PI Issue 12 by Poetry International

Poetry International 12

Poetry International is published annually at San Diego State University The Department of English and Comparative Literature 5500 Campanile Drive San Diego, CA 92182-8140 THE PUBLICATION OF THIS JOURNAL IS MADE POSSIBLE BY A GENEROUS GRANT FROM THE

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Creeds and schools in abeyance, Retiring back a while suffice at what they are, but never forgotten, I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard, Nature without check with original energy. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;WALT WHITMAN

FOUNDING EDITOR Fred Moramarco EDITOR Ilya Kaminsky MANAGING EDITOR B. H. Boston ASSOCIATE EDITORS Martin Woodside Carolyn Selman EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Lisa Hemminger ASSISTANT TO THE BOOK REVIEW EDITOR Meagan Marshall BOOK REVIEW EDITOR Sarah Maclay ASSOCIATE BOOK REVIEW EDITOR Reed Wilson ART DIRECTOR Lehze Flax SAN DIEGO EDITORIAL BOARD Sandra Alcosser Marilyn Chin Glover Davis Steve Kowit NATIONAL ADVISORY BOARD Christopher Buckley Rita Dove Carolyn Forché Marilyn Hacker David Mura Robert Kelly Jerome Rothenberg James Tate C.K. Williams

Editor’s Introduction

his issue represents the 10th year of publication for Poetry International, which we began with a grant from an alumnus in 1997. It is also my final issue as Editor of the magazine. The next issue will be edited by the poet Ilya Kaminsky, and although it’s a bittersweet feeling to send my literary child out into the world, it’s a pleasure to leave it in such capable hands. Ilya is the author of Dancing In Odessa, which Tupelo Press published as a winner of the Dorset Prize in 2005. As a regional editor of Greywolf Press’ forthcoming New European Poets and of Ecco/Harper Collins’ scheduled Words Without Borders: 20th Century Poetry In Translation, Ilya brings a broad international sensibility to the magazine and I have no doubt that he will continue to expand PI’s offerings while at the same time remaining true to our central mission. Bruce Boston will continue as Managing Editor of the magazine. From its inception, PI was based on a few principles: we wanted to publish poems that made a difference in people’s lives—both the readers of those poems and the writers. We had little patience with obscure wordplay and avant-gardism for its own sake. We wanted to introduce the best international poetry we could find in strong English translations to U.S. readers, and we wanted to make a wide sampling of U.S. poetry available to international readers. We have always published well established poets alongside new and emerging voices. Beginning with issue #4, we decided to feature the poetry of a different country in addition to the regular translations in each issue, and we leaned toward countries that were going through major political, economic, or social changes, and were very much a part of our growing world consciousness. We continue to believe that you can learn more about the inner lives of people through poetry than you can from the daily newspapers, and since that fourth issue, we have published features on the poetries of Israel, Russia, Vietnam, Cuba, Mexico, and Iraq. For this current issue, we focus not on a single nation, but on a continent, and not on poetry generally, but on poetry by the women of that continent. We were lucky enough to enlist the services of Anthonia Kalu, who was born and raised in Nigeria and currently teaches African Literature at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley to guest edit this feature on the poetry of African women. She has collected a selection of poems from these strong and courageous women who turn their difficult and often oppressive lives into beauty and art. As Helen Nabasuta Mugambi writes: African Woman Your fingers are bathed in clay Sheltering secrets in ceramic circles Mother griotte You weave histories into squares of cloth Spinning stories into diamond mats We hope you enjoy entering this distinctive world as well as all the worlds represented in this issue. Fred Moramarco Editor

Table of Contents Poems C. G. Hanzlicek

President Bush Speaks

Anne Pierson Wiese

The Messenger

Philip Dacey

New York Postcard Sonnets

MacDonald Dixon

Postcards: New York…Harlem, 1939

Pete Connors

Rejoice 21

Christopher Cunningham

Jacking Up the Summer House Dogwood Coffee House

22 23 24

Leonard Orr

Dried Fruit on Ben Yehuda Street

Lisa Fox

Prosthesis Forgiveness

26 27

Ann Fisher-Wirth

1928. Girl Riding

Jeannine Hall Gailey

Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess, Returns

Christian Knoeller

Genealogy

Brady Rhoades

You Are Walking in Circles in the Desert It’s Snowing in Santiago de Chuco

31 32

Sean Thomas Dougherty

Infinitives of the Rain

J. Marcus Weekley

Birds Are Dying

Gregory Orr

From “How Beautiful the Beloved”

Elizabeth Levitski

More Ways of Things

Anne Coray

Yellow’s a Gravity and a Letting Go 6

Mort Marcus

The Snow Outside

Sarah Maclay

Albumen Print from Two Negatives

Margo Berdeshevsky

Philomel

B. J. Best

A Bird Without Feathers is Something Like a Turtle 45

Sudie Nostrand

Untitled

Emily Lupita Plum

Frontier

Andrew Sofer

Ein Kerem

Charles Freeland

Concerning the Mazurka Chopin Dictated on His Death Bed 49

Oliver Rice

Arthur Sustained by a Grant to Complete his Dissertation on the Gardens Of Rome 50

Barbara Crooker

Nice

Glover Davis

The Jeweler These Are Photographs

52 53

Afaa M. Weaver

How It Is New

Fred Ostrander

A Painting of Grey Seas

Holly Welker

Friendship in Translation

Nin Andrews

The Invisible Girl

Lynell Edwards

From â&#x20AC;&#x153;Suite of Wivesâ&#x20AC;?

Ann Buggey

Revenge of the Whelps

J. Morris

Reversal

Patrick Carrington

Cul de Sacs

Matthew Spireng

Advice

Jason Tandon

Samaritan

Melissa Tuckey

Pete Tells Me Things

Charles Harper Webb

Vegetarian

Ann Walters

Walking with the Ghost of John Muir

James Grinwis

The Lights Are Coming On in a Small Industrial City 71

John Bargowski

Sister Phyllis Teaches Us About the Tree of Knowledge 72 Culling 73

Robert Hedin

The Greatest Basic Math

74 75

Naveed Alam

Homeboys

Susan Varnot

Fall

Marc Elihu Hofstadler

Not Yours

Tom Chandler

Midweek Poem My Martini

79 80

The Lives of Voices: a special chapbook by Li Young Lee Immigrant Blues After the Pyre The Lives of Voices 1 and 3

82 85 86

Standard Checklist for Amateur Mystics First World Have You Prayed Station

88 89 90 92

Out of Joint

Translations SreÄ?ko Kosovel Translated by Ana Jelnikar and Barbara Siegel Carlson

Vasile Garnet Translated by Carrie Messenger

Spoiled Man

Rolf Dieter Brinkmann Translated by Mark Terrill

Improvisation 1,2, & 3 (after Han Shan) A Glass of Cold Water

98 101

H.E. Sayeh Translated by Chad Sweeney and Mojdeh Marashi

Search/Circle Moan of the Mirror

102 104

Carlos Marzal Translated by Nathaniel Perry

Rat Heaven

105

Cirilo F. Bautista Translated by José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes

How the World Was Made Questions and Answers

107 109

Julio Martínez Mesanza Translated by Don Bogen

Against Utopia II The Prisoners

110 111

Yuri Andrukhovych Translated by Sarah Luczaj

Welcome to My Foolish Dreamland This is the End

112 114

FEATURE: African Women’s Poetry Today Introduction by Antonia C. Kalu

116

Mabel Evwierhoma

Nuptial Counsel Returnee Sisi

119 121

Naana Banyiwa Horne

Trying Times Anchor Orgies of Mutilation

122 123 125

Lindiwe Mabuza

There Are Spaces

126

Sindiwe Magona

Mine Boys1 Freedom Poem to a Brother

128 130 131

Excerpt from “Penrose,” a biography of the author’s father in verse.

Helen Nabasuta Mugambi

African Woman

132

Blessing Musariri

Last Goodbye Giving Pandemic

135 137 138

Book Reviews Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: New Writing by Women of The Iranian Diaspora 141 Edited by Persis M. Karim. Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 2006. Foreword by Al Young. Reviewed by Charlotte Innes Grieving Shias By Raza Ali Hasan. New York: Sheep Meadow Press, 2006.

142

The Sleep Accusations: Poems by Randall Watson. Spokane, Washington: Eastern Washington UP, 2005. Reviewed by Jackson Wheeler Dog Language by Chase Twichell. Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2005.

144

Reviewed by Mihaela Moscaliuc A Bumpy Ride to the Slaughterhouse 145 by Dag T. Straumsvåg. Translated by Robert Hedin and Louis Jenkins. Red Wing, MN: Red Dragonfly Press, 2006. Reviewed by Martin Woodside The Plural of Happiness: Selected Poems of Herman de Coninck 145 Translated by Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Kurt Brown. Oberlin, OH: Oberlin College Press, 2006. The Thirteenth Month: Selected Poems of Inge Pedersen Translated by Marilyn Nelson. Oberlin, OH: Oberlin College Press, 2006.

Swithering By Robin Robertson. Orlando, Ottawa, New York, London: Harcourt, Harvest Books, 2006. Reviewed by Reed Wilson Five Terraces By Ann Fisher-Wirth. Nicholasville, KY: Wind Publications, 2005.

149

Reviewed by Patricia Crane With Your Back to Half the Day By Donald Morrill. Tallahassee, FL: Anhinga Press, 2005.

150

Salt Memory By Jennifer K. Sweeney. Charlotte, NC: Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2006. Reviewed by Jim Natal Salt Water Amnesia By Jeffrey Skinner. Keene, NY: Ausable Press, 2005.

152

Reviewed by Patty Seyburn Blue Front By Martha Collins. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2006.

154

Mi Revalueshanary Fren By Linton Kwesi Johnson. Keene, NY: Ausable Press, 2006. Wind in a Box By Terrence Hayes. New York: Penguin, 2006. Reviewed by Lynne Thompson A Worldly Country By John Ashbery. New York, NY: Ecco Press, 2006.

156

Reviewed by Fred Moramarco

A Complex Bravery By Robert Lipton. Grosse Pointe Farms, MI: Marick Press, 2006.

159

Reviewed by Lee Rossi Fire Baton By Elizabeth Hadaway. Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 2006.

159

Cures Include Travel By Susan Rich. Buffalo, NY: White Pine Press, 2006. Reviewed by Jan Wesley A Faithful Existence By Forrest Gander. Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005.

161

Collected Poems By Lynda Hull. Introduction by Yusef Komunyakaa. Afterword by David Wojahn. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2006. the book for my brother By Tomaz Salamun. Orlando, Austin, New York, San Diego, Toronto, London: Harcourt, Inc., 2006. Exceptions and Melancholies Poems 1986 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2006. By Ralph Angel. Louisville, KY: Sarabande Books, 2006. Poem of the Deep Song By Federico Garcia Lorca. Translated by Ralph Angel. Introduction by Greg Simon. Louisville, KY: Sarabande Books, 2006. Reviewed by Sarah Maclay The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets By Ted Kooser. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.

166

Reviewed by Steve Kowit Two Views: The Imaginary Poets Edited by Alan Michael Parker. Dorset, VT: Tupelo Press, 2006.

170

Reviewed by Lynne Thompson The Imaginary Poets Edited by Alan Michael Parker. Dorset, VT: Tupelo Press, 2006.

171

Reviewed by Lee Romney

Contributorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Notes

168

Ad Goes Here

President Bush Speaks C. G. Hanzlicek Wow! Brazil is big. Germany’s an important country; It’s right in the middle of Europe. The point is how we work together To achieve important goals. And one such goal Is a democracy in Germany. We shouldn’t fear a world that’s more interacted. I’m looking forward to a good night’s sleep On the soil of a friend. I will have a foreign-handed foreign policy. Border relations between Canada And Mexico have never been better. The problem with the French Is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur. This foreign policy stuff is a little frustrating. This process has been drug out a long time, Which says to me it’s political. And there is distrust in Washington. I am surprised, frankly, at the amount of distrust That exists in this town. And I’m sorry it’s the case, And I’ll work hard to try to elevate it. One has a stronger hand when there’s more people Playing your same cards. It was not always a given that the United States And America would have a close relationship. I aim to be a competitive nation. If you see a train wreck coming, You ought to be saying, What are you going to do about it, Mr. Congressman, Or Madam Congressman? And my concern, David, is several. One of my concerns is that the health care Not be as good as it can possibly be. When a drug comes in from Canada, I wanna make sure it cures ya, not kill ya. It would be a mistake for the United States Senate To allow any kind of human cloning To come out of that chamber. Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB-GYNs aren’t able to practice their love With women all across this country.

Then you wake up at the high school level And find out that the illiteracy level Of our children are appalling. You teach a child to read, and he or her Will be able to pass a literacy test. Laura said, “You ought to try Camus.” I also read three Shakespeares. … I’ve got a eckalectic reading list. We need an energy bill That encourages consumption. Don’t buy gas if you don’t need it. More and more of our imports come from overseas. It’s your money; you paid for it. I know the human being and fish Can coexist peacefully. We stand for things. I am a person who recognizes The fallacy of humans. We ought to make the pie higher. I promise you I will listen To what has been said here, Even though I wasn’t here. I think that the Vice President is a person Reflecting a half-glass-full mentality. I’m happy to be here with the Eternal General Of the United States, mi amigo Alberto Gonzales. I’m the master of low expectations. I believe what I believe is right. My pro-life position is I believe there’s life. I am mindful not only of preserving Executive powers for myself, But for my predecessors as well. We’ll be a great country where the fabrics Are made up of groups and loving centers. Families is where our nation finds hope, Where wings take dream. It’s hard to be articulate. Justice ought to be fair. Sometimes when you study history, You get stuck in the past. You never know what your history Is going to be like until long after you’re gone. I think we agree: the past is over. Free societies will be allies against those hateful few Who have no conscience, Who kill at the whim of a hat. There are people who can’t stand What America stands for, and desire 16

To conflict great harm on the American people. They never stop thinking about new ways To harm our country and our people, And neither do we. I understand that the unrest in the Middle East Creates unrest throughout the region. I think war is a dangerous place. One year ago today, the time for excuse-making Has come to an end. There’s no cave deep enough for America, Or dark enough to hide. Make no mistake about it, I understand How tough it is, sir. I talk to families who die. It’s a time of sorrow and sadness When we lose a loss of life. Who could have possibly envisioned An erection—an election— In Iraq at this point in history? I’m honored to shake the hand Of a brave Iraqi citizen Who had his hand cut off by Saddam Hussein. The only way we can win Is to leave before the job is done. And so, what General Petraeus is saying, Some early signs, still dangerous, But give me, give my chance A plan to work. I can only speak to myself.

The Messenger Anne Pierson Wiese

In the painting I have imagined, a figure dressed in dusky layers of traveling clothes bends over a rough wooden table, not even having taken time to remove his hat, which melts into the shadows, his long black hair falling forward, as the indistinct faces of the other men around the table seem to fall forward, everyone focused on the object placed next to the dimly burning candle: a piece of parchment still furled at either end, its message barely illuminated, illegible to the viewer, its import measured solely by the urgent attitudes of the men and the darkness the darkness excluding everything but this moment of change.

New York Postcard Sonnets Philip Dacey 2. I’m in the subway, heading home. At one end a young man in old clothes hunches, round as a ball, head down, making muffled sounds--a lost soul, Dante-ready. But when, my stop coming, I stand, I see there’s something in his lap and find, nearing his corner by the exit door, the something’s a large book, its pages lined horizontally. Closer now, I can hear the sounds he makes have pitch and rise and fall deliberately. On the lines, notes. It’s a score, and he’s practicing--I lean and peer--an aria. Puccini. Manon Lescaut. “Tra voi belle.” You ask me how’s New York. Well, this is it: a subway less urban hell than little Met. 25. Mother, this postcard is a wish that you were still alive to see me living where you were born and brought me each year all through my childhood to walk its streets and hold your hand as if you meant to teach me I can call this place my own, be equal to it, even thrive amidst the throng from Washington Heights to Central Park and on down to the Battery’s Pier 5. If you were here with me today I would show you my neighborhood, the places I like to go, holding your hand to steady you all the while we walk along my streets for you’d be smaller than I am now as I was smaller than you were then. I’m thinking this postcard is a prayer. Amen.

Postcards: New York…Harlem 1939 MacDonald Dixon

I met Langston Hughes and Claude MacKay arguing about lines from poems Dunbar wrote when Harlem still had cattle carts and the Dutch farmed their oats under a street sign marked one-twenty-fifth, long after the bar closed, while the bartender sought relief from Ella on a seventy eight, scatting the new notes. Roosevelt was in the White House and the boys flocked down to the Apollo with new songs on their lips hoping to grab a label, or, a week’s engagement at the Cotton Club... My uncle W. M. D. runs the numbers for the block, from Riley’s Flats—what else can a black man find to do if he doesn’t want to be janitor, or a Mardi Gras buffoon in front one of them Manhattan hotels, opening taxi doors and hefting luggage up thirty seven floors, cause the lifts never work when guests check in. Can’t find them at the Waldorf Astoria, where the tips are crisp notes, without the sweat and only chauffeur driven town cars queue for fares... A chap from Missouri escaped by his teeth from a lynching. He stole a few pounds on the weight of some cotton bales when the boys weren’t looking his way. Saved by a freight train bound for Chicago, he barbers on Lennox, by the overpass and talks all day about the good life in the grand old confederacy. ‘If it ain’t splitting hairs in this city, is a journey up river to Sing Sing. In this year of our lord we still second class, and the jobs all go to the men.’

That was before King and the march, Bull O’Connor and his dogs, I cannot forget ‘cause if I shut my eyes it will all reel back, live in technicolor. Forget the old black and whites.’ Langston Hughes and Claude Mac Kay still on about lines Dunbar wrote across the colour bar… ‘In those days black man couldn’t find time to memorize, far less to write, then argue poetry ‘bout years of blight and strife. Nothing has changed, nothing will, it’s all about money and bombs, this century.

