Once Upon A Wild(Ness)

What would it be like if land came to life? If it murmured muddy syllables and moved in moss and tidal swells? Ness by Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood is a book where land moves, speaks, and breathes new life into our world. With mystifying lyricism and illustrations, these collaborators conjure a realm of ruin and rewilding — a realm in which the land reclaims its own sacred magic. 

On a mysterious salt-and-shingle island stands a decaying concrete structure known as The Green Chapel. Inside the structure, a nuclear ritual is underway, led by an ominous figure known as The Armourer. However, crossing land, sea, and time, five non-human forces converge to stop this ritual from being completed. These five totemic forces are she, he, it, they and as, and together, they become Ness. 

This island Ness seeks to reclaim was inspired by the Orford Ness National Nature Reserve on the Suffolk coast of England. During the Cold War, Orford Ness was used as a testing site for the atomic bomb by the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment and the Royal Aircraft Establishment. Continuing through the 1960s, half-buried concrete structures were built to contain these lethal weapons. Now, Orford Ness is a sanctuary for wildlife. 

Chinese water deer and the elusive hare roam the landscape, and barn owls and marsh harriers mottle the skies. From its brackish lagoons and reed marshes to its mud flats and vegetated shingle, Orford Ness offers a sliver of wildness to surrounding plant and animal life. The former Bomb Ballistics Building and other military structures on the island have been converted into nature viewing spots for visitors.  

Similarly, the landscape in Macfarlane and Donwood’s Ness is a place of contrasts. The island in Ness is a site of potential hostility and danger because of The Armourer’s nuclear ritual, yet the landscape aches for freedom from human violence and domination. This island has a protector: Ness. Willow-boned, Ness moves by hyphae and sings in birds. Ness speaks in swifts and has skin of lichen and moss. Ness breathes in rain and exhales rust. Ness has hag stones for eyes. Ness sends “flints through time to foretell their seeings.” Ness is here. Ness is now. Ness begs to be heard: “Listen. Listen now. Listen to Ness.” Ness is multiple; it is being, place, and time, and it has come to reclaim the land. 

The image at the core of Ness is the hag stone, as it’s known in Great Britain. Found in dry riverbeds and along the seashore, hag stones are stones with naturally occurring holes in them created by water erosion. According to folklore across Europe, hag stones are believed to possess a variety of magical properties and offer protection for those who find and carry the stones. It’s said that to look through such a stone is to see into the future or the past—to open a portal between realms. Ness acts as a hag stone itself, giving us a glimpse of the deep time that enfolds us, and as we peer through it, we can see the past and the future we face. 

Ness is a feral and startling incantation that pushes against the extinction of wildness. Weaving threads of ancient myth and Middle English storytelling, Macfarlane and Donwood create an illustrated poem-prose-play that brings to life the fundamental crisis of the Anthropocene: climate change and rapid globalization. As a response to the incipient threat of climate change, this modern mythical tale ruminates on the relationship between humanity and Nature.

At its core, Ness asks us how we defend ourselves from the dangers we inflict upon Nature, and consequently, ourselves — the dangers mankind creates as a result of our own hubris, ignorance, and taste for dominance. These dangers are visually realized by artist Stanley Donwood. Donwood’s shadowy illustrations capture a rooted sense of place that sprawls and anchors Macfarlane’s lilting words. Through this illustrated poem-novella-fable, Macfarlane and Donwood remind us that Nature is the force that tethers the past and future to the land and that humanity and Nature are bound to one another. 

Ness is a timely book that speaks to the power of Nature and its indomitability—it reminds us of a world beyond human. Macfarlane writes with the vision of Nature reasserting itself and reclaiming its power to flourish and provide life. Though humans are now considered to be the dominant species, our legacy will pass, and everything will once again return to the land, the wildness. 

A Magnificent, Sentient Beast of a Book: E. Briskin's Orange

E. Briskin makes a stunning poetry debut with his new release, Orange, which is more of a scavenger hunt of intertwining consciousness than a simple book. Before I critique a thing, I want to reinforce that the nature of poetry is to liquify and fill the mold of whoever might read and interpret it. The guided nature with which E. Briskin brings us into his post-dog-mortem world of footnotes and winding reading paths does not negate the identification process that makes poetry so near and dear to us. It enhances the experience.

I made my way through the maze of Briskin’s stream of consciousness in two different ways. First, following the numbers, and then again by reading the traditional way. Regardless of how you tackle this beautifully written and incredibly thoughtful book, you’ll want to have your phone, tablet, or laptop nearby. Briskin explains some of his most straying thoughts in the footnotes, but I still found myself dropping my book into my lap to Google things – like what the sculpture “Greyhounds Playing” by William Hunt Diedrich looked like – to fully understand the depth and brilliance of what was being said at a given moment. Briskin also sends you careening back and forth through the pages, as some footnotes refer to earlier or later ones. As you search wildly through his writings, you begin to see the spider web of thought weaving tightly together. I absolutely loved the scavenger hunt feel of this book, particularly for the thrill that this kind of hunt provides for me. The game of this narrative kept me active and engaged from cover to cover, then back and forth again. Wandering through the Orange labyrinth made me feel lost in a good way. Briskin pulls you into the speaker’s emotions, spins you around, and leaves just enough clues for you to find your way back to the heartbeat of this work.

