Beasts of the Earth: A Camouflage of Specimens and Garments by Jennifer Militello

In 1927, twelve-year-old Marion Parker was abducted from her school in California, held for ransom, and then killed and gruesomely mutilated by a man named William Hickman. He slit her throat, cut off her arms and legs, cut open her abdomen, removed her organs, stuffed her body cavity with rags, and used wire to sew her eyes open.

In short: horrifying.

And in the well-trod tradition of sensational journalism, it horrified the nation in a sweeping national obsession. Hickman was the human monster — the beast — whose combination of charm and violent, aberrant psychology fascinated and titillated. Parker was the picture of girlish innocence — here brutalized by masculinity, perversion, and modernity. Marion, and her murder became a metaphor and canvas onto which a myriad of anxieties could be, and were, projected. Volumes of newspaper articles, folk songs, and even a partial novel manuscript have been written about the incident.

Jennifer Militello, in A Camouflage of Specimens and Garments, unearths the events in poetry — or, actually, it is more accurate to say that she unearths Marion Parker, and tries to give the girl some measure of voice and subjectivity stripped from her first by her murder, and second by her canonization in the media. The result is raw and devastating.

It’s not until roughly the midway point of this powerful collection that Marion Parker speaks to us — on the topic of her murder and mythos, no less — directly. However, once she does, it’s clear we have been circling this story and the companion themes throughout. It’s also at that point clear that the speaker in the epistolary free verse pieces which encircle the three main cycles of poems in the collection is Marion — or a distillation of her or all of the many, many girls like her. And that’s how this collection operates: by dawning understanding. Each new poem reaches back and changes the way you had read the ones which came before, which changes the way you are reading the poem you are reading now, which hints at what may be coming . . . eventually you are left with a fizzing continuity of experience.

The first cycle of poems is all raw and ancient wildness. The most enervating poems use imperfect rhymes and irregular rhyming schemes to build a fast, syncopated beat that gets in the bones. The frequent use of repetition and parallelism at the start of thoughts or lines lends these pieces a flavor of an oral tradition — and thus antiquity. Beasts haunt the verses — haunt the book — including potent archetypes of wolves and werewolves, dogs and hounds, the hunt, the woods, the darkness, and the old gods. Here already, though, Militello is laying track for what is to come. The beasts are not simple monsters, and their female prey not simple victims — that worn old narrative has no place here. In “A Dictionary of Having Been Prey in the Voice of the Grandmother” in which Little Red’s dear nana is freed from the belly of the wolf with the thought, “I could finally be the beast,” and “I had been eaten, I was the beast. I had the taste of bewildered flesh.”

She’s constructing different narratives here: no damsels.

Harder to parse, but marrow-rich is the collapsing of the dichotomy of birth and death. Birth and death are simultaneous and synonymous, as in when in “A Dictionary at the Periphery” the speaker narrates: “On the day I was born, the moon’s phase / was waning crescent. No death / to sweeten like a side dish . . . ” and later, “I was the last animal at the lamp the night / man was born. Record me in the morgue’s lost books.” And in “A Gospel of the Human Condition” we find, “Ourselves / at periphery. Begotten, not made.”

The middle cycle of poems shifts from an animal restlessness to something more modern: chitinous, and uncanny. The poems are full of industrial, scientific, and brutalistic imagery; and the forms of the poems change with the same restlessness. “Corrosion Therapy” opens the cycle with an algebraic equation, in contrast to the mythic language of previous poems, and pulls the reader in to the darkness, inviting us to a crime and to a complicity in beastliness: “You can’t deny your decisions now that / you can smell what we’ve been, our / living, our pride, our cool little eyes / like rainfall that don’t care one bit. / It’s suicide only to one part of you. / The other part connives to come, to kick / the lame dog, to take advantage / of the dark, to test the door to alive. Is / it locked or ajar? How far will it open? / If I fit through, who will die? Say / goodbye.” Notably, in this section the beast is us, and it is modernity, and it is society. Thoughtfully, Militello follows this revelation of our own beastliness with the aptly named “Criminal How-To” — to help get us started on the crooked and wide.

This is where Militello introduces The Sociopath — an archetype as strong and pregnant to modern times, as any beast from the epic sagas of the ancient world — and their voice unsettles from the first moment it appears in “Dictionary of Wooing and Deception in the Voice of the Sociopath.” It’s not a stretch to imagine that The Sociopath is, at least in part, William Hickman; however, The Sociopath is carefully de-identified — we are discussing a type, a mythology, and a whole group of people (men). “Godless, I am most real / Healed, I am / most ill. Filth is my most honest hour,” and later, “I barter with the periphery,” proclaims Militello’s Sociopath, with the precise sort of Nietzschean Superman ideology which drives our fascination with “sociopaths.” But Militello’s Sociopath both is and is not a beast, because he is also a man: in “A Dictionary of What Can Be Learned in the Voice of the Sociopath’s Lover” we hear from a woman who loved him, a woman who is not a monster, or a nihilist, or a pitiable creature. She is complex, and damaged, and strong; there is a desperate, defiant energy to the Lover’ when she calls, “To wreck whatever touched my hand / to prove I still exist.” and, “Not to want.” and, “To fight and spit. To / let it go. To earn my keep.” She is human, and then so to is the Sociopath — a human beast, which is a much more disturbing proposition, from which a lot of narratives turn away.

