the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless

by Matthew Cooperman 

(Free Verse Editions, 2024) 

Reviewed by Michael McLane

 

In the notes for the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless, Matthew Cooperman describes his newest collection as a “curiously durational project,” a twenty-year work built on odes that explore the vulnerabilities and complicities of being American in the twenty-first century. These odes act as the collection’s tender, beating heart as well as its sedimentary and interrogative core. Questions are key to the idiolect of the poems. Their exploration of the roles of difference, activism and love in modern American life offer an accretion and momentum that sustain the durational scope of the work and, at times, offer possibility, perhaps even hope, as a counterpoint to the memorial nature of odes. 

The scope of Cooperman’s work manifests early in the book. “Snow Globe” introduces us to the poet as a child living in a politically active home in the midst of another profoundly dangerous time for the nation:

    It was January 6, I was six years old, which would’ve made it
                  the 60s, and it was snowing
    Snow filling trash cans like ashtrays. Ma and Pa
            distantly fighting the giant snowstorm.

This is one of the oldest poems in the collection, written in 2003 or 2004 in response to the hubris of the Bush administration. Cooperman admits the choice of January 6th was made at the time primarily for a kind of numerological alliteration, but the prescience of this choice is unnerving and haunts the rest of the collection as the far more insidious actions of the Trump administrations come to bear on the poems. This snow globe of childhood is predictive of coming storms that are multilayered and multivalent—from the tumult of the 1960s, in which both of Cooperman’s parents were politically active, to literal weather of climate change to the inundation of whiteness that lead to the insurrection of January 6, 2021. This progression is confirmed in the subsequent poem, “No Ode,” where:

    On a Wednesday at the Capitol something did happen, not the dream
    again deferred, not the righteous bear not the know nothing snake
             just the sickening spell of blood…

The poem weaves in and out of these two periods of monumental shifts in the body politic and violence on both institutional and individual levels. William F. Buckley and Allen Ginsberg are interwoven with 9/11, calving glaciers, and school shootings. The poem asserts and negates, asserts and negates, undercuts itself like a clumsy nation that doesn’t quite earn its ode. So, it is a “No Ode,” a longing to come to terms with atrocity only to find its accretion and recurrence, ending in the acknowledgment: 

    This is a history poem       This is not true       In my country there is
                no history but the lesson we didn’t learn

Cooperman collects, scours, and recontextualizes these lessons, salvaging bits of wisdom from the eternal return of American hubris and violence. The poems are often iterations of a nation in conversation with one another or talking past one another. Two of the most poignant examples occur in “General Context” and “Major Lure,” poems that apply cut-up and erasure techniques to speeches given by General Douglas MacArthur, including his “Farewell Address to Congress,” in the years immediately following World War II. In “General Context,” he writes:

    Americans never quit, 24/7 openness, we will be prepared to say
    something, do things…

    Our government has kept us within borders, as do governments
    do by law. Part of the American Dream is in the borders, where they
    hover. The best of luck is to be born into some kind of dream. 

This disconnect between sleeplessness and dreaming, paranoia and vigilance continues in “Major Lure,” where:
    
    One cannot wage war with old soldiers. Under no circumstances
    should their sleeping be disturbed. Our country is now fit
    for an ailing king. There is no substitute for the facts…

Sandwiched between these two remixed warnings from a departing general is the poem “Gun Ode,” which operates with the breakneck speed of its titular character and offers us an ode at its most heartbreaking. What is abundantly clear but goes unsaid is that this is, again, no ode (“No Ode”) in the conventional sense, but an examination of the catalyst for tragedy, a poem to the facilitator of odes rather than their recipients. It opens with a reference to Kent State, “a dollar with a gun in its mouth, a daisy with the sun / in its mouth,” as well as a callout to Pete Seeger in the lines “where have all the flowers gone // Gun—what have you done to our bodies?” The rate at which this machine births fascists is exponential in the modern era, as Cooperman understands all too well:

                        My hands don’t fit the bitter hasp
    
    As in naked and afraid, without means of protection, we were
    forced to love and evolve

    As in, O America, aren’t you tired of being an ode, why don’t you 
    ever use your Kevlar® shield?