The evident decision to write switchbacks into this story is one that lends to the shifting nature of the multiple themes laced throughout. The fluidity of gender, physical existence, and even breed and species is evident on every page, in a way that feels effortless and thoughtful rather than confusing. There is a purpose to every bend that Briskin takes in this regard. We are asked to consider all beings in this book as just that: beings. This, Briskin’s speaker appears to assert, is what equalizes all of us, human and dog alike. One of the most striking and thought-provoking moments in the story is when the speaker considers a group of intimidating men staring at them, and realizes that if the men were dogs, they would rush over to pet them. The shock of this realization dismantles the belief system that most of us spend our lives learning, navigating, and resenting. Gender roles, power dynamics, social constructs, and more are all dismantled with the delightful consideration of our furry companions and how they factor into our very human lives. Briskin smashes the boundaries of “black and white” thinking by making all of the simple things grey, and all of the grey things simple.

Briskin uses gender in a delightfully playful way throughout this poetry collection. There are very few moments that we are given even a glimpse of the dog in question. The dog holds a fluidity when it comes to gender, breed, and size. Briskin brilliantly uses more tangible things like physicality and appearance to cartwheel and backflip over binary-conforming pronoun use, and in this way, declares two deeply human truths. The first of which, of course, is that bonds like the ones we form with our animal companions are everlasting. This particular point reminded me of Dog Songs by Mary Oliver, where Oliver considers her many dogs’ lives and how their existence and bond with her had changed her own existence. But the second truth is one uniquely conjured in consideration with a dog’s physicality: gender is totally and completely a social construct. This, of course, is not a new idea. But attaching such human things to a dog, and vice versa, is one of the key functions that drives Briskin’s narrative and allows him to deconstruct such a classic duality. Briskin has managed to wrestle the human-dog connection into a new and refreshing form, proving conclusively that old dogs can, in fact, learn new tricks.

All in all, I will be revisiting this book not simply because there are a dozen different ways to explore within it (which there are) but because one could read it the same way a dozen times and find new things hidden in the language every time. More than that, as a dog lover myself, the shock of grief surrounding the passing of a pet and the ways in which it manifests in this book speak volumes. Briskin masterfully navigates the minefield of cliché grief portrayal and comes out the other side with a magnificent, sentient beast of a book that encompasses the abstract of what it means to mourn the loss of a pet. Pick up a copy of Orange if you wish to laugh, cry, learn wildly interesting dog facts that will wow the guests at your next gathering, or if you simply wish to read a piece of quality literature. If one of the above is the case, Orange will not disappoint you.

In their Own Rivers: A Conversation with Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes

I met Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes when I was nineteen. We were both Creative Writing students at Susquehanna University, a small college in a hilly, rural, rivered part of Pennsylvania. The first times I met Liz, she kind of intimidated me. She was outspoken and smart and hugged easily and would kiss her friends on the top of the head. I'd never met anyone like her.

Over the next few years, Liz would come to be one of my closest friends and favorite poets. I was thrilled to learn, a few months ago, that Liz’s debut poetry collection, Ashley Sugarnotch & the Wolf, would be published by Mason Jar Press in April 2020. As anyone who has met Liz knows, she is all magic and warmth, and so are her poems. However, they are also ferocious, bold, and biting.

Following is a conversation that Liz and I had (through a shared Google Doc!) in early January. We chat about wolf mythology, song lyrics, and the challenges of writing about violence. Fittingly, our conversation starts with Pennsylvania.

*

Dana Diehl: Let’s start at the beginning. Where and how was Ashley Sugarnotch born? Where did she come from?

Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes: When I started dating my now husband, I would drive from Harrisburg, PA to Moscow, PA, mostly along 81 North. Just south of Wilkes-Barre, there is the Ashley / Sugar Notch exit. They are two discrete towns that get to share a sign. I loved that name. I knew I wanted to write something about her—I didn’t know what yet—so I held it with me. I remember saying to my husband, “All I know is Ashley Sugarnotch is a bitch.” She’s not—not in the end—but you can see how annoying she is in the first poem I wrote for her: “Ashley Sugarnotch & the Big Red Bow.” This poem is partially ekphrastic to Bob Diven’s painting “Red Bow” which was displayed at Susquehanna University’s art gallery in the fall of my senior year. I remember seeing that painting and thinking, “That’s her! That’s it!” 

This other character showed up in one of the first seven or so poems I wrote, but at the time he didn’t have a name. I think I originally even thought of him as me! But then I had a dream where I was in a room with a dear friend filled with books and warm light and dust. He was reading to me, and I pulled his mustache off and plopped it on my forehead. And then I was like: Oh. Here’s this other person. I think this person is more sinister than I am. I think he’s a wolf. So I read everything I could find on mythic wolves. 

