They Obliterate Us with their Aerobatics of Language and Rhythm

My brother used to build these rockets we’d launch when we were kids that would blast up into the atmosphere forever. We searched and searched to find out if its explosive magic would ever manifest in the vacant lot where we stood staring up into the sky. We were sure it had found its way to another planet, but then somehow this white, phallic-shaped thing would plummet back down into our world again, intact but with burn marks, changed. That’s what happens when you pack together the right ingredients. You come up with an implosion of the spontaneously combustible kind. Ryan W. Bradley and David Tomaloff are that kind of ammunition. They obliterate us with their aerobatics of language and rhythm that bring us back to ourselves. We can imagine that we have escaped, but forget that you are a mammal and you had better watch your back.

the afternoon is a tourist   a noose

with its arms spread out like a clock

when it is Sunday afternoon   I make believe.

play the part of the father left rotting in the den

a half empty glass for the fifth time today

the dampened spark of ice cubes failing to ignite

this is a time capsule raised from barren soil

the aging bomb shelter of the nuclear family —

Bradley and Tomaloff mesmerize us with their transmission of cadence and meter. It’s music, improvisation with the volume turned all the way up, quadraphonic sound and we’re standing trying to hold ourselves together in the midst of it.

where then is the skin

we peeled from one another,

the would be bone-clothes

in which we earned our scars?

what we struggled so long to support,

to cut our teeth on failure

building a better ribcage

to house a more broken heart.

You Are Jaguar is two hands shaking in the woods, two voices wandering in our heads stretching the territory we didn’t know we spanned, a dueling navigation of subterfuge that surfaces and exposes itself within every stanza.

draining like suburban gutters

into the careful concealment

of flowerbeds below . . .

& with it go my teeth

cut for hurricanes,

holding fast to the edges,

of the photos we’ve become:

This is a collection that blasts through us with the violation of our truths. There is nowhere to go but inward. We must own the beauty and debauchery of the animals that we are.

. . . if you are the mandible,  I am

the mouth swallowed whole   I am

the glint in the city’s eye   recapturing

a sense of   how to crave the jungle.

Bradley and Tomaloff are packing in the ammo and setting off the fuse. Get a copy of You Are Jaguar and find out where you land; scorched, yet transformed.

More Opposite than Black and White: A Review of Mary Leader's Beyond the Fire

When I moved to my first apartment in Indianapolis, my possessions were scarce: a bed, a couch, and two Virgin Mary nightlights. By chance, the only bulbs I had for them were blue and red — the remnants of an after-Christmas decorations sale. I joked with visiting friends, dubbing them Good Mary and Evil Mary. We talked about how the arrangement — one for the kitchen, one for the bath — was strangely apt; how we mortals live, doomed to oscillate between needs, walking constantly toward one, then the other. It wasn’t until much later that I became aware of the work of yet another Mary, who has just come out with her exciting third collection of poems, Beyond the Fire. It is in this book that I see this same sort of alternating movement.

Mary Leader has long been known as an innovator in her own work, using both aleatoric methods and traditional forms. Forms as machines, in a way, that make demands on their content. Her two previous books (1997’s Red Signature and The Penultimate Suitor, published in 2001) share this fascination with merging the traditional and experimental aspects of poetry. Starting with the experimental element in this book is: “They Vibrate,” what appears at first to be a concrete poem, an uneasy square of text for the eyes to enjoy at the expense of the voice. It’s a poem which ends up being, on closer investigation, the key to the entire book. It consists of lines of super- and sub-scripted opposites that vary over the course of the poem, the complementary colors red and blue, for example, which Leader sees as more opposite than black and white:

redblueredblueredblauredblaurotblaurotblaurotblaurotblaurotblauredbluere

These opposites morph into others: whore / virgin, mortal / venial, Mars / Venus. Rose / Iris turns to Eros / Ire. What, at first blush, looks to be a block of wavering lines of text becomes instead the juxtaposition of opposites ranging from gender to particle theory, and it succeeds with wonderful economy. The book, as a whole, also oscillates between these. Pentacostal Christians and Jews. Age and youth. A child’s still life and the seminal works of Kandinsky. Poems even bisect themselves, such as with “Among Things Held at Arm’s Length,” divided into poems for Mother and Father. The patterns beget new ones. Writing becomes weaving. In “They Vibrate,” the block of text suggests fabric, and in “Persistence of Empire in the Dream of the Pastoral,” we find the weaver. The speaker finds nine trees and moves between them: “and around / their trunks one by one I move, a spool — // Red grosgrain—in my right hand, and in my wake — / Blue — a nice loose shank of rope narrow of / Gauge.”

