Odder by Katherine Applegate, illustrated by Charles Santoso

Posted on November 4, 2022 by pagesofjulia

I fell in love with this book as reviewed by a colleague of mine at Shelf Awareness (here), and bought it for the six- and ten-year-old sisters who are my friends. But when it arrived I couldn’t let it go and so I read it first.

It’s every bit as delightful as it sounds in the above review, and I’m so glad I picked it up, and glad that I have young friends to inspire me. I loved the storytelling style: easy-reading, brief, free verse poems that speak plainly but also with lyricism (Odder’s front paws when she was just a pup were “dream-busy / small and soft as / a toddler’s mittens”). I loved Odder, of course, her name and her personality and frank responses to the world. What do I know about sea otters? but this story and characterization felt true to the natural world, and at the same time, offered many lessons applicable to other life forms. “Why simply dive when she could dazzle?” The ocean isn’t about morality, and there are no villains here; after a shark attack, Odder doesn’t blame the shark. “She’s seen enough to know / that this is how life is, / and this is how death comes.” (Spoiler alert: death has not come for Odder yet.) There are some excellent how-to poems: “how to rescue a stranded otter” offers important points about not rushing in; there are two versions of “how to say goodbye to an otter,” for both humans and otters. There’s a neat little poem called “keystones” that teach the meaning of ‘keystone species’ succinctly, which is a fine example of how Odder gives both naturalist lessons and broader ones.

I’m charmed, and so happy I spent some time with this book. Definitely recommend.

Rating: 9 clams.

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Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

Posted on October 31, 2022 by pagesofjulia

Claudia Rankine’s voice is as powerful as you’ve heard, and Citizen is many things, in ways that can be challenging but also make it a rewarding meditation. A slim book, it rewards slower-paced reading, because there’s a lot to think about (and look at). I think I had envisioned a book of poetry in more traditional fashion, which would be challenging for me (because I find poetry difficult; I think I look too hard for literal readings). What I found was a little more form-bending, which mostly made it a little easier to take in. Lyric essays intersperse with poetry, and there are a handful of images of visual art as well, and references to other media, including YouTube videos and Rankine’s own “situation videos.” Predictably, I follow along better in the prose-ier sections than the poetry-leaning ones, and the former come first in the book, which I think made the transition a little harder. This is a problem on my end (when will I get over my fear of poems?). I sort of wish for a reading guide, although that runs the risk of prescriptivism.

Citizen is about race, or about race in America, or about what it is like to be Black in America. It relates macro- and microaggressions so that they build up: does the reader feel shocked? weary? angry? reading them? Well, maybe that’s the point. The small, everyday experiences have cumulative effect. The narrator spends a chapter (essay?) describing what it is to sigh incessantly, and be shushed in her sighs. She spends time observing Serena Williams: her play, the aggressions she experiences, when she does and does not react with outrage, and how the world reacts to her reactions. There is a chapter of scripts for Rankine’s situation videos, about which she says on her website: “It is our feeling that both devastating images and racist statements need management.” (I couldn’t figure out how to watch the actual videos on her website, although some are on YouTube.) There is a list of names of Black men and women killed by police; it fades out into gray text because the list is too long. The visual images that come in between the text sections might be said to offer a break, but it’s more like a different way of looking.

On the cover image, I most like these words from The New Yorker‘s review: “The book’s cover, an image of a black hood suspended in white space, seems to be a direct reference to Trayvon Martin’s death, but the image is of a work from 1993, two years after Rodney King was beaten senseless by members of the L.A.P.D. It’s called ‘In the Hood,’ and it suggests that racism passes freely among homonyms: the white imagination readily turns hoods into hoods. The image also makes you think of the hoods in fairy tales and illustrated books, part of the regalia of childhood. But its white backdrop recalls the haunting quotation from Zora Neale Hurston that keeps cropping up in Citizen: ‘I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.’ The hood becomes an executioner’s headdress, too.”

In the end after finishing the book and trying to review, I find my impression is more of poetry than of prose, because there’s an overall feeling even between the moments where I was frustrated because I couldn’t always parse the literal meaning. (Maybe Vince will show up to explain it to me.) Not for the first time, the poet is smarter than I am. But it was a hell of an experience, and I’d read more. Her reputation is deserved.

Rating: 7 lessons.

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WWJD by Savannah Sipple

Posted on July 25, 2022 by pagesofjulia

Disclosure: Savannah has taught as guest faculty in my MFA program and I have met her personally.

