“I Was a Stranger, the One Who Could Remember”: A Review of Sean Singer’s TODAY IN THE TAXI

New York City cab drivers have an almost mythic status in the American imagination. We think of them as loners who work the fringes of society, akin to cowboys in their savvy, self-reliant mode of living. Their occupation requires that they observe and listen to the needs of others while restraining their own impulses, so we ascribe to them the discerning, insightful minds of philosophers. In his latest collection, Today in the Taxi, Sean Singer elaborates on and complicates this mythic figure; he describes his own experiences as a cab driver, interweaving personal stories with thoughts on jazz music, Franz Kafka, the spiritual lives of prophets and saints, the films of Jim Jarmusch and his own wry sense of humor. In a voice that is both candid and lyrical by turns, Singer illuminates his experience as one of the urban workers whom Graham Russell Gao Hodges refers to as luftmenchen, meaning “people of wind, smoke and onion skin.”  

Today in the Taxi is comprised of a series of sixty-two prose poems that take the form of diary entries. Each piece unfolds as a daily meditation on cab driving. In a poem whose title could be a deep cut from an obscure rock or jazz album, “Antivenom,” Singer begins by recounting the discomfort he felt when a passenger left her baby alone with him in his cab. He riffs off of this feeling of unease, jumping nimbly to thoughts of American saxophonist Don Byas and then to Franz Kafka. These discursions, like the arpeggiated improvisations of a jazz musician, sketch out a space of wonder and emotion; they allow us to follow the contours of Singer’s thoughts as he puzzles over the brief yet revealing interactions he has within the sacred precincts of the cab. I am reminded of Basho’s diaries-cum-haibun collections, Travelogue of Weather Beaten Bones, or Narrow Road to the Interior. Each of Basho’s diary entries begins with a recounting of daily experiences then shifts into the poetic reigster of haiku. Singer performs a similar gesture by relating the everyday events of his life, then drawing us into the symbolic, the interior of his being. “I use my breaking and steering inputs to turn inward,” he writes in the opening poem, “One Tenth.”

Through these hybrid poems we bear witness to Singer’s frustrations and the slights he is forced to suffer, issued by various occupants of his cab. “Sometimes passengers treat the driver like he’s invisible,” he laments, yet, in spite of this he maintains a generous spirit, interpreting his role as providential, part of a divine plan. When ferrying a man to meet his drug dealer he notes, “The vehicle is not just a way to get to the crime, but somehow to bless whatever the journey needs.” This thread of blessing and faith weaves throughout the collection, partly through Singer’s repeated references to a female-gendered entity called “the Lord.” This being, much like Singer himself, must perform the abject tasks of cleaning up and attending to things that others do not see. She must push a shopping cart full of plastic bottles taken from a trash can, she must swab the deck of the Orizaba, the steamship that Hart Crane leapt from to his death. In one poem she is a raccoon in Central Park North rooting through a garbage can. Who is she, this strange creature, part-terrestrial, part-divine, that transfigures herself repeatedly? Perhaps she is an aspect of Singer, himself, or perhaps she is a debased god, one that Singer can address without feeling pressured to prostrate himself.

Some of the strongest parts of the collection read like spiritual instructions issued by a cab driver. In “Limbo,” he writes:

When the oncoming headlights are too bright, it is said you should look to the side at the lines on the road. You would stop yourself from being blinded, and stop yourself to imagine the road ahead, unstrung, and the rubber against it.

In “Rites,” he explains “Driving it must be noted, is about 10% physical and 90% mental. The wheel obeys the commands of the rose brain and its taut rituals.” These observations convey the speaker’s identification with his role as cab driver. In the film Taxi Driver, Peter Boyle’s character says of cab driving: “A man takes a job and that job becomes what he is.” Singer expresses a similar sentiment in “Harlem River Drive,” “The driver is nothing without the 3,300 pounds of metal slicing the air,” he concludes. The speaker of these poems is not merely reporting his experiences, he embodies his vocation, he is one with his vehicle, the wheel, the tires and the road. This sense of oneness with his occupation invests the driver’s speech with a quality of transcendental vision. He transforms the act of cab driving into a spiritual discipline that runs parallel to the other forms of faith alluded to in the book.

Being a collection focused on the daily routines of a cab driver, the atmosphere of the metropolis pervades Today in the Taxi. Bare, gritty, skyscraper-lined New York streets wind across every page, as Singer leads us through an exploration of the taxi as a site of danger and intimacy, a place where feelings of unwanted desire or anger can push through at unexpected times. It is a unique venue, the driver and passengers are strangers thrust together in a space as private as any confessional booth. In Jim Jarmush’s nocturnal comedy-drama, Night on Earth, a film Singer cites in a poem bearing the same title, this is precisely the purpose the cab serves. To judge by Singer’s poems, this brief intimacy provides a window onto a wide array of human emotions and experiences. These collected vignettes create a dynamic mosaic of life in the city, one that is poignant, harrowing, and at times darkly funny.

Rather than existing purely as standalone pieces, these poems gain power through their connection to one another, in this way they are reminiscent of other poetry collections such as Dear Editor by Amy Newman, and, more recently, the hybrid collection, Dear Memory by Victoria Chang, both of which use the repeated epistolary form of address to yoke together a series of related poems or essays. The titular line “Today in the taxi…” not only establishes the diaristic mode of the poems, but also acts as a refrain, giving the whole book a larger music; it creates a rhythm that draws the reader from one poem to the next.

Throughout the book we experience a cab driver’s loneliness and abjection. Singer’s driver must bear the weight of human anger, sexuality, compulsion and fear. He must be the recorder of these events. “I was a stranger, the one who could remember,” he says, waiting in his cab for an ambulance to rescue an unconscious thirteen-year-old boy. Yet, these feelings never threaten to overwhelm the collection, instead we feel Singer’s reserve, his quiet watchfulness “I put up with things calmly, without weight, without bones…” Beyond the negotiation of these fraught interactions we sense a spiritual yearning. In the concluding poem of the collection, “Take Hold of It,” we recognize the job of cab driver as a spiritual path:

Tomorrow in the taxi it will be another day. I’ll read the book twice, then lend it out for someone else to read quickly, then I’ll read it again.

