The Unbuttoned Eye
by Robert Carr
(3: A Taos Press, 2019)

Reviewed by Devon Balwit

Back in the mid-eighties, I sometimes accompanied my gay roommate to the bars of West Hollywood. A woman, I was invisible to the patrons and spent my time like an anthropologist, trying to learn the ways of gay bodies—how men signaled desire and acted upon it—so different from what I knew. Robert Carr’s poems flesh out (indeed!) these hows, unabashedly delighting in men’s desire for other men. “We are the timeless fuck in skinless / dark,” “We do not care / for sex with women, hunt // toothsome men.” Bodies and the pleasures they give are lovingly itemized— “thin men measure dark lengths against the lining of a mouth.” Sexual pleasure is taken in bars, in bathrooms, on boardwalks, in tents, in elegant bedrooms, “[c]ock dowsing the center / that sustains space.” Even knowing the threat of what was then called G.R.I.D. (Gay Related Immune Deficiency), candy-colored condoms were left by many sex-club patrons untouched in bowls: “Come into me unsheathed / strand, little death hood / between boy and man.”

These are the beautiful bodies documented by Robert Mapplethorpe—not the least of which was Robert Mapplethorpe’s own. Readers should spend time with Mapplethorpe’s photographs to catch their many echoes throughout the poems—the infamous whip in the anus, the gorgeous calla lilies, men having sex in multiples, leather-clad men, men pissing on one another, Mapplethorpe sporting devil’s horns. The photographs of Robert Carr as a young man echo some of Mapplethorpe’s poses. They are produced using the process of Solarization, which involves re-exposing the photographic paper during the development process to produce an eerie silver image that makes his young, sculptural body look electrified, surrounded by a dark halo, almost as if the fine hairs of the skin have become metal filings drawn by a magnet.

Alas, as we all know, in the 80’s, the hungry body soon became the dying body. Drawing on his long years of witness and serving the infected and the suffering, Carr writes intimately about the ravages of AIDS on his community: Kaposi’s sarcoma, thrush, incontinence, hair loss, vomiting. These bodies that were once sought out to pose in art classes, for photographs, for one another in the heat of passion, soon fail in hospices, hospitals, and on living room couches. Carr’s poems are unsparing: “Release of shit in a death-bed, spread / of blood shaken over birth. Salt of first cry, sugar / of breast milk, black rattle vomit.”

And yet the dying body calls forth compassion, as in this excerpt, from “Font”: “You whisper how he’s lost the strength to walk, so for weeks // you’ve carried him like a child learning a waltz. You tell me how, / lifted from the bed, he places lesioned soles on top of your feet, / how you walk backward toward the bathroom […]” All-night sex morphs into fear and deathbed vigil.

And yet, as the poet’s mother says to him: “Not everyone who dies / is a beautiful boy, amen.” Many of these men do make it through the crisis. Then, they have to accommodate yet another loss—that of aging, the beautiful, sculptural body morphing into the lumpy, dumpy, mottled old body, yet one that celebrates the opportunity to age. “Wrapped in a fist, I grow still—age spotted, / a lichened twist growing out of a night.” “I burrow contented in fattened fur— / learn to love loss // of lank […]” Bars tame into thirty-year marriages, husband and husband, the raising of a child, wills, and funeral arrangements. While good, the poet admits, “Life is flatter now that no one is dying.”

The reader soon notices that The Unbuttoned Eye is full of Roberts. The collection begins with a prelude: “Some names I remember, others I make up […] I am the sum of prints, stacked Roberts […]” At least fifteen poems reference the name: Robert Mapplethorpe, Robert Carr, young Roberts, older Roberts, bedside Roberts, bedded Roberts. How do these many Roberts interact? Robert chides Robert: “Robert, stop moping with the dead.” Robert witnesses Robert: “Robert clings // to castles in reread picture books.” Roberts mourns (with) Robert: “Wordless, / another Robert leaves the neighbor’s house.” Robert reflects: “Robert, even now, we are not lovers. I allow you a bronzed urn on a mantle, nothing more.” Prose poem letters to and from Robert Mapplethorpe serve as section heads. The multiplication of the name, the reappearance of the poet’s younger self in photographs, shifts the reader forward and backwards in time—through avid bodies and ailing ones, wistful and grateful ones. The Roberts challenge one another and call one another to account.

Finally, the poems must stand as poems, and not just as a historical record. These do—artfully and cunningly wrought. Carr has mastered line breaks, startling us with deft shifts in direction, for example: “I sit naked with a small group / of strangers, unusually well / hung.” He plays with layout, adding space at the margins and between stanzas to allow the poems to breathe as in this excerpt from “Someone Else’s Bruise”:
  
    Restless swelter
           —curled paint,
                        a ceiling skin hanging
    in heat. A never-
                       to-do list. Rolling
    onto my back,
    I find imprints
          on a forearm. Twisted cotton
    sheets spiraled on the floor.