I loved these poems, the irreverence with the reverence, the frank talk about bodies, the attention to detail. They make sense to me in a way that poetry rarely does. Sipple’s poems are about people and relationships, violence, place, queerness, sex and love, fatness and body shaming, and religion. The title really comes into play in the third of three sections, and I read those three sections as being about three eras in the speaker’s life, in which she is (first and foremost at least for this reader) coming to terms with her sexuality. In the third section we get the WWJD poems, and the speaker claims her lesbian identity and continues to work on making peace with her body. The earliest two sections held perhaps more trauma and violence, where the third approaches a safer place. It’s also (perhaps logically) got more humor in it, as when “Jesus and I Went to the Walmart” and bought lady plugs and helped a young man pick out condoms.

                                              …Jesus found him, took him by the
shoulder and starting talking about how to please his girl. Jesus
held the ultra-ribbed and had just said something about clitoral
stimulation & remembering this wasn’t a 50-yard dash when I
said Jesus, what are you doing? and snapped the condoms out of his
hand.

There is some outstanding sensual work, as in “WWJD / about letting go.” I loved the writing about fat as in “And the Word Was God.” From “Jesus shouts, Amen!” I loved this final line: “My body is a holler I’ve tried to escape / time and again, but now, with this woman, I am home.” And the closing poem of the collection, “[Jesus rides shotgun]” was the perfect finish.

I’ve encountered a few poems this week (and not for the first time) in a form that I think is the cleave poem. (From Cleave Poetry: “In its most basic form the cleave poem is a vertical stanza on the left hand side, a vertical stanza on the right hand side, and a third horizontal poem which is read straight across from left to right, as though there is no gap between the left and right vertical stanzas.”) Sipple has one called “Rain, Love” that intrigues me greatly; I’ve been reading it over in the two ways, in two columns and then as a single right-to-left piece. But a friend of mine then suggested reading it in sort of a U-shape, down the left column and then back up the right from top to bottom, and it is a whole, third, outstanding piece in that way, too. How exciting and mind-expanding! (Thanks, D.) This has me thinking as well about the poems that can be read from top to bottom or from bottom to top, with two different meanings. (Sometimes you see them printed twice, in the two orders. I’ve seen these called palindromic, although I think that only works in the literal sense when it’s printed twice.) If anybody has a great example of that other form – or favorites of the cleave poem – I’d love to see them.

This collection excites me. Thank you, Savannah.

Rating: 8 times.

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Starlight & Error by Remica Bingham-Risher

Posted on July 22, 2022 by pagesofjulia

Disclosure: Remica has taught as guest faculty in my MFA program and I have met her personally.

This is a lovely collection of poems about family, love, different configurations of relationships, forgiveness… partings and comings back together, and always music. There are many mentions of music throughout, as an important thread in the speaker’s homes (young home with family and adult home with family of her own) and in her life; this adds up to the braided thread of music through the poems themselves. I love her writing about children and family, the ways in which people can be family without necessarily sharing the biological ties we (culturally) expect. “Son·sor·éa (\sahn-soar-ray\)” and “Mother Necessity” both comment on being a mother to a child not one’s own, and “Ways to Please a Five-year-old Superhero” is first a list poem (which you know I love) and then as well a pretty straightforward and I think helpful guide, as its title promises. These poems delighted me, as do the love poems (always, and coming off of Mary Carroll-Hackett’s collection that I reviewed the other day… I can still remember Mary telling us, at residency, that “it gets better” as you get older, and I love how both these women’s poetry reflects that, that love and, yes, sex can be messy and filled with contradictions but also deepening and enriching as they age and complicate). “Training or a Weapon” is about trauma and different ways of teaching, and I think I can remember Remica reading this at residency and I loved it then too. And there is a poem titled: “A student writes the thesis: If you never find your soulmate, this is when one must face the harsh reality of making major decisions alone and, though the grammar is incorrect, I give him credit,” and it is going to stick with me.

I still find poetry hard, but also rewarding. Thanks, Remica.

Rating: 7 days like this.

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The Night I Heard Everything by Mary Carroll-Hackett

Posted on July 18, 2022 by pagesofjulia

Disclosure: Mary has taught as guest faculty in my MFA program and I have met her personally.

This collection opens with the title poem “The Night I Heard Everything,” in which the speaker recalls a time when an unnamed person made an explanation that opened up the world. Its sets the tone for the rest of the book, with topics from the personal (love and lovemaking, family) to the external (science, history, nature) and a tone of wondering, admiring awe and hope. There are also repeating images and themes of women’s experiences and intergenerational ties, and connection to place, which of course speaks to me. The speaker’s loved ones are in several cases gone, but also everpresent, because (in the final line of “Someday the Woman You Will Be”) “there are, in fact, no endings, no endings after all.” There is mourning but there is continuation; these poems are concerned with ancestry, inheritance and what is passed on. They are mystical but also embodied – I love how Mary writes about love, as in “Here, Touch Here” and “Dark Brown Is My Favorite Shape.” This is a neat, brief poetry collection, easy to read at least in terms of its length, but also lots to linger in.