It is easy for me to get hung up in the details of structure and how these various motifs set about these vibrations, but it is plain to see that these were not Leader’s only concerns. The language is incisive and exact. The poems are not only small machines, they are machines that do something. Take, for example, “Folio,” one of the major poems in this collection, which incorporates the elements just mentioned:

Consider the distinctions among aether and air and oxygen within a hundred breaths of death // I mean, normally, the outer sphere of heavenly edge whether imaginary in myth or actual in imagery from the Hubble Telescope (see, “aether”), and the grand earthly surrounding supply (see, “air”), are lovely—taken for granted—containing and expanding as they do—but when it comes down to it, the true necessity to keep life from stopping is the O (see, “oxygen”) // Molecule, element, fundament

The work also unforgettably portrays the scene of her mother’s death:

Her body is at issue:  flesh, bone, ignored hair / [ . . . ] / Her teeth, loose pebbles, studs in brackish water, saliva pooled dark as tobacco

It is here that we see as it was suggested in “They Vibrate,” that the poem catches things mid-oscillation; a family’s argument surrounding the speaker’s not coming to her mother until the last moment fades in comparison to larger issues:  “Within eleven years, I will forgive Armand, whose own skull, in her / nineties, under skin so fair it belongs only to those born with red hair, supplies her cheekbone-knobs, which mine match // And of self-forgiveness, that part of the Janus figure stays inchoate.”

It is with an intricate movement of thread against thread that the pattern on the face of a textile materializes, and so it is with Leader’s book, a wide-ranging and remarkably cohesive collection that comes highly recommended.

I Feel A Song Coming On

Since this isn’t a review, I think it’s OK for me to tell you some things about myself, not that I will reveal much. That is, if everything should work out, I won’t be hiding or pretending, but I won’t be telling you anything more than Nate Pritts, who names himself here and there in his book, is telling us anything about himself. Besides, what are we beyond what happens to us? Is there a child born in these pages? A marriage allowed to spoil, then molder? An abandonment, hitchhiking into irresponsibility? Bad faith and friendships broken by the blunt ax-edge of passing time? Sure; maybe. And this is one of the reasons why I want you to read Big Bright Sun, so you too can squint into the realizations that stream out, center and edge, from these poems.

They sing, the poems in Big Bright Sun, and they sing in such a way that you might imagine someone singing along. Rising and falling in them all feathery with soft blacks, withdrawn, a Cure fan and true believer in operatic Disintegration mope. Only occasionally slipping hits of Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me ecstasy, even though those indulgences aren’t easy to admit to, much less confess. There are exclamation marks blossoming everywhere in Big Bright Sun, and affirmations embracing their own vulnerability. I never doubt this person, or his voice, even in its “awesome!”-ness, or take his excitements for ironies. This is delight, being absolved from cringing at escape pods and deflector shields borrowed from Star Wars and lines like these:

as if the past was something
that just happened yesterday & the future

will be something like a tin saucer landing in your front yard.

I can smile at lines like those and mean it. Which is not to say Big Bright Sun is a book defined by ease. Work has a place in these pages. I mean, I can say that I like Big Bright Sun because, in trusting, page by page, that I will like whatever I read next in it, I find in me someone who is capable of such enjoyment . . . not untrammeled, certainly not unadulterated, sometimes even ragged and wraith-like, but nevertheless a person who can admit “I can.”

So, yes, there’s happiness in the book, but much of the time, that happiness assumes the form of some haunting. Is happiness really just an intense desire to be happy? Could it be that happiness has an accomplice in nostalgia, that longing for moods that were once more intense, that broken if healing recall not of any specific feeling, but the capacity to feel at all? One poem in Big Bright Sun is entitled “Monday, Monday,” and cycles, line by line, though an entire year of what might be beginnings but speak more in the language of false starts. “Monday, Monday”‘s form is a kind of whimsy, but the words themselves are sad, sometimes even desperate. Inside this charm is heartbreak, and you don’t even have to crack the former open to find the latter.

July

3.

I make a sandwich. I drink grape juice. I peel an orange.

10.

Today I am a lute in a window & there is no breeze.

17.