DD: Have your dreams inspired your poems in the past? How big of a role does your unconscious play in your writing?

EDML: Yes! I dream pretty intensely almost every night and have for most of my life. From the ages of 19 until I got pregnant at 27, I had a dream about once a month where I had miscarried a pregnancy or given birth to a stillborn child. Sometimes fetuses would bloom in my tea. In one of the dreams I miscarried in a birch wood in fall and buried the child under the only oak tree and wept, “Alison Dubai, I'm so sorry.” That was the main one that became poems. I wrote a series of epistles to Alison Dubai in some alternate timeline where I had gotten pregnant as a 21-year-old. I even wrote a poem from the perspective of Kenny! It got published as a very short run chapbook, Letters to Alison Dubai. At the reading, I read the first and last poem and had people in the crowd read the other poems. Kenny read his! Truly weird and beautiful.

The thing about dreams is they feel like something has happened in your sleep. I know that some of the more nonsensical parts are maybe less-than-interesting, so I usually wait until something very beautiful or pertinent to put in a poem.

One of Kenny's dreams makes it in the book too! The beginning of “The Wolf: A Shadow Manifested” are words he said to me as soon as he woke up one morning: i died on a ship / last night in my dream. // the ship had sunk i / was in the only unsunk room.”

DD: Fairytale retellings and adaptations are so prolific in our modern-day culture. Why do you think these old stories are still so accessible and irresistible to us? In Ashley Sugarnotch & the Wolf, you play with the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale. Why were you drawn to this narrative? 

EDML: You’re not wrong to bring up Little Red—I bring her up in that first poem! But Ashley isn’t explicitly Little Red. I think it was Ian Anderson, the Editor-in-Chief (and cover designer!) at Mason Jar who said Ashley was more like Red’s older cousin who teaches her to smoke cigarettes. When I was doing all of that research of wolves in folklore, I came across a bunch of versions (old versions!) of that story. What was most striking to me was that the version we know best was in fact not the most common version. Often times the Wolf won. (In fact, Kenny just read our kid a version of it where the Wolf eats her and it just ends there!) Occasionally, Red saved herself. But seeing the story over and over like that made me start thinking about cycles of violence. Why did Red survive sometimes but not others? Or, why was the Wolf sometimes successful? And how does the moral tale change depending on the outcome?

Ashley and the Wolf live in modern times but they are Big Picture characters. I knew of three different stories where, for example, a daughter was left orphaned because her father killed her mother. One of the mothers, Trisha Edelman, was someone I went to elementary school and junior high with (she has a poem at the end). Is what I write about specific? Of course, to the point that I actually created an annotated version of my own book so I could keep track of everything I’m referencing. But are Ashley and the Wolf stuck in their own cycles—are they bigger than themselves? Yes. 

DD: Please tell us more about the wolf mythology you discovered through your research. Is the wolf always the bad guy? Did the wolf as a symbol change based on where or when the myth originated? 

EDML: I could have told you so much about this during my second year of grad school, but yes—the Wolf is always the bad guy. I read all the Grimm Fairy tales I could find (a very nice collected that the library had). I also read everything I could from this website, D.L. Ashliman’s Folktexts. The Wolf is intrinsically bad in folktales. That’s one of his characteristics. He’s never redeemed or redeemable. In fact, part of the moral of these tales is that people should know better something that on the one hand seems obvious (if fire is always hot, don’t be surprised when you’re burned) and yet also put the blame back onto the victim of the Wolf’s crimes. The last Wolf poem, the one where he’s killed Ashley, was written fairly early in the process. Later, I had peers suggest (as I mention in “Statement”) that I would be contributing to this negative cycle if I explicitly wrote about it happening. So I tried writing some alternative endings where those poems just stopped short of the murder itself. But I never, never wrote an ending where the Wolf redeemed himself or where Ashley got away. Of course that can happen, but that’s not the story these characters are telling.

We love highlighting narratives where someone overcomes adversity against all odds. Even less violent things: I’ve read more than one article on this woman who got some weird loan/grant situation, without a huge down payment, and bought a house in D.C. in such a way that her mortgage is under $1,000 dollars a month. Housing prices are so high here that, for example, even if I had a $100k downpayment, I’d still be paying $400 dollars more a month than I do in rent, and my rent is already more than double that woman’s mortgage. Sorry for all the numbers! My point is this woman is the exception, in fact nearly an impossibility, and yet people write about her like: see! It’s possible! It’s possible for you to climb into homeownership if only you know the tricks! If only you work hard enough! Ashley, Little Red, the kittens that the Wolf eats in one of the stories—it’s not their fault. And while it would be nice if they could break out of this cycle, they aren’t the ones that can do it. 