            O First Responder, thank you also for being America

It is a poem that spares us no violence in its repetitions, its sonic qualities, its product placements and, most of all, in its complicity and sadness: 

    I can’t think of one happy memory ever associated with a gun

        Disarm      Disarm     Disarm      Disarm

    If the impulse to destruction is greater than the insight to love
             We are doomed to a garden of graves

    If freedom is money spent on guns, what is American grace?

Cooperman can envision a grace beyond fear and armament, and he does so again and again in this collection. Perhaps the most vivid example is in the alternative history he offers in “Country Mulligan,” where the hanging chads of the 2000 election fall differently and we have a President Gore and a “kinder enclosure […] / the planet turns cooler, greener, bluer […] / A Moslem spring flowers in poly-Arabian nights / Scheherazadism, Two Stateism, 23andMe goes viral.” All the dead poets and dancers and artists return; Sandy Hook is a place of community rather than mourning; the mass shooter at an Aurora theater finds love rather than profound loneliness. The poem is sad and hopeful, distraught and in love with possibility all at once. 

The hope that manifests in bits and pieces in “Country Mulligan” is more fully embodied in “Difference Essay,”  a ten-page poem that is simultaneously an ode to difference in all its forms—corporeal, cultural, political—and a study of being the parent of an autistic child, which shapes Cooperman’s understanding of the necessity of difference in American life. In a recent interview with the Laurel Review, Cooperman says of the poem, “atmosphere is a durational project, and that duration has also been the duration of my now eighteen-year-old autistic daughter. So the poem functions as a hinge of sorts. What happens to our country happens to us. And I didn’t really realize what was difference until I saw difference… the disease of homogeneity is actually—at least in my lifetime—an American disease.” Cooperman is unflinching in his indictment of this disease:

    But then I’d come to write of a terrible relentless
         sameness. The monochrome in the chromosome, the color
              of some and not others. Who is not other in the infinite
             catalogue of difference? To be riven is a state. “The shades
                  of the prison-house close round about us all”

And he is not alone. Voices and influences accrete as the book moves along, but perhaps nowhere more acutely than “Difference Essay.” In the passage above, he channels Walt Whitman, W.E.B. Du Bois, and philosopher Timothy Morton, whose concept of “hyperobjects” plays a recurring role in this and other books by Cooperman. In the same way that different versions of America talk to each other through these poems so, too, do different versions of the poet converse and illustrate how influences and mentors converge and diverge in these versions of ourselves. Whitman is a constant companion in these poems, as is Ed Dorn. The projective verse and proprioception of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson manifest in Cooperman’s use of the full “field” of the page as well as varying font sizes, colors, and other typographical techniques to score the poems. The result is a piece like “Difference Essay,”  a work so layered and polyphonic in its influences that it emulates the differences and possibilities the poet calls for in his nation as well.  

It is perhaps unsurprising then that, after the blizzard of violence, schism, and creeping homogeneity of the last twenty American years, Cooperman should offer up the final say of this collection to two poetic forefathers, Pete Seeger and Louis Zukofsky, in a poem called “Bouquet.” It ends on a couplet that ends on an ellipsis that echoes those past tragedies while planting literal and metaphorical hope in a new generation:

    the markings of progress
    by hook and drive

    anthem     anodyne     aloud

    the little hands
    the little hands stitch new flowers…
 

Besaydoo

by Yalie Saweda Kamara

(Milkweed Editions, 2024) 

Reviewed by Deborah Bacharach

You know that delicious shock when sounds you can almost understand suddenly transform into words? Like when you realize “Besaydoo” means “Be safe dude.” We discover this, as does the speaker’s mother, in the title poem of Yalie Saweda Kamara’s award-winning first book. The speaker and her mother then adopt this phrase as their mantra: “Besaydoo, we whisper to each other across the country. Like / some word from deep in somewhere too newborn-pure for the outdoors, but we / saw those two boys do it, in broad daylight, under a decadent, ruinous sun. Besaydoo.” Kamara is a Sierra Leonean-American writer and a native of Oakland, California. In a wide range of poetic forms, she explores the ruinous and tender.