Rejoice Peter Connors

Postcards, gas bills, love letters tinged with pheromones. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know whether it is an act of trust or a test of loyalty but people keep giving me things to mail. This is too much though. Marked undeliverable. Instead I will sit here dreaming of packages that open into a future they will never reveal. Only ritual, only more ritual: cats and dogs poised to hear bell chimes through a shifting maze of seasons. This nip in the air. Temple of June Bugs, Kingdom of Worms; the time of our awaited birth is awash in new currents, baptized in rivers of whiskey and winter. Strange flowers planted to pick or plow under. As you will.

Jacking up the Summer House Christopher Cunningham for Helena

I crawl in the dirt under the house because the earth heaves in winter: the windows are tight, the door won’t close. Our porch isn’t level, and the upstairs bows like our old bed, sinking in the center, but I crawl in the must under the house so that air off the lake, which blows all morning in the trees, can enter the windows at night. The door—does it close? I ask you, calling from below—How’s that?—Almost. Not quite. A little better— as I crawl in the dirt under the house. A door is how a house knows itself—what it allows to enter, what it keeps out. Forget cement or windows. A tight door that will close and open—we did that, together, me below, you above. We know winter doesn’t matter when I crawl from the earth and enter the house: the windows we open wide. The door, we don’t close.

Dogwood Christopher Cunningham The dogwood whispers into bloom, white cross blossoms pronounced in a hush, words chosen with care. Where the pear and cherry gush in loquacious snowfalls of profusion, the dogwood, reticent, spare, says this, and this, and now that, and just so —a haiku poet, black-barked, slender-curved, meting out blood-tipped bracts—not blooms—like syllables. Outside my window today before dawn, our tree’s sparse stanzas of white glow blue, like December’s snow at dusk. In this light, they seem to float, a flutter of shimmering moths drawn to the wrought black splay of twig and limb. A breeze touches the branches, and the tree fractures into jostling planes of light, geometrical, shifting silences.

Coffee House Christopher Cunningham Coffee is like sex: it shouldn’t be too hot, which is a mistake some people make: it shouldn’t be so hot you can’t enjoy it right away, because you shouldn’t have to wait for it. Or cold, cold’s good too, with lots of ice. Thick, it should definitely be thick, smelling of burnt things, fingers and toast and earth, strong with aroma like black felt-tip markers— indelicate, indelible, not for children, a chemistry of scents writing its name on your tongue, in your hair, on the inside of your collar, the musk rising off your skin like steam from macadam after summer rain, so the rest of the day, everyone will breathe it and know. Of course, it’s best on a table in a café, where they serve morning glory muffins and strawberry scones. And it should be enjoyed noisily, your slurping audible above the chattering of glasses and plates and voices, so the woman and the man muttering sedately over decaf in the corner by the window look over and stare, embarrassed, then offended, then simply curious that anyone could enjoy it so much. And it should be bitter —please, no sugar or artificial sweeteners— bitter like an ending, like a sad movie that returns to you the next morning in bed, fermented by dream and sleep into flavor that has passed through bitterness and come out the other end as some new thing, a savor without name, that lingers on the surfaces of your tongue long after you’ve left the table, and the café, and the stale crumbs

Dried Fruit on Ben Yehuda Street Leonard Orr If you held two large dried figs in your open palm (thumb up, fingers in a relaxed curl), you would certainly think of me. Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d note something familiar in the deeply-lined, brown-tan mottled outer skin, thick, pliable, unexpectedly soft. Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d bounce them in one hand and with the other, play with the woody stem and excite the multitude of seeds inside. Dates make me think of you, small, slim, their brown uniform and aureole. Figs are primitive and thick; you can chew around their fringes, but each half of a date is a nipple. I suck them gently for the sweetness and they feel firmer, giving their sugar. After, whether figs or dates, all the fingers are sticky and slick.

Prosthesis Lisa Fox I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know why she had it hidden in a box beneath her bed, the plush bubble that was a breast. I lifted the fake flesh as I would lift a dandelion to my lips or when touching her thinning, brown hair. Alone in the room, beside her bed, I kissed the nipple, held it to my breath like a mask, placed it against my flat chest. Turning toward her mirror, I danced with my distorted image. * Today I sit on her bed reading a book while she dresses for work. I glance at the empty space, the scoop in the skin hollow as a seashell. The missing soft faucet I drank from when I was young. The breast became a splinter and she became another woman wanting to keep her body secret.

Forgiveness Lisa Fox In two days I drive to New York a Christian. I always believed in God, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s just, I think Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m listening. But why does my body weaken, stutter like a fever, move as if with bad knees from the weight of returning to a wound in the past? My constant circus, the chase at night. I spent my childhood in fright, slept among beehives and flashing lights. Lord, if I understand you correctly, we must forgive family, the blood I run from, the people who pounded pain in me like nails, because they are the ones who actually help save us?

1928. Girl Riding Ann Fisher-Wirth

Gray-eyed girl on the train to Lincoln, you have folded desire like the dresses you packed in a steamer trunk, preparing for freshman year that breathless August. Freckled girl with small wrists and a brow lofty and arching, your quiet gaze vanishes over the autumn fields. You raise a pastel gold-tipped cigarette to your lips, and love how the fox collar of your new brown coat brushes your neck as you lean against the window; dreaming, you are delicious to yourself. No one, not even your sister, has ever seen your breasts. But you are not thinking of love, not thinking of college, not thinking at all as the train carries you deeper into twilight’s beautiful estrangement. If you get off the train you will become my mother, so don’t, don’t, because then I will lose you: ride forever through the tender night, as smoke drifts around your carefully drawn lips and soft hair.

Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess, Returns Jeanine Hall Gailey

I went underground to escape (my brother, the storm) breaking everything (the way he does) his fists everywhere. I hid there, taking the warmth of my breath, my gold fingers. The people mourned, tried to lure me from the cave, but I was happy in the quiet damp dark, sleeping. Then there was dancing, goddesses singing my name, throwing clothes and pride to the wind and then laughter, surprising, my own. My laughter filling the cave until I joined them, naked in the light, unable to resist the shocking, unstoppable song of our bodies.

Genealogy Christian Knoeller

Age, she said, is sediment in the blood, like the river flowing placidly past fractured walls that hold in good years, giving way when water rises like a dark tide laden with the fertility of silt: motionless trees towering in twilight, leaves blazing, water lapping steps leading down to a landing where you can cast for bluegill that crisped in an iron skillet with cornmeal, white creamery butter and a sprig of fresh tarragon, taste in these tiny pumpkinseeds the riverâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s last abundance beside hot Strudelâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;once a word for whirlpoolâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; swirl pastries served on bone china, Viennese coffee strong and black. Oh, my great aunt said by winter light with an inflection lasting half a century after arriving in America, How beautiful the flowers were last summer motioning to her circular garden, reciting the litany of zinnia, marigold, violet, the memory of seeds in ground grown hard as stone.

You are Walking in Circles in the Desert Brady Rhoades What a shame, you said, holding a match to the bed, which dissolved like a woman in heat, these possessions betray me, I hate them. Your home was in ruins—burned, smashed up. This sofa will not stay true, nor will 50 pistols, or a shoe … You had quit your job, closed accounts, divorced M. You walked in circles in the desert because the straight way had proved untrue. Alexander, I tried to disagree but lost my hat in the wind. We can no longer cleave to the sheets in despair. The world suffers intolerable hunger. The world which fed us for years. They say they see your shadow on the crestline. I’m coming to the Valley of the Kings, with wine to tenderize, and 29 prayers.

It’s Snowing in Santiago de Chuco Brady Rhoades and no one can believe it, not the lonesome, backroad dogs or the insane. The stars blew up, says a man standat the window in his socks. The world is changing; those twins, hope and dread, snip each other’s wounds and show them off in vases. The vases are clay and the earth is breaking off in pieces. Cesar Vallejo is dead, technically, non-ambulatory, not there in a winged-back chair in a book-filled room, but it’s snowing in Santiago de Chuco, and no one can believe it.

Infinitives of the Rain Sean Thomas Dougherty To move beyond the accordion, pawnshop, shrapnel. To singe wind, as it bends beyond the refinery along the polluted lake, where once we swam beneath the dark’s exile. To leave, which is, to arrive. Which is to memorize a maze so well every corridor is choreography against the walls. To bounce a ball against the walls of childhood, so the rhythm becomes sung, bone sung, tongue sung, through the window of the chest and Bible pages borne out of the psalms of a woman moaning, Cleave this hurt I can’t forget. Bourbon smoked against a glass. Spin the threads, to weave a Ferris wheel, and watch below the distant arms of strangers gathering what love is left to leave or take. Pennies in the penny arcades. The mourners outside Quinn’s funeral parlor, the girl who blows smoke as if into a frame—like Daphy, who cannot sleep on 4th street in the slumber of the rain’s despair, the choreography she’s garnered through the years of never letting anyone close enough to gauze

her constant grief: To divorce the occupation and to dance, to dance across the hills of Jericho, the hills of honeycomb, the grief she carries of her father dead. What grows old is more than mold is more than words or recitation. And Daphy, who cannot sleep for the voice calling across an ocean, emigrant into the otherâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; oared light, river of witness. Tonight, she waits for the black roses to open their bleeding hands.

Birds Are Dying J. Marcus Weekley I don’t know what kind. They’re chirping up a storm as they die in the gutter, and beside them a road continues on. People pass on the road— couples, salesmen, rocket scientists, and the birds chirp louder, hoping someone will hear. Why am I the only one who hears? Is it because they are outside my window? Maybe they know I broke up with Amy yesterday. I am kindling for Someone’s fire. They chirp and chirp, no one notices, chirp, wait, a girl sees them struggling in the gray gutter. Her hair, is it wet, and she bends to pick something, a flower, no, a scarf, from the dirt. She wraps it around her hand and cups a bird in her palm. She crushes it. She smiles and the birds are chirping, chirping. I want to ask her why she killed me, a fragile thing. And now I am an axe in the hand of Someone. I jump out my window and chase after the girl who crushed that bird. She runs and the others on the road stand in my way. I push through loaves of bread, stock prices, missiles and star charts, but the girl gets away. I yell at the people, point at the birds in the gutter fluttering, chirping, but the people walk on. They ignore the birds, who have turned in for the night, and will wake up tomorrow and start dying.

From “How Beautiful the Beloved:” Gregory Orr When you go, go all the way. Surrender everything; give up All that’s precious— That way you won’t be tempted To bicker with yourself Over scraps you still control. Maybe then you won’t be redeemed. Maybe then the beloved Will lift you up. Who knows the depth of her pity? Who knows how far down He can reach with his love? --A single purple thistle bush In its autumnal glory, And all those butterflies— Oh, beloved—from a hundred Directions they come: Your lovers. --All those years I only had to say “Yes.” But I couldn’t Finally, I said “maybe,” But even then I was filled with dread. I wanted to step carefully. I didn’t want to leap. What if the beloved Didn’t catch me? What if the world Disappeared beneath my feet?

--That t-shirt—it smells Of him. Don’t wash it. I need to hold it. Close. I want to sleep With it near my face. How ridiculous this is: Grief leading me by the nose. --We let death take him Without a word of protest. None of us spoke up— Afraid to make a ruckus, Afraid death might notice us. We didn’t dance or weep Or scream our grief. We let the beloved go Without a song or poem And that diminished us.

More Ways of Things Elizabeth Levitski I have heard that to hold two truths in one’s heart at the same time is wisdom, that to wish always for things to be different is to forget that the shadow moves as the sun commands. When I was a girl I drove through the Alps with my mother, singing. I told stories to keep her awake. She told me that a woman who travels alone is a woman who knows what she wants and a woman who knows what she wants is a woman with something to say. She made me promise to never forget it. Not so many years later I carried her death around with me in my pocket, worried it like a talisman, my ticket out, my ticket to anywhere, no strings attached. My sister wants to know why we can’t be friends. It’s because I wasn’t there, isn’t it? Isn’t it?, she hisses. Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them. It isn’t spring’s sure greening or the seedling’s pluck and grit, it’s my own keen eye for deadwood I’ve grown to trust, how the wood gives like butter to a knife beneath the chainsaw’s certain bite, each stove length I cut a warm thought that spins through my head, that’s cached in my heart, split and stacked smugly between stands of birch and pine, how they smolder, ready to catch and spark as even a burned tree can reignite.

Yellow’s a Gravity and Letting Go Anne Coray In autumn, birches are the first to part with their currency, leaves approaching Naples yellow tinged sometimes a chocolate-brown, teardrop-shaped, reaching out in the way of tears before they touch your cheek. As I bend to pick them up, the leaves don’t resist collection, and the hundreds I gather from my patio fill more than a five-gallon bucket. When I release them, they’re quiet, like dollar bills— no louder than tears. Leaves, tears, dollar bills: I get confused with the mix of colors and smells. Green is transparent; transparency is a shift from green to yellow. Who can tell from the scent of soil what went into its making? Didn’t you catch a whiff of leaf in your very tears? All my life, I wanted the world a stencil, a clean print between the yellow and the grave. But now there’s twilight fuzzing the edges of things, the wind’s light touch on the clouds. So I start to wonder who am I to speak of poverty and value

if I canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t taste the brightness in my own tears? There will always be salt and weight and sadness. Take a dollar bill and hold it to the light. See how it thins and yellows. See how itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s possible to read the other side.

The Snow Outside Morton Marcus The snow lies down in the dark woods. It is weary and emits a soundless sigh. It settles under the trees, the hair of old men, silent, still, fallen beyond the house and window. It shifts as I do in bed beneath the blankets, awakened by the silence. The snow outside and me inside. What was I dreaming? Or is this the dream: an old man in bed hearing nothing, waiting for the tick of snow flakes, each one a remembrance, a scratching that never enters the room and that I long to hear. This is a dream not of past or present but of the future occurring nowâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;

or not a dream, but the thoughts of an old man awake in a dark house, willing the furniture to scrape against the floor, or the faucet to drip like a schoolboyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s steps as he makes his way out of the dark woods, wondering at the silence around him, listening.

Albumen Print from Two Negatives Sarah Maclay We’re on that road again—road that flies through the path of old-growth sycamores—that country road, the dirt one I’d walk naked on at night—blindfolded and barefoot, feeling my way through the trees, brushing the twigs from my face, and here we are: broad daylight, fallen leaves, leaves as big as your hand and scutting along in the breeze: you know the place. Who cares anymore if you fell from the sky like some great-winged bird? Now you seem to grow from the earth. You hold me, clutch me, pull me, want, I think, to shackle me, consume me—oh, I don’t know what you want. I was ready to kiss you, but you pin my shoulders to the earth. You’re not malicious, just distracted: this is what I tell myself. You might like to know that it’s muddy down here. Puddles form in the ruts on the road, as curved as little saddles. My body is smeared with moistened dirt but I can’t help loving the smell, even as you take my clothes like a scavenger and I glance to the side of the road—only inches away, years of green to my left, but I glance back: a brown landscape. Inches away: what I wanted; what I have. You who rip my clothing off may keep it. Keep it. I may walk the road with nothing on, but I will walk it. There is a thing called bitterness. It has a taste.

Philomel Margo Berdeshevsky She arrived on the scene at first light; an animal hunting a familiar scent. It had begun in an alley after the snow drifts had covered all that was there before last night. In ancient Rome, the central arenas had been strewn with sand, to soak up the blood. Here, was a cement sea studded with islands of unknown footsteps. It was only quiet, and white, and secreted. She wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t thinking of she-wolves and old legends of this gladiators' city now. Not of wolves. And not of children. And not of their suckling. She was thinking of a man who had been between her legs two nights before. Eager as a poem. Now a snow had covered his last cry and only she could feel it, ramming her. Now the beautiful. Or the blade attached to it. She knew that she would not see him again. And that there was no one to hurt in return. No one to mourn with either. She permitted herself to accompany his last circle. His walk. His breath, graying under variable stars, dimming. Her eyes on the snow. An exercise, with her breath. To keep it from stuttering. She knelt to the spot and she began gathering fists of the snow into an uncertain, undefined shape at first. She didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know how to make a golem. The dark sun rose. After it was built. And she lay down into its scraped bed. Still singing. A nightingale with its heart like a cut tongue. Her legs open, pleading. â&#x20AC;˘ -note- Philomel: L Philomela , fr. Gk Philomele , an Athenian princess who was raped by her brother- in-law King Tereus, en route to her own marriage, and, after having had her tongue cut out by him, she was later avenged and transformed into a nightingale. The nightingale in pastoral verse is symbolic of romantic love.

A bird without feathers is something like a turtle B .J. Best But a turtle is nothing like a bird without feathers. This can be proven scientifically: take a turtle (painted turtles are popular for this purpose, due to their small size and compact frame), and to its shell affix the plumage of a previously plucked bird, starting with the filoplumes and working outward to the larger contour feathers, ensuring proper spacing between feather rows. Wings of balsa are to be constructed and then stapled to the shell, and again feathers should be added, beginning with the tertials, then the secondaries, and finally sculpting and completing each wing, remex by remex. You will need a large open area, such as a field or empty parking lot, and a launching device. Ornithologists agree the slings used for launching clay pigeons work best. Load your feathered turtle; fire. Note that while it rotates comically through the air at a high velocity, it quickly falls to the ground. Now: Locate your turtle and inspect it. Both wings have broken off. Most of the feathers are missing. Portions of the shell may be cracked or broken due to impact, and one side may exhibit shallow parallel scratches, depending on how far the turtle slid after landing. Its head is resolutely inside its shell, the turtle ruing whatever it is turtles rue.

Untitled Sudie Nostrand

Put this body on and visit earth like a child in the corner of a garden let into a tremendous place of bewildering beauty. Here, they tell her, whatever she imagines will come to be. They give her awesome power to co-create the universe if she can only remember.

Frontier Emily Lupita Plum I used to have dreams of the route you’d take to leave. I could see on the map the mountain collapsing after you’d driven right through the middle, the paper folding up into thousands of tiny squares with you still inside. I’m smoothing it out, opening the map to find you but everything has moved: the borders, the desert, the long stretches of flat land, they have changed. a different language. a new country.

Ein Kerem Andrew Sofer A lemon tree stands in my yard. Its fruit is therefore mine. Except the old stone house I love (it smells of burning wood and mice) is Arab, so each dusk the children loot. This is the game: when I see them I shout; when they hear me they run, and in a trice vanish like sunlight in the olive trees, leaving their hate behind. It’s not about lemons at all, of course, but who owes what to whom. Once in this village, an angel spoke— he that warned a god was to be born. Whose language shall we speak to pay the debt? I raise the children’s crooked stick and shake lemon after lemon from silent thorns.