DD: One of the most challenging aspects of this book is that it asks us to engage with the aggressor. In “The Wolf Attempts to Explain Himself,” there’s this lovely and startling passage, in which the Wolf laments Ashley’s inescapable death and his part in it:

[…] the last thing / i want is to find you in my dreams tonight / and crack open your ribs and rid your body / of its organs. is it so unreasonable to want a justice / for myself? a new ending where i justify / i’m not a wolf inevitable. finding you in the water / of the river and holding you down your body / putting up a fight because that’s human ashley

When we talk about cycles of violence, our first instinct might be to silence or look away from the perpetrator. Why was it important for you to include the Wolf’s voice in this story? What was the experience like of going inside his head?

EDML: I want and need to start by saying I don’t think the Wolf is excusable. And I don’t think you should side with him. I also think it’s worth noting that Ashley and the Wolf are both white. That’s how both of them can survive for as long as they do—the privilege of their whiteness. That’s also largely what Ashley’s first poem is about: how she was so privileged, even if she felt so destroyed. 

I wrote all of these poems before #MeToo. I think it’s incredibly important for us to call out the people who have done terrible things, even if the justice can only be a public record (See: my poem “Statement”). But, I think going forward we have to consider how we can prevent these cycles from happening. I had a friend (mentioned in the “Be Kind” poem) who raped someone. I haven’t actually spoken to this person in more than half a decade now, but I still remained friends with him at the time. What he did was inexcusable. But I also know he was incredibly sick for months leading up to the choice he made. He did not have resources to get help. He tried on more than one occasion and was either waylaid or outright rejected. I was there; I saw this. It was not my job or my other friend’s jobs to take care of him more than we did, which was the most we could. But I wonder: what would have happened if he had gotten help in all of those moments before? What if he had been able to utilize the resources that would have stabilized him? There’s a graphic memoir (and now a movie, apparently) called My Friend Dahmer about a dude who went to school with Jeffrey Dahmer before he committed all of his terrible acts. He also muses here—what structures could have been in place to prevent him from murdering? The story about Pinegrove, the band, and how the lead singer was accused of some misconduct is, I think, a good example of something that could happen. An intimate partner of his called him out, and he took a full year to reflect—including taking time off from touring and being in the public. He only returned after, through a mitigator, his accuser gave her blessing. If that hadn’t happened, he might have ended up like Jesse Lacey, lead singer of Brand New, who spent years abusing women, some of which were minors! 

None of this is a full solution, but I wanted us to be with the Wolf in the moments before he acted. He fails, but he’s also in a system that lets him fail. Ashley and the Wolf are both walking upstream their own rivers.

DD: You’re open about the importance of music in your life. In fact, your poem, “The Wolf: A Shadow Manifested,” is written after a mewithoutYou song. What has music taught you about poetry? Are there any other musical artists who influenced this book?

EDML: Truly, the music I love the most is music that makes me feel like I’ve been torn apart and put back together. I want and hope my poems make people feel that way too.

There are a few sneaky lines that I added that were misheard lyrics, if I’m being honest. “you knew / hate is defined / as spitting out / each other’s mouths” is from the song “Still” by Daughter. She means that two people are fighting and spewing hate. I misunderstood it as people turning an intimate act, like kissing, into chewing each other’s faces off and then spitting them out. Yikes, Liz. 

The poem about the Ashley having windmills in her chest instead of lungs is also an actual dream I had, but the line itself is from “Almost Crimes” by Broken Social Scene. The actual line is, “You’re like a messiah, pal. Little kingdoms in your chest.” I thought he was saying windmills for years! Ironically, “little windmill” IS in a song, just not one I found until much later: in the Blink-182 song, “All the Small Things,” they end by singing, “The night will go on, my little windmill!” A term of endearment!

Another tiny note: I have a line about dragging a lake because it shows up in two songs: “Cicatriz E.S.P.” by the Mars Volta and “Floater” by Every Time I Die. No one else, when I workshopped that, knew what that phrase meant! 

So I guess music has mostly taught me weird words and turns of phrase, intentionally or not!

DD: If your book was a band, what genre of music would it play? Where would it perform?

EDML: They would play mid-aughts punk rock. No, actually—it would probably just be my favorite band, Roof Beams, which is folk rock. And because it was my book, and not the actual Roof Beams, they would play in my living room whenever I pleased. And sometimes outside in the summer in the grass. And sometimes next to my bed as I fell asleep. 

DD: Something people in the lit world might not know is that you co-host a podcast, The Smug Buds, with author and editor Will Hoffacker. So, I have to ask. What are you most smug about in your book?

EDML: Two things: the first is the sestina, “The Wolf Attempts to Explain Himself.” I had a teacher in a workshop setting tell me, “Well, it got pretty close to succeeding, too bad it won’t.” Basically, saying I had made a good effort but that the poem was impossible to fix. Well, considering it got published on its own and is now in this book, I feel pretty smug about that. 