Carr’s work is also full of poignant metaphor. He writes of pink magnolia blossoms, birds echoing boys: “Almost to a bird, they fell to earth / and died of fear. Blush gray wings / silent, folded on a walkway […]” Titles unfold layer upon layer. Font evokes tears, holy water, the fluid in lesions as well as the font of the Motel 6 sign. “Chocolate Box” refers to the slab of a dead man’s coffin as well as the narrator’s own anus, hiding the thong of the deceased whose funeral he is attending. Carr has a light touch with his heavy material. Never once does the reader feel that the book was written in the service of a message, and yet it traces the course of an epidemic and of attitudes towards and of those who bore the brunt of it. “Everybody leaves behind something,” Carr writes. We are fortunate that he will have left The Unbuttoned Eye.

Inside the Animal: The Collected Red Riding Hood Poems
by Shanan Ballam
(Main Street Rag Publishing, 2019)

Reviewed by Ben Gunsberg

Shanan Ballam’s third collection, Inside the Animal: The Collected Red Riding Hood Poems, enters the same woods mapped in her debut chapbook The Red Riding Hood Papers, but rather than carrying a picnic-sized bundle of poems drawn from the European fairytale, this book assembles a six-course feast. The collection is divided into sections that correspond loosely to Charles Perrault’s version of Little Red Riding Hood, a tale intended to warn readers—particularly women and children—about the dangers of trusting men. Inside the Animal inherits the basic dramatic contour of the original story, but by deploying a diverse range of perspectives Ballam’s poems uncover a more complex set of motives and desires than the fairytale allows. Here Wolf wears Red Riding Hood’s cape, Red Riding Hood shape shifts into a “girl-gun,” and Grandmother hangs upside down, dreaming of a bat. Such surprising additions and addendums create a pleasing tension between the familiar and the strange. Much like Little Red Riding Hood herself, who steps off the safe path to collect flowers, one feels neither completely lost nor at home while reading these poems, but one certainly finds beauty.

Wild roses, petunias, red-winged blackbirds—the natural world tempts and troubles the various speakers in these poems. Take the first few lines of “Grandmother Waiting for Red Riding Hood: The Footprint,” which uses gorgeous language to connote both vulnerability and menace.

    Silvery lupine,
    blue penstemon,
    throats open, drinking bees.

Seduced by such beauty, it’s easy to forget the dangers that dwell in the forest, most notably the slippery carnivore who preys on little girls and sickly grandmothers. Wolf, however, develops into something more mysterious and extraordinary than we expect. Unlike fairytales, which tend to typecast characters, Inside the Animal complicates the relationship between good and evil, predator and prey. In “Wolf Tracks Red Riding Hood,” for example, Wolf appears more heartbroken than frightening while bemoaning Red Riding Hood’s Dear John letter: “Over and over he reads her note / through a burning blur of tears.” Dejected, Wolf imagines the auburn afternoon he and Red Riding Hood planned to elope:

    They would float away down
    Emerald River, emerge at the end
    of the world where no one
    knew who they were.
    They would marry, build
    a cabin. They would live alone
    in a bee-loud glade.

By rendering Wolf as a rejected suitor rather than a killer, Ballam redraws Perrault’s portrait of predatory masculinity and helps redeem Wolf despite his transgressions. Indeed, transformation as means to redemption is a thematic line that helps cinch the collection into a satisfying whole.

Red Riding Hood and Grandmother escape victimhood. Wolf shakes his fate as an eternal predator. Even the woods, which provide a treacherous context for the drama, surrender their “meadows of death” for “gold light filling the mouth of the valley.” In this way, Ballam challenges the fairytale’s familiar conventions and presents a more complete and genuine reflection of the human condition. These transformations ring true because the poems, though set in the fantastical world, record keen observations about the world in which we live.

Inside the Animal also explores the liminal space between the observer and the observed. In revelatory poems, such as “Both Sides of the Window,” the speaker’s place inside (outside?) the story is called into question.

    The story is a window, and light slides
    its eyes through the glass. Little prickles
    of time, the squeak of a finger, smudging
    its oily print. Outside the sky darkens

Whether the speaker of this poem lives inside or outside the Little Red Riding Hood story, “Wolf will always be waiting, the girl always watching.” Such lines suggest there is no escape from the animal, yet the book’s final section marks a pathway forward. We’re granted a glimpse of this path in the poem “Grandmother, Inside the Wolf,” where Grandmother “whirls, weightless,”
  
    turning and turning
                           in the gauze of beginning

             She is a hummingbird
                                         inside a glass cage,
                           feathers thrumming

While one imagines Wolf’s insides to be vulgar and terrifying, Ballam once again defies expectations, this time by transforming viscera into a gauzy womb. How lovely this reversal, this renovation, where Wolf becomes a means to Grandmother’s rebirth and renewal. Indeed, many of these poems conjure sublime moments out of the most visceral language, out of carnage. How is this possible? Credit Ballam’s dexterous control of the prosodic elements of the language. It’s easy to luxuriate in an abundance of consonance and assonance in the first stanza of “After Reading The Odyssey & Paradise Lost, Wolf Dreams”:

    From thick woods men emerged,
    wind-sick, sea-blown,
    her voice, woven silver, rose
    from her house of stone,

The pleasing repetition of vowel and consonant sounds warbles atop an irregular pulse. In addition to showcasing Ballam’s fine ear, this stanza illustrates the contrastive movement typical of many poems in the collection. Often the most melodious lines are paired with the most terrifying images. Poem to poem, this contrastive tendency conveys a philosophical stance, one that blends a romantic faith in the imagination with a stoic acceptance of vulnerability and peril.