___________ Author’s Note: “Ein Kerem” (“Well of the Vineyard”) is a village on the western edge of Jerusalem. According to tradition, Mary and her cousin Elizabeth, John the Baptist’s mother, met joyously in Ein Kerem while both were pregnant. Both pregnancies were foretold by the angel Gabriel (Luke 1:8-38).

Concerning the Mazurka Chopin Dictated on His Death Bed Charles Freeland And still, the sense remains. Extinction is waiting just beyond your fingertips. It hangs in the air like those acrobats who have no place to practice, no real affiliation. They pester the neighbors, jump around on their roofs. They pull the laundry from the lines and, every now and then, sprain an ankle on a vent. If we didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t fear silence so much weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d send them on their way. And maybe this is what the world is counting on. At least that part of it that makes space, that clears out the living to make room for the dead. It knows we are lonely. It knows our final tally must somehow get beyond the number one. And yet, to hear some people tell it, the advent of the marvelous is just around the corner. Just up the street where the mountain is draped in concrete and galleries. Where the old women go to get their hair shampooed. And the jeweler is neck deep in opals.

Arthur Sustained by a Grant to Complete His Dissertation on the Gardens of Rome Oliver Rice How the circles of light fall, as if inadvertently, on the metaphors rising from the stalls in the Porta Portese, among the starlings returning in October, he a random element, alfresco, changing money on the Via Francesco Crispi, like a man who takes pictures of the undivulged. How vanishing is the unfinished business of the statues, are the intimations that swirl about the kiosk where they sell the news, are the faces on the Piazza del Popolo, himself overtaken by rumors of the sirocco at summerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s end, by fragments of eerie continuity in the calls of the bocce players by the Tiber, the splashing of the fountains in the night. How equivocal is the frail veterano, are his nervous fingers kneading, caressing, is the Popeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s helicopter, is the feather floating on a reflection of its sky, are the beads dangling in the doorways.

Nice after “La Promenade des Anglais à Nice,” Raoul Dufy Barbara Crooker

The row of palm trees curved along the Baie des Anges like a strand of beads on the long white neck of a beautiful woman, and the blue Mediterranean filled the windows of our small hotel. At night, the waves rattled the stones like someone washing chain mail, or a woman searching for something she’d lost. Blue, blue, everywhere blue—Maritime Alpes off in the distance, paint on this table, trim on the walls. At the market in the vielle ville, blue shellfish, crabs and mussels displayed like needlepoint, and sea holly and lavender in buckets in the flower stalls. We had never been so far from home, without our daughters and damaged son. Blue, blue, missing their voices. But not-blue, this new freedom, like slipping into a dress of silk sky, believing I could speak another language, wear perfume behind my ears, spend the days wandering museums, streets with flower boxes on every window, cobblestoned alleys, then nights with you in restaurants with gilt-backed chairs, damask napkins, ruby wines. The world of travel had licked its multicolored stamps, pasted them all over my skin.

The Jeweler Glover Davis My great-grandfather packed his best suitcase and left behind his lyrical Cymri for a glittering jewelry store in Canada. Wheels, springs, and intricate gears would click beneath his hands and, for awhile, beat like a heart. Diamonds he tapped along a scored line broke in perfect angles, light refracting blue, white, red like polished blades against the sun. Talent and a long apprenticeship gave him such mastery he could do anything jewelers might want to do with pendants, pearls, engravings etched in gold or the brass bound chronometers on a ship’s quarterdeck. Eventually he’d own a jewelry store in London, Ontario and earn so much he’d speculate in stocks and bonds. He bought some fields near Houston for grapefruit then just before oil spouted from a drill he sold them. We framed his picture set in a collage with other relatives now gone forever. We hung it on our living room’s pink wall where gradually it fades like one of the myths an American family would maintain a generation or two, claiming roots, distinction, some small part in destiny. But where are the Welsh battle hymns, the poems whose syllables are set in a tight form like polished stones in a bracelet’s web? Where is the power to dream prophetic dreams bequeathed by Merlin’s gold-dust words scattered to every quarter of a ragged map? Somewhere descendants blink back particles of light or loose a diamond in a tear.

There Are Photographs Glover Davis We sat together at a table, all of us so firmly dedicated we could think of little else besides a grail of words in every circumstance an eye or ear could search. These moments quickly passed. Now some of those caught there in black and white have died or disappeared into the vast crowds thronging the blurred avenues of light Even their features in the photographs yellow or darken or erase themselves in some locked drawers where the one who laughs has lost hair, lips and eyes or on some shelves where obliterating time coats these with dust. The negatives prove some of us were there with all we were, our eyes lit by a gust of light blown from banked candles on the air. Overexposed, a photo puts a tongue of flame across a red-oak centerboard and there our hands pressed flat as though unstung by the toothed flame shaped something like a sword Where now are Levis, Trejo, Jones, Spear, all of those who at a rounded table posed that day like brothers with a common goal before the light failed and the shutter closed.

How It Is New Afaa M. Weaver At night the garden sleeps and changes itself, adds new lines to a path, uncovers a small stone well, moves the shadows of the temple so the sun must adjust. The temper of the earth changes, blue is more blue, green is less green, the white streaks of clouds are thinner smiles. Last night there was a rainbow working in it all, making more what was less, feeding the thick way trees cover the rough way up the mountain. I am here at your feet waiting to see how you make suffering less of what it is, how you take a worn heart and kiss it over with lips attuned to giving, and when you move from your perch here, there will be a chance. I will lean over to where you were and see all the secrets of getting through, of how to climb through where leaves are as thick as tears in the ocean, of how to call the eagles down to land in my hand and dance without tearing me. This morning I went out again, walking, despite the crack in the bone, the slip of gristle in the joint. In the corner of the gravel road, I found another paradise.

A Painting of Grey Seas Fred Ostrander The children stand in the door. Their shadows reach inward Across the floor. The sun glimmers In the thick needles of the pines. As if hearing some call, they will depart, Their gesture not of greeting but farewell. It will not be possible to meet again as we are. You turn away your looking. They, as we, are borne through the years like something Floating downriver and into the rapids. We know about death. We approach it also. (Your painting of grey seas, or a painting of graves) Time does not pass. It lasts. And the intensity of the heart. Because we lose hold. The wheel turns and we are unable to hold on. We cannot meet again as we are.

Friendship in Translation Holly Welker We both know moonlight shining through a crack in the gate means leisure. Darkness is a man tattooed for battle; you radiate nothing but light. You worship a goddess so pale, arched and slender she is almost a crescent moon and nothing more; I cannot trust her. Still, you gave me your right hand, then your left, while the rest of you is reserved for a woman who provides you with children but turns away from the small scratchings you say are stories. Once I forgot the word for bitterness. You thrust your hand into the air, then smiled until I parted my lips to smile back. And then you placed your fingertip on my tongue, certain I would recognize the lingering taste. I do, even in this small dose.

The Invisible Girl Nin Andrews But there were rules. Always be quiet was one. Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t let on was two. You might be seen then. And not forgotten. Not that her parents meant to forget her when they dropped her off at school, the tennis courts, the local swimming pool. At the end of the day she watched as parents came in station wagons, and one by one the other children went home. Some were hugged by their parents, and some were smacked. Every day a red-haired boy left sobbing after he refused to get out of the water. She didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t envy any of them really. She liked the feeling of being alone, listening to the crickets and watching the moon rise, long after the pool and playground emptied. She liked listening to the lifeguard talk on the phone to his girlfriend, saying I will be there. Yes. 10:00 sharp. I love you. She had heard those words before. Her father said words like that every day. She was glad

From “Suite of Wives” Lynell Edwards

II. Love, Helen All Greece hates the still eyes in the white face, the luster as of olives where she stands, and the white hands. “Helen,” H.D. A thousand fucking ships, to recover my sweet ass? What fools. And that’s not the half of it. Listen, bitch: I wanted out. Out of that palace house, prison of Spartan glint and despair; out from under the sexless slump of the old man, his stale breath, palsied grip; out from the clutches of the brats we begot, immortals’ burden to issue heirs. Out of it all, sister. So when that fine shepherd showed his sweet face, the swan in me lifted to meet his mouth, wild bird heart swollen like a sail in the Aegean breeze, his hands on the arc of my cygnet neck, his hands sculpting the hollow of my waist, now winged love soaring across the waves, the wine-dark flush of desire unconstrained, now my marble silence tightening as a noose around Troy’s breath. And you want to know why and how much and when. I say: take your goddamn thousand ships,

rattling songs of arms and the man, clarion gifts that seethe revenge, but know this: when the long battle years wage on and you wait for your man while age bends your brittle frame, spots your once-milky skin, thins your fertile hair where he buried his tears, released his joy, know this: I am beautiful still; your men, all dead.

IV. Unraveling

Now all these lies he made appear so truthful, she wept as she sat listening. The Odyssey, Book XIX

I get the reports, hear the news, see the e-mail distributions: whirlpool rock financial ruin your triumph or defeat, how your men were lost, transformed utterly, your silence from the island. I have received the gifts over these long years: the lacquered box, wedding cup, tortoise comb and mirror, each catalogued by its occasion missed. And I have made marks on the wall for the boy, notched the door frame for each year, driven the miles to school and sport, and now by his embrace I feel him taller, broader than I remember you.

These men that line the halls will not wait, their plans, their contests more elaborate each day. They ask what I make: travel cloak or cape, blanket, subtle tapestry. But nothing in my smile betrays the end: a net my love, for your return and soon.

V. Trophy I have done with tears. I will endure my death. Cassandra, from Agamemnon, Aeschylusâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Oresteia Agamemnon, baby, hot from acquisition, trade, splendid astride your plunder, speed me across the wine-dark lake in your terrible vessel. Gilt me as you will: I am your morning glory, daylily, bikini-clad figurehead wedged in the thrust of a cigarette-sleek bow. Burden my limbs with stones the color of bone and blood. Buy me a ring that will cut and shine. Gun us past the deep channel, the sheer cliff, the lesser men in their lesser crafts. Shred the wake into white madness, cutting spray. Agamemnon, sweetheart, outrace the dark horizon, thunderheads gnarled with the surging storm. Carry me heaving and damp to your marble halls.

So what you do not hear my cry above the whine and saw of horsepower, the smack of wave against the hull? So what if the clattering boast of other menâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s gold shutters the arc of my wail? So you do not know the brutal truth of my possession the flash of cloaked knife, the end in nets and slaughterthe ride, Agamemnon darling, wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t it a ride?

Revenge of the Whelps Ann Buggey I think the dog next door will eat us, when he gets loose. Through a knothole I see him shredding window screens, eviscerating Wood. We’d be convenient prey, our proximity so close. Soft and warm to mouth, soon yielding, we would not struggle too long. Naïve, we ignored the realtor’s warning about our neighborhood. “It’s changing,” she said. We saw nothing of the dogs to come, The ravenous barking for bones. We foresaw nothing of the rejection Of our children in their soft faces. They loved us, love us, I am sure. Must they kill us to separate from us? I hope no child is near When that pit bull gets loose. Flesh is meat to him. He knows no better. Ignored, he kicks the air and nudges his empty bowl for hours, growling And whining. Beautiful creature, mushroom sleek, his are not the whimpers Of loyalty spurned, of waiting for attention, but of years of gut hunger Inside a high fence. After our children devour us, will they feel relief?

Reversal J. Morris The rugs have had too much to drink, especially that red runner in the hall, which has always been a little sarcastic anyway, and now it’s playing stupid practical jokes—I always landed on my butt. The curtains are tipsy too, fluttering and moaning stuff a boy shouldn’t hear. The ceiling fan is high, the dishwasher’s loaded— look out, here comes a dirty saucepan, right at my head. Cabinets nipping from bagged bottles, unmade beds sprawled unconscious, wobbly chairs bending over backwards, lamps that brighten, darken, flicker and pop, as the juice flows… Our whole apartment has gone on a binge, and not for the first time. This place has got a problem, the day will come when all five rooms cram themselves into some church basement: Hi, my name is apartment 912 and I’m an alcoholic. But moored in the middle like small boats straining against tautened ropes, my parents smile at each other, at me, and take my hand. The square footage is a rhomboid wreck, drunk as a skunk, but Mom and Pop are sober. Their faces are orderly and bright, like bills paid on time and placed each month in a brown accordion file. That’s the way to run a face, to maintain a person— pay your bills on time. And let the apartment do what it likes, it’s just a bunch of wood and metal and fabric. You’re flesh and spirit. Stay sober, stay calm, let the walls and whitewash do the drinking. We’re family.

Cul de Sacs Patrick Carrington

Let’s say one night you want to forget. You uncork a second Chardonnay, but instead of separating you from the relic of a man in the lazyboy, the sound of your spirit crunching like saltines, it magnifies the unacceptable state of affairs, its hollow bed and empty feed bowls. And then, for the sake of argument, let’s say you decide to take a stroll for some air because you’ve already tried the good cry, but the neglected streets look just like the black and motley rug of your life, and the shops on Main are a house of mirrors where you see yourself in the window of every dead end, among the Maytags and moderate dresses. And let’s say, for the sake of consumers, you need more bang for your buck, and the bottle in your hand you’re quite sure you meant to leave on the kitchen counter is empty just as you pass a tavern that happens to be the sanctuary of a hard young man. And then let’s say you say yes to a festival because you don’t believe in coincidence anyway, because your best friend the vineyard has already warped the quality of your mercy. And maybe just for the hell of it. And really, it’s not like yes is a permanent thing. Not like a tattoo or death, or the circle of sores around the night’s red mouth.

Advice Matthew Spireng

How to survive a plan crash. What you should wear. News at 11. —Television promo The last time the plane I was on flew into the side of a mountain at a speed they were never quite able to determine, I should have been wearing something other than the sports coast and slacks I’d chosen for that morning. And though it wasn’t what killed me, my tie could have been a noose had it caught in the seat I sat behind as I flew past at whatever speed the plane was flying before its sudden stop without warning. I suspect the perfect attire that day would have been what I wore the previous time my plane crashed, the time I did survive, when in running shorts, a tank-top shirt and running shoes, I was about two miles into my daily run when the flight I’d missed went down.

Samaritan Jason Tandon I watch a great invasion on TV. Neon bombs fall through the night. At dawn a man races into a pet store. Everything is smoke and feathers, Close-ups of fish in their tanks, Eyes bulging like someone caught bluffing In a cutthroat game of cards. My neighbor knocks at my window. She's locked herself out of her house. Beauty, someone once passed me On a cocktail napkin, Is a voice pleading to be let inside. The crickets have fallen silent. Beside my foot a tulip has poked through the loam. At my kitchen table we share a cigarette, Watching smoke circle in a cone of lamplight. How stupid of me, she says again, Then only the crinkle of turning pages As I thumb the phone book for a locksmith.

Pete Tells Me Things Melissa Tuckey The tomato tree in his front yard for example and the pond weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll dig at the top of the hill despite the lack of water The sunset is broken in office tower windows and weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re drinking red wine from plastic hospital cups When he coughs the stitches in his chest pull loose He tells me there was a shark once in Micronesia he slit its belly and watched it swim away without a heart

Vegetarian Charles Harper Webb The hostess's garden gushes beans, tomatoes, peas. Green corn billows in the fog. If Jim could only fog his conscience out the way, at a party last week, he fogged out his wife’s name—"Bob, this is . . ." And like a tablecloth whipped from underneath a five-course meal, Jenine was gone. "Blocking," his shrink called it. Nothing about tackling Jen’s spite, or how not to catch the pass thrown by the woman nibbling sprouts beside him now. He can’t forget her name—Mandy—or that she's vegetarian: lips watermelon-red; eyes, berry-blue; skin, eggplant-smooth, pale as lychee. He's inside her event-horizon, spiraling down while his genes prance like Maori warriors: flexing biceps, waggling tongues. Like girls in France, hers do the hoochiekoochie dance. Biology's not destiny, feminists cry, willing their breasts not to give milk, their ovaries to stop delivering eggs. Is Mandy—a vegetarian feminist—his destiny? Among his friends, affairs are unremarkable as vegie-burgers. Vegetarians are a serious crowd. No cripple jokes. Never say, "throws like a girl." When Jim mimics his neighbor from Bombay, Mandy's meat-free lips pout succulently. Disapproval fires her colorconscious eyes. Are there more women vegetarians because men crave meat more? Is that sexist to think? He pictures male australopithecans bounding over the savanna, chasing flocks of broccoli. Neanderthals tromp proudly toward their cave, a big zucchini shouldered on a sagging pole . . .

Mandy, you're shishkabob to me. You're freshcaught trout grilled on mesquite. Life without you is wilted lettuce in a paper dish. I'll stagger home like a man years in the bush who bursts into Fat Burger, and orders the diet plate. I'll limp away from manhood's jungleâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;symphonic with cries of animals my teeth evolved to chew, my tongue to tasteâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;onto the barren white plains of Tofu.

Walking with the Ghost of John Muir Ann Walters Because there was a dew last night the spiderwebs are pearled strings and every fallen leaf has perished twice. Rotate the picture 45 degrees to see how evenly squirrels manage their budgets. The precise rules for ecological satisfaction can be met with a dry cough and the scrabble of deer in the underbrush. Pencil in your favorite bird call. Sweeten your remarks with honey. Balance the dampness in your chest with every rock that crumbles into soil.

The Lights Are Coming On in A Small Industrial City James Grinwis The moon drops into a slashed and decaying porcupine. No, it is merely an old plank of rusty nails the fishy moon drops into. A five-legged dog slinks along the street in quest of a nugget and he finds one. His hide is illuminated and he smells like Nyquil. A toddler cursed into the rising dawn. A toddler balled his fist and cursed like a little fuck. Like a wedge of cranes, cereal bowls spread over the panic tables. I could not find the time, did not know where to look. Railroad engineers kept peeling lemons into empty cups. At the pemmican plant in the distance, a friend counted figs while arranging the bones of rats. Countless sticks of deodorant were perched on the rims of countless aquariums and every once in awhile one or two plunked in. A boy lifted a small, red, poison dreamcatcher. Racks of antlers dotted the road. It is dusk. A miner slipped, envisioning his wifeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wrists.