The second is general, but: it’s the book itself. I had a lot of support writing this book, but very few people got really excited about it. Workshop, something that I am not super precious about, was mostly grueling. So often it seemed like people didn’t understand what I was saying/doing. I thought it all made sense in my head, but sometimes I would explain myself into circles. I didn’t think I needed to revise the book more (by the end of the writing process) but most of the feedback I got back was pretty lukewarm. But I knew the book was there, I knew all of its intricate parts, so I just went for it. The most gratifying part of getting this book published is—starting with my press, Mason Jar, and then onto the many people who so graciously blurbed my book—they all get it. At first it was relief. And now I’m just hella smug about it.

DD: Who should read Ashley Sugarnotch & the Wolf? Who would you like to read it?

EDML: You know, I have a lot of coworkers who have told me that my writing is too sad. To one of them I actually said, “But aren’t you concerned with the human condition!?” And she said, “NO!” One of them, who read my essay, “Touch Me,” told me it was just so sad. I said, “Oh no! That’s the warmest thing I’ve ever written! No one dies!” (I then followed this up, after a pause, with “There are some things worse than death, though,” and wow did he roll his eyes!)

Which is to say, if you just want to escape, like maybe not my book? But if you like stories, if you like poems, if you like things that aren’t exactly one thing or another, please read my book. I feel like I’ve always been in all places at once. I’m pansexual, neither here nor there. My poems tell a story but also have very specific forms. I sewed a man’s dress shirt to a skirt and wore it to a wedding this spring. If the things you like most you have trouble explaining because they seem to wimble-womble—then you. You should read my book!

Occasions for Poetry: A Review of Joseph J. Capista’s Intrusive Beauty

I love this book of poems and its wild sensibility that tide pools, street violence, a vase of flowers that should have been thrown away, an osprey with its prey, teaching, fatherhood, a 19th century photograph, a crossing-guard at an elementary school, all are occasions for poetry. I appreciate that the poet looks in equal measure out at the wide world and in toward his private corner. When I was studying poetry, I was taught that in some poems, every word and phrase are like bricks in a wall—if one can be moved, the poem isn’t done. Strong walls with secure bricks—this is what a reader finds in this fine first book.   

The first poem, “Telescope” is an invitation to the reader to join him. The opening couplet tells the reader look through the same telescope as the speaker. What follows is a list of what the speaker sees shifting in a delightful kaleidoscopic way. The egret turns into a cloud and more clouds, which is like the sand, then like the waves, then like shells and farther out a freighter. At the heart, where according to Gregory Orr, we come closest to a meeting between chaos and order, a poet has many choices to make including how to position himself in his own poem and this speaker, one might say, keeps his distance, but I’d add that by doing so, does the opposite. The heart of the poem occurs when the speaker looks at the egret and then at a freighter that is

farther out
Than one might ever hope

To swim, especially you

The distance that seems impossible to cross could signify any goal, artistic or otherwise, and what endears me is that the speaker tries to be distant from his fear of failure and fails. He accomplishes this via his chose of pronouns: first third-person, “one might ever hope” and then second person “especially you,” where “you” is really an aching “I”. I love this modulation and that there is no “I” in this poem, yet all we need to know is here. The self-restraint makes this listener lean in to hear.

The poem “Thaw” has a different structure. Rather than kaleidoscopic images that bear down on a private moment, the poem braids together two narratives: a moment among Baltimore’s poorest residents and a moment in a married couple’s life. The couple drives through the city watching workers perform yearly spring chores I think of as medieval; collecting the dead from mounds of snow. After the couple reaches home, an argument ensues, and the poem ends with an achingly beautiful image. In the middle, literally of the poem, the speaker sees a “drifter” who is walking through three lanes of traffic and thinks that maybe he is

conducting a rush hour
motet his ears alone could hear. 
He waved. I almost waved right back.

No matter how bleak, in the middle of it all, the speaker is ready to wave, to offer and receive the smallest solace from wherever it might come. It is stunning. 

“History of the Inevitable” is like a wine that begins sweet with a bitter aftertaste, an effect Capista is able to create because of the formal constraints he plays by. The poem begins funny and ends poignant. It also employs a gorgeous list, this time, more fanciful, and it too tries to create distance between the speaker and the heart of the matter; it seems to me the speaker of this poem pulls out all the stops to contain his feelings, and that makes it all the more moving. This time, instead of his pronoun choice creating distance, the tool he uses is his choice of words. The title is regal and odd—it’s impossible to write a history of the inevitable—the scope is too vague and unending, and perhaps the poet intends to suggest that the desire to do so creates one more item for this impossible history book; the title seems ironic, which is a distancing strategy to manage the emotional temperature, which all wonderfully collapses as the poem takes its turn inward. The poem begins:

Fire wants to be ash, which, wants
a bucket to hold it with unseeping certainty.

The bucket wants to look like the moon,
which it does some nights, while the moon

wants to be the storefront window, full
of something. 