And then we arrive at Marion Parker.

Her poems are devastating. Here Militello imagines a Marion, first in “A Dictionary of Mechanics, Memory, and Skin in the Voice of Marion Parker”, who laments her lost life: she will now only get to grow old “in the minutes it takes to be dismembered: / one suture for each of my antiseptic mouths. / Tattered is how I began.” She worries: “If I do not happen soon, / I will not happen at all.” Marion continues, in “A Letter to the Coroner in the Voice of Marion Parker”, to cry out: “I am trying not to break. Debris is all I am. / My face gaunt where once it was seamless, entrails / replaced by rags, eyelids wired open, a congregation / in my eyes with all the candles held by children.” These poems more directly deal in the violence visited upon Marion.

Then comes a different Marion, who — remember — is imagined in these poems as speaking from beyond the grave, in the poem “A Dictionary of Keeping Quiet between the Monstrous and Holy in the Voice of Marion Parker.” She moves from discussing her death, to the creation of the Type or Identity of Marion Parker (in the media and public discourse): “I cannot be made / natural since my flesh / burns with these machines. / I am crafted of dimensions, mathematical, a prize. / I am somewhat alive.” She says: “There is not rest for / the wicked. There is no / remembering the grand. / I take the hands that hurt me and mistake them / for my hands.” She grows angry at this second violence, the flattening and constructing of her identity: “The hour is anger, is artifact, is over.” declares the speaker of “Working with the Instruments”, repeatedly delivering the imperative “kill it.”

The third and final poem cycle brings us to the present day with “A Dictionary at the Turn of the Millennium”, which greets our era with a series of “hellos” to the various ills of our society, from overcrowding, to experimentation, from hopelessness to “adrenaline catastrophe.” The cycle pivots to “A Dictionary of Resignation,” elucidating the inevitable coming apocalypses: “Enough. The dogs of god are loose. / Finally the nights you do not sleep / like packs outrun the wolves,” and, “Touch is a rough crypt of covenants. / Random things awake. / Draft horses cart their owners to the grave. / The inept shall inherit the earth.” Decline and decay are a theme throughout the section, but the myth cycles also return: to start with: Icarus and Odysseus make appearances. And their stories are not relayed so much as reframed — Icarus is a figure of hope not hubris, Odysseus’s story is one of unarchaic homesickness.

The wheel turns. Endings are beginnings. Birth is death.

In “A Dictionary of the Dead in the Voice of the Living Collective” the dead (the past) literally live inside of all of us: “They think of flame but sing of ash, a drop / of this, a sip of that, their lairs inside us / skinned and mute. Eyes a snapshot of hunger.” Nothing is new, and the wheel turns. In this way, the final poems are an affirmation and release: everything is terrible, and an End is coming — whether simply death for the individual, or a societal collapse — but an end of one era or cycle is simply the beginning of another. Near the very end, Militello moves to using a chilling, powerful “I” as the narrator — a collective voice of humanity? Or the dead? — who tells us in “A Dictionary of the Afterlife” that a beast approaches to devour the earth and “digest the bones to break them.” But this “I” will bury the beast, drown it in a fountain. It’s a powerful final chord.

Dean Kostos: Poet of Two Worlds

It can be argued that all poetry is a negotiation between two worlds. An interior, private jumble of imagery and sound, a chaotic montage, must find the proper words to convey meaning to the world. For a poet who has suffered from severe mental trauma, the task of creating balance and harmony in language becomes even more crucial.

Greek American poet Dean Kostos is one of these damaged negotiators. In his early books his language is playful and inventive; he is adept with forms such as ghazals, but underlying all is an uneasiness with surfaces. The discomfort is made clear in a poem called “Rampart” from his first book The Sentence That Ends With a Comma: “You never realize it, but the/ dust is the world’s gradual crumbling/ as you proceed to speak.” An increasing poignancy enters his work for the residue of lost lives, civilizations, and dreams. This is often reflected in poems that reference both ancient and modern Greek history, language, and art.

His poem “History Tilts across Your Hips,” from Rivering, is addressed to the famous Kritos Boy statue by a narrator who remembers “ravines perilous as love” in his own life and looks into the eyes of the statue with worship. But also, sadly, despair. “When your eyes speak, one talks / of arrivals, the other / of departures, each a tunnel / away, your thoughts unspooling / toward the vanishing point.”

Later on in the poem, a chiton (as remembered clothing) falls, “heart-roots snap/ from muscles memory,” and yet a divisive distance remains in the last lines. “One eye: Leave;/ the other; stay, stay.” Can this be the distance between an ancient past, idealized as more whole, and a contemporary world marked by ambivalence? Or is it an attempt to reconcile the two? As it stands, the poem is a brilliant evocation of the two worlds each lover carries within: the fight between past and present, between avoiding desire or accepting Eros.

Kostos writes about outsiders, but not as an impartial observer. He endured the violent bullying of classmates at his boarding school for being gay, and at one point was thrown down a flight of stairs. At the age of fourteen he entered a mental institution, where he stayed for two years. However as an adult he became a professor respected by his peers, won a Benjamin Saltman award for his poetry, and is the author of eight books.