Sister Phyllis Teaches us About the Tree of Knowledge John Bargowski For weeks no one could go near it, every branch she’d scissored and tacked to the cork board so laden with brightly wrapped treats the tips brushed the greenish spears of grass she’d pinned along the molding, the sweetness melting through the room that frigid morning steam sizzled from the nozzles of the radiators and Sister found a chewed wad of Double Bubble melted to the feeder pipe, everyone silent when she demanded a name, dragged Kenny Coyle out of his seat by the ear to lay on his belly under the tree and hiss like a snake, pulled Tommy Chiccone, now a fiery revolving sword, away from his desk-full of A’s to guard the cloak room door that Sister screeched was the way to the Tree of Life, slapped her pointer against the blackboard and made the rest of us lay our heads on our desks and imagine ourselves in the middle of that Garden when the Maker’s wrath was unleashed, voice booming through the cedars, bending over the sapling pin oaks, a whirlwind passing over the cursed yellow fields of mustard already sprouting buckthorn and thistle, our first parents hidden and naked, banished to a lifetime of toil, Kenny writhing across the worn linoleum as Sister stamped her heel and scratched all our names onto that shameful space she kept on the blackboard for Mother Superior to see. 73

Culling John Bargowski

I thought his homers would never return when he climbed to the loft after supper to snap the necks of the cripples unable to join the flock for their daily stretch, his prize birds' tight circles above the D&J Bar widening out over the county courthouse and St. Joseph's Home for the Blind while he crushed the two white eggs from the accidental pairing of a city champion with a handsome blue-check who'd wandered in for some fresh water and dried peas, a sudden fluttering and twitching in the burlap sack he'd knotted and carried down the ladder as the yellowed nail of an old favorite poked through the weave of the fabric.

The Greatest Robert Hedin What I remember most about Muhammad Ali Are not the fast hands and loose, graceful footwork. Or Manila or Zaire. Or even what came after— The slurred speech, the sad slow shuffle. No. What I remember is a boy somewhere In the foothills of the snowy Zagros Mountains, A small Kurdish boy in a long blue robe Who gave us directions that day we were lost. And how he knew nothing of America But two syllables he sang over and over In the high unbroken voice of a girl— Ali, Ali—then laughed and all at once Began to bob and weave, jabbing and juking, His robe flaring a moment like a fighter’s. Ali. One word, two bright syllables That turned to smoke in the morning air. And he pointed down the long, dusty road To Hatra and Ur, the ruins of Babylon, And the two ancient rivers we had read about, Their dark starless waters draining away into fog.

The Greatest Robert Hedin 72 beats per minute. 4,320 an hour. That’s 103,680 a day, or 37,843,200 a year. Now subtract for the cigarettes, the bourbon, the sleepless nights, the lost weekend in the Poconos. That leaves 567,600,000 taps until the clouds part, the dust bows down, until the little black train comes to take me away, O Lord. All this I calculated this morning, February 9th, Ash Wednesday, as I sit here under duress—one hand over my heart pledging allegiance, the other drumming furiously at the calculator, while snow drifts down over the empty lawn chairs, the flakes too many to count—and dedicate to Pythagoras, Euclid, and all the other early mathematicians, but mostly to those three overworked draft horses who darkened the stables at Washington Elementary—Miss Keeley, Miss Ramsey, and Miss Benson—whom I thank now for the flash cards, the mountains of homework, and the long suffering hours I spent at the blackboard, adding columns taller than I was. May they rest in peace, wherever they are.

Homeboys Naveed Alam the imported tulips introduced the mini skirts provoking the ire of our imams who confiscated the colors of spring we abandoned fashion and began collecting the sunshine fluttering upon the leaves for curing the melancholy mirrors some started making brooms for sweeping the splintered ambitions we were fascinated by journeys but no one ever left town only heard stories from our hashish addled elders mixing fact and fiction journeys have eyes they told us the size of lakes where the stars go skinny dipping they use clouds as pillows but beware be very ware of merciless journeys if their feet ever get wet they slit the throats of waves aimlessly we roamed the streets ignoring the pretty boys who deliberately dropped something just to bend and expose the fake designer underwear peering out of the low waist jeans we strolled away our youth neither saying hi nor bye keeping our gaze fixed on the dogs and doorways then it rained kept raining we grew fat…and languorous

Fall Susan Varnot The horses in the field wander around into shapes their shadows make from them. One, gritty with a tattoo stamped on its hind quarter, surfaces over and over as though pulling away from its form. A cloud leans past blue. Into this morning, smoke from a house catches in the uppermost branches of the cottonwoods. The trees flutter, shaking off the last of their silver leaves. Into this morning, I hold myself to heat and what light, itself, makes of me; my shadow falls slowly through glass, the way light and not wind handles everything without temper, even the last of the morningâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s stars.

Not Yours Marc Elihu Hofstadler Some days nothing is yours. Not the bed you sleep in, your favorite Paisley shirt, or even the sky, speckled with cold white. Your partner’s tone carefully reminds you he’s his own man, and your friends maintain an adult distance. You’re not even master of yourself: your moods run off in zigzag rivulets, like spilled milk. Nothing to do but wait it out, try to sit emptied of thought until the world in its own sweet time floods back— for your life wasn’t given to you, only lent, and one day you’re going to have to give it back.

Midweek Poem Tom Chandler I crawled outside my body through my mouth and fingers, out both ears, waited in air while I did a crossword, filed my nails, told a small lie, ate part of a salad, then crawled back in and slept through the night, silent as a chair in a darkened room, completely forgetting this dream of itself before I awoke the next morning.

My Martini Tom Chandler Shaken to its bones, each molecule of vodka a memory, Zhivagoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s yellow fields pushed against unsmiling sky. There is ice lodged in this story, a thousand unwritten winters frozen past all suffering, the snow falling through the years muffling the widowâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s tears, piled bodies, the smoking rubble of palaces. And, of course, an amnesia of vermouth, with one olive more than happy to flood my skull with fire, one to numb the world into a silly toy and one impaled on a plastic prong in the shape of a tiny sword.

The Lives of Voices: a chapbook of poems by Li Young Lee

Immigrant Blues People have been trying to kill me since I was born, a man tells his son, trying to explain the wisdom of learning a second tongue. It’s an old story from the previous century about my father and me. The same old story from yesterday morning about me and my son. It’s called “Survival Strategies and the Melancholy of Racial Assimilation.” It’s called “Psychological Paradigms of Displaced Persons,” called “The Child Who’d Rather Play Than Study.” Practice until you feel the language inside you, says the man. But what does he know about inside and outside, my father who was spared nothing in spite of the languages he used? And me, confused about the flesh and the soul, who asked once into a telephone, Am I inside you? You’re always inside me, a woman answered, at peace with the body’s finitude, at peace with the body’s disregard of space and time. Am I inside you? I once asked lying between her legs, confused about the body and the heart. If you don't believe you’re inside me, you’re not, she answered, at peace with the body’s greed, at peace with the heart’s bewilderment. It’s an ancient story from yesterday evening called “Patterns of Love in Peoples of Diaspora,” called “Loss of the Homeplace 83

and the Defilement of the Beloved,” called “I Want to Sing but I Don’t Know Any Songs.”

After the Pyre It turns out, what keeps you alive as a child at mid-century following your parents from burning village to cities on fire to a country at war with itself and anyone who looks like you, what allows you to pass through smoke, through armed mobs singing the merits of a new regime, tooth for a tooth, liberation by purification, and global dissemination of the love of jealous gods, coup d’etat, coup de grace, and the cooing of mothers and doves and screaming men and children caught in the pyre’s updraft, what keeps you safe even among your own, the numb, the haunted, the maimed, the barely alive, tricks you learned to become invisible, escapes you perfected, playing dead, playing stupid, playing blind, deaf, weak, strong, playing girl, playing boy, playing native, foreign, in love, out of love, playing crazy, sane, holy, debauched, playing scared, playing brave, happy, sad, asleep, awake, playing interested, playing bored, playing broken, playing “Fine, I’m just fine,” it turns out, now that you’re older at the beginning of a new century, what kept you alive all those years keeps you from living.

The Lives of Voices 1. Dear and With The boy didn’t want to let go of the bird. As long as he closed it between both hands, several worlds not just inside and out, not just fear and desire, not just dream and appetite, claws, hands, and wild eyesseveral worlds remained one, inviolate. Until the moment the thing set free flew beyond recovery. And the bird became various birds, and the one became many. indefinite parts: wings and the shadows of wings, cries and the color of his mother’s hair, fate and a lifetime of longing.

3. Tethered The dove outside my window sounds hurt all the time. No country of origin. Living in occupied territory all the time. In the shadow of an unattainable heaven, burdened by memory of perfect orchards trimmed by unseen hands. Maybe being winged means being wounded by infinity, blessed by the ordeal of freedom. At crossroads

all the time, all the time rocking chair, rocking horse, rocking train, rocking boat, a heart born to a station of oars, an office of wings, born flying, born falling between heads and tails, trespass and grace, home and wilderness. Could be thinking is curved, like the earth, and feels, therefore, heavy. Could be wings are an affliction, a different kind of tyranny, and flying no better than walking upright.

Standard Checklist for Amateur Mystics A lamp, so you can read the words on the tablet. A hand to copy the sentences you find. A hand for you to rest your head. Feet to dance the gist of what you find. A bird to scour your heart. A bird to help you pronounce the sentences. Breath to fan the fireâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s nest. A kiln to test the choice. A crown to keep underfoot. Two eyes to see the one in one. Three to see the two in one. Seven to see the all in one. A hand to cross out your name. A donkey to carry your shit. A monkey to filch change and food. A brother to point out the way. A sister to redeem the refused. A sister to ransom the straw. A sister to wake you with kisses when youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve fallen asleep on your opus.

First World Sister, we died in childbirth, remember? Into birds we died, into their flying. Toward all of sky we perished so completely our mother cried, “Where are my little ones?” Into her voice we died, that white singing, dispersed in day’s greater sentence. And the days, we disappeared into them and what they confided, coming and going, but where? Of noon we died, and of midnight, our longings the bridges we built towards the future, longings we wove in secret out of worry, wonder, and expectancy. And we died of the future, of calling and mission only we could keep, leaping into every favorite season; sinking into roots, dreams, and books. Nights beyond the house, we looked up and fell into the known configuration of stars. Nights, housed and in bed, we closed our eyes and died into the unknown constellations: the empty basket, the jeweled stair, the table set for a guest. Into our names we died, then past their precincts, and would not be persuaded the world lay kept in other, bigger hands. Our secret? Where we stood, there stood all worlds. We died, and we go on dying. So where would I look for us except in everything I see.

Have You Prayed When the wind turns and asks, in my father’s voice, Have you prayed? I know three things. One: I’m never finished answering to the dead. Two: A man is four winds and three fires. And the four winds are his father's voice, his mother’s voice . . . Or maybe he’s seven winds and ten fires. And the fires are seeing, hearing, touching, dreaming, thinking . . . Or is he the breath of God? When the wind turns traveler and asks, in my father’s voice, Have you prayed? I remember three things. One: A father’s love is milk and sugar, two-thirds worry, two-thirds grief, and what’s left over is trimmed and leavened to make the bread the dead and the leaving share. And patience? That’s to endure the terrible leavening and kneading. And wisdom? That's my father’s face in sleep. When the wind asks, Have you prayed? I know it’s only me reminding myself a flower is one station between earth’s wish and earth’s rapture, and blood was fire, salt, and breath long before it quickened any wand or branch, any limb that woke speaking. It’s just me

in the gowns of the wind, or my father through me, asking, Have you found your refuge yet? asking, Are you happy? Strange. A troubled father. A happy son. The wind with a voice. And me talking to no one.

Station Your attention please. Train number 9, The Northern Zephyr, destined for Riverâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s End, is now boarding. All ticketed passengers, please proceed to the gate marked Evening. Your attention please. Train number 7, Leaves Blown By, bound for The Color of Thinking and Renovated Time, is now departing. All ticketed passengers may board behind my eyes. Your attention please. Train number 4, The Twentieth Century, has joined The Wind Undisguised to become The Written Word. Those who never heard their names may inquire at the uneven margin of this story or else consult the ivy laying awake under our open window. Your attention please, The Music, arriving out of hidden ground and endlessly beginning, is now the flower, now the fruit, now our cup and cheer under branches more ancient than our grandmotherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hair. Passengers with memories of the sea may board leisurely at any unmarked gate. Fateful members of the foam may proceed to cloud and Veronica. Your attention please. Under falling petals, never think about home. Seeing begins in the dark. Listening stills us. Yesterday has gone ahead 92

to meet you. Your attention please. Train number 66, Unbidden Song, soon to be the full heartâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s quiet, takes no passengers. Please leave your baggage with the attendant at the window marked: Your Name Sprung from Hiding. An intrepid perfume is waging our rescue. You may board at either end of Childhood.

Translations

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Srečko Kosovel was a Slovenian poet who died in 1926 at the age of 22. Reputed as an avant-garde poet, Kosovel’s poems have been published in three major collections, released in 1927, 1931, and 1964 respectively. He continues to be an influential figure to contemporary Slovenian poets.

Out of Joint Srečko Kosovel Gradually sliding out of joint ... It jolts flies off the axle, everything spins, cracks, flees. cyclones – houses swinging, someone calling: where are you, God, mother? Towers above us collapsing. We can't get away. The houses swing, rise like piano keys played far away – a wave heaving across the world. Everything collapsing, fleeing, out of fear, we can't speak in this dark, a flash no one can say where – 95

Slowly sliding out of joint ...

Translated from the Slovenian by Ana Jelnikar and Barbara Siegel Carlson

Vasile Garnet is the author of four books of poetry and one novel. He is the editor of Contrafort, the Republic of Moldova's leading cultural magazine, and currently serves as Moldova’s representative to PEN. His poetry has been QuickTime™ and a TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor translated from Romanian into French, German and Italian. are needed to see this picture.

spoiled man Vasile Garnet

I know it’s possible to live like that – alone and not actually real largely tolerant of yourself although with a feeling that you are being indulged as if you're stuck underneath a projector of visions omniscient and unforgiving I tell myself there may exist a mechanics of suffering in which you are a humble detail a lost human being held by the hand and urged "more obeisance, even more obeisance!" and you even enjoy writing tragically about the kind of spoiled man you are about a man who is a daily ritual of regrets I know that there exists an evil magic to life a baroque seduction into which you dissolve with a folksy mirth sometimes and only the (desperate) dignity of what I am – the words of old Thomas – gives me courage for the views ahead Translated from the Romanian by Carrie Messenger

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Rolf Dieter Brinkmann was born in Vechta, Germany, in 1940, and died in 1975 in London, after being struck by a hit-and-run driver. Brinkmann’s posthumous poetry collection, Westwärts 1 & 2, appeared in 1975, which was awarded the prestigious Petrarca Prize. A collection of Mark Terrill's translations of Brinkmann, Like a Pilot, is available from Sulphur River Literary Review Press.

Im provis ation 1, 2 & 3 (af ter Han Sh an ) R olf D ieter Brink mann "No one knows from where Han Shan came." He climbed down from the plateau on Cold Mountain, wrote, "What should I do here?" in the stone, there were no titles, no numbers he sat there and looked at the snow, the explanations, "footnotes," came later, explained nothing. The calligraphy in the coldness, white, the staring at the stone, the forgetting of memories, which is an achievement. He wrote, "The wise man has not a penny," as he was again caught by surprise with the desire to leave the mountain, troubled by the "condolence of the flies," &, as he swept out the room, he was contented. 2. Clack, clack, the society is the abstract,

("everyone 98

stares at me, since I lost the way")

you hear the many sounds of the shoes

("the persons in the story are fictitious, that goes for the story as well")

it's the same endless noise Translated from the German by Mark Terrill Brinkmann, "Improvisation...," page 2, new stanza which fills the world, wherever you are. And, let's say, once again: "suddenly" as you took the curve driving out of the city, night on the autobahn, and the chains of lights came to an end, you knew

("if there's something to be happy about, be happy about it")/ when finally weeds sprout through your skull etc.)

clack, clack (like cha-cha-cha) the effect. And really, it's difficult not to see that anymore, but rather the oneness. 3. To sing a song with no other purpose that to sing a song,

is a hard job, like sitting before the snow covered mountain, for years, without distraction, staring, and then, one day, with a single stroke of white ink on the white paper, so placed that everyone sees that the mountain 99

is completely empty. Translated from the German by Mark Terrill

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A Glas s of C old Water R olf D ieter Brink mann & falling asleep in the shadows. I don't care about the next catastrophe. The rustling of the newspaper is just a confusion of the places where the doors, far away, are slammed shut. The shirt, newly washed, is dry when I wake up. It's simply a matter of catching many good moments. And who is the idiot playing with coal in the stairwell? That's a leftover piece of the dream, which must quickly be burned up: "Loneliness, where you are, no blade of grass grows, & no one needs a lipstick, simply out of a desire to be there and be beautiful." Translated from the German by Mark Terrill

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H. E. Sayeh, the renowned Iranian poet and scholar, was born in 1927 in the northern Iranian city of Rasht and published his first collection of poetry, First Songs, at the age of 19. His numerous books exhibit a hybrid of socio-political poetry and traditional Iranian verse in the lineage of Persian masters, Rumi and QuickTime™ and a TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor Hafiz. Written in the numerous traditional forms of are needed to see this picture. Persian bardic poetry, Sayeh's poetry emphasizes current issues of Iranian society, and is deeply influenced by historical events including the 1953 Coup d'état and the 1979 revolution.