Today I am a window with a lute in it. No breeze.

24.

I am a breeze not blowing: over there: a window, a lute.

31.

I peel an orange. I eat.

Is this a chronicle? What are we peering into? Maybe you can read these as letters, open but one-sided. Or postcards (which hardly anyone remembers), chatty but also somehow abrupt, in the way people who are moving on often must be. The someone singing all over Big Bright Sun is tracking and covering a specific distance, a distance that looks like hope, that weird blend of expectation and endurance. If Big Bright Sun has a refrain, I have to paraphrase it: “This is how far I am from being the person I want to be.”

Big Bright Sun is also making notes for a map. A map whose meridians and isotherms and orthogonals all point to how achingly between becoming is. Becoming hurts, but becoming doesn’t suck. I mean, becoming is too elastic, too organic — which is maybe another way of saying “necessary” — to bend back on itself to the point where it breaks. Yet there’s no way becoming doesn’t accelerate as you grow older. The poems here understand so much about aging, and they act out that understanding on our behalf. (There are selves who long pre-date us who believed the sun would not take its diurnal course unless impelled by sacrifice.)

The sun, for instance, is a big idea.
A big, doomed idea. It burns itself out

trying to keep us happy & warm.
Please realize that this is my goal too [. . .]

Maybe you will weary yourself on Big Bright Sun‘s endless waning summers, its spectrum of 70’s shag carpet colors (oranges and purples), its gardens and aviaries, its transcendent imminences, its incandescence, how pleased these poems can be by their own analogies and tropes, their flourishes, their long sentences staging grand productions crossing line breaks and the gulfs between stanzas on beautiful deus ex machina crescendos of “and ” and “&”, their reliance on the comforts afforded by the notion that experiences are “things,” enumerable, convertible. Me, I’m comfortable with how it all keeps me cozy in my awkwardness. And because Big Bright Sun hums and rumbles with so much that is, yes, good, the fan in me will be rooting for the fan in you to make your own big deal of its sounds and its sympathies, throbbing like the high numbers in a pair of good, clamping headphones, or the black light in that room that will always be yours.

So, like this someone calling to us out of Big Bright Sun‘s pages, let’s respond by resetting ourselves in sensation. Doing so is not giving into a siren’s song. Rather, its recognizing that some songs are living only for singing along.

I know the flowers will sing in the loud sunlight

& what they sing will sound so right it won’t matter if it is.

What are we joining? Since it is no use in injuring ourselves with speculations, let’s return to noticing these worlds whose lives don’t really need us, for maybe they aren’t all that indifferent. Maybe they just propose an attitude that we can’t name but, in our trying to describe it, can free us from needing ourselves.

I Don't Cry Loudly, Nor Do I Cry for Very Long

Dear Joe,

I admit that travel, the departure and arrival associated with it, sometimes makes me weepy. If I cry, I usually cry on airplanes, most often during take-off and landing, and especially if I am reading a book. I cried on the flight home from Russia a few summers ago when I finished reading Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov. I cried on a flight to Houston last year — I was traveling on my own, was deliriously winging my way home to my wife — when I finished Stoner by John Williams. And I cried while reading your book on the flight out of Denver in the late winter of 2010.

I don’t cry loudly, nor do I cry for very long. I doubt any other passengers suspect my sadness. My wife has not noticed my occasionally crying on flights, and she usually sits next to me. No, instead, I tear up and flush red. My heart yank-yanks just a little bit harder. And yet, I feel embarrassed. There’s something about the modernity of travel, now, that discourages us from emoting. It’s very hard to feel normal when crying in the midst of hundreds of other people, each sitting still and forward, trapped in a miraculous tube at altitudes far beyond our comprehension.

No, I want to celebrate travel, distances, meridians, departure and arrival.  I want to celebrate the sadness of circumnavigation, and what better way to do so than to invoke the spirit of Antonio Pigafetta. What better way than to read of you and Cheryl, of your struggles to navigate 665 miles, the 665 miles between Indiana and D.C. To read:

. . . If prayers
are swift, deranged birds
I am letting them loose from the decks of my body

Look for them. Two years
& more promised, seven months

apart, what gifts are there
to give? A ring

To describe your finger or another book
in which to write what is your pleasure or

Dear Joe,

Hello? the tools to bind a book

& how much flesh is the book?
& how much bread is the book? 