In his poetic landscapes, figures move about who are damaged and marginal. A dwarf pushing a pram, Coney Island sideshow performers, Miss Havisham from Dickens, Jack and Ennis from Brokeback Mountain, even the Dauphin, the ten year old son of Marie Antoinette who perished in prison, his “mushroom-colored” heart stolen from his corpse. The poems insist that we live in two worlds: the world of commodities, appearances and structures, and another world accessible to those initiated by suffering, then understanding and compassion.

In a poem called “Creature of Two Worlds” from Last Supper of the Senses, there is a metaphor for this suffering, a description of a sycamore tree placed by a fence secured with a padlock.

Despite its growth, the tree can’t bend
to thrust out the obstacle, and so pretends

to need it, burling pulpy meat
over the metal like a punched lip eating.

The desire to be freed may not relent,
yet a saw would gut the core to cut the fence.

The preceding lines certainly have a precedent centuries ago in the Romantic movement, however Kostos, as a poet living in an age of deconstruction, creates a dialogue between what he sees as a place where truth springs from wounding, and the often false, commonplace world based on social interactions and shared assumptions.

Because Dean Kostos believes the true heroes of this struggle are outsiders, he gives us a persona poem whose narrator is the ghost of Amadou Diallo, an innocent man murdered by New York City policemen. Kostos makes readers empathize with the wounding of Matthew Shepard, another man murdered, this time for being gay. And mathematician Alan Turing’s life is also celebrated, though his untimely death is mourned. Ashile Gorky, Sylvia Plath, Hart Crane, and Frida Kahlo all appear as guides who hold the key between two worlds.

Most of his poems are also lyrical, with striking imagery. Here is a poignant description of a Coney Island sideshow performer in the beginning lines of “Scorpion Cowboy,” from This is Not a Skyscraper.

How does he tend to the body’s needs?
Clunk! His pincers thud like sand-filled shoes.
Making his mother’s body bleed

when he was a boy, he swore he’d
mask his thalidomide shame like a bruise.

In a poem called “Turkish Man With Cinnamon Eyes,” also from This Is Not a Skyscraper,the narrator speaks from historical wounds inherited from four hundred years of oppression, when Greece was under Turkish rule.

I say the world is text & we read it.
The world is history & we bleed it.

I say, I’m unable to love. Love me.We stand above the bridge, peering down,

the East River rippling below us—
hair of a deity about to breathe.

While a wish for healing may exist, Kostos is too fine a writer to present his readers with New Age homilies about self-acceptance. There may be no conclusive way to bridge a gap between two worlds, despite the clever use of an ampersand or skillful line breaks. “Wounds Wound with Poems” suggests that the creative process itself is a kind of surgery. “Perhaps all poem are bandages,/ pristine or blood-soaked.”

Kostos implies that all of us, whether or not we create art, have “sought approval from monsters who traffic shadows.” It’s fitting that that he mentions a chilling episode from The Twilight Zone television series that involves unwound bandages and approval. And poets themselves hold chisels that are “dark & dripping.” But Dean Kostos is one poet who does so with grace.

We wait in hell’s white-enamel cellar.
Plants shrivel on sills. Our hands
flicker like wings, as computer keys

clatter, carving words into luminous
screens. We try to hew our David
from all that he is not—
our chisels dark & dripping.

—“Wounds Wound with Poems,” from Pierced by Night-Colored Threads

Do It Like This: Personal Science by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s Personal Science opens with a problem, posed in the poem “A little tether”: “A self being an object, I can construct / the object I am trying to get to / Refer to the page / But when left, the page fades to pinks and yellows.” The speaker of the poem — Bertram or a version — tells us both what her collection will try to do (construct a self on the page), and that that effort will inevitably fall short: “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.” The negative space created by this admission is overwhelming; it feels shiveringly, deliciously illicit — a secret revealed, or a power move flawlessly executed, or both. It’s also maddening given that the Self she pieces together in the twenty-four poems of this collection is breathtakingly rich, vivid, and human.

It begins with a series of “Legends like these I keep keeping” poems, which precisely and lyrically conjure the nothing-everything moments of female friendship, spun out of quiet moments between and around the tough shit we cannot escape, and must share with each other (there are rules for dreams). In the “homo narrans” poems we get these luminous little human moments around the meanings we construct and the way they break down: “I worry about hurting the turkey & I find I cannot harm an animal I do not understand,” the narrator of one says while admitting complicity in her companion throwing rocks at it a breath later; “A man walks over and because he looks like the stud on the cover of a romance novel — not to dark but not too light — I figure he’s the gardener.” says the speaker of another. These are precisely the kind of dirty-delicious insights into what is often (pompously) called the human condition which satisfy.

The pace quickens through the series of smaller poems which form “Cerebrum corpus monstrum” on the power of the startling turns and juxtapositions in the images and ideas, and by the growing mood of a searching — or a yearning — building in the collection: “Shining. Alone on a road through Texas, following / The dips of a hawk you let the car weave across lanes / & nothing happened but the hawk kept flying away. / though it was infinite & became but hallucination / You bear all this.” And, like the hawk which soars and then dips, Bertram’s flights of language never stray too far without returning to the real and the grounded. Later in the same poem, the speaker says of a conversation with her brother: “I tell him psychic unease. / Sounds like procrastination he says. You should cultivate / A more productive trait. / Take tenacity, for instance.” Which is exactly the sort of dry thing siblings might say to one another.