Search/Circle (Gharibaaneh) H. E. Sayeh Search, search the house, look everywhere You’re an exile in this house, search like an exile One was a meadow lark, my own heart’s pair The world is not her nest, search for the nest One is a wine-maid tipsy behind a curtain She passed on the glass so search like the drunks The joy of drunkenness hides under whose lips? From this hand to that hand like a shared glass, circle One is the starling that ate the garden of my heart You won’t find her in a trap so search for the seeds A wind from her mouth has caught me in fragrance She is here, she is here, search the whole house A song no one heard—it fled from itself Don’t call out its name, go softly, go softly Tears planted in that dirt grow the root of the vine In the turbulence of wine, churn in the cellar What a sweet smell, where is her bed? Circle that flower as a butterfly—search

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Laugh at the intellect that love didn’t choose it Swing in these chains like a lunatic—search Her footprint’s not here in these walls built of sadness If you hunger for treasure, search in the ruins If a door opens inward, you are the key Turn like the gears in the lock made of time Who veiled her face from Sayeh under a spell of sleep? In dreams you can’t find her, search in the legends Her body brushed my body, she took me, she took me If she never brings me back, whirl, search, circle with gratitude Translated from the Farsi by Chad Sweeney and Mojdeh Marashi

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Moan of the Mirror (Ahe Ayeneh) H. E. Sayeh Digging in the pit, her family knew it was her by her long hair. O earth— is this the same innocent body? Is a woman only this pile of dirt? She used to comb the treasure of her hair, and braid beyond the mirror frame the wind of her thoughts. She used to greet the morning, ‘Salam!’ And her smile would pick a flower from the reflection. Lifting her hand to her temple she would brush the night aside to reveal the sun in the mirror. Her mind would wake on the rising day, a rain of stars shaken loose from the sky of her eyes, then that sweet smile would open a door through her reflection onto the sun-garden of her soul. Thieves have blinded the mirror by stealing those eyes from the sill of morning. Oh you—burnt youth— the ash of spring! Your image has flown away from the empty mirror. Holding the memory of your long hair the mirror moans in the hanging dust of morning. Birds in the garden sing for no reason. This is no occasion for bloom. Translated from the Farsi by Chad Sweeney and Mojdeh Marashi

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Carlos Marzal was born in Valencia in 1961. He has published five books of poetry, most recently Metales Pesados (2002), which was awarded the National Critics Prize and the National Prize for Literature, and Fuera de Mí (2004), for QuickTime™ and a which he received the Loewe Foundation Prize. His books of TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor poetry were in 2005 collected in El Corazón Perplejo (Poesía are needed to see this picture. Reunida, 1987-2004), and in 2005 he published a novel, Los Reinos de la Causalidad. Sr. Marzal lives in Valencia.

Rat Heaven Carlos Marzal On a road to the interior, to the northwest, some thirty tortuous kilometers from Valencia proper, there is a house, a hundred years old now, my great-grandfather built to last. Old photographs, old stained walls, a faint humidity that seems to be the essence of a dead and unrecoverable time of horse paths, of cisterns, of fat men with sturdy mustaches, and colonies, and tuberculosis. Summers, the house welcomes us disdainfully, arrogantly, generation after generation, and I attend to its rites. Sometimes in the opulent night, I’ve listened to rats skittering, hidden and wandering, kings of the attic crawl space. No one knows for sure how they get in, but they are not the figments of dreams. I don’t know if my father heard them or his father’s father. At times, I’m convinced the dank rooms, the rats, the hours trapped here, are the owners of the old homestead, not me or my family, and they are waiting, patiently, for the summer of all summers to come, when we pass on to be another photograph on the wall,

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one more familiar tree fallen far from the promised paradiseâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; for stretched out above our heads, in the ceiling, it is night, and in that heaven the rats are praying, a savage homage to their loathsome god. Translated from the Spanish by Nathaniel Perry

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Cirilo F. Bautista, author of several books in English and Tagalog, is Professor Emeritus of Literature and University Fellow at De La Salle University-Manila, Philippines. His epic QuickTimeâ&#x201E;˘ and a poem The Trilogy of Saint Lazarus, portions of which have been TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor are needed to see this picture. published in such journals as Triquarterly, Manoa, and World Literature Today, received several honors, including the Palanca Award, the Philippine National Book Award, and the Philippine Government-sponsored Centennial Literary Award. He was awarded an honorary fellowship in creative writing from the State University of Iowa, and was a visiting writer at Cambridge University. How the Word Was Made Cirilo F. Bautista The cry of the crow in my core is grief. Passing through the calm of a heart that bleeds from his pecking, the procession winds its way toward the desolate mind until the recurring songs of my world are like a black concerto, deep with mourning. Bird of Adam, Bird at Gethsemane, why does the song of Creation become a sword when wrapped in the old Testament? How many arks does the Word demand that Creation may be fulfilled? How wide 107

the Blade? With what roots shall it entangle itself? Bird of the Three Riddles, let your grieving lips sing: “In the Beginning was the Nail, then came the blossoming of Blood…” Translated from the Tagalog by José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes

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Questions and Answers Cirilo F. Bautista Don’t you know that a mountain is nothing but smoke? Don’t you know that a thought is nothing but foam? Don’t you know that sackfuls of rice will go bad when they’re hidden deep down in the breast of a poem? Make a dragon swoop down from a mountain of smoke that your thoughts made of foam may be put to the test; make a throne out of rice that’s been kept in a nook that a God may be wrought from the poem in your breast. Translated from the Tagalog by José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes

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Julio MartĂnez Mesanza was born in Madrid in 1955. His books of poetry include Europa, Las trincheras and the forthcoming Entre el muro y el foso.

Against Utopia II Julio MartĂnez Mesanza The sailors have gotten drunk again: once more they are talking about a country they say they know. In this undefined land greed does not exist, and the laws they have are all benign. That is what they say. But they never find themselves in agreement about the exact location of this place. The boldest think my kingdom should resemble the country of their visions and have formed a secret brotherhood, whose purposes my spies know very well. But with men like these it is important to rely on common sense: let them talk. If their land of dreams existed, it would be a fraud. In their stories, I never see a man, just a plan of no importance and a life without friends, horses or ambitions. But what I have seen is power, blood-deep hate, predestination, law that tells what is right not what should be, law that cuts off balls. Let the sailors drink whenever they want: if that country, an offense to man, exists, in justice I will raze all its dominions. Translated from the Spanish by Don Bogen

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The Prisoners Julio MartĂnez Mesanza To Lorenzo MartĂn del Burgo He must have come from a race of giants. We'd stare at his eyes, and the pride he showed would overwhelm us. We were full of praise for his greatness of spirit, for the way he'd sweep aside the chains there in the cell. He was dignity and the untameable, a spinning star around which all revolved. When he was taken away, our own lives lost their steadiest point of reference: the cell stayed just as it had always been, but without our splendid trophy there barracks life became insufferable. We planned out raiding parties, surprise attacks and systematic looting, all in vain; it was no good to camouflage ourselves in rags and slip into the enemy's cities, grabbing everything we could: no amount of plunder could restore the confidence we'd lost, and victory was no longer beautiful, and battle turned into the work of murderers. We look out at the night sky from our cell, imagining a line of barren moons, each one more distant from the one before and a sun that is just a ball of ash drifting as those moons leave it behind. The treachery of those who give the orders and all our crimes have no importance then; though late, we've come to learn renunciation and find a consolation in contempt. Translated from the Spanish by Don Bogen

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Yuri Andrukhovych was born in 1960 in IvanoFrankivsk, Ukraine. In 1985, together with Viktor Neborak and Oleksandr Irvanets, he founded the popular literary performance group "Bu-Ba-Bu" QuickTime™ and a TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor (Burlesque-Bluster-Buffoonery). He has published are needed to see this picture. four poetry books: Sky and Squares (1985), Downtown (1989), Exotic Birds and Plants (1991, new editions 1997 and 2002) and Songs for a Dead Rooster (2004).

Welcome to My Foolish Dreamland Yuri Andrukhovych Taras is right when he says: Alarm clocks should not drag us up in the mornings. Morning is a time of doubt anyway, total nostalgia. The worst that could happen. The necessity to survive the rest of the day somehow pins you to the bed. Win another half hour. Consider what you saw. Considering dreams – an attempt to bring order to the night adventures, to give form to the plots, brightness to the pictures. What really happened? Why the hell did a drunken Tomas leave dry excrement under the seat? The sexy nun, was she demanding something, when she pointed at me? I still remember the clock. There was an ocean of time left before departure, but no way of leaving the trailer crowded with friends. Why not? It’s much worse, when you go, with a bunch of flowers, to visit someone who was actually killed a month ago, for a celebration evening. Why the celebration? Another two minutes and I’ll explain, I’ll chase the nun I’ll make Tomas clean up after himself…

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Considering dreams leads to nothing but parallel conclusions: life passes. The problem of mornings lies in the fact that life gets shorter and shorter. Only in dreams, where everything is stupid, does life look real. And so, eternal. Win another half hour. A horse with bound legs is nothing but a seahorse. Almost everyone thinks: will he show it or not? Almost everyone thinks it’s already the end. Yaroslav Dovhan reads the last line. Those present mostly applaud, joyfully. The end didn’t really come, at least you couldn’t see it. Almost everyone sighs in relief. Some think: thank the Lord, it could have been worse. Yaroslav Dovhan explains that Mayakovsky read just this way, in the place where his statue now stands. Where will Yaroslav Dovhan’s statue stand? Yaroslav Dovhan states: ‘Poetry – is openness, defencelessness’ Dropping the trousers – a gesture of love, agreement, capitulation. A man without trousers – is like a soldier without a fatherland, a Wee Willie Winkie. Masculine death hunts those without trousers. Masculine death hits below the belt. You need courage to read poetry aloud, to announce it, to get naked. Like Anna Sereda, Yaroslav Dovhan could write: ‘When I read you poems – I undress from the waist down, but not entirely’. I hope we’re not going to call the doctor? Translated from the Ukranian by Sarah Luczaj

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This Is the End Yuri Andrukhovych ‘When I read you poems – it’s as if I were undressing in front of the doctor’ – writes Anna Sereda. It reminded me of something. But what? Let’s leave the doctor to one side, lift him out of the text, we’ll call him when we need him. That leaves the sentence, ‘when I read you poems – it’s as if I were undressing’. Rostsislav Koterlin also writes ‘as if’. To be honest, this irritates me. That ‘as if’ wraps the naked truth in scraps of paper. And the truth is most sexual when naked. The writer should write. The archer should arch. The hunter should hunt. The end should end. Sentences should be as clear as possible. So let’s throw out ‘as if’. What’s left? ‘When I read you poems – I undress.’ What does that remind me of? Yaroslav Dovhan, poet and my friend, and also friend and my poet, gets up on the chair. Those present behave in various ways. Some are happy, for this extraordinary opportunity to hear good poetry. Some aren’t happy, because they think it’s all going to end in tears. For example, the chair won’t hold up. Or an orgy will start, etcetera. Some don’t believe that the trousers will come off. Trousers down – faith conquers all. Some don’t believe that after this, only poems will begin. Poems begin. Some enjoy the sight of male thighs, still in pretty good shape. Some don’t even enjoy that. Almost everyone is happy for this extraordinary opportunity to hear good poetry. Yaroslav Dovhan reads confidently, sometimes makes mistakes. Out of the open zip of his trousers, On his end, or crown, he rests. The dreamt-of master, on his horse. Translated from the Ukranian by Sarah Luczaj

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Featured Section

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African Women’s Poetry: Rhythms and Echoes of a Continent by: Anthonia C. Kalu, PhD Africana Studies Program School of Modern Languages and Literature University of Northern Colorado Greeley, Colorado June 2007 Africa’s diverse languages and cultures are reflected in various artistic forms and styles, especially in its poetry. Ubiquitous in its reach, African poetry is part of both the core and the maintenance system of the traditional African knowledge base. Poetry is one of the continent’s most fully developed verbal arts traditions and features a variety of forms and styles. Consequently, there is no single representative African poetic tradition. Despite great differences in poetic form, style and theme, however, there are recognizable, distinctive features in poetry from the continent because of an unstated requirement for resonance of core African principles and experiences. The word for “song,” “music” and “poem” is the same in many African languages. Embedded in folktales as songs or chants that enable retention of both content and meaning, poetry is one of the earliest art forms encountered by the African child. Frequently, children are also introduced to poetry through chants to the rain, to birds in flight, and when they learn the accompanying chants or songs for the various events of rites of passage. However, the urbanized African is more likely to read or watch television rather than chant or sing traditional poems. Consumerism, in Africa as elsewhere, continues to stifle creativity and restrain artistic expression. Among African traditions, it is safe to say that poetry is one of the major casualties of colonization. Taken by itself, this statement seems far-fetched until one realizes that, within the artistic tradition, the problem is linked to contemporary African literature’s perennial question: language. During the colonial period, the need for expertise in the colonizers’ languages constricted indigenous self-expression as Africa’s school children learned European-language poems in western-style classrooms. This approach to western-style education in Africa perceived indigenous poetry as irrelevant, relegating all its aspects to the non-western educated African and to children. Eventually, when educated Africans started writing poetry, many shunned African verse as they strived for the rhythms and cultural meanings of the colonizer. During the colonial period, many indigenous poems were recorded in print by both Africans and interested westerners. Some of these poems were translated into various European languages, providing contemporary African poets with various opportunities to glean knowledge about indigenous composition strategies, rhetoric, style and form, as well as other aspects of the oral traditions. In contemporary African literary studies, the best known indigenous poetic form is “praise poetry,” which addresses the life and prominent deeds of members of the community. Among the Zulu and Basotho of southern Africa, praise poems may be addressed to prominent national leaders or to one’s favorite cattle in the kraal. Throughout the continent, praise poems that have national prominence are composed by

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skilled poets. However, within a given generation, they may be composed by young people as they come of age and begin to recognize skill, virtue, valor, and so on in each other as well as within their ethnicity or nation. Although this form abounds throughout the continent, the most studied within contemporary African literature are the Zulu Izibongo and the Yoruba Oriki. Recently, praise poetry from the Horn of Africa region has also gained some distinction. The most amenable to the exploration of political, historical and social life and experience, praise poetry survived most of colonialism’s onslaught and is deployed in various ways, including contemporary African music, by contemporary African poets. Many African women’s works in the post-independence era are influenced by western feminism; some explore what Alice Walker has called “womanism” and other theoretical approaches to women’s issues. While social criticism is central to the focus of these poets’ works, a prevailing theme is that of giving (women’s) voice to Africa’s current dilemma. However, with regard to the relevance of poetry in the lives of women, contemporary African poetry lags behind other art forms. Further, language plays an important role in this regard as women are the most affected by western-style education in Africa. Many of the poems echo or revisit prevailing discussions about women’s status in the family, society and the nation. Culturally, the African woman is perceived as one who straddles traditions, a bridge between the generations. As a result, her responsibility for making sense of contemporary Africa continues to grow as the continent struggles with development stunted by violence in all areas of life. The works in this collection focus on contemporary issues in post-independent Africa. Contributors come from different regions of the continent, but, because of available space, the collection is not as representative of all regions as one would like. All the poems were originally written in English; there are no translations. A brief examination of these poems confirms the fact that Africa is undergoing violent change, some of which borders on a kind of epistemological violence, as questions of individual and national self-knowledge are challenged daily. At the top of the list are issues of structural and physical violence including wars, HIV-AIDS, poverty, hunger, failed national leadership and exile both within and outside the continent. These poems provide evidence of the nature and pervasiveness of the current culture of violence on the continent. Even a brief examination of these themes reveals the extent to which Africa and Africans are struggling to regain normalcy. Here, normalcy does not mean that precolonial Africa was devoid of violence or suffering. As I went through the poems submitted for this collection, it was difficult to ignore the prevailing sense of loss, even in the poems that deal primarily with love, understanding and progress. However, whatever their topic, the poems in this collection assert the fact that African women continue to work hard to deny power to both traditional and modern efforts to silence women and accord them second-class citizenship status on the continent and abroad. While the African woman’s assertion of self-worth is a pervasive theme in these poems, what is instructive is the extent to which women participate in the relegation of African womanhood to the background of African life and experience. Whether the question is about the African woman’s claims to physical beauty and her exclusion from recent fashions in the global marketplace as a result of her different body build, or the advice given to the young woman by her mother about how to achieve marital bliss, the contemporary African woman poet speaks out for positive

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change, both globally and locally. According to many of the poets whose works appear here, the African womanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s assertion of her physical beauty and her rights to speak within the African household are as crucial to the project of enhancing positive change globally as her ability to reclaim the right to extol African experience and life.

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Mabel Evwierhoma (1965) is from Benin City, Nigeria. She graduated from the University of Ibadan, Ibadan in 1986 with a degree in Theatre Arts. Her area of specialization is Theater Theory and Criticism. She is currently on the teaching staff of the Department of Theater Arts, University of Abuja, Nigeria. She was Head of the Department of Theatre Arts (19982000) and Deputy Director of the Consultancy Services Unit (2001-2003). Between 2005 and 2006, she became the Deputy Director of the University's Centre for Gender Security Studies and Advancement. Her publications focus on feminist aesthetics and womancentered approaches to drama and society. She is a member of several national and international academic organizations. She speaks Urhobo, Edo, Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba (all Nigerian languages) and is married with four children.

Nuptial Counsel Mabel Evwierhoma Child be quiet when your man speaks look down and count your toes窶馬ever look up to look at his face is insolence cook his meals launder his clothes massage his ego窶馬o matter how fragile at night time no matter your aches welcome him always: with open arms and open legs. Keep quiet my child when in-laws arrive with bended knees and head bowed see to their needs and special whimsA welcome always awaits the in-law whether young, old, male or female. It does not matter what time of month or time of night. When he brings a co-wife and this causes you heart pain smile and let your lips stretch to your ears he was circumcised to please several wives.

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When your relatives arrive? careful—don’t show much love for no bases of comparison should arise. Be quiet my child— my child the day you married you became something under your husband totally to be controlled and ironed out your personality flat. Never come back here when there is a rift your room was given out to your brother as we escorted you away to your groom the only space you have is at your new home. Mother! To be tongue-tied when my man speaks means I have no voice or language or was born mute. Mother to ask questions is to live to query your situation is life itself beauty lies in asking the why of your circumstance and: To seek change is life. Why should I be quiet mother? I talk to father I talk to my brothers Father is a man My brothers are men too My man is a man like them I will stand tall mother My personality is not dwarfed and I realize this In-laws may come and go Should I be servile to none?