This book is wider and taller than average. It has to be. Kamara’s line lengths range from the five-syllable lines of haiku to lines that reach 33 syllables. The ten-page poem “Aunty X Becomes a Unit of Light,” begins “While looking in the mirror, my Aunty X surveys her head, wondering if her alopecia has been a / lifelong exercise in losing parts of herself,” a line that spans the entire page, and a sentence that goes even longer. These long lines appear both in poems that have the feel and shape of a lyric essay, as well as those where the line length ranges wildly between, and within, stanzas. 

The long line length lets Kamara set a conversational tone and teaches us to read as we might a narrative, paying attention to character, setting, and plot development. Her shorter lines serve in a different way. In “A Poem for my Uncle,” she writes:

My uncle came back from the dead the color of

    a strobe light, float-walked above

    the church’s maroon carpet pressing

    into the pulse of every living thing in the sanctuary.

Ending a line “the color of” heightens anticipation. The color of what? And we have to wait for the answer. Putting “a strobe light, float-walked above” as its own line multiplies meanings: both the uncle (as part of the sentence) and the strobe light (from the stand-alone line) get to float-walk. And the short lines slow the reader down and ask them to focus on the imagery, the sounds (pressing, pulse) as well as the overall meaning of the sentence. In her wide-ranging use of lines, it’s like Kamara is saying, “Every tool in the poetry toolbox is mine to use, and I will use it how I want.” 

Uncles, aunts, a brother, a mother—family, who have come from Sierra Leone and must engage with cultural shifts, form a central theme in this book. We hear odes to lumpia and stories of eating malombo fruit in Freetown, but this book also takes place in the racism of America. In “I Ask My Brother Jonathan to Write about Oakland, and He Describes His Room,” we learn of a brother who hugs his own flesh [so] the “X his arms make across his chest is not mistaken for a target.” Unlike how popular culture often depict Black men, Kamara shows us loved ones who are real and vulnerable. And also unlike much of popular culture, she does not shy away from the specificity of racism in America. She includes a series of poems about the Nia Wilson memorial, and in “Bloomington, Indiana Part I” she writes:

What I knew, but did not want to know, was that a friend was called a monkey and spat on around the corner from my apartment. What I remembered, but did not want to remember, was the car with the tinted windows that once followed me for blocks. What I recall, but want to forget, is why we never stop for gas in Martinsville.

The equivocating “what I knew, but did not want to know” gives these images a terrible poignancy, makes the speaker’s witness more real, vivid, and hard-hitting. 

She witnesses violence, racism, and resistance. When the Black football player Marshawn Lynch refused to answer reporters’ questions, Kamara understands this moment as a thrilling refusal to capitulate: “I too have wanted to become a miracle / in my own Black mouth.” This book is filled with the miracles of Black resistance and joy starting from the first poem “Oakland as Home, Home as Myth.” It includes a repeated monostich line “Oakland is a killing field, they say” a terrifying drone that we are taught to consider suspect by the “they say.” The speaker and her community don’t feel this way about Oakland—outsiders do. Kamara contrasts that disparagement of her home with lines of sensory delight and celebration:

               The upper level of the MacArthur BART Station

    smells like Palmer’s Cocoa Butter because being ashy in The Town

    is worse than jaywalking. The aroma of chocolate blankets the opposing

    platforms, while warm air kisses bare ankles and calves

Here is a magical world where the very air smells delicious because of how the people care for themselves. In “Sweet Baby Fabulist,” Kamara tells us a three-year-old nephew calls everything Black: 

               Black is what he called the universe,

    to show us how much he loved her. Black 

    were the rainbows, the full moon and the deep nightfall.

    Black were the rivers and sky. God was as Black

    as the autumn breeze’s call. 

This child sees a Black universe full of love and beauty. The syntax of “Black were” combined with the repetition and rhymes (nightfall, call) make the poem sing like a lullaby. With these techniques, the poem becomes both a witness to Black joy and a promise to protect those who can see the world this way.