The longest piece in the collection is “Forecast” — a prose poem in this context, or perhaps just particularly poetic prose; the distinctions blur. The voice — the Self — is most vivid in this piece, which is stunning and original. It is written in third person, but is brought close by an intensely relatable style of stream-of-consciousness and mode of free association. The subject of the poem — always only “she” — checks forecast after forecast, for her area, the region, the country; she refreshes the page and checks again, checks averages, checks patterns, checks a day out and week out month out. The revolutions around the forecasts resolve in to forecasts for Italy, and thoughts about what to pack — aha, she is going on a trip — which zag away, “Suddenly she remembered a package of breakfast sausage that had been in the freezer for months and was, last she checked, completely frost bitten. She got up to throw it out.” Without losing the thread of forecasts, the piece’s protagonist goes on to worry the themes of what she will do if there is a terrorist on the plane, the concept of the bystander effect, Kitty Genovese, the first full loss in aviation history, a plane crash in Buffalo where she went to college, the aviation concept of the deep stall, making paper airplanes as a child, birds in flight, an old boyfriend who used to deliberately drive fast when was angry, more forecasts, the 1993 “storm of the century”, explosive decompression, Japan Airlines flight 123, her knee problems and the orthopedic surgeon. Then —

“What are you doing, he asked, as he passed through the room on his way to the kitchen. She quickly clicked away from the injury reports gathered around a downed China Airlines flight… She struggled to catch her breath. Nothing, she said, as he was leaving the room.”

Ah, the familiar animal panic of being discovered down an internet rabbit hole.

The poem goes on, and she remembers a time she was delayed due to a mechanical malfunction, she takes some more pills for her anxiety because she is worried they will wear off before she boards (here, her thoughts take on an even more dreamlike timbre), she obsesses over the weather, she digs in to forums of conspiracy theories about the missing Air France flight, she researches all the things that can go wrong on a plane, she checks the maintenance records of the fleet she will be flying. Softly and suddenly, without fanfare because the piece is not about the journey, she is in Milan at her brother’s apartment and pouring over the news about the tsunami, the Fukushima plant, Libya, the bombing of Pan Am flight 103, Gaddafi, radiation spread patterns; ending helplessly: “The only safe place to be was in a plane.” The poem is devastating, incisive, true. It is also one of the pieces which most strongly demonstrates the way in which Bertram weaves scientific, historical, and philosophical concepts into her poems to make them richer.

The collection moves in to the final act, going from strength to strength. “Homo narrans (transplant)” haunts with the image of a transplanted heart wrapped in a papier-maché of dollar bills. “Homo narrans (sustenance)” is a treat, entirely written as a footnote on the subject of a post-apocalyptic existence under an otherwise blank page. The phrase “Like a teratoma whose nails will not stop growing / my life gnaws at me.” from “Psychomanteum” gnaws at the reader from the page; as does “So we read the prehistoric findings. / Nothing hidden in the flesh / but the bone eating its way out.” from the brilliantly titled “Crypsisssssssssssssssss.” There is a distilled genius in “Homo narrans (tongue)” with lines like: “I bite off my tongue to / keep the illness from / spreading its ugly baby. / To tie off what remains I / twist the end tights as a / sausage.”

The final poem in Bertram’s collection (“Homo narrans (Do it like this)”) is a wonderful, terrible dream (there are rules for dreams). The “I” — the Self — of the poem is in a library, looking for her parents who have gone; the library is a plane; the plane has taken off: “The librarian / instructs us / to look forward, / hold our arms / overhead like children on a roller / coaster. Her smile / widens from the forehead / to the jaw. She demonstrates / as the plane pitches, yaws / & dives. Watch me. She says / See? Do it like this.“

Blue Honey by Beth Copeland

Nothing is harder than losing the ones we love. And losing them in slow-motion, watching the persons they were disappear in their own bodies — “the long / goodbye” — is a harrowing process. Poet Beth Copeland grants her readers full access to her life, loss, and love in the new collection Blue Honey, winner of the 2017 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize. Each poem is deeply personal, giving honest, heartbreaking snapshots of how she lost her parents told through moments from her childhood, marriage, and parents’ battles with dementia.

Primarily told through a reflective lens, the poems of Copeland’s childhood show her spirited, adventurous parents before their abilities were lost to Alzheimer’s. Missionaries in Japan, there are stories of her parents’ cross-ocean voyages which help contextualize the deep loss of personal identity experienced through their battles with dementia. These journeys also serve as haunting analogies for the final one they are on: “When I ask / where he went, he blinks as if / returning from another / hemisphere into daylight, still / adrift between this continent / and the next.” The juxtaposition of the tragic late-life realities with the vibrance of youth are heartbreaking. Copeland writes, “When / I was small . . . I believed / he could hold back / time forever, a pulse that / would never stop” — a painful illusion one learns the truths about with time.

Copeland’s honesty throughout the collection is moving and purposeful. It gives a thoughtful and balanced reflection on the challenges and frustrations of mental-faculty loss for both the afflicted and the loved ones watching the disease take hold. We are shown her father’s struggles to speak and swallow, as well as her mother’s rapid memory loss. Towards the end of her life, her mother would quickly forget things she’d just done or said. Her mind refreshes and repeats. Copeland’s love and sympathy are well highlighted, but she doesn’t sugarcoat the challenge: “I want / to talk to her, but I want / to hang up, too, after listening to her / refrain like grooves on vinyl.”