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Returnee Sisi Mabel Evwierhoma Sisi returned from Italy arrayed in dross not fit to magnet glory or pity The last hut of her ancestors gave way to the flood six seasons ago Now washed back without funds no home wants her in it The city lights beckon again Undaunted She is led to a shanty Of more humble standing than the hut and thatch washed away without a trace. Rootless faithless Sisi tries yet again to cross the Atlantic that washed her back rejecting what was left of her flesh

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Naana Banyiwa Horne is an Associate Professor of English at Santa Fe Community College in Gainesville, Florida. She was educated in Ghana and the United States, Horne is an educator, scholar, writer, activist, poet, storyteller, and an African culture and dance instructor. She has held teaching positions in universities in Ghana and the United States, designing and teaching various courses in English, African, African American and Caribbean Literature, African American Studies, Women's Studies, Ethnic Studies, and African Culture and Dance. Her scholarly articles and poetry have appeared in a number of journals and magazines. Sunkwa: Clingings Onto Life, her collection of poetry, was first published in 2000. Sunkwa Revisited will be published in early 2007. She is married with three children.

Anchor Naana Banyiwa Horne If I am the tree trunk You are the root that anchors me firmly in the earth keeping me sturdy and centered. You dig deep into the earth nourishing me with your sap. Strengthened, I branch out. I rise toward the heavens and blossom into fruit

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Trying Times Naana Banyiwa-Horne My mother does not care for my interventions anymore. They have become in her mind actions engineered to undermine her ability to care for herself. She accuses me of deliberately confusing her, of wanting to be the parent. But then even simple activities confound her. My mother does not brush her teeth anymore. Instead, she’s launched a crusade to rescue distressed toothbrushes. As hard as we try to keep ours out of her reach, she finds them and holds them hostage. We watch, in heartache, her teeth decay, while she stuffs pocketbooks full of toothbrushes. She collects bath soap. She collects toilet tissue. She collects wash-cloths. She collects the towels. She stashes her collection away in obscure corners. So they are nowhere to be found when needed. She tirelessly collects things to feel still in charge. My mother now doesn’t take kindly to help. When I attempt to help she tells me “Baby, wait until I can no longer do for myself.” As she struggles with her clothes, she gets exasperated when I budge in to remind her that the underpants go on first. They go under, not on top of, the sweat pants. She comes close to murder when I insist she cannot put on the sweatshirt she has picked up. It is the one she has finally taken off with two weeks food stains and body odor in it. “Quit your lying,” she tells me. “I am a respectable woman. I will not be caught dead wearing smelly clothes.” Some days I win the fight to do for her. But most of the time I am the loser. 123

If I persist in my efforts to help, she becomes flustered. And then she shuns me.

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Orgies of Mutilation Naana Banyiwa Horne How many times must we pay the price? How many times must we succumb to the knife that cuts into us, excising vital body parts till we are left with stumps where wholesome limbs once prevailed? The obsession with sheer physicality dwarfs the spirit within, destooling the soul that should reign supreme. Forced from center stage, shunted to a corner, the soul flees, leaving us wide-eyed. Left vulnerable to assault, we become devotees to orgies of mutilation, cardholding members in the cult of cut and slash, of nip and tuck. Ruthlessly, we offer ourselvesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; sacrificial lambs in rituals of atrophy. Having shifted our consciousness from visions of wholeness to atomism, we embrace our stumpsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;content to be now no more than the sum of our parts.

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Lindiwe Mabuza is currently High Commissioner of South Africa to the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, and she previously served as South Africaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany (1995-1999), as non-resident Ambassador to the Philippines (1999-2001) and as High Commissioner to Malaysia and Brunei (1999-2001). She represented the African National Congress (ANC) in Sweden (1979-1987), as well as in Denmark, Norway and Finland. Ms. Mabuza opened the ANC office in Washington (USA) (1989 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 1994) and was a Member of the first democratic Parliament in South Africa (19941995). She obtained an MA in English (1964) from Stanford University and another MA in American Studies (1968) from the University of Minnesota, where she lectured in the Sociology Department. From 1969-1976 she was an Assistant Professor of history and literature at Ohio University. As poet, she has published and edited several books.

There Are Spaces Lindiwe Mabuza There are spaces In our closeness You and I create There are spaces Awaiting their own Fulfillment In the moment of Highest awakening I dare not again doubt The preciousness of your gift Offered each time each time The soul of your music Draws mine Nearer and nearer Awake 126

To take To wed The baton of your heart In the pulse of our Wonderings The musings of the past Insinuate their Bitter life With their sweet hollow promises But since you promise no paradise Except the one we Build together Every day passing is a new marvel Anchoring desire With the tenacity of Willow roots Unbreakable even Nearest the fluidity of Their water home Because of this I have neither Sulked nor wept As each often must walk away For though Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve hated each parting And the miles between us I have also savored Every treasure stored From which I quietly Draw some Naturing Holds nurturing And some maturing Until the next Honeymoon 4 December 2002

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Sindiwe Magona, a novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, storyteller, short story writer, and actress, recently retired from the United Nations and returned to her country, South Africa. Her novel, The Green Freedom of a Cockatoo is expected soon. Mine Boys2 Sindiwe Magona An inconvenience now, the train ride seems; Laughable almost, by present horror dimmed. Black bodies gleaming, all in line, A throng, a thousand strong. Old and young alike, all bare of clothing. Standing, gleaming, seemingly unbowed. Naked a unpadded bean, Alone, each man stands His cover alone, his stifled feelings. Forward, the line shuffles, Men going for treatment. Strong black bodies gleaming Defenseless as defanged snakes. In this new scene of initiation, This bizarre manner of indiction, Each man is dusted; With powder, cleansed and purified. Risk of illness diminished This is Company Policy: Maximize Investment potential! The men are dusted, Everywhere vermin lurked; The men are dusted, 2

Excerpt from “Penrose,” a biography of the author’s father in verse.

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Everywhere vermin suspected: On head. Under arms. Between legs. One by one The mine boys are dusted. One by one With sprayings of DDT. And, coming up from down under, Naked they stand for search: Tawuza! High, lift leg! High! High! Higher! Push out! Push out! PUSH OUT! Show anus free of precious stones. Show anus free of white manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s gold.

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Freedom Sindiwe Magona I will be free But long lines once Every four years or so Are not my goal. I know. I know. For this, thousands died. My hat I humbly doff For this sacred sacrifice. I will be free. Yes, I will be free, From hunger and joblessness From living in fire traps Overrepresentation in all Diseases of chance From early graves for my Little ones; toothless-ness For my aged mothers; Blind-alley education; Inescapable welfare Sapping what little remains Of my self-respect. I will be free! Oh, yes, I will be free From fear From hunger From want Of every kind. From crunching debt; Diminishing dreams. From shrinking Life path – forth shall I burst Brimming with zest – ready and eager Tall to stand. Taller still to stretch Till by sheer force of unquenchable will Yesterday’s shadow, down the cliff I drive Yesterday’s sorrow, down deepest sea I drown To arise insistent Unpushdownable As the rising morn I will be free I will be free! Oh, yes! Yes! I will be free! Hotel Nontas – September 09 1995 130

Poem to a Brother Sindiwe Magona Language fails me In our mother tongue, I’d ask Ngowesingaphi ke lo? Die hoeveelste een is die? I’d ask In Afrikaans But in English I’m plain tongue-tied Trying to fashion a simple Question that would elicit The numeral, the number and order Telling me of your profane fecundity. But, ma’an, I can’t be Bothered any more Don’t tell me, do not introduce me To one more brat that has Sprung from your unbridled loins. I wince each time you Open your buck-teeth mouth Announce: Sisi, this is My daughter/son! Beats me How you keep track of All these children’s names when You hardly see them Never feed them Seldom soothe their cares away. Father, you call yourself! Reckless sperm-spewer, I believe More apt epithet For such brainless breeders; Men who spit seed with the Reckless abandon of dogs Pissing against unnamed street Poles or on random tufts of grass Out on the unfeeling, unthinking veldt.

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HELEN NABASUTA MUGAMBI is associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at California State University, Fullerton where she has also worked as Acting Director of the Womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Studies program. She is on the editorial Board for Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies and her research and publications encompass the areas of oral traditions, gender and Black womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s literature. African Woman (A tribute to the Working Woman) Helen Nabasuta Mugambi In the spring of your time Mother Weaver Mother Trader You summon the winds To purify the grain To cleanse the land You invoke the rain god Over the dry savanna You invoke the sun god Over the drenched land And your children survive Mother with twelve hands The survival of tomorrow Rests in those hands Now the baby Now the hoe Each stroke an echo

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Of something yet undone African Woman Your fingers are bathed in clay Sheltering secrets in ceramic circles Mother griotte You weave histories into squares of cloth Spinning stories into diamond mats Healer Mother Your eyes probe x-rays To banish death from the infantâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s days Trapped on the slippery edge of life Once closing the hole in the heart With your voice Now you mend the hole in the heart With your hands Healer Mother I throw you a song African Woman Probing busy routes of cyber space You combine hoe with cyber mouse To merge our yesterdays Into tomorrow's dawn Braiding Woman Braid me a love song To teach the child To touch the sky Braiding Mother Braid me a warrior song To arm the child To love the world Guardian of the song I come to meet you In the field At the river To march to war To march to peace To tend this toddler nation That is home Mother of song Throw me a songdrop That like you I may sing The revolution of peace 133

Like you I want to chant The revolution of freedom To teach my son The cry for peace To teach my daughter To dream revolution Warrior Mother With dancing feet Lead me across rivers To ride the setting sun Fly me across mountains To claim the seat In the parliament house To plant seats of love In parliaments of hate Mother Song Mother Festival Throw me a songdrop Guardian of knowledge You frame survival secrets Dipped into steel drums Roaring across time To cradle A song drop END August 2005

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Blessing Musariri is a published and award-winning children’s author who writes many other things besides. Her two publications to date are Rufaro’s Day (Longman Zimbababwe 2000) and Going Home – A Tree’s Story (Weaver Press Zimbabwe 2005). She is also published in New Writing Volume 14 (Granta Press 2006), Crossing Borders on-line magazine and African Love Stories (Ayebia 2006). She currently resides in Zimbabwe and travels at every given opportunity. She mistakenly believed she would be a lawyer but came to her senses after sitting and passing the English Bar Finals in 1997. She was the first African e-intern for Sable Lit Mag (and is now a member of the editorial team) and finds it an invaluable learning experience. Last Goodbye Blessing Musariri

The old neighbourhood has not stood well the ravages of time passing through the hands of careless tenants and owners who have died and left their children to fight amongst themselves as paint peels and walls collapse. The families are all gone and the houses are full of people whose trees fall into neighbours’ yards with no apology nor retrieval – broken branches of indifference. There are holes in the streets into which blind men disappear and children can no longer run to the shops barefoot, without telling their mothers that they have found twenty cents in the tuft of grass that stops the gate from closing tightly shut. Do you remember that day? The hot tar, the long grass of the small field we cut across and the dust that clung to our feet as we threw that silver coin on the counter and called out for nigger balls – half a cent each – cheap sweets, dirty on our tongues.

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The grass now swallows the black iron grill from where I used to swing and call you out to play. Strangers bask in the sun on your verandah on Sundays and don’t call out “Good morning” as I walk by. Where did your mother go while I was away? That day I came to see you and you had gone to your aunt’s home in Highfields, we talked for hours – me, legs kicking from a low branch in your guava tree while she snipped and tugged at weeds in her bed of magnolias. She said I was really her friend, not yours, and I was pleased. Why did your father walk out after all those years, without a word? The spirit that once was the neighbourhood now resides in the one place that stands untouched by the slow death of all we knew. Here my mother still kneels and praises God for all she has lost and found. I still hear my aunt’s voice above all the others in the choir, at the front, even though she now sings from Heaven. There are those here who seek deliverance from the tortures of familial spirits, those who search for peace and guidance, and me. We were here the last time I saw you – the throbbing of the beating drums in my heart, the spattering rhythm of the shaking gourds and the ululation as everyone stood up to sing. 1/2007

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Giving Blessing Musariri I have nothing small to give you, no brief stanza of essential truth wrapped up in priceless parcels of wit and metaphor. I have only this, that even I myself have borrowed â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Time.

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Pandemic Blessing Musariri I am bone covered with skin Stretched tautly across angles That were once features you admired. I see the hope in your eye That is too shy to step out From behind your measured look; A lingering trace of doubt Holding reality to ransom. There is no mistake – it is me, This faint outline of human form, This fading being of failing light Whose breath is climbing mountains Leaving me to wait for its uncertain return. The air here is thin and the view; Of lives long passed – my daughter’s Tiny shape, my husband’s ailing heap In a room I scarcely left And now shall never quit On legs that would carry me While air still moves in my body And luster still shows in my face. Yet, no one will say it – Such a small word, A mere morsel in the mouth. It’s been some time since last you saw me You left it so late that now 138

All you will recall of me Is the stench of death too long in one place. I have lingered longer than the truth Can be avoided and yet, No one will say it. A small word, an intangible poison Bestowed without my knowledge, A mere morsel in the mouth.

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Book Reviews

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Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: New Writing by Women of The Iranian Diaspora Edited by Persis M. Karim. Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 2006. Foreword by Al Young Reviewed by Charlotte Innes I only really understood the central purpose of this ground-breaking collection of writings by 53 Iranian women of the diaspora, mostly from the U.S., when I did a bit of web-surfing and discovered a bunch of angry bloggers outraged by the anthology’s lack of political specificity and by its failure (as they saw it) to highlight politically active female writers, one of whom at least (Zahra Kazemi from Canada) was arrested and tortured while she was in Iran in 2003. She subsequently died in custody. Why then had I come away from this book with a deep sadness over the world’s cultural divides? Skipping back over 300-plus pages of poetry, memoir and fiction, I found the bloggers’ charge to be true in essence. Aside from a chilling poem by the book’s editor, Persis M. Karim, on the 2004 execution of a 16year-old girl for having sex—and for (it’s suggested) lacking shame and speaking up against her accusers— there are few overt political references and very little context-setting political discussion, except for a few key events noted in the introduction, like Iran’s 1979 revolution or George W. Bush’s 2002 “Axis of Evil” speech. But then, it’s not that kind of book. What this anthology provides is a voice for those who have had little voice until now—the women of the Iranian diaspora. Their only other collective forum in the U.S. is a 1999 anthology also edited by Karim (an associate professor of English and Comparative literature at San Jose State University), A World Between: Poems, Short Stories, and Essays by Iranian Americans, which presents male and female voices. Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been is not a recounting of political horrors but an exploration of lives deeply affected by events in a country far from where they live now—often (if they are young) because of choices made not by them, but by their immigrant parents. It’s a sort of “Children of the Holocaust” book that’s more about the intergenerational effects of displacement on a daily basis than large events—more about psyche than surface. Ultimately, of course, that is history. Out of a million personal, internal shifts, big historical moments are born. The book’s central event is the flight of Iranians to the U.S. (sometimes via other countries around the world) before and after the 1979 revolution that established an Islamic republic in Iran. Some came to the U.S. as children. Others were born here. Many travel back and forth between the U.S. and Iran. All are trying to fashion a coherent sense of identity out of the disparate strands of their personal histories, complicated by the background chatter of uneasy U.S.-Iran governmental relations. The women of the diaspora face a less violent challenge than female writers in Iran who live with the threat of imprisonment for what they have written. Nevertheless, Iranian women writers everywhere are in effect on the same mission: trying to forge a literature about lives out of joint, whether from loss of freedoms or loss of home, or the immigrant sense of living in a rootless limbo or place of tangled roots. One of the best poets in the book, the late Susan Atefat-Peckham (winner of the 2000 National Poetry Award) brings an American mindset to a bus ride through Tehran. In “Avenue Vali Asr,” she says: “We need another Rosa Parks / to pin herself to that front seat,” as she is hustled to the back of the bus with the other women. “We are not sheep, I said.” Another woman shushes her: “Do not speak, she said, / It is good that way.” It’s the collision of two cultures in a nutshell—and a silence Atefat-Peckham breaks with her poem. Clashes in Iran, clashes in the States. Iranian-born parents want to marry off their Americanized daughters in arranged unions. Farnoosh Seifoddini’s two poems, “Dokhtar-e Amrika-I” (American girl) and “Dokhtar-e Irani” (Iranian girl) show how hard it is to belong in either world, especially as a sexual being —different-looking in one culture, expected to be a virgin-until-marriage in the other. The scary bumper stickers of the Iranian hostage crisis, “Iranians Go Home” and “We Play Cowboys and Iranians,” echo again and again throughout the American schoolyards and streets in the book. As a

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young Iranian girl, the writer and performance artist PAZ was proud of her assimilation as a budding lesbian in her little Arizona school. But in 1979, she is suddenly an outcast. The words “Iranians Go to Hell,” scrawled in black marker on a school wall, remain untouched for weeks. Like so many immigrant boys and girls before and since, she wants more than anything else to belong. “I was going to have to reinvent myself,” she says in her memoir, “1979.” But how? That is the question at the heart of the book. Yet in the midst of complications and inner struggles, the poems and stories also evoke some of Iran’s beauty and immigrants’ sense of loss. Perhaps more than any other group of refugees, many Iranians left expecting to go home again. A little scene in “Years Later,” by Parinaz Eleish, catches it all: I lie here remembering the nightingales of Suza narrow alleys and wooden doors with heavy doorknobs, leading to hidden gardens. I remember my lover’s limping hawk stunted trees in tiny pots, the day I left with a promise I would not keep. And suddenly, I want to sleep all day. Although the quality of the writing is uneven—Karim has deliberately presented the voices of younger, less polished writers (“emerging” voices) with more widely published ones like Firoozeh Dumas (Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America, Villard Books, 2003) and Tara Bahrampour (To See and See again: A Life in Iran and America, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999)—these poems, stories and memoirs have a powerful cumulative effect. Upon reaching the end of the book, readers will surely feel they’ve been introduced to a community of people whom they’ve come to know with some intimacy. They too will be able to say, “Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been,” pulling out, not snapshots, but profoundly human stories.

Grieving Shias By Raza Ali Hasan. New York: Sheep Meadow Press, 2006.