In an unforgiving forest, one fashions shelter by drawing upon the imagination. It’s no wonder so many of the poems refer to “dreams” and “dreaming.” The imagination is cast as both a refuge and a source of agency for Ballam’s characters. Moreover, these poems recommend the toleration of opposites as a means to recovery and self-acceptance. In “Grandmother Dreams of the Field Mouse,” for instance, the speaker’s self-regard oscillates between fragility and strength. In one stanza Grandmother exists as “an obscure stain at the base of milk thistle”; in the next she discovers her shadow spreads “fantastic, tall… a fierce fang on snow glowing orange with evening.” Dreaming of herself as a field mouse, Grandmother appears both large and small, powerful and pathetic. Through the acceptance of contradictions, she frees herself from her role as victim, just as Wolf ultimately resists being written off as a criminal.

Freedom and understanding arrive through a willingness to accept conflicting versions of one’s self. One must come to terms with multiple states of being. Such recognition is the “dark portal” referred to in “Birthday,” the collection’s final poem:

    I close my eyes and drag
    my life, heavy tail,
    into the dark
    portal—

    I understand
    falling, how it feels
    to be a white fountain
    with no beginning,
    a continuous subtraction—

Within this portal the speaker inhabits a “new body” prepared to tread a new path through the lovely, dangerous forest, her eyes “keen and animal, / adjusting to the dark.”

Readers will be rewarded by following Ballam inside the animal. The eyes and ears of Wolf, Grandmother, and Red Riding Hood conjure what William Trowbridge calls a “prism of empathy, erudition, and wonder.” Those who enjoyed Ballam’s previous collections, The Red Riding Hood Papers and Pretty Marrow, will be pleased to find inventive additions and unexpected twists to the fairytale. Undoubtedly one finds pleasure in the way these poems swerve against the uber narrative, but there is so much more to relish while reading Inside the Animal. How delicious the sounds. How satisfying the movement between points of view. What big eyes these poems have. How sharp the vision.

What We Do
by Michele Bombardier
(Kelsay Books, 2018)

Reviewed by MaryEllen Talley

This debut collection of poems by Michele Bombardier begins with a vignette of youthful spontaneity. Two hospital clinicians on a break are igniting past indiscretions written on paper to float like ashen butterflies out a window. In the poem, “Fireball of Sin on a House of Prayer,” the unprofessional yet emotional release of ashes becomes a small fire on the roof of a trauma unit, a metaphor for the well-trained but immature women dealing with the challenges of providing services for impaired patients.

    Frantic, we poured our cups of cold coffee, contents
    of our hospital-insignia water bottles dousing
    the sizzling remnants above the heads
    at those staring up at the ceiling below.
 
The importance of such moments of release for a fledgling speech/language pathologist (SLP) become obvious in the deft images of poems such as, “Baptism,”

    His hand a fist as he pulls the catheter
    from his crotch to above his head,
    an arc of movement and mustard color urine
    dousing me, my clipboard, and my intern name-tag,
    his head lolls to one side, his eyes closed.
    I pull up the chair, lower the bedrails.
    He bats at my hand. When he finds it, he quiets,

As the clinician dry heaves later in the bathroom, Bombardier shows us the aftermath both minimally and compassionately. Readers cannot help but feel the experience. The speaker calls her brother, telling him to promise to always wear a helmet. The incident is evidence that she has found a calling in a profession where success will be measured in small victories. She told her brother that the ten minutes she spent at the patient’s bedside holding his hand had been enough to calm his agitation. No amount of training could have prepared the clinician to deal with this challenge.

While most poems in this collection are not formal, “Adherence: A Cycle of Sonnets” ties together poems about the author’s father, religion, nature, and the past with lyrical loveliness: “when I noticed the sweetness was ocean / couched in brine on my tongue.” Bombardier is an adept multi-tasker, a form in and of itself, and is able to create a confluence of skillful poems on diverse topics: her clinical career, her husband’s cancer, her sons, her family’s Jewish and Catholic heritage, her father’s challenges with residue from WWII and with alcohol, and international crises close to her heart. Rather than overflowing their thematic banks, the scope and variation of the poems weave to highlight the complexity of a woman, wife, mother, daughter, clinician, and humanitarian.

Bombardier’s collection is often self-effacing, as in the poem about her mother-in-law, “What I Want to Believe,” in which she describes family gatherings:

    Once I brought a Buche de Noel
    on her holiday table, next to her Jello

    banana pudding with Nilla Wafers. I was insufferable
    and she forgave me. Now my vegetarian daughter-in-law

    refuses dairy and sugar, brings her own spelt crackers
    and sunflower butter when they visit. I want to believe

    my mother-in-law can smell the grey-brown paste, that she hovers
    in her chenille bathrobe right outside my kitchen window.