The difficulties of Copeland’s own marriage, seen in poems such as “Cleave” and “Sweet Basil,” show not just the tolls losing one’s parents can have on our relationships with others—“Is this pairing of pain / and passion the moon’s / push-pull”—but also help contextualize the miracle that was her parents 66-year relationship and the agony of watching their lives now. Copeland articulates the situation with gut-wrenching honesty: “I love them but want / the blade to drop / the bleeding to stop.”

Each expertly crafted poem is beautiful-written but accessible. Together, the poems give a clear window into Copeland’s memories, experiences, and thinking. They show the grim realities of Alzheimer’s destructive powers. But these incredible poems also show that even in the worst of circumstances not everything is lost. “A mother’s love never vanishes,” Copeland writes, “fixed as / the North Star with no stops in a midnight sky.” Disease can take away mind and body, but it can’t take away love: “I hold / her in the heart / of my heart / where she’s whole.” Pain and sadness are inescapable realities of this world, but Blue Honey grants us the necessary reminder that there is so much more.

Between a Droplet and a Deluge: On Michael T. Young's The Infinite Doctrine of Water

The Infinite Doctrine of Water, by Michael T. Young, explores contradictions that trouble and enrich our lives. While water is essential, floods can kill. This collection also brings to light the extraordinary; the poet teases out insights that a lesser mind would ignore. His humanity and ability to observe guides the reader through paradoxes, ultimately finding them redemptive.

The collection opens with a sonnet-like gesture, “Advice from a Bat.” Written in second-person, it shows there is much to admire and learn from this macabre creature, recalling Roethke’s “The Bat.” Young’s poem, however, becomes an ars poetica: “Retreat to a cave no one believes in.” In other words, dare to write in an aesthetic that may not be popular; embrace a position that is not widely championed. Be authentic. This advice serves Young well.

Reminiscent of The Metamorphosis, transformations populate these pages. A mythic tone informs “Molting,” “Sometimes she can feel her wings growing.” What we encounter in the poems shimmers, dissolves, and changes as we read them.

The reader can also see a Keatsian negative capability. Young accesses this position as an extension of his openness to experience.  He’s receptive to comprehend, and therefore, to grow. He writes, “It’s the nameless power of its bark / that arches over me where I sit / gnawing its roots and curiosities, / growing stronger with hunger.” Indeed, a “nameless power” surges through Young’s cadenced words, which contain another paradox—that hunger can nurture.

A philosophical yearning emerges. In “The Reservoir,” Young asserts, “For years people slaked their thirst / at the source of things.” Longing, call it nostos, propels this collection, as if the poet is aching to return to “the endless blue into which they expanded.”

Another poet who wrote of bodies of water as symbols for time, the unknowable, and the inexorable was Elizabeth Bishop. She was once quoted as saying that she wasn’t writing about thought, but about a mind thinking. Similarly, Young brings us into the process of his thought. His cognitive leaps work as metaphors, proffered to the discerning reader. For example, in “Bioluminescence,” we begin with Rembrandt’s Philosopher in Meditation and end with a fish that emits light in the ocean’s “perpetual night.” Similar to Rembrandt’s use of paint, Young is writing chiaroscuro. He delves into the depths of human darkness to encounter light. Sometimes it eludes him.

“Hungry ambivalence” follows this poet who lives in and a part from the world through his piercingly accurate perceptions of it. He opens the poem “Treading Water” by peering at the Hudson, a body of water that appears to be both beginning and end (fusing and reconciling contradictions). Young is mapping an ontological conundrum. But instead of turning from it, he makes room for ambiguity. Young states, “[C]urrents / … wagging at the fluidity / of the historic, the generosity of chance.” Here again is the poet’s humanity, acknowledging the vicissitudes of fate.

In “After Rain,” we read, “[N]othing profound is safe. That’s why / its chasms are hoarded or pawned in each drop.” A melancholy quality emanates from some of the poems. In them, Young leans towards a more idyllic reality, one that exceeds human understanding, “beyond reach and comprehension.”

“Like Rain” tells us, “[T]he way it all seems to rise and write itself in the hot summer air, / a suggestion of wings and ethereal choirs.” Here’s an example of Young’s attention not only to the what of poetry but also to its how. Never is there so much as an excessive syllable, for this poet knows that in order to penetrate the reader’s unconscious, in order to enter deeper realms, a poem must sing—be it a chant, a lament, or a canticle of exaltation. To be sure, each phrase is musical, even psalmic. Each phrase is a current in an underground river, coursing from poem to poem, arriving at “The Voice of Water.” Young concludes, “Even after you’ve closed the book, / it keeps reciting the lines.” These lines will resound in our minds long after reading this necessary collection.

Almost Human by Thomas Centolella

Were a joke to begin So Jesus walks into this little piano bar in Berlin, then almost all of Almost Human would serve as punch line.

This collection, exquisitely tuned by a musical ear, finely turned by the hand of a master poet — one of our best — clearly revels in its obsessions: Jesus (or the Holy Spirit) adrift in the present day; the piano, the recurrent piano, which tinkles along to no small delight as leitmotif through its pages; Berlin, chockablock with griefs and guilts that the poet sometimes takes upon himself (“A city/that wasn’t me, but could be”).