If it is possible to enjoy the sadness of distance and extension, possible to share that joy of sadness with others, then too it is possible to realize that, in many cases, the anticipation of our arrival tempers such sadness, producing around it a relieving corona.

And outside, I see clouds passing beneath me.

Yours,

Ryan

There's No Time For Pleasantries, These Are Perilous Waters

The phrase “Don't Let Me Forget to Feed the Sharks” is a remarkable piece of advice that is entirely nonsensical. Then again, it is immediately necessary that such advice be given, due in no small part to its easy-to understand imperative. If that sounds like paradox, and if that's OK, then you're one step closer to learning the Dao. Which, of course, is something you'll never figure out.

Jeff Alessandrelli's Don't Let Me Forget to Feed the Sharks opens with an epigraph from The Book of Lieh-Tz'u, which a cursory Googling reveals as an ancient Daoist text. Speaking of Google, Google “wu wei” right now. You'll find yourself reading about how not trying to do anything is really the only way to get anything done, and you might postulate that becoming aware of said doing at any point in the process is a sure way to muck things up. What Alessandrelli is after here is effortless doing, and he'd better get it right because there is so very much at stake.

Thirteen of these twenty-five pages reiterate that “It Is Especially Dangerous To Be Conscious of Oneself” via a different poem of that title. They are formally distinct, but each poem is hyper-conscious of the self or something like it. Take anything from:

All morning long I've been walking
the plank and still haven't hit
water

to:

It's raining up ahead. Then it's pouring, simply pouring.”

In case you've forgotten, all that water is full of potentially hungry sharks. It is imperative that you remember to feed them. Provided, that is, that you remember and self-direct without self-consciousness, as engaging in self-consciousness is at least as dangerous as an un-fed shark.

I think it's in high school that the average reader is saddled with the unfortunate notion that the reading of a poem must culminate in some kind of aphoristic revelation. The trick to correctly reading a poem, then, is to figure it out. Alessandrelli's book begins with revelation:

I have found the secret
Of loving you
Always for the first time.

The speaker here is mistaken.

“The night is an expansive toy
no one can read the instructions to.

Poor Claudia did fantastic work in putting this book together. The binding is hand-sewn, the layout is eye-friendly, and the cover is an indispensable part of the experience. A swimmer in a red bodysuit, head-covering and all, floats or wades in stylized ink-line water, looking like he's forgotten something. The cover image is folded over the hand-sewn pamphlet on a finely-textured dust jacket.  It's an engaging package, and a fine book of poems to boot.

My hand-written number says I'm looking at number eleven out of one-hundred fifty. If you're into handsome books of fun poems, I highly recommend that you pick up one of these while there's still time.

But enough about that for now; there's no time for pleasantries. These are perilous waters.

We Are All Blocking Doors for You Modern-Day Illusionists: A Review of Jordan Stempleman's No, Not Today

With his new collection, No, Not Today, fresh from Magic Helicopter Press, a dateless diary of days both elided and repeated, Jordan Stempleman has offered proof that he is magical.

I experienced a significant portion of these poems for the first time while sitting at the kitchen table eating cereal in my parents’ house during the small hours of the morning. The latter half, with pita at midday. Each poem rang out to me loud and clear, conversational and tangy.

Personally, I’m more disposed to poems that feel like they’re addressed to someone. I’m the type of person who spends a lot of time alone, so when a poem makes me want to shout it out to someone, it’s always a good sign. These poems caught me up, clicked me into orator mode, drove me to read them aloud to the cat, the turtle (who ate the cat, slowly), to my younger brother.

But the magic, the magic. Stempleman’s poems strive to get off the page and into your life. Exhortative, colloquial little things, they want to get up and walk around your living room. Thursday wants to sleep in your son’s bed. Saturday asks if you’ve got any spare condoms, while Wednesday raids your medicine cabinet and hijacks your Ritalin.

But who are they talking to, besides us? For me, these poems seem like they’re addressed to a close friend or lover. Or, if we take them upon ourselves, maybe someone with whom you’ve already gone too far, to the point where they’ve ceased being a lover; someone who you’ve fucked, and then backpedaled. Someone who’s been intimate, like you know a little more than you’ll let on, and to whom you feel all right offering advice. Vicariousness is a strangely powerful thing. We could all be narrators.

On an early Friday, in the once-couple of p. 12, the narrator broods:

Perennial, bad romanticism.
Well, it depends
on who calls who babe.
You wrapped the robot all wrong.
I’m starting to get infected again.