These images are surreal and childlike sequence, yet also stunning: that fire wants to turn to ash is devastating—who doesn’t want “unseeping certainty”? I feel for the moon. The entrance of Mainstreet into the poem surprises, yet who doesn’t window shop and dream? Instead of the Latinate word “longing, the poet uses a Germanic word want three times in the first three stanzas. For all kinds of reasons, a Germanic word places the emotion inside the ribcage rather than in the mind. Then the poem gradually returns to more Latinate words (long, boughs, propel) to prepare us, to distance us, before the last couplet and the heart of the poem. A feeling of being conflicted, I read once, Freud introduced to us in a non-religious context in the word ambivalent. That is, before he gave us this word, I read, people didn’t think much about this internal split or if they thought about it, it was in a religious context. Here the speaker feels pulled in two directions between, well, I assume between his poetry and the demands of the world. To my reading, the speaker distances from the feeling by his use of diction. The final item in the sequence is a man in repose wondering “how he will ever go to his desire when / the universe so needs his tending hand.” There is no “I” in this poem or “you” understood as “I” but a poem full of feeling non the less. 

Another way to look at these poems is that they navigate the sacred and secular, sometimes with wit and sometimes with prayer and often with both. “Devotional of Daily Apprehension” is eighteen tercets. The title suggests a page from a Book of Days, a daily reading to calm an agitated mind, to put one’s mind on God. With archaic diction and inverted syntax, the poem’s first line, “When at dawn, I set forth to find the bell resounding,” repeats sixteen times, suggesting many things:  a ringing bell, urgency, prayer. I think it is gorgeous. The poem begins:

When at dawn I set forth to find the bell resounding
Through unclouded air I find myself beside the tide pool
Anemones, exquisite predators enamored of a world.

The religious overtones are Judaic-Christian in tone, but not content—the speaker is not looking for God of any of the versions of the Bible, the speaker is looking at “exquisite predators enamored of the world.” Isn’t this wonderful, this oxymoron—and it resonates with many poems in the book. In each tercet the speaker finds himself somewhere new. The diction is religious in tone; the subject matter is earth bound. As lyrical, meditative, prayerful as this poem is, it is anchored by place: the speaker is looking at a tide pool by the ocean at the beginning and in the last stanza “wakes up” still by the sea. In between, the poem tumbles from world to world like the pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope. The final image, what an image, soars:

When at dawn I set forth to find the bell resounding
I come to on the dune and if to bend’s to ache O
these swallows how they ache supreme in flight. 

These are formal poems. The collection includes sonnets, villanelles, pantoums and blank verse; I’m pretty sure there isn’t a free verse poem among this collection. Capista employs all the tools of creating melodic lines in his poems. These are poems of the ear more than the eye. The musicality of the lines allows these poems to play cords—they juxtapose what is said with how it is said again and again and again. One last comment on prosody: the first poem of the book “Telescope” discussed earlier that invites the reader to come along, it uses a capital letter at the beginning of each line which seems a practice of yesteryear, and it seems to me that by doing this in the first poem, Capista is signaling that he has his mind on poetry’s past as well as on his own good verse.

The variety of subject matter, the formal constraints, the way the poet positions himself within the poems, the way the poems look out at the world and find an occasion for poetry in the most unexpected places and lastly, the images—a look at Capista’s images is worth another essay—all makes this a terrifically satisfying book. Did I mention that these poems contain echoes of poets who have past—the more I read them, the more I hear their guiding hand.

Holding America Accountable: be/trouble by bridgette bianca

Poet bridgette bianca wants you to know about black people. About black women. About herself. She wants you to understand that their lives are always in danger; that they ready themselves with armor for what the day will throw at them, how amazing; how “bad” they truly are.

In doing so bianca breaks up her debut collection, be/trouble, into four sections—“and the living be,” “this much i know is true,” “our fallen” and “ain’t we a dream too”—sprinkling in their amazingness between all the pain and violence and death they experience every day. bianca breaks her collection into helpful sections, not to make the poems easier to understand or easier to take in, but to ensure she, a black woman, is being heard. As such, she makes clear that her audience is white America, as she pushes back against America’s long and continued history of silencing black women, only noticing them when they can comfort—care—for white people during their most difficult times.

In the first poem “at least i can say” bianca opens by giving context for her discussion of black lives saying from personal experience, “i have/always been keenly aware/that i/could die any day” and “i have/always been sure something/was trying/to kill me.” It’s how black lives are lived each and every day. Danger, death, the possibility of it affecting every choice, as she says in “a saturday night,” about driving while black. bianca asks, “what do you do when you see lights in the rearview mirror/what do you do when the siren loops around your throat.” The use of “you” draws in and implicates the reader in this discussion on policing, effectively gives them a moment to reflect on their own experience, to allow bianca to make her point about how her experience, and by extension black peoples, are different from the readers’.

In this context—to ensure she is not spoken for or misunderstood again—breaking the collection up into sections works. Each section heading functions like the best crafted critical thinking questions, especially the first and last. With the first section heading, “and the living be,” how are their lives lived and in what ways? How are they constructed in America?

