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books you might have missed!
POETRY BOOK PICKS
Tips for Domestic Travel
by Hayden Saunier (Black Lawrence Press, 2009)
Hayden Saunier’s Tips for Domestic Travel is a tour de force of fifty poems. Perhaps it is the author’s acting experience that makes her able to inhabit so many prismatic voices so convincingly. Although there are many poems in this collection that allude to the grief of losing an aging parent, each poem walks a new path, and none of it feels overwrought. Saunier’s careful eye scrutinizes every angle of life through the lens of history, domesticity (removing carpeting from stairs, pulling shirts down from the attic), and travel. “I’m used to living/with the dead; they’re everywhere,” says Saunier in “Beach.”
These are varied poems in length, form and seriousness. The speaker has a frank, charmingly unvarnished voice: in the world of Saunier's work, neglected puppets sport "...the universal poses of the hanged" ("Untangling Marionettes") and a watch found in the garden ("the night before the war began...") is a ticking reminder of "so many things that do not belong to us,/but they are here, and ours."
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Saunier appears to take us to the edge of mortality, daring us to look over the edge, before pulling us back with some small redemption. — Liz Chang
He Looked Beyond My Faults and Saw My Needs by Leonard Gontarek (Hanging Loose Press, 2013)
In contemporary poetry, there is a tradition of sparse, conversational language with a twist (James Wright, Louise Gluck). Leonard Gontarek’s new book of poetry, He Looked Beyond My Faults and Saw My Needs is very much in this tradition, while adding brilliant moments of humor that are all his own. His poetry is not sad or morbid, but he is in love with the slanted image, the unexpected phrase.
In his first poem of the book, he writes, “Jackson Pollock is afloat in his life/with a view of burning cruise ships.” He doesn’t back off from adding his own compelling voice to the image: “I think of Pollock when I am walking the edge /of a field in autumn imprinted with shadows of leaves.”
But he doesn’t stop with the image and the personal voice. Gontarek has a wonderful knack for shaking things up to make sure we don’t become too sentimental. His poems don’t ask for compassion, much less pity, for the poet. They are not pedantic or trying to show off. But they are very human and wonderfully imaginative. They just seem to say, “Follow me, and if I stumble, bear with me”, and the laying out of their vision is worthy of the reader’s most attuned and human attention. — Donna Wolf-Palacio
i would ruby if i could
by Margot Douaihy (Factory Hollow Press, 2013)
Margot Douaihy’s chapbook i would ruby if i could takes its name from a line in one of the poems in the collection called “Text Me.” A sort of double cinquain, the first part consists of lines that could be generated by the predictive typing on a cellphone, while the second part repeats the same lines with the actual intended language.
Awakening sexual relationships between women and the universal experience of coping with the end of a relationship are two themes that appear throughout much of the collection, but the range of lenses through which these themes are viewed is impressively broad. While there’s plenty of longing for lost love expressed here, there’s also a sense of trying to achieve closure, as in the two triolet poems “Late Winter” and “Too Late,” which nearly bookend the collection. Both echo the idea that, just as in the natural world, sometimes there are places between two people “where nothing will grow.” The final, sonnet-like poem, “Game Over,” declares a change in the speaker’s past relationship patterns of being the first to leave. The “turn” comes in the final line and a half: “This time, I’m writing myself Awake./ Fuck The End; it will tell itself. In this story I kiss you. I stay.” These lines may also be a declaration of Douaihy’s presence as a writer, remaining awake and open to where her poetry may take her next. — Aimee Penna