And then there is a further preoccupation, the focus on loneliness, on isolation . . .

For example, my beautiful neighbor.
Passing me on the street or in the aisle
of our local grocery, she made certain
her eyes stayed trained on some
distant target of oblivion.

. . . an isolation which never strays far from the open sea of hostility:

And approaching me in the street
on the shortest day of the year,
a tall creature with long lively hair.
Kept my eyes down until the last
possible moment. And when I looked up —
Beautiful Neighbor, cutting her eyes at me,
rushing by with the startled look
of Who the fuck are youand what do you want from me?

There is in these pages a pronounced focus on beauty, on perfection (“a startling examination/of the secret life you can’t easily articulate to yourself/and half the time are glad you can’t”):

you’re out in the unpredictable world, and some woman or man
is close enough to touch, or to study with impunity,
and what binds you like a spell is something like the symmetriaof Polyclitus: a face so pre-possessing, so proportionate and marble-smooth,
at first you can endure it only in its particulars —
the bridge of the nose, the ripple of a lip, how perfectly
each brow crowns each mesmerizing eye

Obsessions — Thomas Centolella makes the most of them with his gift for the particular, figuring the essential in diligent detail, rocketing from the lurid to the longed for, from admiration to astonishment:

In the next gallery an athlete by Daidalos is so lifelike
I can believe the legend that says he had to tie down his statues
to keep them from fleeing. Anchored in her own room —
not that she seems to mind — a woman of dusky rose,
of wide-eyed wonder, holds a small fruit over her stone womb,
and nobody knows: Is she Persephone? Or someone’s smiling wife,
smiling mother, enjoying the secret of her immortality?

Centolella, in fact, is the sort of lush (though never louche) philosophe you not so much teethe on as graduate to after making your way through the mush and slush pile of marginal poets. As it’s said, when the reader is ready, the poet appears.

Poets, though — and, alas, prosodists — toil eternally at the margins of significance, of consequential human endeavor. They work, often single-mindedly, always hopefully, at Almost (but perhaps not quite) Work – being, by extension, almost (but perhaps not quite) human — their occasionally sublime efforts irrelevant to the moth-eaten, the mundane, the unambiguously non-spiritual churn of the day: the roil of Bitcoin and mass shootings, of partisan incivility, of claims about fake news.

Still, poetry is the news from somewhere, so sayeth (famously) Dr. Williams, so sayeth (darkly) Ezra Pound. Quiet news from the calyx of the Big Bang. Against no lesser backdrop than this, a giant elliptical galaxy — a galaxy evoked in the first poem of the book, “Virgo A” — Almost Human unfolds.

And the labors of this Almost Work, anchored more in the Spirit than the Street, give rise in their escalating otherworldliness, in their meteoric clang against the surface of the worldly, to the small (or not-so-small) splendors of the almost human. The beyond human — the numinous. The mystically better than human.

From these quiet collisions, these Little Bangs, Centolella mines his title. And shares his insights in shy sequence, very like a flower unfurling.

Unfurling altogether logically, though.

As the last of its five sections is revealed, the book discloses the full reasoning behind its author’s choice of Teilhard de Chardin (wearing both of his hats here: philosopher, Jesuit priest) to bestow a benediction — the elegant little epigraph that serves as prologue and summary, both, to the book’s central concerns:

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” Not quite, but almost, human, you see. Upon this premise the poet builds his case and sets his goods.

No surprise, then, when Jesus — almost human, he — enters the city after midnight in the final surge of the collection, trampling like a beatific elephant through Centolella’s fragile, elegant wares.

I was a genius of dreams,
a reticent guest, the exhausted angel
without blessing or bliss, the friendly
demon that keeps things interesting.
The world called me human
but what was the world?

But that’s from the last part of the book. To retreat amidships:

Beyond Jesus in the modern day (“Nobody here bothers him with more than a glance:/his reputation might precede him but not his mug”) — beyond the piano (whose voice “will rise/as needed/before slipping back/into its bed of silence”) — beyond Berlin (“a city said to be evil, holy, shining, eternal,/a plexus of animus and genius, renowned for its ravishments”) — beyond his recurrent points and counterpoints, his favorite dishes, amply dished, the poet finds his surest footing in the dynamics of the oldest war: the one between the sexes, the story of Mars and Venus, in these pages clashing and clarifying, anticipating and isolating. (And more on that particular choice of words some paragraphs hence, in a few comments on Centolella’s craft and musicality.)

So. Mars and Venus. An example: From a dizzying study of a study in the Rijksmuseum, a real life woman in blue stands before an enigmatic Vermeer, and through an exercise of empathy — in what might be an instance of autobiography, as well — the speaker, the voice of the poem, stalls on the borders of a borderline love- or loveless epistle, interpreting the thoughts of his woman in blue watching the Woman in Blue Reading a Letter:

The letter says he’s not coming back.
He has his reasons. There are always reasons,
aren’t there? They make sense —
call them reasonable — even if
they’re far from fair.

And there’s this, in charming and poignant antiphon, a classic He said, She said:

While the music played she took off her glasses and looked at me, and I remembered that the eyes of the temple figures had been made large on purpose, to approximate awe in the god’s presence.