When a prophet asked the Lord about what the book meant, She said, Turn it and turn it again, for everything is in it…

Singer’s lord communicates her final thought to him, “Be silent, for this is the way I have determined it,” she says. The cab driver’s occupation, as rendered in this book, has been divinely ordained. The stories he recounts serve as metaphors for our lives, for the ways we must endure and accept each other with humility and patience, even as we exhaust one another with our frantic hunger to get from point A to point B. “Driving taught me to accept people for who they are, but other times I wish for an asteroid crashing into the city from the cold drain of space.” such is the cutting acceptance of reality that Today in the Taxi presents us with.

Taxi drivers, cast in the role of watchers and servants, are necessarily alone, their own lives hidden behind the role they play. It is hard to establish a genuine connection with people who come and go, who wash over the city streets like tides. Yet Singer’s cab driver never devolves into self-pity, instead, his thoughts go upwards, towards a personal spiritual force, or they pull downwards into the soul, the asphalt and the road itself. They gesture towards something human yet mythic, something that glitters with the city streetlights and wafts along on smog and steam into the realms of the mystic.

Rising and Falling on the Break: A Review of Lawrence Raab's APRIL AT THE RUINS

The poems in Lawrence Raab’s most recent collection, April at the Ruins, are a kind of plainsong, or plainchant. Like plainsong, the words, the lines on every page are characterized by a singular melody, to be sung without accompaniment. Each poem’s pulse is irregular, the rhythm free, not structured under more formal constraints. They are both of and outside of time, ancient and timeless, reaching us from far away in every direction in their monophonic resonance. The poems, in language stripped of its peculiarities, weave in and out of our lives, connecting the stories and myths that tether us to emergent truths we are unable to escape, and confirm our failings of imagination the harder we try. Raab knows there are no new stories to be told, just new ways of experiencing how we know them. The poems in this collection are uncluttered by repeating refrains and unwavering in their singular devotion to acknowledge the darkness and (un)/cover our unrelenting presence in it.

Forests appear in countless works of literature. The forest is a topos, whose physical boundaries carry less literary value. Meaning, the forest is a domain of experiences and of transformation and any physical limits we may experience are essentially meaningless except for its threshold. It is in the dark forest, the darkness inside us, where we must venture to find ourselves: it is the belly of the whale; a cave of shadows. In the cedar forest, Gilgamesh defeats Humbaba in pursuit of immortality. In Little Red Riding Hood, a girl and her grandmother are swallowed whole by a wolf before being saved by the huntsman. In Raab’s “After the Sky Had Fallen” we are thrust to the forest’s threshold, just moments after Foxy Loxy (or Fox-Lox, or Raev Skraev) has lured everyone into his cave beyond the forest’s edge and devoured them, “After which the thatch / of night surrounds [us] / the lost children.” It is impossible to ignore the number of ways we encounter the trees throughout the book. Enough that we wonder at the poet’s truest reasons.

It is not just the edge of forests that the reader must concern themselves with. In “A Little Music” (dedicated to the poet Stephen Dunn) we find the speaker restless at the edge of the poetic moment, ready to be transformed, where “…all the poems / about death had been written,” and where “…all the poems of the future / had exhausted us.” The speaker realizes the transformative moment they are seeking remains unchanged whether it reaches them from “an ancient city” or is “mixing / with the murmur of the sea.” The poem is always reaching them from a recent moment in time other than this one, as a song, as “a little music [arriving] from far away.” And what they assumed was theirs to give, a gift, a chance to give their reader one more opportunity “to walk out into a meadow / of improbable beauty” was never, in fact, theirs, and has always been becoming theirs—not a thing they can impart or teach, but a thing which they have always been confirming by virtue of attempting to give it away. The thresholds are strikingly familiar, and we must wonder then what’s left of wonder, if its unattainable position at the horizon of our understanding is meant to forever elude us.

Raab further threads pasts into presents in the title poem, “April at the Ruins,” a nod to a poem by the same name by H.R. Kent (and to Kent’s nod to Wordsworth) in which we are once again (re)visited by “a little music which arrives from far away.” In Kent’s poem by the same name, we are “…pilgrims / hauling our restlessness through the marigolds,” in awe of nature’s emergence, extoling the flowers. By the time the poem reaches us through Raab’s singular melody, we are relieved of Kent’s “nostalgia / for this place . . . as we walk away from earth,” April truly at the ruins, seemingly lamenting its own annual re-emergence:

In the early morning, frost catches
hold of the new buds that dared
to open. Now, thinks the tree,

I’m going to have to do this all over,

but the leaves will be smaller,
and more vulnerable

Each of us/in each of us is an April at the ruins, never released from all manners of emergence(y), though we are expected to mistake it for anew every time.

At last, in “Stopping by Woods,” we find Raab in conversation with the ghost of Frost, “not far from those trees / that seem to be hiding something.” Here, the speaker acknowledges the trees, the moment, the as of yet experienced transformative experience like a God watching their creation discover what they’ve known will be discovered by their creation all along. But what does it matter either way? The speaker acknowledges the division between what we feel ought to be happening and whether anything ought to happen at all, shattering the illusion about a poem’s purpose, about a poem’s position as transformative experience, as forest. “But this is a poem,” the speaker says, “not life, where nothing / has to add up,” and why we find ourselves expecting we’ll “be given / at the end some useful idea / about duty or time.” And, despite his obvious objections, the irony is we are, and that is the mastery of Raab’s poetry, and of this collection, where we are “watching the snow, lovely / as it is, falling, / and continuing to fall,” and will always be falling if we ask it to.

April at the Ruins by Lawrence Raab is a Neo-Romantic excursion, replete with forests, dark shadows, and ancient echoings. However, the literary ruins we revisit throughout speak of unchanging realms within us we must encounter even if darkness is the outcome and even if the artifice of the “poetic moment” can no longer transform. We are once and for all, with each plainchant, sung without accompaniment, relieved the burden of transposing wonder onto the world. And we are better armed for the task for having spent time here, each poem singular in voice, irregular and free, rising and falling on the break of the line.