And the last section “ain’t we a dream too” begs the question, in what way? The dream white America has created to depict black women, in the sense of aren’t they cool, amazing, confident, or in the sense of this is how they conceived themselves to be, something quite amazing. Or,  all three?

bianca’s poems derive their power from their bluntness. For holding the reader accountable. One way she does this is by the use of refrains. She needs to emphasize certain key points about black people and black women, that white America keeps getting wrong or continues to ignore or discredit. The poem “an exasperated black woman said fuck i’ll do it” uses the alternating refrains “this is not a poem” and “this is my life” as their own stanzas following stanzas telling the truth about bianca’s lived life, what she was going through “…the morning after/the election” after she “…recently buried a loved one.” As the title states directly the frustration of always having to explain herself to white America because no one else will, these refrains stress the factual truth bianca relates, of how she always—and black women historically—have to set their needs and feelings aside to comfort white America when their feelings are uncomfortable,  to play the role of mammy. These refrains build in intensity, enwrapping the reader in Bianca’s world, as the words get more pointed.

this is not a poem…

…forgive me for not
holding back your hair
in solidarity

this is my life

So I’m a little busy

She confidently takes the power from the reader, flips and asserts it.

The refrain in this poem also acts as a call and response in the tradition of black and African poetry. And black music like Jazz and Blues. This, along with bianca’s codeswitching within and between poems, from proper educated English to brief instances of black English before switching back, forces English to adapt to her needs, to her ways of making meaning. These meanings are vital, specific and natural to her experiences as in “i’m trying to remember when i started apologizing for my body” when she says “no growth spurt would/puberty me.” Or in the poem “every nigga is a scar,” where bnianca says “and staying black don’t mean/niggas get to ride our backs/to freedom land/we ain’t no mule.”

Through all the danger, bianca is still able to beautifully assert how amazing her people and their culture are. The poem “that good black don’t crack” is an ode beginning “this is a big black greasy poem” unabashed about all facets of the black community from “the way the other dominos on the table/tremble/when somebody yells/gimme fitteen/while slapping bones” to “full of bus rides down south/or better yet car rides/when the air conditioner stops working/halfway through texas.”

However, the directness about who the audience is doesn’t always work. In an era where writers of color are done teaching white America about themselves, doing their work for them, when people of color are expected to do all the work of learning about white America, the directness took some getting used to. It wasn’t until I read “an exasperated black woman says fuck i’ll do it” that I started to understand that bianca was using this chance to hold white America accountable. Unfortunately this directness in who bianca is addressing unnecessarily interrupts the poems “the good black don’t crack” and “every nigga is a scar,’ undercutting the context in which the poems are powerfully understood, to create a teachable moment.

In the last section “ain’t we a dream” brings everything discussed in the first three sections to an unforgiving and raw head. bianca writes them through the emotional lens of empowerment. All the personality traits American society teaches black women not to inhabit—loudness, the right to their own feelings, joy, to be noticed, etc.—she inhabits with unabashed confidence. A forceful example is from “a message from uppity negresses” where she asserts at the end, that:

…i want you to know
i am all that
i am too good
i know my place is first
and if you have to ask
i have to confirm
the rumors are true
i am better than you
and you can stay mad

I saw such assertions intensify as be/trouble drew to a close. But once the dust settled, it’s apparent that bianca has pushed forward, moved past the witness of white institutional nonsense. Her loving, unflinching gaze of black lives. The only option that remains, she says, is to hold white America accountable and as she asks the reader in “i want the world to see” “am i making you uncomfortable.”

Bill Lavender’s My ID: A Genre Bending Narrative Memoir

Reading poetry can be a radical act of self-reflection. I find myself unpacking my own depths in the presence of a great writer’s fearless journey, whereas maybe I cannot find or accept that moment in other genres or therapies, medicines or practices. Like My Life Lyn Hejinian’s profound imagist memoir, Bill Lavender’s new BlazeVox volume My ID is opening those doors for me.

Lavender’s title poem near the start of the book is a list of firsts that begins with that nearly universal American act of getting a Social Security card as a teenager:

1965, I’m 14, at Evelyn Hills Shopping Center
SS office, where my mother brought me to get
my first card, and next door a wallet to put it in

We hear of the mundane, the triumphant and the embarrassing. We learn who he is by the images of a life fully lived and decades passing by:

VISA, permission to enter, end
of the phone book, second marriage
license, houses VI,VII,VIII, inheritance,
first last will and testament…

A “list of firsts” poem may be a brave and wonderful Proustian exercise but Lavender takes it to master’s level. The yellowed card is “a handsome artifact” and he uses it as the book’s cover. He lets us know he is not going to hide anything in his memoiristic prose poems.

He describes his father’s face in his sister’s portrait one of “primal ambivalence” in the finely tuned poem “Imagework.” “Structures” is a dream poem, both descriptive and analytic and “Grand Isle” takes us on a fishing trip. The ID and the id are both in play. This is the work of a writer in his 12th book. His writing is prone to analysis, sometimes psychoanalysis, and at its best his poetic and genre bending narrative memoir is gripping.