Rating: 7 glasses of tea.

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The Book of the Dead by Muriel Rukeyser; introduction by Catherine Venable Moore

Posted on June 13, 2022 by pagesofjulia

Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead was originally published as a poem cycle in her 1938 collection U.S. 1. It was unearthed, if you will, by Catherine Venable Moore, and republished in a new edition in 2018 with Moore’s introduction. (Disclosure: Moore was a visiting faculty member in my MFA program when I was a student there; I have met her, very briefly.) That introduction is lengthy, occupying fully half the pages of this book, which I hadn’t realized in advance; that is to say, while Rukeyser’s poetry is its raison d’etre, Moore’s essay is indispensable to the reading experience I’m reviewing here. That essay was published in Oxford American (a magazine I adore) in 2016, in its entirety – I did a pretty close page-by-page spot check, and if the two versions differ, it’s by words or punctuation marks, not paragraphs. (OA actually offers more images, too.) You can read Moore’s work here, and you absolutely should (I write, at the risk of unselling a copy of this book; but you will still want Rukeyser’s poems!).

The subject is the years-long industrial disaster at Hawk’s Nest Tunnel near Gauley Bridge, West Virginia. Miners were tasked with both tunnel construction and the mining of silica, a convenient byproduct of the tunneling; they worked without protective equipment and inhaled quantities of silica, which caused silicosis (as it was known at the time it would), of which they died by the hundreds. Most of the miners were migratory Black Southerners housed in temporary work camps. The death toll is still unknown.

Rukeyser, a young lefty poet/journalist, traveled to West Virginia to document these events in 1936, as the last of the miners testified before a congressional committee even as they coughed and died. She was accompanied by a photographer friend (whose photographs, but two, were lost). The Book of the Dead was Rukeyser’s result: documentary, poetry, journalism, testament. Moore’s essay places this and much more information in context so that the reader is ready to appreciate Rukeyser’s poems when they come. Recall that I am infinitely more at home with essays than with poetry, but I found Moore’s work to be very moving, beautifully done, and informative. I found the poems more challenging, and I would not have gotten as much out of them without Moore’s help. Perhaps my favorite was the title poem, which is also available online at The Poetry Foundation, for whom I am grateful.

I’m very glad I spent a day immersed in this story, certainly an important one in our national and regional history. This was a bit of homework before, hopefully, visiting the recently dedicated memorial myself. I am very glad that Moore did the work of getting these poems and this story out into the world again.

Rating: 8 hills of glass.

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The Drowning Boy’s Guide to Water by Cameron Barnett

Posted on February 28, 2022 by pagesofjulia

I bought this book when Barnett visited my MFA program as a guest writer and lecturer a few years ago, and as I read these poems I heard them in his voice, which I remember as unassuming and powerful. They share a humility, an honest, open, vulnerable, questioning attitude. Their concern is not always about race, and in fact the poet (or the persona?) often resists or resents that that should be his expected work – which is fair – but there is a frequent question of whether there’s a right way to be Black, and some very strong writing in indignation and in rage at what it is to be Black in this country. “Post-Racial America: A Pop Quiz” is fiery. Several poems for Emmett Till are extraordinary and still just what we need. In “Notes on Cameron Barnett” (a bio, as it were, in poem form!), he writes: “Another black poet told me he liked my poem / for Emmett Till despite His story being overdone / For weeks I fantasized about switching out / the murderers’ names and putting in his.” Whew. I also appreciated the water theme throughout (as in the title, which is also the title of an astonishing, perfect poem), which can do so much good, diverse work. “Muriatic” does that strong, water-and-fire work, and then is immediately followed by “Bishop on a Slant,” which is about family. Likewise, “Firefly” honors the imperfect father-son relationship, finishing with this wisdom: “I want to take everything you think you taught me and teach you / what I have learned.”

I was also gratified to find again Barnett’s memorable contribution to Psalms for Mother Emanuel.

The book is structured in three parts, I and III each containing a number of individual poems, while II is marked ‘from The Bones We Lose.’ The design of these sections eludes me, and in general I find these poems harder to respond to than I did Duffy’s, that I reviewed recently. Inarticulate though I may be, there were many moments here that made me stop and think and whose beauty or truth stay with me. I had to move more slowly.

Beautiful.

Rating: 7 word problems.