Looking Up and Other Dangers: A Review of Corey Van Landingham's LOVE LETTER TO WHO OWNS THE HEAVENS

In her stunning second poetry collection, Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens, Corey Van Landingham asks us to look and look again at the cyclical tragedy of war. Her richly layered and intricate poems use modern settings and relationships as stages for pageantries of desire and dominance, encounter and estrangement. In them, she reflects on the disconnect people experience when they view others, objects, and events from a distance. Much like the remove many may feel in regard to the drone, the primary subject of the book.

Throughout the collection, Van Landingham chooses a lens of exposure and exhibition, both of her speakers and the others they encounter in the poems. Rather than launch a removed observational critique, Van Landingham seems to situate herself within the mess. She introduces herself in relation to the drone (“In the Year of No Sleep”):

Long nights I would… watch the simulated
stock ticker make senseless
money for people I will never
see. Across the country men
make invisible machines…

The stock market’s steadiness, its business as usual, is contrasted with the abrupt destruction of a targeted drone attack. It happens, life goes on. Later a similar contrast is made in “Recessional," where Van Landingham describes a wedding in detail:

and not one of us thinks what we look like
from above, nor of
the eleven-vehicle wedding procession
delivering the newlyweds
to the groom’s remote village…
One man looks up.
We know the rest from headlines.

And it costs us nothing, Van Landingham seems to say. Too easy. Too easy to put away from sight and memory. It happens. Even when we know about it, we move on.

I think the brilliance of these poems is they offer different lenses for us to look through— to keep exploring and perhaps better understand the human impulses behind desire and destruction. It’s interesting to note that most characters in the poems are innocent bystanders, observers of art, at a distance from war—a daughter of her deceased father (“Elegy”), a teacher of her students (“In the Year of No Sleep”), young girls of the mysterious antics of unruly boys (“Field Trip," “The Goodly Creatures of Shady Grove”). In “Love Letter to the President,” we learn the senate has “quietly stripped a provision to an intelligence bill” which would have required the president to make public the number of people killed or injured. The speaker’s outrage takes a darkly humorous turn, offering an I’ll show you mine if you show me yours—the number of boys she made out with as a teenager for the number of people the government injured or killed.

The poems are often ekphrastic, directly responding to masterpieces about war. In “Love Letter to Nike Alighting on a Warship,” the drone is likened to a famous statue (Winged Victory of Samothrace)—“ears stripped, mouthless—Good Girl! Broken Goddess!”; Van Landingham quotes Dickinson equating sleeping with “ignorance and error”; relates how at night the drones must still land on the ground. They almost seem animal, like they need rest too. And men use their hands to clean their wings. There’s more complicity in this recognition, some of the distance removed. Though their destruction is remote, the drones still need care. Human hands must still perform their maintenance and operation: “Stand back, a docent / warned me then. You’re getting, he said, too close to her.” There’s distance and yet proximity again, this time alluding to the speaker’s closeness to the statue, and also to something truer and deeper than history’s celebratory tales of dominance and defeat.

Van Landingham seems to be exploring the space between us—our potential for creation as well as destruction. In every poem, beauty is juxtaposed alongside cruelty. In “The Goodly Creatures of Shady Grove,” Van Landingham references Miranda in The Tempest in order to highlight humanity’s potential for naïveté, as well as our own responsibility to see what’s in front of us. Young girls watch the spectacle of boys jumping off a bridge: “In the self-same space as wanting, cruelty is born”—one boy catches a fish with his shirt and then beats it against concrete: “He wants the other boys / to see the girls see what his hands can do.” Even children are capable of cruelty and can recognize when something is kind or not. Even children may be swayed by the desire to be desired. Misguided in so many ways.

How do we navigate this space between us when it holds such potential for love and destruction? Many poems explore the dynamics of a couple or perhaps couples, layered with references to historical divides: an ill-fated pair encounter history and natural boundaries on a road trip in the “Great Continental Divide;” a long-distance lover reflects on differences in weather between the two coasts and the seeming impermanence of love (“On a Morning Where Our Weather is 60 Degrees Different”). The author seems to be saying that there are natural distances that happen between man—our coming together, our moving apart. And there are ways to bridge that divide, means of connection. In “Transcontinental Telephone Line,” a long distance couple use phones to bridge the distance, yet:  

Eleven days after the line was finally
finished, Franz and Sophie were shot in Serbia
and the world was dark for four more years.

Technology brings light yet also ushers in darkness. Are we better for being able to talk across miles, where our words are no longer private? To be located by satellite where a drone can snuff out human life at any instant?

“Elegy for the Sext” contrasts a personal moment of sexting with other historical moments—the first image from a comet, the Berlin Wall broken down, how one can own a graffitied piece of the wall: “It is true that, once the body becomes fixed, it is too much itself.” She seems to be speaking to the human drive to capture, possess, and objectify moments in time—whether an intimate picture of a body, a (literally) concrete piece of history, or a photo of something we would never normally see, if not for technology: “Once the body becomes a downloadable thing, is it true?” Are we better for seeing, knowing, capturing these images, or lessened? This poem leads us into a series of poems written in response to an art exhibit depicting scenes from the Civil War.

In “Cyclorama,” Van Landingham plays with line length and page formatting to describe her own and other visitors’ perspectives and responses to the Gettysburg Cyclorama: “We, astonished readers of history, lean forward. But / the thick railing holds us back. Denies the moment.”

Art is a way into the past, yet still, we find ourselves held back from war’s reality in so many ways. The line between entertainment, ideology and education is so easily blurred. Visitors’s words make for some poignant moments:

I never could have
done it, march across, like, a wide-open field…
No, that one’s Little Round Top.
Where we ate our lunch.

The author then interjects surprising insight into the human condition:

The sold-out
showings prove this—in Atlanta and Pyongyang,
in the Kunstmuseum Thun and Berlin, Ohio—
how we have in us a taste for beauty and for
terror.

In “Love Letter to MQ-1C Gray Eagle,” the speaker addresses the drone by name, alludes to a deeper knowing of this new form of warfare. She describes being seen doing simple innocent things like picking a fig from a tree and eating it, like “lovers / consume things, in the moment, making the flies jealous,” comparing how quick and complete the drone destroys people. “We could get on like this, at a distance,” she says, alluding to her former poems about long-distance lovers, the ways technology allows the lovers to see and be intimate with each other: "I could pretend / to see you. I could flash you my mediocre breasts.” Again, the theme of exhibition and shame—she confesses feeding moths to her cats and then crying after: “I’m often / sorry about what I do, even if I don’t stop my actions.”