The Sleep Accusations: Poems by Randall Watson. Spokane, Washington: Eastern Washington UP, 2005. Reviewed by Jackson Wheeler Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes write sorrow on the bosom of the earth. —Richard II, Act 3, Scene 2 In his first full collection of poems, Raza Ali Hasan sings into being, with a voice choked by regret, a song worthy of being written on the bosom of the earth. Without being overtly political, it is impossible not to think of the contradictions being played out in the Middle East today as one reads, “While you fatten him you terrorize him / with different Asiatic techniques / into mildness and meekness” (“Mourning and Other Activities”). Politically flavored poetry can be dicey or disintegrate into unpolished rant; however, in the skillful hands of Mr. Hasan, the language of his images builds incrementally, like a honeycomb, each contributing to a great whole: “If only Gandhi’s spinning wheel had spun / a million yards of cloth we would have covered all our war dead” (“That Part of the World”). The earth he describes contains the “remorseless monsoon,” the “clerical darkness.” It is a world in which the “little imam” declares, “Eternity has no use for witnesses.” It is an eternity in which the notebooks fill up, “each quick scrawl going across and down.” It is an eternity with an “emptying, narrowing hallway,” where poets argue over the “proper ornithology for the symbols of woe.”

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Mr. Hasan takes the manifestations of civilization and unmakes them. It is no mistake that he suggests the first garden, Eden, of the three great monotheistic religions, in his poem, “In That Part of the World.” He more than suggests it; he summons it and makes of it an awful thing: In this part of the world the children know and have desires to be a martyr, to enter paradise, to leave this life. Of the twenty-nine different names for the garden, they know all twenty-nine by heart. For this part of the world began with a garden and will end as an open ditch piled up with bodies. It is the land where cathedral and mosque come apart, where the walled garden is unwalled, and where a fistful of rice thrown up in the air may or may not have become a white flock of red-whiskered bulbuls, where the alef—the first letter of many alphabets—is discovered and defined in Alhazen’s darkened Cairo room. There is mystery in these poems; there is sorrow; the poems are a tether one puts on when one picks up this slim volume, the other end firmly in Hasan’s grasp. Who knows, perhaps it is a demented latitude, a rain-drenched dream or a teahouse where we, “The countless birds. . . cut, dive, and peck at crumbs / have nowhere it seems / but the one gray sky. . .While the patrons. . .think they are free to come and go.” I enjoyed the lamentation of these poems, the power of this small book to give me a sense of belonging to the throng at the teahouse, to count myself as one of the “eloquent listeners,” to understand that “ji” is a term of endearment and respect in Urdu and is commonly added to the end of names and sentences. It is with my own rainy eyes that I write in dust, “Thank you, Raza Ali Hasan ji.” * Many of the poems in The Sleep Accusations have opening lines which suggest movie scripts or perhaps stage directions, some with a surreal twist: “The day I was born a streetlamp plunged / hissing into the sea.” “She has arrived, unpredictably. Accompanied / by music.” “I was born in the year / of the red Chevrolet that no one owned.” Randall Watson, in his first, prize-winning collection, draws in the reader with these lines as sure as grappling hooks, although, at times, one feels with as much finesse as well. These are not delicate poems; these are poems which come at the reader with a certain bravado, their many questions weaving a sense of bewilderment, adding to a dreamlike quality which pervades this collection. Perhaps Watson intends that the reader become of one mind with the friends from “Memorial Service,” who stand about “. . .resisting / a confusion that is new to them. . .,” a confusion cultivated by Watson’s precise use of the personal pronoun “I,” which deepens the mysterious world view, captured in “Barabas”: If I thought I saw Barabas last night, I didn’t. ... …If I had seen him he would have looked like a man who had been contemplating one of Schopenhauer’s epigrams for years . . .

There is the “I” which is “practiced upon like a piano”; the “I” from “Sitting,” who states, “But I also know —forgive my vagueness—the value gained / when the stranger who abhors the cold is pleased to see / that someone else is pleased to love it”; the “I” who states, in “Song”: “If I were a garden I would sneak into myself.” Here, Watson boldly takes the reader into the world of sleep, where he describes himself looking out his bedroom window, “still pretty in the ignorance of dreaming.” As with so much of the work, the reader is informed by statement, then left slightly off balance by unexpected questions, which are scattered throughout the poems like stars in the Milky Way. “Song,” which I consider one of the best poems in the

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collection, concludes with, “Where did this blanket come from? I’d wonder. / And I would marvel at such kindness.” I was ultimately captivated by this book and returned again and again to “A Dog’s Life,” which I will not reveal here. I urge the reader to discover it, while I sit back and await the next book from this intriguing poet.

Dog Language by Chase Twichell. Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2005. Reviewed by Mihaela Moscaliuc In her sixth poetry collection, Dog Language, Chase Twichell continues to assay the world with unflinching clarity and ethical commitment, though it is her introspective incursions and elegiac pieces that shape the volume’s dominant register. A “hungry ghost,” a “spur” and a “bee gathering gold dust,” the fluid “I” of Dog Language looks back “through the ghost / of self-consciousness to its embryo, / first the tomboy, / then the chick in a deerskin skirt,” while reflecting on this “strange world,” “its nations charred, / its altars still on fire, / its playgrounds still.” The volume’s five sections recount the poet’s spiritual and artistic awakening, her depression and selfmedication, relationships with family and companion animals, the father’s last days in the nursing home, the mourning process. However, there is sense of inexhaustible inventiveness and self-generative possibility that defies the book’s architectural rigorousness. “I’m trying to record whatever / I can of the instantly squandered present / so I can say in stone-plain words / what sentience is,” declares one speaker. Constantly surprised by where each poem takes us, by its associative thrusts and intriguing leaps, we learn quickly to trust the poet’s voice and vision. Each poem seems impelled into existence by necessity—be it interior (“an addiction, / this scribbling-turned-typing”) or prompted by the destruction of the Earth—and then released to discover its path and poetic form in the process of unfolding. Lyrical voices filter the world through a Zen sensibility and deliver the vision in spare, elliptical strokes, while narrative voices prod the story forward, conjugating events and emotions with conversational ease and precision. Many poems begin in a meditative state and segue into the quotidian, which they probe and illuminate with discerning eyes and discriminating compassion. Nature provides the poet with a private diction, a way to cathect her emotional energy, and a means for scrutinizing the world. Ice, puddles, and “a negative of snow” connect the speaker to her father’s “beautiful fragile brain” (which she “had not yet finished loving” before its death), while a “carnage of ferns” describes the shouts of workers “dredging coal tar / from the brook.” A poem titled, suggestively, “The Paper River” develops around the metaphor of the river as first beloved: triggering source for the imagination and the meeting place of “life and art,” it connects the creative mind to a “bed of ancient broken pears,” to “sidelong trout” with “gills like fresh cuts,” to “oblique god[s],” and to an English language “full of driftwood and detritus, / bones hung with trinkets, / scant beaches more stone than sand.” “Sometimes,” one poem begins, “a sentence has to go forth / into the world like an eldest child / […] / who knows all about sex / and has to live with the secret knowledge.” An artist who wants her obituary to say that she “wrote in the language of dogs,” Twichell thinks of poems “as a series / of small harsh rebirths.” She finds solace in the fact that words “do not live entirely inside the language” and that, despite all odds, they can “cauterize / all wounds to the truth.” “Well, that’s it. See you”— last poem and volume conclude in a tone whose registers have accrued gradually, poem by poem: sorrow, apprehension, but also circumspect hopefulness and delight in the beauty of transience. Sex makes only rare appearances in this volume haunted by the various embassies of Death. Nonetheless, insofar as “our relationship with the earth [can be] erotic,” as Sam Hamill has argued in a recent interview, Dog Language is an erotically charged, earth-bound, and spiritually vibrant collection.

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A Bumpy Ride to the Slaughterhouse by Dag T. Straumsvåg. Translated by Robert Hedin and Louis Jenkins. Red Wing, MN: Red Dragonfly Press, 2006. Reviewed by Martin Woodside “It's been a quiet week in the cave, and the Neanderthal fingers / a hairball he found in the stomach of a musk ox.” That hairball becomes the worlds first die, an act of creation that intimates us quickly with this wonderful collection of prose poems. “The puzzled Neanderthal rolls it over and over—until he starts to worry about the connotations: ‘Does this mean we'll have to / climb one more rung on the evolutionary ladder?’ his wife sighs. / ‘These are turbulent times,’ he says. ‘Anything can happen.” A Bumpy Ride to the Slaughterhouse is a slim volume, packed full of such distinctive musings. The 27 poems here display a quixotic restlessness, casting a skeptical eye on human progress—or the lack thereof —and our fading connection to the natural world. These themes surface perpetually through Straumsvåg’s juxtaposition of scientific and natural processes, his inventive use of animal imagery, and, most clearly, his preoccupation with maps, which serve only to disorient: “But the map / is a forgery, nothing is right. Not a single landmark is where it / should be. And the compass points are all dead wrong. Not even / the people are right, dressed as they are for a different life, miles / from the river.” The poet's mood oscillates from gloomy to whimsical, but his language is consistently punchy and tight. Translators Robert Hedin and Louis Jenkins present Norwegian Straumsvåg's breezy tone with simple, unadorned language that grounds the playful abstraction in his poems, allowing the author to philosophize without ever sounding ponderous or precious. “Stares” begins with “the arresting image of the speaker” “practicing animal stares,” before realizing: “The stare is easy, a feather dancing in the wind. /A way of /looking at life. The difficult part is to imagine a life other than / this. A life without trickling rain / and wet wool. Dry days. The / bumpy ride to the slaughterhouse.” The ride ends with another (de)evolution poem as “We gather around the fireplace…a / confused bunch of primates picking the lice from each other's / hair in the faint December light.” Straumsvåg's final image is grim, but the poems here balance hope with despair, suffused with a curiosity and vitality that resonate beyond the page.

The Plural of Happiness: Selected Poems of Herman de Coninck Translated by Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Kurt Brown. Oberlin, OH: Oberlin College Press, 2006.

The Thirteenth Month: Selected Poems of Inge Pedersen Translated by Marilyn Nelson. Oberlin, OH: Oberlin College Press, 2006.

Swithering By Robin Robertson. Orlando, Ottawa, New York, London: Harcourt, Harvest Books, 2006. Reviewed by Reed Wilson

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Most of Europe lies above the 45th parallel (roughly the same latitude as Minneapolis and Ottawa) and what we call “Northern Europe” lies even higher on the map—closer to the edge of the continent, its habitable climate, and the traditions of what we call “Western civilization.” It’s not surprising then to find that the poets of this region often call us to step outside the familiar comforts of hearth and home, help us to hear, if only briefly, that wilder music of what Yeats called “the deep heart’s core.” *** We might say that Belgium is where the European North begins, and Belgian art, from beer making to painting, seems often a project of racking or framing warmth. Herman de Coninck was born in Flanders in 1944 and died suddenly of a heart attack in 1997. His poems though continue to glow with an intelligence and humanity—what Wordsworth called “wise passiveness”—made available now for the first time in English by Laure Anne Bosselaar and Kurt Brown. The earliest poems here are playfully concise, managing their linguistic and imagistic cleverness with discretion. Language consistently turns on itself, reveals its insufficiency: Will I be unable to shut up about your legs that welcomed me with open arms? Or shall I tell you about a distant king whose thoughts of you are changed into the moon by a magician? And will my hands lie on your breasts as softly as snow on the most beautiful mountains I’ve ever seen? Yes. “Yes” to everything, though that word in itself is insufficient to express fully any moment of human affirmation. Ebullient and expressive imagery burns brightly in these early poems. It might all be language, but we’re reminded constantly of some sensual experiential ground: Eva jumps off mountains whirling laughter around herself like a lasso. Will she wear her joy the way soft buttocks wear sheer panties? Yes, and she will be absolutely forbidden: a paradise inside the gates of her name. Things—even lovers—are words and vice versa, and like a good conjurer who rolls up his sleeves and turns his magic box open to our view, de Coninck dares us not to surrender to their seductive invitation: Your sweaters, your red and white scarves, your stockings and panties (“Made with love” says the label) and your bras (there’s poetry in those things, especially when you wear them) are scattered around this poem as they are around your room.

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Come in, reader, make yourself comfortable, don’t trip over the messy syntax and kicked-off shoes, have a seat. The poet’s work darkens considerably after his first wife’s death in a 1971 automobile accident. Poems from the middle years feel more condensed and withdrawn, as in “Hérault,” named for a river in southwest France: “Waves of wind blow an ocean of time / softly, back and forth. / It is ebbing.” That floating pronoun in the last line refers, of course, to many things—the river, the wind, and time itself as the poet approaches middle age and its attendant losses. Nevertheless, profound faith in his work remains, and in “Mother,” he reminds us that poetry itself is more than the sum of its collected stuff; it’s “about letting things / grow moldy together, like grapes / turning into wine,” even if the process is “hoarding words / in the cellar of yourself.” When the bottle opens, the genius flows with an honest clarity that reminds me at times of William Carlos Williams, that great lover of Pieter Brueghel, arguably Belgium’s greatest painter. In the poem that begins “He had hoped it could be done without autumn,” the poet wishes for “Sudden snow. Ascetic white. Precise cold. / Less thinking about its significance.” Though he recognizes the necessity of autumn—“the sorting out, cleaning up, such endless unraveling of loss”—he wishes for a moment that “everything could just expire, and nothing needed to last.” But it’s never that easy, and in “Glass shards in the sun” de Coninck eulogizes his mother even as he recalls her painful last days: “Even while you were still alive, a slow crumbling / took place, took more and more of you.” Our work is always necessarily autumn work where “few words pass / into language / or make it on their own.” In “‘Yes, sleep,’ I Say” de Coninck reminds us that “Things happen. / They’d happen just the same without words. / But without words then.” And yet when that happens the world seems a little more cold, bare and spare than it need be. “A painting needs a frame, / as happiness needs mortal fear,” he tells us in “Poetry.” The poet’s art frames and defines our fragile hold on this earth where de Coninck tells us he “decided to grow / old. To start doing it now. . . ” * In Danish poet Inge Pedersen’s poems, translated by Marilyn Nelson, nature interpenetrates culture. Indeed, it’s often by the intrusion of what’s not human that we know who and what we are, as in the ironically titled “Room Service” where the poet tells us “I have received / and I owe my wholly special / heartfelt deep condition / to the neighbor’s cow no. 76 / who has stuck her head up / all at once at my window / with grass and clover dripping from her muzzle.” Poems often begin this way, with a striking occasion for exploring that “heartfelt deep condition” within. In the first poem, for example, “Towards Morning,” the poet imagines herself a falconer: Towards morning I ride high in the saddle: scram or you’re dead meat I snarl at all the small rodents in my heart the day is a falcon on my shoulder And in “My Grandmother Sits in the Garden,” a photograph gives way to a memory of “a little bitty shape / in a white bed,” and then, as the poet walks in the garden, to a cloud of flowers a rare, fragrant bush with a dream name closer:

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now my grandmother is sitting in the garden. Where is the grandmother now, really? Where do we locate her if not in mere fact or memory? There seems to be some other region from which experience arises, and it’s too deep for an easy name. Sometimes the poet admits to too much disrespect for “civilized” boundaries and categories. In “Circle,” she wants “an evening with dark / blue frostcrust shining / on the snow around the house / and my knees / in the hollow of yours” but also “an evening with hot / blue asphalt / and sweet wickedness / my gaze / on the curve / of another man’s back.” Sometimes she even admits to fantasizing surrender to the non-human world, as in “Blue,” where she imagines a man seen climbing a silo: dreams of casting himself from the top and in the last second before hitting earth being caught up. Borne by the wind’s whisper in the blue spruce. At the center of this collection though, is a recognition of our need to respect such boundaries even as we define ourselves by pressing against them. In “Right There in the Smoke,” she tells us that in her warm morning kitchen she can let spoons teacups knives drop out of my hands and fall into lead white out of every fixed meaning. In such moments, “in the veil the sparrows throw up like a glittering / wall before my eyes . . . I glimpse the border / of what can be said.” The poet’s performance then is the same as the protagonist in “Tight-Rope Dancer,” a poem that reminds one of Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” (Brueghel again, in another context). Her high wire act requires the “grimace d’artiste” as she must “pivot on a knifeblade” knowing that if she falls “the audience will scream. And turn away / scratch its back.” But Pedersen never falls here—the poems keep their balance. Birds become apt figures for the poet and her self-doubts, especially those that nest in the shadows of our eaves. Imaginative flights bring us back less to meditations on what might happen should we fall than to a reassertion of what really matters: “that someone will whisper, and you feel / a tickle at the bottom of your ear.” * To “swither” is to suffer indecision or doubt, states of mind that Scottish Poet Robin Robertson’s poems paradoxically both accept and resist. The title of this book, Swithering, can’t help but sound to the modern ear like a linguistic hybrid of “swerving” and “slithering,” reminding us that there are no straight paths in this world and that our survival may depend on occasionally adopting the motive style of the Old One in whatever form he takes and in whatever tradition he arises. The poems here, even more than Pedersen’s, test the limits and boundaries against which humanity doesn’t so much press as crash. And they seem to say that the spaces we inhabit are not so much won by adaptation and compromise as they are leased to us by our overlords—those natural forces that, ultimately, do with us as they will. In “Ghost of a Garden,” the poet tells us that at times he has found himself somehow in an old tool-shed “caught in the lash of brambles, bindweed / and tall ivied trees like pipecleaners. . . . ,” a place that “looks out, / vacantly, on a garden run to seed.” Meanwhile, “In the corner of the shed my father is weeping / and I cannot help him because he is dead.” “Ghost of a Garden” owes most of its force not to the odd turn with which it ends, but to the compelling presentation of that seedy garden: “the lost tennis court, grown-over benches, / a sunken barbecue snagged with blown roses.” Another and longer poem, “Between the Harvest and the Hunter’s Moon” establishes Robinson as an especially skillful descriptive poet, though again the rich and sonorous presentation of

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natural detail seems, as in the most profound and “dramatic” painted landscapes, to have some vague allegorical resonance. Location, in space and human time, is always central to Robinson’s project, and here his heavily stressed lines invoke an ancient linguistic muse as they evoke a very specific wind and seaswept landscape: Waves trail in, darkening with height and depth, almost black before they turn and crush themselves white: the rocks milking the wave to a froth of sea-foam . . . Birds in this poem are dark scavengers, and the poet listens to “the wheedling / keck of jackdaws, as they throw themselves / like soot around a deep ravine" and watches as “crows and bald-faced rooks / make heavy weather of the tussock grass.” The best we can do in such a place is accommodate our song and worship to nature’s ways and customs: I carry stones wherever I go: it is bad luck not to leave a cairn on top of the rock, a stone on top of the cairn. Meanwhile though, “under the rookery,” we position ourselves for defense or ambush, “slip a bullet in the breech and wait here / in this dark.” In “Bow” even human physical intimacy is figured in terms most satisfying to the warrior or huntsman: “I draw to full stretch, / blind-sighting in the dark / along the memory of your body” and finally “drive into your heart / up to the feathers.” “Passion,” remember, means “suffering,” and such conceits, by burning themselves into our sensibilities, resist stealthily the onslaught of mere “erosion.” In “The Trumpeter Swan,” that bird stands for us: You can learn how to fly, see all the edges soften and blur, but you can’t hold on to the height you find, you can never be taught how to fall. In “Mar-Hawk,” on the other hand, the bird stands against us, and, like a good Highland Chieftain, might lead our rebellion. A “mar-hawk,” we are told in one of the many glossary endnotes to this brief poem, is a hunting bird “that has been spoiled by clumsy handling.” The result of such spoiling is a bird that (and I offer here Robinson’s definitions in brackets) When we slip [release] him on sprung [flushed] quarry he takes stand [perches] in the trees, or rings up [climbs in spirals], towering [soaring to a hover], and rakes [drifts] away, unmade [untrained], unmanned [untamed]. Ultimately the way we “handle” the world—train, tame and domesticate it to our uses— depends on language, our terminology and nomenclature. That fact alone might, if we understand it properly, give us the courage to soar against the cold wet edges of our temperate zones.