I don’t know if he wanted to kiss me, but he didn’t move his eyes from mine, he didn’t move at all.

She was leaning slightly toward me and her black sweater made the color of her eyes more compelling, and I wanted desperately to touch her in some way, but the god was unyielding and held me firmly in place.

He was so well-behaved I was aching to kiss him, though I knew I shouldn’t.

The song ended and then it was just the rain and its solitary syncopation.

There are splendors scattered like diamonds on the loose floor of these pages. There is “Your Legion,” “encoded with messages” crucial to the survival of this craft and sullen art, crucial to its admirers, to its practitioners. There is “Pergamon,” well worth the tour. And “Examination,” which bears (and stands up to) close scrutiny.

And then there is the poem “Nuptial.” Perhaps the best in the book. None wittier, none more evocative, none more technically acute. The word cant never employed more cunningly. Appearing early in the collection, an incitation — a stand up poem. This reviewer, reading the pieces in sequence, noted at the bottom of the page, “Now I know I’m in the hands of a professional poet.” The piece cannot be quoted here in full, and deserves more than to be quoted in part. It is, standalone, worth the price of the volume.

As are others, such as “Meadow,” which delivers a 21-line one-act play with the brevity of a bullet. And “Why I’m in Awe of the Spiral,” where even the flush of a toilet is significant “when its swirling is a variation/on our sidereal drift.”

Back to Berlin: “Say the one you loved was Jewish./Grief and peace just a block apart.” This is sad and syncretistic and wise, worldly-wise, a fusion in tone of the horror of the city’s history and the wistfulness of its charms — one of those moments “you’ve always heard about,/the one that could kill you but prefers to make you stronger.”

How fail to mention a poem with “a woman sitting so still/she had all the affect of a mannequin” or the dazzling “Namaste” or (of equal brilliance) “The Lost Coast”? Or a piece that offers a glimpse of the musical composition process which leaves little doubt about its similarities to the poetic process, a poem in which “an elegant dark-haired song, glistening with sweat” has walked to the poet’s house “all the way from its neighborhood in Havana” (has sweat ever been sexier?); or an internee poem thematically evocative of Plath and Auden; or “Simulacrum,” if only as an unexpected homage to Yeats? Centolella leaves few leaves unturned. There’s even a sprinkling of haiku.

On craft and musicality: Some few lines above were fretted with a couple of choice pairings (clash & clarify, anticipate & isolate) designed to pleasure the ear. The ear of a poet. And all in good fun. Get the essence of the game? Centolella does, in spades, in compounds of glorious aural enchantment, discrete snippets here adduced from various of his pages (which morsels, incidentally, nearly cohere as a poem when stacked thus):

a plexus of animus and genius
renowned for its ravishments
affection and its afflictions
alliances and allegiances
iritis in both eyes
arthritis in both knees
soothe and scathe
meager and mundane
cirrus and circus
gone to gray, gone for good
vexing as a hex
fidgety with tangent and anecdote
the radiant and the raucous
a concrete bunker on a lonely campus
the diligent clarity of a Kashmiri sky
without blessing or bliss
I despised the despoilers that would deprive
plash and swoosh
against hull and paddle

The poet’s technical tool chest is formidable. Alliterative adornments. Check. Range of expression. Check. The gift of clarity. Check. Sensitivity to consonance. Check. Shaking the kaleidoscope from the sacred to the profane. Check. Skillful striptease to stark-naked truths. Double check. And yes, the rare abilities to engage, to delight, to load, to lighten, to skirt the sentimental whilst rambling the rim of poignancy. De plus en plus.

Many artists, most writers, all poets, operate on the fringes . . . the fringes of an overwhelmingly Bottom Line culture, a society where quantifiable achievement — Work! — engulfs anything so frail, so vague, as the “spiritual,” the “almost human.”

Yet it is precisely in this vector that Thomas Centolella purées his gruel, where his poetry negotiates “the mysterious union of the divine and the human,” a phrase he employs in describing his piano, but which is likewise descriptive of his work.

These are poems of dramatic diction and street level brio, spirit elevators and gut punchers, poems of great learning and great good humor. These are ideas scrupulously framed and delivered with virtuosity. A fine, very fine, refined intelligence gleams here. And a pleasing modesty as well.

This is not a collection for the unconcerned, largely tuneless, unsmiling frantic nest of humanity, not a book for the man in the street.

But very much one for the reader in the subway, where poetry crawls from car to car, on placards, on signs, on ribbons of graffiti — poetry almost human — forcing the agile rider to lift her eyes wide open.

Palm Frond With Its Throat Cut by Vickie Vértiz

Latinx Los Ángeles. One of the main reasons the city is always praised for its diversity. Spanish peppering homes in Bell Gardens and mariachis shooting the breeze as they wait to be hired at Mariachi Plaza in Boyle Heights.

But pay attention to the media or watch the movies and T.V. shows made by Hollywood, and it’s like the community doesn’t exist. As Chris Rock said in his 2014 Hollywood Reporter article criticizing the industry’s lack of diversity, “You’re in L.A., you’ve got to try not to hire Mexicans.” It’s as if Hollywood refuses to know its own city. A willingness to ignore a community that makes up half the city’s population.