It’s trouble in the second person, wounded domesticity, something interior that’s fallen apart. The next day, they’re in need of a pharmacy. Who’s open late on a Saturday?

This narrator is one who interrupts herself frequently — interjections, for emphasis, to spur the moment, “wait a moment,” “who’s kidding,” “I’ll say it again” — a person trying to impart this wisdom on the reader, but who’s having an extraordinarily difficult time focusing on what he’s saying.

I think I’ve narrowed down where the magic comes from. It’s all about the slippage, the shifts where the normal suddenly transposes with something else, something strange or fantastic or simply unexpected. The interjections foster the shifts, they say, “Hey, I’m talking to you, now let me take you away.”

To elucidate, I’d like to share the first part of a Tuesday with you, from p. 49:

Let alone the beach with its history
of never going too far out, suggests
what attracts us to this land of so much for ordering in
sandwiches for the receptions of our lives, is, on the one hand,
we are never idle because we can lie our way back,

If we peer in really close at this, we might find that it’s constructed of phrases that aren’t content to stay by themselves, little expressions that butt up against one another — a thought comes along and takes the preceding one over, like the Calvin clones that can’t get a word in edgewise because they’re all interrupting themselves. But each subsequent piece doesn’t just take over, it builds off of those around it, weaving them together to form rafts of words and phrases that float out into space.

This, the moment you realize the lazy waves are taking you, the moment you start lying — this is the slippage I’m talking about, the moments of pure magic: in others, it’s the moment the split halves of the head become an instrument, the insects become human-sized, the city becomes a girl, the typing hands become a bird with a stone tied to its leg, when the cat puts on the sweatpants. When you realize the second person is you.

From another Sunday, another favorite, a little piece of magic from p. 64:

Perhaps it’s difficult to understand we’re probably safe
before anything happens. As it is written, even the earliest biplanes
fell through the air, a sky unwanting to be fixed.

For the sky that rejected those planes, that pushed them downwards and into the ocean, the sky that was content to hang uninterrupted over our heads, keeping us safe just by virtue of being there — the poems in No, Not Today are also addressed to us, for me, and for you.

A Diagram of Longing & Rooted Energies: On j/j/ hastain's Prurient Anarchic Omnibus

There is a bruise pressed against my tongue, big enough to make a sound like a voiceover set against a silent film. j/j Hastain’s poetic and visual journey, prurient anarchic omnibus, is that moving image. Imagine body as a spool of film, projecting portraits  that can be spoken or felt — sometimes both or just one or combined — with various senses like taste and aroma.

A bruise is defined as two types of injury: damage to feelings of self and areas of discolored skin from burst blood vessels.

I am bruised. I am gathering up each emotion like seeds scattered over torn up soil and massaging each shape of feeling I have from these words.

j/j writes:

this is the body/learning what is beyond itself     through itself

I enter this book as a poet, who not only writes along these lines of body and skin cell’s memories, but also as a human who is often in need of a refitting inside this body. j/j creates a narrative I can read in various orders and directions, allowing for a journey that is experiential, emotive, and never the same.

prurient anarchic omnibus is an x-ray, a diagram of longing and rooted energies.

A new year has just begun.

Resolutions are gathering, cracking, solidifying.

I hunch my fleshy skeleton over my desk and write. I begin this day negotiating time and coffee-scented gasps.

The air outside is too cold to declare any type of fashion sense; yet, right before exiting cluttered bedroom with blue bag full of dirty laundry, I catch my reflection; pressed down and wrinkled, unencumbered by gender distinction. Then I drop my bag, open up j/j’s book as though it is a magic 8-ball from childhood, where weighty questions are answered with a swift shake and reveal. I flip to page 62:                                   

I need to be bruised by this

to have my gender        fractured

into more musical

than binary

I decide my laundry can wait, because suddenly this book is less about bound words with ISBN and more of a declarative unpunctuated voyage that does not insist upon clean clothes or brushed hair. I am rooted. I am under siege, commanding my insides to get involved. To respond.

The space in which j/j writes from is like a window without the frame attached . . . it is magnified musculature and intuitions memorizing its unhinged construction. j/j’s images offer an illustrative shape to each word, sound, and peculiar image that not only bruises our own expectations of language, but redefines the discourse of lustful mayhem cocooned inside one’s gender-full, constantly shifting, retranslating mind.