At the book’s center is “Tui: an Elegy.” It is a tryptic, bookends of a mourning process with a travelogue in between. The beginning and end are unpunctuated creating an unnerving staccato, and the travelogue in the middle introduces denser prose text. It is a journey about travel and loss, and the writer’s compulsive urge to document it all. His sure language and process succeeds in bringing the whole to us. “More and more life feels emptied like that” he says in recounting a memory of another travel journey in the midst of the one to Tui, Portugal. He and his partner Nanc have taken many journeys together. She is there in a way that is essential. Their feet land in the familiar place, “The big room where we used to have to ask people to move to make room for a dart game, was empty but for the bartender.”

“Time” is the collection’s most fearless work. Here Lavender recounts clear eyed seeing his oldest friends who’ve scattered and regrouped, the 30 years gone by and how to relate and re-relate to them in the present, again in an unpunctuated flow, a satisfying collision of memory, thought and action on the page.

The book’s final piece is a “magpie scholar’s” history of “La Police” both the origin of the word and the concept of the modern police force. It was originally written as a Locofo Chaps chapbook, sent to the 45th president on his 100th day in office. On first read this writing seemed tacked on to a collection which felt complete. Then I found myself discussing Lavender’s assertions, re-read it, and understood its place in a book about an ID card. “One is a thief unless one can prove otherwise. Thievery is not merely punished; it is prevented by this pragmatic measure. Have your identity card or go to gaol.”

In Bill Lavender’s ID, wisdom is the bittersweet prize of a life well lived. So much can change that simple pleasures become unfamiliar. This book is full of timeless empathy: “Poetry that ancient broken/ pottery of sound.” It is a gift to all who strive for sentience.

Making the Right Narrative: Eve and All the Wrong Men by Aviya Kushner

“You have no idea what happens when you make one creature out of another,” warns the speaker of one of Aviya Kushner’s poems. Her chapbook Eve and All the Wrong Men (dancing girl 2019) makes the brave choice to revisit the biblical first woman so often featured in literature. Unlike other treatments, though, Kushner’s poems focus on transformation of self-in-relation to fully separate self. Her modern Eve refreshes the myth by dealing not with sin or sensuality but the (re)modeling of identity through encounters with the wrong men.

The women in Kushner’s poems share in the female legacy: “I was taught I had no choice/but to inherit Eve’s path on earth.” Eve, responsible for the downfall of Eden and for original sin, set women up as the gullible, subordinate sex. Eve positions us, as women, in an existence defined relative to men rather than independent beings. Rather than accept the limits of this legacy, though, Kushner sets out to find the “wrong men,” responsible on some level for perpetuating the limits women face.

The titular wrong men walk the pages of the book, often overheard at breakfast tables trying to make desirable partners of themselves using whatever tools they can assemble, one being language. Praising everything the desired woman says as “interested, interesting, interest, and oh yeah, incredible,” he hopes to hear himself reflected back in his partner, as the original Adam did of Eve. “Honey From the Wrong Men” finds language manipulated even more insidiously for consumption: “a whole bakery in the mouths of men, /saying anything for a taste.” In hearing the words, a woman knows she equates to transient pleasure, but being a delight “at least for the next hour” can be seductive. At best, these men are irritatingly amusing. At their most insidious, these men subsume the women they pursue, and “take me into how he read/the world.” The goal, then, is to come away from the wrong men with something of the self intact, which mostly happens.

Regret and relief at times collide in intriguing ways for the speaker. In “Perspective,” the speaker sees clearly “The life I could have had/stands in front of me,/wrong as the wrong man.” What was lost and perhaps once longed for becomes clear as “the angle of the wrong,” suddenly sharp and blindingly visible. “Bed” extends this sentiment to the ex married to another woman, and the gratitude at having escaped her fate. Identity, here, comes from the breakaway: who she could have been but did not become so.

When it comes to the women Kushner wants to be, readers find she admires the unsuspecting but authentic female. In “Imagining the Thoughts of the Lovely Eighty-Something Woman with the Vintage Glasses, Who Lives a Few Floors Down,” the speaker lives as unapologetically as any woman can ever hope to live. “I am who I am,” she says, “like the sea is the sea.” While her life has its imperfections (a flaky neighbor whose inattentiveness leaves the speaker to go out in the cold and snow), her soul is satisfied by the view from her window, augmented by her imagination. She first admires these “utterly man-less, there at the end” women in “Men” for the way they don’t want to be her, young and man-seeking. There’s a similar awe, if not admiration, for the “toothless hooker” who attracts a constant stream of men despite her unflattering appearance.

If the collection leaves us wanting in any way, it does so perhaps in the art poems. While David and Venus of Urbino certainly channel themes of sensuality and male/female dynamics, they are static figures in a collection that is constantly moving, flitting from encounter to encounter as it studies the sexual politics dogging women since Eden. Kushner is most successful when spreading gathered detail across the page or starting hard truths in the face.

Ultimately, Eve and All the Wrong Men leaves us with a modern Eve in the form of a woman seeking to reclaim and remodel herself separate from the men who wrote her into the character they wished her to be. Through all her transformations, she has made self-determination out of her inheritance.