However, Latinx Angeleños, like poet Vickie Vértiz, are increasingly penning their own narratives of a lived life born here in Los Ángeles and of the community they’re from. These writers, most with roots in Mexico and Central America, use their writing to portray their loyalty and love for their community in the context of discussing social issues. This Latinx Angeleño literary tradition took hold in the 1980s, in part due to what L.A. poet Marisela Norte said about her community living on the Eastside of the L.A. River: “I don’t know why things start and stop and matter once they’re safely over that side,” the Westside, “of the bridge.” [1]

That’s why in 1982, the poetry anthology Two Hundred and One: Homenaje a la Ciudad de Los Angeles/The Latino experience in Los Angeles appeared, that focused on these long ignored voices of L.A.’s Latino/a poets. The anthology included such future heavy hitters as former L.A. Poet Laureate Luis Rodriguez, Victor Ville, Marisela Norte and Helena Maria Viramontes. [2]

*

Vickie Vértiz’s second poetry collection Palm Frond With Its Throat Cut (University of Arizona Press), sidesteps the glare of Hollywood and vividly focuses on her community of working class Latinxs in Southeast Los Ángeles. At the outset, the first poem “Already My Lips Were Luminous,” places the reader directly into her family and community with Amá and her uncle whose “breath is two cases of cigarettes and one/aluminum beer.” Where “Amá throws/up two dollar wine/after a pool party.” This place is where “the songs of crows/outside unspool.” However, Southeast Los Ángeles is more than just the stereotypical working class Latinx. Vértiz tells the reader not only that “my first kiss is with an uncle/comforting.” but that:

When his sons leave for the Persian Gulf  he kisses them too   and
I’m                  confused
because men never embrace around me…
I understand, then                there must be other ways to love
your children

This is what Vértiz’s collection explores, the different ways to love a person or community. One of the most personal and prevalent ways she explores, Vértiz learned from her father. She explained in an interview that “my relationship to home is…the way my father related to the family he made with my mom…that I could leave, and I should leave, and I could always come back.”[3] And in Palm Frond she periodically leaves Southeast L.A., at one point, the outset of part two, traveling to Paris and Mexico. But when Vértiz returns home, her poems retain that intimacy and socio-critical eye that illustrates that her community matters and that it matters in/to L.A., while retaining the love and empathy of a place that will always be a part of her.

In the persona poem “Don Mario” she says:

One bedroom in the city of crowded…
covered in finger filth…
In the living room, darting bullets in the dark…
Mario dreams of driving
his plump neighbor on her errands
: church first, the 99 Cent Store
Bursting with school kids

Vértiz does a powerful job of allowing the reader to experience her Southeast L.A. community through her and her fellow Latinxs as individuals, employing precise line breaks. These breaks create multiple contextualized levels of meaning, like ending with “driving” in the above poem. That evokes open freedom and possibilities before cementing Mario’s dream into a more realistic and plausible one, shaped by Mario’s reality and circumstances. Circumstances born out of a long history of neglect that Vértiz understands all too well.

*

Palm Frond With Its Throat Cut also expands on Los Ángeles’ Latinx literary tradition of documentation, of giving a “historical and cultural consciousness” to a community,[4]by Vértiz including her own queer Latinx identity. This is one of those other ways to love that she tactfully alludes to in “Already My Lips Were Luminous.”

In the poem “Portrait as a Deer Hunter” Vértiz places her Latinx queerness, by again using history, in the struggle for LGBTQIA rights, including an epigraph about the famous Stonewall incident in New York. But it’s her ability, as she says in “Lover’s Letter,” “To be untranslatable” that infuses many of these poems with her compassion and certainty, that creates a refreshing queerness that’s definitely her own. Vértiz says at one point, “Today is more like summer in South Gate or/Bed-Stuy.” This is the regular everydayness of being a queer Latinx, the unnoticed and unrecorded parts of these lives that occur once the media has left.

Vértiz skillfully captures this “untranslatability” because she understands how to adeptly use poetic lines. She creates extra spaces within a line to capture the extra meanings and layers of her queerness with a verve and sincerity that lacks the typical insecurity that accompanies such a self-discovery and portrayal. These extra spaces cause these otherwise easily accessible poems to strategically pause, powerfully allowing the reader to notice and feel the extra complexities of the love and affection she has to navigate through.

As Vickie Vértiz says in the final poem, about her language—these poems—they are “My resist.” In the Latinx Angeleño literary tradition she vibrantly expands on, and brings thought provoking light to, her Southeast L.A. community. And when readers step away, a part of that light lingers inside them.

Notes

[1] Rachmuhl, Sophie. A Higher Form of Politics: The Rise of a Poetry Scene, 1950-1990. Otis Books/Seismcity Editions, 2015.

[2] Rachmuhl, Sophie. A Higher Form of Politics: The Rise of a Poetry Scene, 1950-1990. Otis Books/Seismcity Editions, 2015.

[3] Membreno, Soraya. “Fierce As Fuck: The Future of Poetry Is Brown & Queer.”Bitchmedia.org, Bitch Media, 6 Oct. 2017, 9:22am.

[4]Rachmuhl, Sophie. A Higher Form of Politics: The Rise of a Poetry Scene, 1950-1990. Otis Books/Seismcity Editions, 2015.