The author understands here that we all fall short of our better intentions. We can recognize our actions as wrong and still not stop. The last line of the poem is particularly striking:

If you require no hands and I require no
privacy, aren’t we destined to be less human together in the dark?

Van Landingham raises so many questions in her poems, none of which have neat or simple answers. Perhaps in the looking and looking again, in the reflecting and bringing these matters to light, we might still reclaim what slowly and surely is being lost.

Somewhere Between Soaring and Plunging: A Review of Richard Cole’s SONG OF THE MIDDLE MANAGER

“I didn’t expect I would fall in love with [Song of the Middle Manager] . . . . In fact, I wanted to dislike it.” This quote struck me as sort of egregious given it came from the judge of Grayson Books’ Poetry Contest, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, regarding Richard Cole’s winning book of poems. She wanted to dislike it? Her words seemed like a harsh discrimination, even for a judge . . . until I began reading the poems myself. Then I, too, found myself reacting quite itchingly to the sometimes simple diction and the repetition of a few clichéd images and words (the word beautiful and its many derivatives are incessantly used). Then, suddenly, like Trommer, I fell in love.

It happened when I wasn’t looking. Unlike Trommer, I didn’t want to dislike the book, but I live my days in the corporate world, and I kept wondering how this poet was going shake me up emotionally using the mundane humdrum of corporate life. How could Cole make music out of what I found so uninspirational every day? However, the more I read, I discovered Song of the Middle Manager is not just about corporate America. The forty-two poems in this collection are an amalgam of corporate, artistic, and blue-collar labor. Cole writes about dreamers (“Every unremarkable donut shop/is somebody’s act of faith”), investors, managers, and workers. He covers the celebrations and utter catastrophes of every kind of business—from the building of the Egyptian pyramids to the deadly tragedy of Deepwater Horizon (“steel/groaning as the burning platform/drops to its knees”). Cole himself indicates the book is, “about work and the human spirit, about the sacrifice and gain we can find in the business world, our daily lives, and the labor of creation.” As such, Song of the Middle Manager is as much a work of simplicity as it is a complex illustration of the relationship between humans and our work.

A deep dive into the poems uncovers exquisitely quiet truths about “work and the human spirit,” written in the same simple manner as Ted Kooser’s unpretentious, straightforward poems. However, with Cole’s poems, there exists a dual nature, exemplified throughout the book in the way Cole moves from comfort to chaos in a back and forth, yo-yo like motion. Just when you expect the yo-yo to return again, it slams straight into the ground. I can be reading one poem comfortably, quite unassumingly, and then without warning, “The sky is filled with brokers jumping from windows,” having a “love affair/with gravity.” I’m undone. For a long time. It takes me longer than it should to recover from that image, from those words. Only a skilled poet can evoke these feelings consistently: soft lull of comfort, emotional explosion, rest and recovery, rinse and repeat. Cole’s poetic expertise lies in this playful back and forth of the yo-yo and the yo-yo’s purposeful destruction. As evidence, threaded throughout the poems is a recurrence of people and objects soaring through the sky and then plummeting to the ground. Indeed, in “Song Without Words” Cole asserts,

Let us have poems
that cough, sputter
and soar like kites or plunge
to the ground, dragged
and helpless until they rise again
or not. . .

I expect the kite, soaring with ease and ecstasy, to come back to me, whole. Instead, it plunges to the ground. It may or may not rise again. Somewhere between that soaring and plunging, there exists a realization of instability that symbolizes the largely typical feelings of being part of corporate America where, while things might appear stable, many times there is an underlying fear of being bought or sold. The “earth [could] drop. . . . away” and “the corporate body [be] reorganized.” In this teetering state, one is never on sure footing.

To further illustrate this disorienting duality—this push and pull—Cole reminds us with every poem what it means to be human, then reminds us what it’s like to be one cog in the wheel of a massive machine. In “Perfect Corporations,” he asserts, “Corporations are people, too,/ numbers with skin.”  In “Chapter Eleven,” “The copy machines/ start thumping like combines, spewing out projects, and management/ scrambles in a frenzy, trimming the fat, throwing out bodies, beating the/ drums, and the VPs slam down their phones and roar to themselves in/ silence.” This kind of imagery in a book that also celebrates buying “smooth clean planks” of lumber at Home Depot and making jewelry out of “junk and abandon, out of busted/ nickel,” lets me know I can’t put my guard down with Cole. He’s capable of frightful (or delightful) surprises around any corner. 

While some of these surprises may be macabre, Cole is not without humor or heart. For instance, “Firing the Poem” succinctly reflects, in way that is both snarky and poignant, the vernacular used by managers to let employees go. When the manager says to the poem, “We want to treat you like a human being/even though you’re not,” Cole insinuates that employees often feel less than while sitting across from a person of power. The entire poem is filled with this back and forth of what it means to be human and what it feels like to be treated otherwise. The poem’s ending is not so much an exclamation point as it is a simple resonating truth:

. . . and you’re free to go. Security
will walk you to the door.
I wish you the best,
and be careful out there. I mean that.
You were always a stranger.

The poem that got fired is now simultaneously one thing (free) as well as another (jobless). This dual nature reinforces the symbolic back and forth yo-yo motion as well as that plummeting splat that Cole is so good at. Further, we know that the poem is not human, which makes the subtle humor palatable, and we chuckle, but Cole’s personifying the poem makes the last line so powerfully sad. 

Song of the Middle Manager is ultimately two things: a mirror reflecting a dual human nature and a complex study of our relationship to our labor, our employers, and our physical and artistic creations. I began this journey not expecting to be emotionally moved. Had I given up after the first two “beautifuls” I would not have experienced the next sixteen iterations nor reached the conclusion that it’s not that Cole doesn’t know any other word for beautiful; rather, he’s “making an art of bittersweet discouragements.” So, overlook the few simple quirks and go with Cole wherever his poems take you; he’s painting a specific picture for you: “On one side the ocean, on the other the storm, like a painting that’s alive in a wonderful, terrible way.” Both the ocean and the storm are beautiful.