Throughout the book, this is a promise we hear a speaker making to herself. Several poems refer to getting sober, deleting Tinder, moving away from the worst of Midwestern racism because those patterns and places keep her from Black joy. In “Elegy for My Two Step” she tells us:

    Before the spirits left me, I used to sway

    with some sort of lubricated ease inside

    a dingy crescent of bodies that reeked of

    2$ Dickel shots and buzzed with Tinder

    pheromones.

The “dingy crescent” of this old life contrasts with the full moon the child sees. The poem ends, “I touch my blessed, undying self.” She has rebuilt herself. “Besaydoo,” the saying, means the community is watching out for you. Besaydoo, the book, celebrates the importance of that community but also shows a speaker bringing herself healing and joy. 

Deborah Bacharach is the author of Shake & Tremor (Grayson Books, 2021) and After I Stop Lying (Cherry Grove Collections, 2015). Her work has recently appeared in Poetry East, Last Syllable, and Grist, among many other journals, and she has received a Pushcart prize honorable mention. She is a poetry reader for SWWIM and Whale Road Review. Find out more about her at DeborahBacharach.com.

Waste Management Facility

by Scott Withiam

(MadHat Press, 2025) 

Reviewed by Carla Panciera

In a waste management facility, waste products are altered chemically, physically, and biologically for a variety of reasons. Scott Withiam does the same for the ordinary world around us in his latest collection (his third). Nothing ends up as it begins, resisting the usual predictions, long held notions, and plain logic. The result is an imaginative and singular adventure through a world we thought we knew.

 

The early pages of the book seem anchored enough in reality. The opening section focuses on the rustic landscape of a childhood spent “speeding across corn flats to the lake,” driving deer for hunters with a friend, and recalling the taste of a grandfather’s homemade pickles. But even the first poem, “Draft”, establishes the idea of an imbalance that is alluring and poses an important question. The speaker’s grandmother scales a wall at an overlook and leans into winds, imploring him to join her. “She kept telling me to step up, look, / but I covered my face,” he says, perhaps referring to the present danger or to some version of his own future in which, he too, will either be forced to let go, eschew sense, or continue to observe the world from a safe distance. Which, one wonders, would be preferable?

 

The question is perhaps answered in “Men’s Room” where a lone gas station attendant behind glass one night is a reminder of  “unattended / animals . . . in a failed zoo, catatonic, / rubbing the same spot in a chain-link fence.” There are many ways to exist within the spectrum of balancing on the edge of violence to being stifled in a literal cage. 

 

In “One Man Show” the speaker views paintings of familiar landscapes that capture grief, but he claims he is “not interested in any artist’s abstractions.” Rather, he longs to be grounded in the what is, to remain far from the ledge, perhaps the antithesis to poetry and certainly to many of the poems that follow. Here is how we manage, these first poems seem to say: Children navigate the fraught relationships of adults, adults reconcile painful aspects of their own pasts, all of us process grief.

Despite our attempts to tread carefully, it is impossible to ignore what threatens our peace, even when it happens offstage. In the poem “Hard Candy,” a young boy is admonished by an older person not to choke on a treat. While the warning is generic enough, actions outside the stuffy parlor where “three clocks ticking . . . / chased each other. One just had to take / the lead” is a scene that increasingly portends violence. Here and elsewhere, the poet bears witness to the small dramas of relationships and the larger social issues of migrant workers, failing farms, and boarded up factories, far from any abstract concepts of reality. If only we could exist in the world without internalizing its images, we wouldn’t need any alterations in what we find. 

 

Instead, we embark on an experience that is anything but a preservation of realism. People strolling along a beach are “bugs on a jawbone . . . pill bugs topside and topsy-turvy.” When breakfast with an old friend becomes tense, one man imagines himself as a chief petty officer on the eighteenth century New England streets full of “coopers, cordwainers, and shipwrights.” Another poem’s speaker imagines a discussion between the lovers where the woman becomes “as tight-lipped as a mollusk” and the man wonders, “And what did that make me? A greasy dumpster raccoon / feeling around for a clam underwater.” 

