between a husband and wife that is charged with sexuality, the care the speaker offers to his own children. No matter what happens, the speaker finds a steadying in nature, in life’s daily rhythms. In “All day long there’d been papers,” Fillman writes about leaving the sterility of an office for a field: “he let the scent of earth / breathe its dim life of decay / into his bones.”  

Fillman never settles on easy answers but instead grapples with the complexity of what it means to be human and to be responsible for other humans. Feet firmly routed in the present, House Bird understands fully what the past has given to us.

Jennifer Judge is a poet, professor at King’s College, and coordinator of the Luzerne County Poetry in Transit program. Her poem “81 North” was selected for permanent inclusion in the Jenny Holzer installation For Philadelphia 2018. Her work has also appeared in Rhino, Literary Mama, Blueline, Under the Gum Tree, and The Fictional Cafe, among others. Her first book, Spoons, Knives, Checkbooks, is forthcoming from Propertius Press. Learn more at jenniferjudgepoet.com.