Subverting Heroism and the Trojan War: A Review of A THOUSAND SHIPS by Natalie Haynes

In this subversive novel shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2020, Natalie Haynes produces a bold reading of the women featured in Greek mythology, who have “always been relegated to the edges of the story.” Until now…

A Thousand Ships presents a narrative with a feminist twist on the myths surrounding the Trojan War. Haynes brings to life a series of fierce accounts told by the women affected by the war’s bloodshed and betrayals. Although some might claim that these figures are not forgotten, in original sources such as The Iliad, The Odyssey, and Heroides, they are only briefly mentioned and tend to function as possessions subjected to the abuses of men. From these mythological origins, Haynes assembles her own emotional masterpiece packed with elegant language which can be implied through her descriptions of grief and love. For instance, when Amazonian queen Penthesilea shoots and kills her sister, Hippolyta with a bow and arrow in a tragic accident, she vows to avenge her by surrendering herself to death. Having lost the one person who was “dearer to her than life itself,” Penthesilea proudly leads her own army of women, her “bright jewels of the mountainous north” into battle to defend Troy. Haynes not only dismantles the rules of heroic traditions evident in Homer’s epic the Iliad, such as the value of glory for men who fought on the battlefield, she also provides perspective on behalf of the women who were motivated by their love for friends and family.

In The Odyssey, Homer portrays Odysseus as a brave leader with good judgement, whereas Haynes challenges the validity of this notion by insinuating how incapable Odysseus is of returning home in one piece to his family, especially when some of his own men return to their former lives. Odysseus’ lack of progress and attempts at warding off any unwanted distractions prove to be a comical failure in Penelope's letters, as Haynes incorporates sarcastic humour throughout her novel. Years after his departure, Penelope who is riddled with frustration by her husband’s impulsive need to seize opportunities and endanger himself in the process writes:

“They say that Circe, your witch friend, told you the consultation was necessary. I suppose I should be grateful that she only persuaded you to sail to the end of the world to do her bidding. Some women really will do anything to avoid returning a husband to his wife. But honestly, Odysseus, did you believe this journey was necessary?”

Penelope now mocks Odysseus’ irrational decisions as he roams around like a restless child, always looking for the first sign of trouble. While he is waylaid by storms, detained by a giant one-eyed Cyclops, and led astray by a charming sorceress, Odysseus barely considers those he has disowned, and purposefully bides his time so to speak in relentless pursuit of opportune moments to prove his worth. Just as men strive to gain greatness, so too do they get side-tracked in their endeavours, and Haynes summons her readers to consider more openly the ways in which women like Penelope could survive without their lovers.

Haynes ranges well beyond the male-centric scope of The Iliad, as well, to highlight how there is more to being a hero than creating war and causing conflict to solve issues. Oenone, Paris’ wife, is abandoned after he pursues Menelaus’ wife, Helen of Troy, “the face that launched a thousand ships”—from which the novel draws its title. Helen’s beauty is believed to be what drove Paris and Menelaus to fight for her affections in the war after she embarks on a scandalous affair. Evident in Ovid’s Heroides, Paris writes to Helen “No woman of beauty is like you,” which points out how his love for her will “attempt to conquer any obstacle” in his way. A betrayed Oenone is thus left to raise their son on her own. Menelaus, on the other hand, despite his efforts to retrieve his wife loses Helen to Paris and all hell breaks loose. As a result, Menelaus recklessly decides to rally his troops to “bring her back to him, costing countless lives and creating countless widows, orphans and slaves.” While Oenone resents Paris who she swore loved her and their son and holds him accountable for the grief he has inflicted, she spares herself from giving him the satisfaction that he has won. Instead, he lies wounded and begging before her. Both Oenone and Menelaus are victims of their partner’s deception. Yet while Menelaus resorts to selfish drastic measures to claim back his wife, Oenone, directs her pain in a more rational manner. Instead, she selflessly accepts her responsibility to be the best mother she can be for her child and renounces the defining characteristics of what heroism was believed to be, simply by surviving without the man she once loved by her side.

Haynes refers to The Iliad in the afterword to A Thousand Ships, as quite rightly “one of the great foundational texts on wars and warriors, men and masculinity.” However, unlike Homer who fails to acknowledge the valuable contribution women made, Haynes conveys how heroism is something that everyone regardless of gender can exhibit through various forms other than fighting between men alone. I thoroughly admired how Haynes reconstructs the tale of the Trojan war through an assortment of female characters, including those more minor women who have always been side-lined in relation to its male-centric history.

In conjunction with The Iliad, Ovid’s Heroides plays an essential role in Haynes’ novel through the device of letters inspired by the heroines of Greek mythology, “in address to their heroic lovers who have in some way mistreated, neglected, or abandoned them.” Penelope writes to her husband Odysseus who was obliged to join the Trojan voyage and help return Helen of Troy back to Menelaus. However, what she did not realise was how long he would be away for, that he would miss his son growing up, or that she could risk losing him altogether on his travels to another woman. During those twenty years, Penelope, similarly to Oenone, is left to raise their child singlehandedly, and anxiously awaits the return of Odysseus. Yet unlike Oenone, Penelope knew that Odysseus still loved her and always intended to return to where his duties lay as a father and as a King to his people on the Island of Ithaca.

Due to not being as familiar with Greek mythology as others may be, I was fully expecting A Thousand Ships to be a somewhat challenging reading experience. As such, I found Haynes’s brief List of Characters before the beginning of the book to be a very helpful introduction for guided reference, in that it encouraged me to seek out who they are and how they all relate. The further I read, the more I understood how these courageous women dominate the novel and how Haynes passionately reimagines them throughout their personal journeys of resilience. It becomes more apparent amid the harrowing repercussions of armed conflict that the “casualties of war aren't just the ones who die,” but the ones who, by further extension, fight for survival amid the war’s trials and tribulations. These include the Trojan women who are captured and become exposed to the sexual desires of Greek men, Briseis who mourns the loss of her slaughtered relatives, and young, selfless mothers like Oenone and Penelope who are cast aside by their ignorant husbands. Each woman has in turn “waited long enough” to be heard, and Haynes grants them all the honourable voice that they deserve in their stories. Given the compact size of the novel, which is just short of 350 pages, Haynes does a commendable job at displaying a diverse range of heroines who were involved in one of the most notorious events ever recounted in Greek mythology.