Likewise, grandparents bequeath significant memories. In “The Song and Dance Man,” Bombardier reminisces about her grandfather wearing a Derby hat and breaking “a chain of seven generations / by not becoming a rabbi. Another word / never spoken in our house: pogrom.” Such silences can become a survival trait in a family. In the poem, “My Grandmother Comes to Ellis Island, 1923,” readers learn that her grandmother never mentions a baby left behind in the old country,

The poet addresses her father’s tribulations as well. Although Bombardier writes in the sonnet, “A Toast to My Ghosts,” regarding alcohol, “I like my wine to taste like relief, which means only one glass, sometimes two,” she also writes of being a child smelling fear, “I’m four again and he stumbles down the hall.” Bombardier alludes to the ghost of her mother, “She put up posters to cover the holes / in the walls.”

As time bears witness to changes, the adult daughter cares for her father in poems such as, “A Taste of Sweetness,” which describes how she “loved feeding my dying father” using skills likely honed in the hospital setting, “tapping the spoon / soft against his lips, waiting / for his bird mouth to open.”

    The time for words had passed
    and my father, who did not speak
    to me for years, blinked
    as he reached for my hand
 
This collection is not about Bombardier the parent or penitent. However, motherhood and spirituality are never far from her musings. “Sometimes All We Hold is Prayer,” beautifully recounts a phone conversation with her son who had just become a father after a dangerous delivery:

    And they realize they are moving, rocking
    side to side, holding
    their son through the little metal box

    and a thousand miles. The three of them
    softly crying, then breathing,
    not wanting to release the weight in their hands.

Bombardier’s love of living amid the water and trees on an island in Puget Sound has infiltrated her son’s life. In the poem, “What the Arborist Hears,” she writes that her son asks the tree for permission before, “the grip and embrace, the pull / up and into the canopy, that foreign land.”  She instructs her son in another poem, “Rise Like a River,” how to be a feminist,

    If you were my daughter, I’d want you to rise
    without asking, spill over your embankments.
    And to those who would dam you,
    I’d want you to rise higher, to push
    your currents against what holds you back.
 
Close to the end of the collection, in the poem, “Ode to The Pacific Northwest Winter,” she writes of family and resiliency in the context of weather, “The rain continues its long blue song, / humming lullabies even as we rise in the dark,” ending with,

    If we’re lucky, we’ll lose power, stay home, read by candlelight,
    listen to the roof buttress against the relentless pelting.
    We’ll eat from the stockpiled tins of beans,
    boxes of shortbread, packets of cocoa with dried marshmallows,
    like eating shrine offerings, symbols of surrender, a type of devotion.

This collection begins with the poet in “Frantic” mode, as she and a young colleague pour cold coffee on a fire they set, and ends with a waitress filling a cup “held aloft, little white begging bowl” as a more mature Bombardier sits alone in the poem, “Breakfast at The Local Diner.” Even though the poet doesn’t “like to eat in the morning,” she eats now because the waitress offers solace. Like the waitress, Bombardier’s poems offer literary and emotional encouragement and nourishment, a solace while we wait for our “cup to be noticed and filled.”

Deaf Republic
by Illya Kaminsky
(Graywolf Press, 2019)

Reviewed by Deborah Bacharach

Ilya Kaminsky’s second book, Deaf Republic, is both a book of stand-alone poems that hold in their individuality and gravitas and a heart-breaking play where the second poem, “Dramatis Personae” lists the characters and each subsequent poem builds with setting, narration, dialogue, and dramatic action. The craft and the moral weight of this work left this reader in awe.

In Vansenka, a fictional occupied town, the plot is set in motion when soldiers gun down a deaf boy in the poem “Gunshot.” The townspeople respond by pretending to be deaf. The reader walks with the townspeople as they resist, gets to be inside the heads of the puppeteers who lead the insurrection, and suffers all the consequences. Like the people of Vansenka, the reader must live with harsh truths. It’s not easy or pretty, but necessary.

The poems center on several themes: how to resist, how poetry can or cannot address violence, despair, hope, and complicity. These are not small topics but explored via Kaminsky’s deft hand, images, and humor, we get lines like these from “Soldiers Aim at Us”:

    On earth
    a man cannot flip a finger at the sky

    because man is already
    a finger flipped at the sky

Kaminsky uses the image of man literally standing up to make a philosophical statement about resistance. However, in the overarching themes of the book, the “fuck you” of the finger is given silently through a full body gesture.

While “Beautiful are the women of Vasenka, beautiful,” their resistance is fully embodied when the women of the town in “Gaylas’s Puppeteers” lure the soldiers into the puppet theater for sex and then “when finally he passes out, she strangles him with a puppet-string.” Death by puppet string is so bleak as to be ridiculous, but it also symbolizes the small lethal power the townspeople hold.

Kaminsky addresses head-on a conflict inherent in this work: can poetry be used to describe the horrors of occupation? Obviously, the book is evidence he believes it can, and yet, one of the strongest moments in the book refutes poetic tools. “That Map of Bone and Opened Valves” is full of imagery and metaphor, but in the middle of the poem Kaminsky writes:

    The body of the boy lies on the asphalt like a paperclip.    The body of the boy lies on the asphalt    like the body of a boy.