 

The heart of the book centers around lessons learned from the speaker’s job at a waste treatment plant: look busy, keep out of trouble, and observe the world through a clear lens that often relies on humor and the ability to manipulate language—the perfect internship for a young poet: 

 

As for feeling bad about being paid to

or about being removed from view

or about cheating taxpayers

or wrestling with the value

of a hard day's work or complicity,

I’m sorry, none of those concerns surfaced. 

 

The young man’s candor and his acceptance of his role matures into a realization that what keeps people most busy is avoiding solutions. Kids convince themselves they can’t learn algebra. Teachers can’t control the chaos in the cafeteria. Scientists can’t determine what has killed the birds they study. No one can slice a block of cheese with the proffered knife. When a former chemist flees his own country and ends up cleaning professors’ offices, his supervisor reminds him not to finish his day too early: “‘We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. Then what would there be?’”  The void, of course. Time to confront real questions. No wonder we spend so much of our lives engaged in the meaningless and make so little progress. The only employee who demonstrates any initiative in these poems is a blue jay (yes, the bird) who, fired from his job at a funeral home because he made a nest in the hair of the deceased, earns a new position as a concierge because the manager can’t imagine “who better to direct visitors to the most interesting places.” In Withiam’s world, this scenario is less ridiculous than reality. 

 

In these pages it is the non-poets who reach for creative expression—a brochure writer, the colleague trying to describe his golf swing, the woman who “had called curtains / of squalls giant jellyfishes, when a child / living on a high plateau.” By contrast, in “The Angry Estate Gardener,” the eulogists at a friend’s memorial service who are poets, lose their craft when they most need it. The speaker listens to their maddening chorus of platitudes. Meanwhile, he remembers the story his late friend told of the time he worked with a gardener who raised koi and banana trees to sell to the rich. The only marvel to a man wealthy enough to rent the trees for a party, is that they can stand on their own despite such shallow roots. “No one can stand on their own,” the friend offers, “covering, all at once, a lot of territory— from gardener to the great idea of global share so far from carried out, to poets—and right there was let go on the spot.” 

 

Withiam isn’t subject to treacle and sentimentality. He’s disgruntled, sarcastic, impatient with ornamentation. He’s very much part of the “real” world. (He reads People Magazine in doctors’ offices, pauses on his way to teach a class, surprised to hear an admissions tour guide using the fact that the school has Aaron Hernadez’s brain. “But where’s the heart?” he wonders?) But he is also capable of producing poems in which suitcases are interviewed by detectives, and a hibiscus, hybridized beyond all fragrance, dreams of hatching a mockingbird to once again distinguish itself. One of the final poems begins with a couple’s first promising night together and then veers into a dream world where manholes speak to the woman trying to escape her new lover, in part because he corrects her vocabulary. 

 

Even the sacred art of poetry itself can be reexamined through Withiam’s lens. In an attempt to win a poetry contest to make his mother proud before she dies, he is only partially successful. He wins, but is accompanied to the reception by his mother’s ghost who assures him “‘that poetry can transport anyone great distances.’” Instead of finding this inspiring, he is unable to write. Instead, he takes a job dressed as the Statue of Liberty, standing on a street corner and waving motorists into the parking lot of a tax preparation office. Solutions ahead!

 

In Waste Management Facility, Scott Withiam asks his readers what the grandmother in the first poem asked: Will you stand here on this ledge? As the wind howls and blows your coattails like sails, will you forego your safety net? Are you prepared to see what happens when, uncaged, unbound by logic, you, instead, trust in a balancing act between what is and what can be? The answer, of course, especially where these poems are concerned, is yes.

Carla Panciera’s newest book is Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir. She has published fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in numerous journals including Poetry, Nimrod, and the Los Angeles Review. Her collection of short stories, Bewildered, received AWP’s 2013 Grace Paley Short Fiction Award. Her poetry collections are One of the Cimalores (Cider Press Review Award) and No Day, No Dusk, No Love (Bordighera Prize). A third collection is forthcoming in November 2025 from Bordighera Press.