Poetry Is All That Wires Us Together: A Conversation with Garrett Caples about LOVERS OF TODAY

Garrett Caples is a poet and writer. He is an editor at City Lights Books, where he curates the Spotlight Poetry Series. He has a PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and lives in San Francisco. Lovers of Today feature poems that generously place the reader in a particular poetic moment that is both elegiac and also wildly entertaining.

Tiffany Troy: Why name your collection after a bar? How does the title poem, “Lovers of Today” open the door to your collection?

Garrett Caples: Ultimately, it’s really naming it after a poem, because that’s the title of the poem. And that was probably the first thing I wrote in the book because my last book came out in 2016, and I wrapped it up maybe a year before. “Lovers Of Today” is the newest of the new batch.

It’s a cool title and that’s a title of this poem and it was an exciting poem to write. But the poem got the title from the bar, and the bar—ultimately, it’s from a Pretenders song. At a certain point, I listened to the song to make sure everything is okay. It’s a good song.

There’s a reason why you can’t copyright titles, because they circulate in these different ways. It’s kind of more of the poem, but it was an earlier part of the book. I get married in the middle of the book. So the early part of the book is certainly about a type of bachelorhood.

It’s just a good title. I tried some other titles, and it didn’t really come off. It’s the first line of the first poem, too. I used to be very against that idea of having the first line of a poem be the title. But when I come up with these little prejudices about poetry, I try to break them. I make myself do things that I don’t like and ask what do I do with that.

I always didn’t like taking a book title from a poem. It’s just more real estate to have fun with. None of my other books had a title poem. This is the first one. I did that partly to push against my own prejudices.

Tiffany Troy: I think that’s so cool and wonderful. Especially with the epigraph by Alli Warren: “I enjoy my drink, but not enough to name a book after a bar!” Right after, you have your title poem. Sometimes you really can believe two things at once, which really goes to how you go against your little prejudices.

I loved how your poems are rooted in place, in New York, California, Russia, and travel to these places. I see the surreal and how everyday observances in your poems become strange and beautiful, like with the onion-shaped dome or your dream about Ra. Could you speak to your writing process?

Garrett Caples: I am very much of a collect-the-poems-when-they-are-done type of poet. I don’t worry about having enough poems for a book in advance. Inevitably, books have their own personalities to them. It’s neat in a way because on the one hand, putting out a book artificially stops whatever you are doing. You might be on a roll in this way, and just out of necessity, tie a knot. There is something kind of artificial about that process vis-à-vis your own creative processes, so sometimes you like think a book correspond to more natural rhythm of where you’re like.

In terms of how the poems all relate to each other, it’s just where I’m at in a given point. But I keep on changing. If I start to get into a thing, where I’m like a certain sort of poem, I just get bored. I don’t want to have a style. In a way, the poems declare their own style and their own form. In my earlier books, there was a lot of formal striving that’s all gone now. I just figure it out as I go along and it declares its own format. I never have to think about it too much anymore, which can be good or bad. I look at some of my early books that I find kind of amazing. But because they were so formally driven and that’s relaxed, I just become more of a human being, I suppose. I just am a poet now so I just don’t worry in making individual pieces of art.

Tiffany Troy: My next question is directly tied to being attuned to being a poet. Do your poems find their form or vice versa? I am wondering if you could describe how the poems find their form?

Garrett Caples: It’s one of those things that’s almost different every time. Discussions of process break down because I don’t think I have a process. On some level, each poem has its own thing. Each one feels like a painting. It has its own life. I don’t have a process as such: a lot of it is that I just get irritated with myself.

My poems tend to hew to the left-hand margin. Ultimately, as creative as you can be with layout, ultimately you should be able to do it with no layout. The form of the poem “Lovers of Today,” is ultimately about forcing myself away from the left-hand margin. The way it came through with that poem, in a certain way it’s the feel of the trip I was on in New York, which lent itself to it. I went to New York a million times, but it was a particularly exciting trip.

There is a line from a John Lennon song “New York City.” “Que pasa New York” is a line from that song. That song had that kind of feel too. A London guy in New York and loving it and being blown away. It wasn’t a new thing, just like it wasn’t new thing for him either. He wrote the song in the 1970’s, and he’d already been to New York a bunch. But you can be there and suddenly the city just opens up in great ways. I was trying to get some of that headiness into the poem and have it swirl in that way.

There aren’t that many of these types of poems in the book. Ultimately, though, poetry shouldn’t depend too heavily on layout. I’m trying to get the words down and not worry about the layout so much.

That said, layout for me is a lot about line breaks. There’s so much action in my short line poems, that I do not feel the need to scatter words all over the page. The break itself is doing the work. That got weird on me in this book. In the poems, “Emotional Rescue” or “Hairy Sniff,” some lines started breaking in the middle of words. It sounds silly but it wasn’t a conscious decision, but that’s how it came whenever I tap into when I am writing poem. For those poems, I would practice reading them to make sure I remember how the syntax goes vis-à-vis the line breaks.

The way I became a poet ultimately was realizing that poems are just sentences laid out a certain way. I’m always working on setting the syntax against the line break. I’m not reinventing the wheel there, but that’s how I figured how to be a poet at all. Realizing that I knew how to write good sentences and use that against line breaks what you’re doing for line break. Sometimes, the line breaks are just deeply motivated and sometimes it’s just size, and you are just making a column of some sort.

Tiffany Troy: Thank you for sharing that eureka moment with us, the idea of writing sentences and tapping into the poet inside of you and doing the line breaks as they go. Something that I love about your collection is the rambunctiousness of your voice that is at once complex and wry with humor. Could you speak about how you construct and maintain this voice?

Garrett Caples: The voice is the whole thing really, on a certain level. I don’t have any problems with that. Maybe I should have greater ambitions.

I write a great deal of conventional, exposition prose, like for let’s say the New York Times. But unless I’m not allowed to, I have to write in first person.  It’s not like it’s one voice either. You make different voices with it. I realized that so much of what’s compelling about the literary experience is ultimately not the stories or the plot or anecdotes or the sentiment even of poetry, it’s the way of talking and finding a compelling way to put things.