By setting up one simile and then using the same pattern to refuse to make a simile, Kaminsky hurls the reader out of the fictive dream. The reader must wake up and see this boy only as a dead boy. Through this moment, which occurs early in the book, Kaminsky warns the reader that some horrors cannot be shown through plays of language. So, even as the reader continues on in a world of imagery and metaphor, they are asked to also stay present to horror.

One of the biggest horrors this books addresses is not what the soldiers do to the people, but what the outsider does not do. In the first poem, “We Lived Happily During the War” Kaminsky writes:

    And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

    protested
    but not enough, we opposed them but not

    enough, I was
    in my bed, around my bed America

    was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house—

Kaminsky uses line breaks as a dangerous pause to switch focus and meaning. The line “enough. I was” finishes one sentence and starts another, but as a line together the words suggest the speaker believes their survival was enough without worrying about their neighbor, a strong indictment. Kaminsky uses the same doubling in the next line, creating the image of a bed floating in America and then stripping that support away in the next line. The effect is disorienting. These line breaks simultaneously delight in their layering of meaning and point to the horror of our own culpability. Kaminsky makes sure structure matches meaning. During a poem about bombardment, the lines are confusing, surreal:

    It has begun: I see the blue canary of my country
    pick breadcrumbs from each citizen’s eyes—
    pick breadcrumbs from my neighbors’ hair—
    the snow leaves the earth and falls straight up as it should—

The first of several poems titled “Question” is small (presented here in its entirety) and quiet just like the newborn in a moment of peace.

    What is a child?
    A quiet between two bombardments.

Sometimes Kaminsky specifically uses the structure as a counterpoint to the meaning. In “What We Cannot Hear,” he juxtaposes a wistful folk tune over a speaker’s wife being taken by the invading army:
  
    They shove Sonya into the army jeep
    one morning, one morning, one morning in May, one
         dime-bright morning—

Kaminsky’s most unusual craft technique is his incorporation of sign language. He tells us early in the book that the townspeople invent their own sign language. Periodically, a poem ends with a drawing of a sign, labeled with what the sign means. Kaminsky is both illustrating the poem and teaching the reader their language as the townspeople are learning it. We become one of them. One of the last poems in the book is just made of signs without any words. Two powerful things happen in that moment: the reader has to go back through the book to remind themselves of the signs’ meanings, literally revisiting the history, and they are forced to be in silence with the townspeople, while feeling the thrill and power of having a language that subverted the system, no matter how precarious their situation.

Kaminsky does not let us relegate bombardments and murder to some fictive town. He frames this dramatic fairy tale with poems set in our modern Western world, bringing the pain very close. Kaminsky is a Jewish, hard-of-hearing, Ukrainian-born Russian refugee who has lived on the US/Mexico border. He brings all those identities to bear in a dramatic poetic fable for our time. We are now in a deaf republic where so many are willingly deaf to others. These poems help us to listen.

The Carrying
by Ada Limón
(Milkweed Editions, 2018)

Reviewed by Peter H. Michaels

Ada Limón’s new collection The Carrying finds joy in the quotidian and wonders how a self-directed life should feel. The poems repeat imagery of the newly born, green growth, and death as moments with truth, but without answers. In “The Real Reason” the speaker’s mother is scarred “from an explosion that took her first child she was carrying / in her belly,” and although a similar speaker in the poem “Trying” is working with her partner “to knock [her] up again,” the book expands the meaning of “carrying” beyond its recognized connotations. Limón’s ability to examine the smallest moments of life anew and translate that wonder and weight to the page is astounding and illustrates what this collection carries.

The speaker in “The Last Drop” owns many of the collection’s narratives as her own and considers the many stories—replete with grief—she carries within. After iterating several titles for her potential memoir the speaker recites two parallel parables implying that her life hasn’t been “easy,” but “all of it is good.” This thought guides the reading of “Dead Stars” which is seeded with lines such as, “We point out the stars that make Orion as we take out / the trash, the rolling containers a song of suburban thunder. // It’s almost romantic,” because Limón mates the celestial with the earthly while meditating in the midst of collecting trash.

In “Almost Forty” the speaker says “I’ve never been someone / to wish for too much, but now I say, I want to live a long time.” Facing mid-life after accruing a lifetime of grief leaves the speaker afraid, but grasping for more. This sentiment is repeated in “Sundown & All the Damage Done” where the speaker finds “a strange / contentment to this countdown” of years in contrast to loved ones who have passed already. This consideration of mortality continues in “The Vulture & The Body” when the speaker asks, “What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry grief?”

While not an answer, a reply is found in “Instructions on Not Giving Up” as the speaker faces “a green skin / growing over whatever winter did to us,” because now the speaker is like that greening tree that “seems to say, a new slick leaf / unfurling like a fist, I’ll take it all.” This acceptance of growth, in whatever form it takes, roots as the collection winds down. Other green and grounded moments occur in “The Burying Beetle” where a speaker confesses that she “lost God awhile ago. / And I don’t want to pray, but I can picture / the plants deepening right now into the soil, / wanting to live, so I lie down among them,” and this scene of grafting new vegetable life to her own becomes explicit.