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The World’s Wife: Poems by Carol Ann Duffy

Posted on February 18, 2022 by pagesofjulia

I got this title out of Pandora’s Jar (review still forthcoming!), and it’s every bit as good as I’d hoped. These are the women’s stories, from myths and classics and fairy tales, reconfigured. Many of these women are new to their tales, like Mrs. Aesop, Mrs. Sisyphus, Queen Kong, Frau Freud, and Pope Joan. Others already had their own myths before Duffy arrived to rewrite them: Penelope, Demeter, Circe, Salome. The book begins, for example, with “Little Red-Cap,” whose relationship to the Big Bad Wolf takes a different angle. A few of my very favorites are “Mrs. Midas” and “Mrs. Darwin,” although I’m also captivated by Duffy’s Eurydice, who was so relieved at the quiet of the Underworld and so sorry to see that damned Orpheus again. Clever, clever, cynical Eurydice.

I am pretty confident in calling these persona poems: each takes the first-person perspective of a female hero we’ve not heard enough of until now. Each has its charms and its surprises; I have been slow in writing this review over more than a week–unusual, and a bad hole to fall into usually, but they haven’t left the top of my mind in that time. I think Duffy was the perfect author to do this job, the new highlighting of both familiar traits and of delightful surprises. (Guess what body part Frau Freud assigns no fewer than 31 nicknames to in fifteen lines.) These poems are often funny, often fraught and moving, and always lovely. See these images: “a thousand windows, each with its modest peep-show / of boredom or pain, of drama, consolation, remorse.” And these judgments: “The Devil was evil, mad, but I was the Devil’s wife / which made me worse.” What else has Duffy written? I would read more poetry if it all worked like this: easy to access but inviting lots of processing time, deep and rich and wide.

Rating: 8 teeth of the rich.

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Psalms for Mother Emanuel: Elegy From Pittsburgh to Charleston

Posted on January 25, 2021 by pagesofjulia

Psalms for Mother Emanuel is a brief chapbook commissioned by the Pittsburgh Foundation on the first anniversary of the 2015 shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. It includes nine poems and one visual piece, and they are beautiful and impactful. Beyond that I hardly know what to say about this collection; it feels almost holy, and many poems do maintain the reverence of the title, so that to comment sort of feels inappropriate.

The whole thing is… wrenching and also lovely.

Here is the title and first line of Cameron Barnett’s contribution:

If a bag of silver coins and a bag of bullets sound the same
then take my ears, I do not need them

You can actually view the book here, and I recommend you just do so.

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My Alexandria by Mark Doty

Posted on January 8, 2021 by pagesofjulia

I read this quotation the other day, and I’ll let it open this review.

Nothing which does not transport is poetry. The lyre is a winged instrument.

–Joseph Joubert, essayist

I first know Doty from a prose work that informs my love of objects in writing. (Plenty on Still Life With Oysters and Lemon here.) So it’s not surprising that there are lots of lovely, striking details and things here, in the first Doty poetry I’ve attempted. “What was our city / but wonderful detail?” What, indeed.

These poems feel perfect, crystalline, like they couldn’t be any better or any different. Each word is so carefully chosen. I love the internal rhymes and the music, and I love the enjambment, and the images, and the surprises. I still don’t feel like a very expert reader of poetry, but these have everything I feel like I want a poem to have. There are clear themes throughout the book: death, mortality, grief, with references to the author’s partner dying of AIDS and of others in the same situation. (I found that subtext easy to see, but I know a little of Doty’s life story, so I’m not sure how visible it would be to a reader who doesn’t.) It’s not a book of grief, though. It’s a book of seeking meaning and a way to carry on, of trying to see beyond death, and it’s a book of really seeing the world. Something else I recognize from Still Life is a constant, serious attention and observation.

What I think the title, My Alexandria, brings to this collection: a reference to a storied place no longer quite accessible, where things were famously better or at least very good, but in ways we can’t see from here.

Not for the first time with Doty, I noted many lines I want to keep forever. From a poem called “The Wings” (which takes place in part at the auctions that I know, from another book, Doty and his partner Wally used to attend together),

Some days things yield

such grace and complexity that what we see
seems offered.

I love that enjambment (made greater by the stanza break).

Later in that same poem,

An empty pair of pants
is mortality’s severest evidence.

This is something Doty does so well, the distillation of concept into an object.

And from the poem “No” (I so love turtles),

the single word of the shell,
which is no.

Besides these, my favorite poems are “Esta Noche,” “Chanteuse,” “Fog” and “Brilliance.”

I had success with reading these poems aloud, which I’m sure is always a good strategy, but one I don’t always use. Also, reading very slowly. Many of Doty’s perfect, perfectly fleshed images take several lines to come together, and I need to grasp them completely. It takes concentration. As much as I love a poetry reading, these are not images I could take in by just hearing them. I need to take my time.

Poetry is still hard, but so rewarding, when done this well.

Rating: 8 fused layers.

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