We’re in a cultural movement where there’s not much to do in terms of formal innovation even though I studied a lot of modernist poetry and it’s all modernist innovation. But it’s almost all been tried at a certain point, and so, what’s the next thing after that? I don’t have an answer to that, except I know as an editor of poetry as well as a writer and reader, I just need the poetry to not sound like everyone else. There’s a lot of poetry that is pretty good and accomplished, but it all sound the same. I’ve heard that sound before.

It’s probably hard to have any kind of real perspective on your own poetry, but I don’t think anybody’s poetry sounds like mine. And I feel that in this cultural moment, that’s the measure of becoming a poet, if it sounds like you and there’s no other person you can slot in there. For the poets that I really admire, that’s just the case: you won’t be able to mistake one poet for another poet.

Tiffany Troy: I think that is exactly right. And that’s what community building, gathering, and celebration are all about, which are the different voices and what makes us different.

Garrett Caples: But there’s a lot of pressure to conform at the same time. The poetry community tends to favor a certain range of individuality and so you’ve got to push back against that. Because of the MFA system, so much poetry comes through that system. So inevitably, there is certain amounts of homogenization that goes on. I’m not knocking that world because many of my friends and people I admire come through that. But you’ve got to figure out how to get through it and break out of it.

I didn’t know what I was doing when I became a poet. I just knew I wanted to be a writer, and I found myself studying to become a professor at Berkeley. I wasn’t really interested in becoming a professor, and I just didn’t know how you can become a writer at all. So even though I did finish the degree but I abandoned the profession. But I don’t regret getting this PhD, because it got me out to San Francisco, you know, and put me in a writers’ town. For poetry, I feel like, besides New York, it’s the best town to be a writer in. San Francisco’s got such a center of gravity and literary tradition to it, and it still maintains that character even in this Silicon Valley age. So much poetry of great import of the second half of the 20th century originates here.

I was lucky because I didn’t really know this and went to Berkley because it was a highly-ranked grad school. I went to Rutgers as an undergrad, but they were all very bad. They wrote mainstream, hip stuff, and I just wasn’t hip enough to know where in New York you could get some good poetry. I stumbled through the English department at Berkley and that led to the rest of my life.

My other poet friends, like Jackson Meazle from Little Rock, Arkansas went to San Francisco State and Micah Ballard went to the University of Louisiana in Lafayetteas an undergrad but used that to become a grad student at New College of California. Both of them came to San Francisco because San Francisco is the poetry mecca, and they already knew that. I just stumbled out here and got lucky.

Tiffany Troy: I really love that story and isn’t everyone so excited about San Francisco. Your poems have this specific sense of humor that also cuts against yourself. It’s self-deprecating but at the same time you also glow.

What are some themes in your collection in your collection? What do you want the reader to get out of it?

Garrett Caples: This book is a funny book because part of is I’m pushing 50 and people start to die on you, especially if you are in the arts. You meet people at the top of the mountain, they are old people, and they die. Philip Lamantia was like 71 when we met and I was probably 26 or 27. But it’s what I love about poetry: there is so much intergenerational hanging out that I find very stimulating among the poets in San Francisco, Some of the people who I’ve met have been the most important and the greatest experiences of my life.

But if you’re any good at all, a real poet can see that. You get access to the top people in poetry quickly in a way that doesn’t happen in other more money-driven art scenes, because there’s no money in here. You get to hang out with Ashberry and Creeley as a young man. I was good enough that I could do it.

There’s a lot of deaths in the book, and at one point I thought about calling the book, Death. But it didn’t quite fit. The death material is fairly celebratory, and I try to speak of the people who meant the world to me. Some of the people are very old too, but it almost makes it worse when someone really old dies because you just get so used to relying on them being there. It doesn’t feel better when the person is in the 70’s or 80’s when they die than if somebody younger dies. It’s not a book about COVID, but it fits this time because it has this undercurrent of dying to it.

The last piece in the book, “Soul Book” is a poem I wrote for an art book called People Are a Light to Love: Memorial Drawings, 2004–2016. The artist, Veronica DeJesus, was a San Francisco artist who is now in LA. She worked at a well-known bookstore called Dog Eared Books. When somebody personally connected to her or a famous person that she was interested in would die, she would do a memorial drawing and stick them in the window. Over the course of several years, Veronica ended up doing around 300 drawings. She was looking for someone to write a text for her art book that wasn’t essay, but creative. So I wrote a sample, the first two or three paragraphs based on her drawings. It’s a first-person sentence for every drawing. The piece appeared as prose paragraphs in People Are a Light to Love. Then, for Lovers of Today, my editor at Wave, Joshua Beckman, suggested splitting the paragraphs into individual lines, which gave a second life to the piece as a long poem. It’s all about death, because all the photos are based on someone dying.  

There’s obvious overlap in our tastes. But Vernoica and I come from very different places and with different lives, so she had plenty of figures in there I knew nothing about. I would read around about X, Y or Z person until like some sort of luminous detail emerged and put it in the poem. That was a years’-long process of hers, and we published our book pre-COVID. But it feels like for this time because it feels like we’ve gone through so much death.

The book’s last poem or two before the long poem were from the very beginning of the pandemic. I was actually in France when the pandemic happened, doing my first and thus far only writing residency. I was in France at the time, in February and March of 2020. In mid-March 2020, I had to leave very suddenly. The last few poems are set in France and then ends in San Francisco.

Tiffany Troy: What are you working on today and do you have any closing thoughts you want to share for your readers?

Garrett Caples: I’m always working on something. I’m an editor at City Lights, so I do a lot of other people’s books. To me, being a poet gives you permission to apply yourself to any literary endeavor. Sometimes that means editing somebody’s book, and sometimes that means writing your own book.

Since I finished writing the collection, I’ve done a McMclore book at City Lights. During the pandemic, I wrote around 7 prose pieces that I’m trying to see if I can turn into a book. I don’t want to think of it as a book of commercial fiction, because it doesn’t have anything to do with that. I think of them as fables or parables. I would like to publish with a poetry press and not worry about that.

Tiffany Troy: Do you have any closing thoughts you want to share for your readers?