Scions of leafy, life-like weeds and tomato plants wind through this collection. The speaker in “Dandelion Insomnia” stays awake pondering how simple propagation would be if she were a weed like a dandelion “making perfect identical selves, bam, another me, / bam, another me.” This innate fertility in weeds is paralleled by animal life in “Carrying”:

    A few farms over, there’s our mare,
    her belly barrel-round with foal, or idea
    of foal. It’s Kentucky, late fall, and any
    mare worth her salt is carrying the next
    potential stakes winner.

While “What I Didn’t Know Before” is a poem-length metaphor about an effortless love, the ease of animal reproduction returns: “A horse gives way / to another horse and then suddenly there are / two horses, just like that.” This is in stark contrast to the speaker in “Would You Rather” who is struggling with fertility and is “making a list of all the places / I found out I wasn’t carrying a child.” 

Then in “Mastering” the speaker’s trusted friend posits “the thing that makes you / believe there might be a god after all, is the making of a child” adding a friendly face to a patent societal pressure intimately intertwined with womanhood. This married speaker without children seems to broadcast an implied desire for childlessness, adding sting to her secret struggle with infertility. Her friend, assuming that a woman’s meaning in life must be gestated, regardless of willingness or capability, wounds the speaker and their friendship. The reader is privy to the speaker’s unspoken thoughts, “Isn’t love / that doesn’t result in a seed, a needy body, another suckling animal, / still love? Isn’t that supernatural? Screw your god.”

The speaker in “Trying” tells us “I’d forgotten how much / I like to grow things” adjacent to another attempt at pregnancy. Likewise, the speaker in “Maybe I’ll Be Another Kind of Mother” eschews traditional motherhood for days “writing words / and then at the movies, where my man has bought me a drink, // because our bodies are our own.” While “Trying” ends with desire to nurture another:

    I still worry
    and want an endless stream of more,
    but some days I can see the point
    in growing something, even if
    it’s just to say I cared enough.

This feeling seems reconciled by “Maybe I’ll Be Another Kind of Mother,” which says “it’s only the original tree again, green branches giving way // to other green branches, everything coming back to life.”

At the end of the collection, we arrive at a reckoning with these struggles in these lines from “Sparrow, What Did You Say?”

    What would I
    do with a kid here? Teach her
    to plant, watch her like I do
    the lettuce leaves, tenderly, place
    her palms in the earth, part her
    black hair like planting a seed? Or
    would I selfishly demand this day
    back, a full untethered day trying
    to figure out what bird was calling
    to me and why.

This passage leaves the speaker questioning whether her offspring should inhabit ink and page or a more corporeal form without any answer.

Generally, a failure to reconcile a craving for the impossible with an accepting of the attained is jet fuel for anxiety. The Carrying brings this fuel of the unanswerable to the burning grief from Limón’s preceding collection Bright Dead Things where such losses could “light up the room with pain, / [it would] be such a glorious fire.” However, the speaker in “Mastering” starts to accept that “perhaps the only thing I can make / is love and art,” and the poems in this collection are bursting with masterfully created art. That isn’t all that it is carrying. What Limón’s collection truly carries is “so much fire,”  a glorious fire—lighting a path of self-awareness and warming the chill of loneliness—allowing a reader to stop and encounter all that they are carrying.
 

Personal Science
by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram
(Tupelo Press, 2017)

Reviewed by C.K. Coombs

Dreams are seldom drawn from the void. The unanchored scenes, the acute images, and the vivid feelings of a light doze and impactful musings, these are drawn from experience and not from nothing. Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s Personal Science is a collection of poetry that first mystifies, then touches the reader. Upon initial inspection, one may be tempted to think the book nothing but a series of half-remembered dreams, but deeper analysis reveals a grim and somewhat disturbing memoir. It is a submersion into Bertram’s stream of consciousness, which runs dark and wide.

Bertram’s writing creates a nebulous dreamscape, one of fading and flashing pictures, scenes that are often ominous. That fear suffuses the book with an atmosphere not unlike that which pervades a nightmare. Take “Homo narrans (chainsaw)” for example, wherein one of the only images described is that of “the blood spray on the garden’s wooden fence,” or the poem “Cerebrum corpus monstrum,” which begins with a terrifying series of implications:

    Nothing to be preserved
    By the idea of paradise.

    Take this pistol.

    The old dog’s ashes taken home in a cedar box.

    Take this blindfold.

    The warbler with the cinched wing won’t take
    From your handful of seeds.

    Shoot into the crowd.

    To feel the heart, you must
    Put your hand in it.

The reader is left haunted, wondering at the grim scenes which continue throughout the book. They seem to jump randomly among topics such as phobias, relationships, farewells, and death. Initially, it all comes off as strange and disjointed, like the shadowy figments and fragmented memories of a mind on the edge of sleep.

A small, clarifying rule for the book can be easily overlooked at the beginning. In the first poem entitled “A little tether,” Bertram recognizes the mind-bending journey that the reader is about to embark on, and seems to throw them a life-line, a grounding cable to some form of reality.

    The thing is just what’s said
    The line I try to get to
    There are rules even for dreams
    The cars are always cars I’ve driven
    The men men I’ve known

With that excerpt, the book is charged with an authenticity and a exposure that captivates the reader, and shifts the tone. These are not riddles without answers, designed to confuse. They are reminiscence, a recalling of things muddled—of pain and fear, of abuse, of “cars [she’s] driven,” and of “men [she’s] known.” No order is needed when baring one’s soul, and the fact that Bertram is willing to do so merits praise.

Approximately one third of the book, the middle third, is devoted to a seventeen-page prose poem called “Forecast.” A nervous woman, possibly Bertram, suffers from an intense fear of flying. It drives her thoughts, ironically, towards every article she can find on flight, plane crashes, plane construction, and flight history. Her fear pervades every part of her life, overcomes her attempts to suppress it, and outlives failed and unhealthy relationships. In a way, her fear becomes one of the only constants in her life. Her need to check the forecast every hour of the day on seven different websites, her constant searches and studies, these habits accompany her throughout her life where almost everything else changes. The final line of the poem is a surrender to the fright. “The only safe place to be was in a plane,” and the only constant in the author’s life is fear.

These pages stand in a striking contrast to the rest of the book. They rise from a fog of imaginations, a mountain in clouds. They are full of concrete settings, definite actions and reactions, as opposed to the more amorphous scenes of the other poems. It is as though the reader is allowed to come up for a breath, before returning to murky, simulated subconscious.

As she mentioned in “A little tether,” the men she has known play into the story frequently. Unsettling depictions of violence and sex frequent the pages, especially in the series of poems titled “Legends like these I keep keeping.”

    he made with the heat of his hands
    the night before our wedding
    made of my neck a bottle
    then ran me down the alley in nothing but
    a ghostwhite t-shirt & panties.

And then, later on in another “Legends” poem it reads:

    unfuckable. and don’t ever let a man fuck you up against an air-conditioner 
    I told you, & don’t ask me why, just don’t be the kabob on a shish, all skin &
    girl, ass against some window.

The alternating brutal and sensual details, alongside the explicit scenes, don’t so much hint at the speaker’s violent past, as much as they unfurl a host of chronicled dangers, a litany that bears repeating. Where the longer poems in the book have individual titles, “Legends like these I keep keeping” sets itself apart. Rather than it being just one poem, each page is its own moment, its own relationship. The legends that Bertram returns to are all relationships, each a different style, but all equally disquieting. Each is structured with a different form, tone, and voice, and each is a melancholy instance of trial and error, the experiments in Bertram’s deeply personal, scientific study.

Such poignant methodology is at the heart of this selection of Bertram’s poetry; it is an attempt to make sense of a life, a blending of experience, emotion, and things more indefinable. It is not an easy read, but it is a powerful one. It is a soulful collection, an acute and revelatory one. The poems never truly fit the mold of a confession, but they nonetheless work their way to a vulnerable reckoning. However, it is perhaps Bertram’s own “Homo narrans (iceberg)” that sums up Personal Science best:

    The glittering iceberg
    now not at all what I
    thought.

Bluebonnets, Firewheels, and Brown-Eyed Susans
by David Lee
(Wings Press, 2017)

Reviewed by Nancy Takacs

In his sixteenth book of poems, Bluebonnets, Firewheels, and Brown-Eyed Susans, David Lee does something unique, while continuing to appeal to the big-hearted, the irreligious, and those with a funny bone. The book unearths his remembrances of women who lived in small-town west Texas, much like the one he grew up in, from 1948–1962, grappling with a Baptist culture. Several of the poems are in women’s voices, resonating with what women still have to deal with overall, but especially in rural America’s tight communities. 

“Poetry,” said Roethke, “is an act of mischief.” In his introduction, Lee warns us that this book will be so. He finds inspiration from his grandmother who wanted him to behave when he was four and told him to make up stories to keep himself from being bored. This is how he constructed his first tale. He dedicates the book to her.

Many writers and critics question whether writers of one gender can effectively get inside the mind of the other. Playwright Michelle Willens believes, “while women probably still write their own parts better, cheers for all who are daring to probe the ever-changing state of the sexes,” and literary critic Sarah Seltzer says, “[W]riting across gender may be harder, require more research and humility. We may fail or get ‘called out’ for letting our biases show…but the attempt at understanding, empathy, and inhabiting the soul of someone whose life experience is not ours, helps us grow as writers, and people too.”

Lee has given himself this challenge, it seems, to not only know and put forth what women felt, but to champion their strength and wildness, and to show compassion for their struggles. We come to know women who easily outsmart obtuse men, feisty women who know how to steal time away from family for their own pursuits, and who defy culture and religion to be themselves. The book also shows how selves and dreams became lost, while revealing subservience as a veneer, that no preacher or husband can snuff out a woman’s spirit. Men are foils for the women, who take center stage. 