Garrett Caples: What I’m trying to do as a poet and editor of poetry as I do a contemporary poetry series in City Lights is to try to maintain the integrity of collections of lyric poetry. There’s at least one school of avant-garde thought that lyric poetry is retrograde, and they are incorrect. The books I publish at Spotlight are hard to market, because I pick poets who can write good poems, and I avoid project-oriented poetry for the most part. Project-oriented poetry is easier to market and come up with clever things to say about them. There are a lot of poets out there, but ultimately you are only as good as a one-page poem. If your poem depends too much on sequential, serial stuff, I’m skeptical. There’s plenty of great poetry like that, so I’m not trying to make a blanket announcement.

What I’m trying to do is to carve out a space for real lyric poetry. I still feel like I publish avant-garde poetry. There’s no contradiction between lyric and avant-garde. That’s the type of thing I’m up to. The great bits of poetry are microscopic, so you want to preserve the arena that happens in versus all the pressures to write a book. It’s all ambition-driven, and not driven by the poem. I’m trying to do things where the poem is driving everything you do. It might hurt you career-wise, but you have to not care about that and think about the art.

Bird of Ashes and Fire: Toti O'Brien reviews SURVIVING HOME by Katerina Canyon

“Here is my pain,” says a poem from Katerina Canyon’s newest collection, Surviving Home. “Consume it.” And it ends, “Then do absolutely nothing.”

Canyon’s pain, stark naked and shining, is what the book unveils for the reader. Without a single doubt, it’s a pain that inherently resists consumption. It’s the pain of the Phoenix, bird of ashes and fire, lava and resurrection, introduced as Canyon’s spirit-animal in a poem that adds to the intensity permeating all verses a sudden, bright vein of humor. This Phoenix has short, black feathers and looks like a stubborn chicken, pecks at bugs and roosts on the windowsill of a hospital room. Where else should a Phoenix be? Barely reborn, yet soon bound to burn again—as like Icarus, she can’t help flying towards the sun—it isn’t someone’s chimera. It is the real thing.

So, what does resurrect from its own ashes? Is it the poet? The poetry? Is it memory? Is it pain itself? I believe what is meant to stay is the inextricable mesh the book is made of, the tight tapestry of suffering and resilience, experience and reflection, witnessing and rebellion.

“Here is my pain,” Canyon writes, and there’s a holy echo to her words, as if she were hoisting a calyx and saying, “this is my blood.” The same biblical quality is found in the first poem, “Involuntary Endurance.” Since the opening lines, “My story is not one revealed with chapter / And verse. It is expressed in blood and bone,” a new genesis is announced. The word becomes flesh.

Sparsely, yet throughout the book, the poet carries a conversation with the kind of god who is a white, male, supposedly loving father. The dialogue is a peer-to-peer exchange. Canyon doesn’t forgive this god who allows pain to be widely and unevenly distributed. She looks straight in his eye, unafraid to let him know she doesn’t abide by his rule. As the book proceeds, we feel that the balance between human and divine shifts, that the girl who talks back to god wins the argument, takes things into her hands. And we trust her. It is she that we now believe. There’s a holiness to this poetry collection, as boldly and blatantly secular as it is. A profound, human holiness.

What pain is this? Societal gravity funnels pain so that the heaviest burden weighs on black women. Even more, depending on when and where they are born. Add childhood, and you’ve got the vantage point from which Canyon writes. So the pain she refers to is the agony endured by the square inch of skin, the inch cube of female/black bone that supports in its whole the magma of the world.

Still, with the sheer honesty that is her true signature, the poet manages to shun the spotlight, identifying a locus of more suffering. In one of the indelible poems she devotes to her younger brother, she talks about whiplashes. “I just remember / Twitching as is each crack were / Against my back

But they were not. I am just a witness.
I hover through storms and report
The heat index of memories.

Father’s whip stopped when the scream of the child stopped. This is the brother to whom the book is dedicated, the boy who’s locked inside a closet all day when he howls his bothering “rabbit scream.” The elder sister is sent in as well, “as a sedative.” The routine is narrated in a poem that is central to the book both physically and metaphorically. The dark closet where the siblings are bundled and confined is a womb in which—like the phoenix—they will find a way of being reborn. Rather, to re-create the world they unwillingly were born into. It is the alchemic athanor allowing them to transform the one thing on which they have control: their perception. Their imagination. There, in captive suspension, paradoxically they will find inner freedom. They will turn the world on its hinges, like an afterimage, and decide the cell in which they are entombed is an open, luminous immensity.

Perhaps.

Father-with-the-lash, father closet, father shark, father snake has no mercy and the book has no mercy on him, yet doesn’t pronounce verdicts. Father is a dispenser of pain, a main instrument of pain, yet a vehicle too, as pain passing through his hands is bigger than he is, and comes from further back, elsewhere.

Also strength and resilience come from far. Among Canyon’s most moving poems are those highlighting vertical legacy, the lesson of black women from the past (“Sojourner”) and especially the mother-daughter, mother-son bonds. From “Playing with Roses”:

Your talent resides
somewhere within me

Memory is enough
to make it bloom
[…]
We are daughter and mother
Bound by the same sanguine root

From “Before God”:

When you cried, I nursed
you in bitter milk.
Breaching through secrets,
you asked
if I ever wanted you.

Shouting through clouds
My son, I wanted you
before my own birth,

Before first sword cut to stone.
Bathe in my tears, my blood
Know that I wanted you
Before God.

Love legacy is so deeply felt and expressed, it seems to imperceptibly lift the overwhelming weight of abuse. At least show another path, another perspective.

A few poems touch at language in interesting ways. From “Scrabble”:

[…]                 Some letters are

worth more than others. Some words
worthless, as the tiles reveal.

[…]
When it’s over, I’m left with a blank.

A long conversational poem (“I Left Out ‘Bells and Whistles’”) enumerates words and expressions coeval with the poet’s birth (from “magnet school” to “assault weapon”, from “black-on-black” to “delegitimize”)—a smart, subtle way to show how heavily an era-and-society’s clichés affect those they directly concern.  

In a similar way, this collection made me ponder a trope of our present time—“trigger”—all too naturally associated with Canyon’s powerful poems. Content triggers. I am often perplexed by their practical application, but this book made me doubt the concept itself. Made me ask how legitimate “triggers” are, when it comes to poetry. When it comes to this.

She says, “Here is my pain.”

Look and listen. Then, let it resonate.