Take for example, the poem (astutely set in the parts of a Greek tragedy) about Amanda, who married the dull Reverend Strayhan. She chooses an “anonymous” name, Amanda Strayhorn, and becomes a famous erotic writer among the Ladies Literary Society, all unbeknownst to the reverend. Coincidentally, her bible-thumping husband suddenly finds his libido, having excused himself from his former belief that wanton sex is Satan’s evil. After drinking a Coors beer that is tasteless, he determines it is a sign from God that he can do what he wants, misreading bible verses to twist them to justify his sudden license while depending on the misogynist Apostle Paul’s credo, “That all things are possible in those who love the Lord.” 

There is much more to this long poem—gossip at the Brenda’s Curl Up and Dye Hair House, ironic references to bible verses, and more of the Reverend’s excuses to become libidinous with his wife. By the end of the poem, those verses are riddled with puns, and the reader is wrapped in the melee that results from the unveiling of Amanda’s new identity, the reverend’s horrified discovery, and sides-stories about sex that intensify the irony. 

Lee has said, “I don’t believe in a God who frowns.” He was a seminary student at one time, though he left the seminary and always thought it to be the worst mistake he ever made. His dislike of preachy-ness shows. In a prior poem, we encounter the voice of the town librarian, who finally puts the hypocritical reverend in his place, in the church parking lot after a service:

    she said All my life

    I have engaged in a love affair

    with the written and spoken word

    devoted myself as Custodian of Culture

    to honor the right literary, civil, and genial

    use of language which I have always

    considered deity incarnate

    until my contact with you

    I believed we had sufficient wordage

    such as malarkist, buncombe, vacuous troglodyte,

    lambent dullard, cornaptious miscreant

    all perfectly acceptable terms short of verbiage

    for the socially and intellectually execrable

    therefore I had never comprehended

    manifest need for the coinage and usage

    of the nominative cocksucker

    prefaced by the adjective stupid

    to create what seems on certain occasions

    the formation of a perfect inferior syllogism

    until now

    and thanks to you

    I shall never again be confused 

    by the etymological necessity […]

As this interaction shows, characters in the town intersect in at times, compounding our knowledge of their traits and how others interact with them. We get to know them, as if we live next door. In several poems, Lee seems to have to right something, especially between women and their husbands. “The Fish,” with its epigraph from Elizabeth Bishop’s same-titled poem, enjoys the plight of Arty Gill when he ignores his chores and goes fishing, comes home drunk, and dumps a load of fish in the sink, expecting his wife Modean to clean them. When she refuses and finally leaves for days, the fish putrefy, and Arty has no choice but to put on a gas mask and clean the stink out of the house himself, using a hose, and an elaborate mixture of odd cleaners. The epigraph lingers as the poem ends with Modean’s success: “…victory filled / from the pool of bilge / where oil had spread a rainbow […] / until everything is 'rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!'”  

“Post Mortem After the Obsequies” features Mary Lynn, who looks back on her past, after her insufferable, emotionally abusive husband dies. He had consistently put her down, calling her Merlean, and never filled her desire for anything. She lost her dream to sing opera, and felt trapped. The portrait of her is drawn in her own voice, “I’ve never known the taste of truffles / but I’ve lived a life / cramful with trifles […]”

Towards the end of section “7 Coda: Last Call,” is an exquisite passage in which Mary Lynn deals with what is supposed to be grief for the loss of this man, knowing her mother’s and dog’s deaths were the only ones she felt true grief for. Lee substitutes wistfulness for grief, as her mind sets to resolve, to hope:

    Lord God,

    it’s one of those alone

    hard red wine nights

    foreshadowing a bloodshot tomorrow morning sky

    spiral broken moon splinters scattered

    all over the floor and on the furniture, lying

    like breathing, open-eyed antimacassar

    daring me to come sit anywhere near

    pushing me out the back door scared

    into the big alone

    Oh, but breathe in the waft of a ghost rain

    under a waxing cat scratch moon

    floating through live oak

    listen to the memory of a waif cinder maid

    singing Una Volta C’era Un Re

    and beneath me
    exactly between my feet

    a perfect moon-scarleted primrose

    glistening in the rekindling of the night

Lee has mentioned previously that Mary Lynn’s voice is very close to his mother’s, and that the dead husband in the poem is his step-father. The poem appears to give Mary Lynn back a few of her losses, and to celebrate her life, even as Lee imagines what it was like for her to live much of it sadly. Still searching for herself in old age, the voice rings true, right down to the core of her loneliness, her fears, as well as finding hope and boldness in nature and remembered music, suggesting both of these gave her relief, and perhaps relief to Lee, in the knowledge of how his mother may have observed, reflected, and opened, as she moved toward healing.

This is new terrain for Lee in some ways, but it is still him at his best. The swells of it, its risks, spot-on vernacular, humor, tenderness, and depth that calls forth Chaucer, Milton, Dante, and Greek tragedy will be familiar to readers of his previous work. It is both earthy and erudite. He is a magician, a weaver of poetry-tales unlike anything anyone else has written. It is a delight to once again share in his fine mind and heart.