Five Terraces By Ann Fisher-Wirth. Nicholasville, KY: Wind Publications, 2005. Reviewed by Patricia Crane In Ann Fisher-Wirth’s latest collection, Five Terraces, a fifth century Ming Dynasty scroll becomes a map the speaker consults as she navigates her past, wandering its edges the way modern museum-goers

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wander the room-length exhibit: viewing it from various perspectives, including the fog-like ether of time. That Fisher-Wirth uses her stunning ekphrastic poem, “Walking Wu Wei’s Scroll…” twice, mirror-like, to bookend the collection is daring. That she manages, through these facing mirrors, to render intimate details of her life both universal and timeless, is brilliant. What the reader experiences is a simultaneous journey through the ephemeral and the tangible. Like watching fog lift and fall over a mountain, details come clear, then slip away. “We begin with such solidity,” the speaker says. “Midway through the scroll the emptiness is greatest… Then, moving left, the solidity returns. / / But no: moving left, the emptiness returns.” Whether it’s emptiness or solidity doesn’t matter. The direction of movement doesn’t matter. Nor does it matter whether “the faintest pink in the houses to the left” is dawn approaching or dusk (“or has someone lit tiny lanterns?”). Either way, light is a guiding force. Everything takes on equal significance. While the best poems are rich with craft, insight and intelligence, one must speak of the whole collection: how what comes before informs and is informed by what follows. The way facing mirrors throw an image both forward and back on itself. So when we first read how “solidity cups fog…as two hands cup the silence where a face was,” we feel the emptiness evoked by the shifting face of grief. But by the second reading, we see the faces of the speaker’s bereaved, and by association, our own. Similarly, on first encounter with the lines “Now we have come to the place, / my love, / where I must lay you down,” we feel the implied weight, whoever “my love” might be. But by the second reading, we understand there are many loves—among them the speaker’s stillborn child, dying mother, and former lover. The “you” morphs, accruing possibility until “you” can be anyone, even the seemingly solid things of the world, even the world itself. If the mirrored poems are the ephemeral, then the poems between them are the tangible. They show us that to be blessed is to live in the thick of life, messy as it is, flawed as we are: “You cannot know the blessed ones except in mortal flesh / with mortal longing.” Everything is holy, especially the wholly lived life where Trinket (a “holy whore”) and a slowly starving cat “whose mouth gives out / the smell of death” are among “the real torn beings.” Time mars us, as it mars the scroll’s silk, and this marring is what makes us “holy / blessings.” Fisher-Wirth’s poems inhabit the traces we leave behind. Whether her “kiss-shaped seal…glowing at the end of eternity,” her bones ripening in “that teaming bed / where we all lie down together,” or her ashes scattered on the headland under the fog she loves, they grapple with the dichotomy of our seemingly solid presence and our transience; and are evidence of this poet’s willingness “to say death’s a gift. ”

With Your Back to Half the Day By Donald Morrill. Tallahassee, FL: Anhinga Press, 2005 .

Salt Memory By Jennifer K. Sweeney. Charlotte, NC: Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2006. Reviewed by Jim Natal Donald Morrill’s With Your Back to Half the Day is not an easy book of poetic lyricism. Morrill challenges the reader with expectations of complicity in the work, then lavishly rewards the effort with provocations of intellect and, yes, soul. In many of the poems, Morrill confronts readers—and himself— with a series of questions and propositions that must be individually considered; interactive reading is demanded. This does not always make for flowing poetry, but what is occasionally lost in halting music pays off in an accumulation of remarkable insights and revelations. In one such poem, the knockout “(Ready for you…),” the reader must suspend reliance on the literal and just go with the images and concepts presented until the lines begin to coalesce into a testament of a faith ready to accept, a responsive reading for one voice: The Lord of the bitter leaf, of the pond busy beneath a breeze, the Lord building roads through virgin woods to the deer— what is the secret of the Lord’s interest?

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Because this is a book of such profound reflection, it’s not surprising that mirrors come up more than once in the collection. Morrill uses them not as a tool of ego but of close examination—of himself and his beliefs, of the courses of friendships, of childhood memories, and of love that “has given me / more skin / more shadows.” Some of the most touching poems in the collection, Morrill’s second, focus on close relationships and the sense of impermanence they engender. In the lovely “(I’m supposed to think of loss…)” a tender scene becomes a musing on the transience of love, a life together, and the moment “which is merely now pressing against / our thighs pressed against each other stopping nothing.” In “Night breeze on our soles…” intimacy is: That breeze…a hike to the dam, all the holding back we’ve never managed, sex still finding the stranger in us—at least one of us fearing it’s the last time. The seven-part “Amorous Ode” descends into “the mind’s middle-of-the night / filibuster,” wandering down halls and posing questions (“In rooms almost empty / of ourselves, we’ve cried. Isn’t that praying?” and “You leave / rooms lit / with their doors closed. // Are they then filled?”). But the poet always comes back “to you / who revises me / as I write you.” Similarly, in “(You with your face and I with mine…)” he enumerates in a crescendo of modified repeating lines what is possessed and yet cannot be held: “You with your eternity and I with mine / neither ours but ours as much as anything.” But Morrill sees no reason not to “lean forward and climb” (“No peak awaits, no summing up, no wisdom in turning back.”), also restating his case eloquently in the poem “Proceed” and in the bittersweet “(Lucinda you know…)”: “ Lucinda you know the scattered firewood—grief— / and that rain is rain so briefly, and a scar a second beginning.” As the collection’s title implies, the poems are pervaded with an interchangeable half-full/half-empty sensibility. It is a book of wise wistfulness, a hymn to, in Morrill’s words, “this needy world that doesn’t need you.” * All poets are observers. Some view the world around them more acutely than others, but poets by their nature tend to see things differently than the average citizen out for a neighborhood stroll. When a poet sees details, those details coalesce into images. What is done with those details and images—and the creative choices made in selecting which of them to use—are what set the finest poets apart and make their work memorable. Jennifer K. Sweeney not only collects the myriad details, she has the deftest of touches in choosing and introducing them into her poetry. Her first poetry collection, Salt Memory, winner of the 2006 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award, is awash in gorgeous observation and leaps to imagery. She alerts us immediately that hers is a distinctive vision: in the book’s first poem, “Writer–in-Residence,” typewriter keys “perforated time”; hands “had turned to starfish”; and “everything felt deliberate, / the small boats of my shoes, // spoons exaggerated in their drawer.” Sweeney is a poet existing in palpable time—“I keep a diary of husks” and “the days stacked like fragrant wood” and “the season of throwing milk at the stars”—with an intense sensibility of the natural world. In poem after poem she reaches to define her relationship with nature or uses it to define herself, the edges of her being often blurring as in the best Zen or Rivers-and-Mountains poetry. Her awareness of the pervasiveness of nature is a chord running beneath her words, very much like the way she describes the sound of the ocean: “At night the salt-swell calls / in baritone and you come.” Sweeney hears nature’s music everywhere and in startling ways: when “Beachgrass trembles in the wind’s / vibrato,” a bird carver whittles “a kind of music / into the grain,” or when “a Pacific wind is sweeping over the city like train music.” In the lovely prose poem “Moss Beach,” she sets up a duet of place between a cello and the shore, concluding, “Our breath draws its bow across the forest, as the / forest plays the sea.” Her natural images arrive in flocks and pods, sets and stands: crows from “a lost forest…have taken / our city block // like a convention of witches”; “redwings fly up from the folds” of a skirt; gray whales travel “in love triangles

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like three vessels”; waves sound like wine / glasses, thousands of them, crashing,” and in a coastal grove “trees have knitted / themselves to earth.” Even everyday objects are seen as through a nature documentary lens: “the vase, elegant as an elk’s throat.” Sweeney showers her exceptional imagery on the humblest of plants and creatures, such as potatoes or jellyfish in the Monterey Bay Aquarium. In “Ode to a Banana Slug” the “slippery muscle mumbles / its pace” and “Warnings slide / through glossy nerves and the / yellow tube body / swallows itself / like folded dough.” Yet Sweeney confers squishy nobility on the slug not done just for poetic effect but to impart a lesson. When she begins to hike in “slug time” her “eyes absorb” the environment “leaf / by stone” and she glories in how good it is “to be a sliver / of mountainside.” This is not to say that Sweeney doesn’t deal with human matters. She does, often springboarding from the themes that have inspired poetic reflection for ages, such as painful coming of age and the wistfulness of old age, the fear of loss and the acceptance of its inevitability. Her love poems are sensuous (“Sizes”), slyly humorous (an apology for eating lobster that has other ramifications, or a description of voyeuristic doves outside her bedroom window), fresh (comparing marriage to kayaking), and comfortably erotic, like sex with a long-time spouse. However, even when ruminating on the most personal or darkest of subjects, Sweeney can’t keep those wonderful nature references from blooming. She is a teller of gentle truths and a gifted sharer of epiphanies.

Salt Water Amnesia By Jeffrey Skinner. Keene, NY: Ausable Press, 2005. Reviewed by Patty Seyburn Jeffrey Skinner’s fifth book of poems is one of the argument’s for fewer books of poetry – stay with me – and that is intended as a compliment: because we exist in such a prolific time, when, between the minimal cost of publishing a nice paperback and the proliferation of the Internet, there is so damn much poetry to read, because of this glut and the commensurate confusion of the poetry reader – what to choose? – this book, like a few other books greatly worthy of many readers’ attention, is unlikely to find itself in as many hands, before as many eyes, as it deserves. And it deserves a great many. How lovely when a book can be said to “about” something, contrary as that notion is to Archibald MacLeish’s proclamation, “Poetry should not mean, but be.” That’s all very well, but in the course of 74 pages of poems (excluding front matter) , a few abouts are welcome. Here are Skinner’s: departure and return, gratitude, indifference, animals, coffee, time, space and our role in the universe. Obviously, this book doesn’t have much on its mind. One of its pleasures is the poet’s willingness to take on the small and large-scale subjects, and the book wears its quiet profundity lightly, as if slightly uncomfortable that it’s managed to arrive at the odd, provocative and revealing places where the poems venture. A consistent narrative voice filters through these poems, and the soul belonging to the voice seems an affable sort: self-deprecating, doubting, wanting to engage and be engaged by the world but appreciative of the solitude necessary to figure things out. The strongest work in the collection are meditations on experience and observation, a series of imaginative elegies for the father, and a series of poems titled “Theory of…” that takes on various vastnesses of world and mind: Heaven, Mountains, Last Moments, Insomnia, Home, Cool, the Wounded Hen (that one begins with Simone Weil, so it’s not REALLY about a wounded hen) and, of course, Everything. The tonal watchword of both the voice and the forms is: casual. Not in terms of rigor or approach – quite the opposite – but in relation to the writer’s desired posture, both his desire to be able to take things more lightly, and his inability to do so. There’s a studied breeziness – a pleasurable affect – to these poems that balances out the abstractions and heightens the poems’ effectiveness. What I don’t understand, however, is why the book does not begin with a prose poem, when they dominate the book by approximately a 4-1 ratio (don’t count) and are the collection’s strongest works, where the voice is at its most lively, most engaging, most searching, most indicting. Perhaps it’s the old anxiety about prose poems (which this reviewer shares) but really, it’s time to get over that, time to thank Baudelaire and Co. for such a flexible form, and focus our attentions on banishing mimes. In general, the lineated poems intrude on the worlds of the prose poems, because the prose poems do manage to create whole, small worlds (after all), whereas the lineated poems carry the burden of their line breaks and struggle to be as complex as the prose poems seem to be without even trying. In other words: there are the

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popular kids and the losers, and in this case, the popular kids are actually the ones worth hanging out with. Go figure. Yes, feel free to say, isn’t there room for both? Not in my cosmos. This book offers many wonderful lines that, should you find an opportunity to spout them, will make your friends suspect that they should not be taking you for granted, and possibly should have married you. As well, Skinner gives a wonderfully accurate and dodgy description of writing is in one of the collections’ earliest poems, “Gulls”: “… The even odder thing called writing, which is not work exactly, not play, not worship, not a waste of time. Not exactly.” Not exactly, for most of us. In the case of this book, not at all. * As one might imagine, the poems of Always Danger create a world of injury, of partiality, where few stand a chance of emerging unscathed from overt peril or daily toil. And yet, somehow (shouldn’t every evaluation of strong poetry include the word, “somehow,” implicating both luck and the unknown?) poet David Hernandez manages to make this contingent existence celebratory, full of sideways revelations and salvaging moments. As well, though the poems are conversational in diction and syntax, the complexity of their tone, akin to Sappho’s coinage of “bittersweet,” invites the reader to return to them over and over, suspecting that she has not quite plumbed the poems of their offerings. There is human sacrifice in the poems, though not the kind that involves pyres or burial. Instead, they leave the reader with a pleasantly uneasy feeling, that productive sort of nausea when an image or phrase, or dare-I-say-it feeling just won’t go away. These poems are full of violence, intentional and accidental, the fatal kind and the kind you walk away from. There are fires and guillotines, shootings and beatings, the one-armed man and the bulimic girl, the despairingly sad and the unrepentant; these characters make Chaucer’s folks look like Mary Tyler Moore. (Oh, Mr. Grant….) According to the title of one of his poems, even the Chess Match Ends in (a) Fight. There are potholes and manholes and various other holes and those who will push you into them. And part of Hernandez’s gift is his unrelenting eye for the detail of harsh circumstance. The attention he pays to the fringe of a situation indicates that, like in a good poem, each detail contributes to the whole of a situation: even the anomaly matters and matches. If God is (not) in the details, as architect Mies Van Der Rohe said, Hernandez’s world is certainly orchestrated by a talented lone gunman or a committee of Cosmic Designers. The imaginative flights of these poems are guided by the conditional: a sense of longing for what might have been alongside the nagging quality of contentment. These brief journeys into the world of possibility are another part of what make living in this world bearable, accompanied by redeeming glimpses of connection that the poet provides just as a situation begins to breach our tolerance for the bleak. In “Another Dimension” he catalogs a different interaction with the beloved, in which the pain and challenges of this life are absence – but so is the relationship, as the writer is reduced to a mere encounter: you can’t have it all, you can’t even want it all, because there’s always a price. In “Bully,” Hernandez waltzes us through the life, death and afterlife of a universal character, where he still triumphs. “He should’ve died sooner but / shoved Death so hard to the floor / Death spent an afternoon snapping / his bones back in place….” You will hear, in these poems, the way a working mind works: not the way that Language poets claim, in semi-coherent thrusts and fragments, but with elisions and cohesions, digressions and recollections. “Driving Toward the Sun” begins with gridlock and ends with a meditation on the temporal nature of our existence, closing on the gorgeous line: “Our sun-warmed and borrowed skin.” The language is both compact and abundant, with figures that serve both as comparisons and music. The consciousness and voice of this work chronicles and interprets the ironies of existence without needing to trumpet the quiet wisdom of its perceptions. Hernandez’s second collection dwells in the same continuum as his first, A House Waiting for Music, but promises and delivers a great deal more.

Blue Front By Martha Collins. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2006.

Mi Revalueshanary Fren By Linton Kwesi Johnson. Keene, NY: Ausable Press, 2006.

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Wind in a Box By Terrence Hayes. New York: Penguin, 2006. Reviewed by Lynne Thompson Receiving gifts of Linton Kwesi Johnson's Mi Revalueshanary Fren and Martha Collins' Blue Front, a reader might conclude that she's been given opposite sides of the same coin minted in different countries. That is, the sure bet that human beings will treat each other as less than human out of ignorance, greed, hate or some other equally ridiculous proposition no matter what flag they pay allegiance to. As such, these two books of poetry cannot be critiqued in a single review in the same manner as one might critique any other two books of poems read in rapid succession. Poet Terrance Hayes, whose latest collection, Wind in a Box, will also be discussed below, has been quoted as saying, " . . . any two things set side by side create a dialogue . . ." That's certainly the case here—and even more so, with three. In each of these books, the poets' approach to their subject matter is fresh and non-canonical. *** Blue Front, Collins' fifth collection, recounts—within a larger historical context—the lynching of a black man in the early 20th century as witnessed by her father, who was five years old at the time. Her earlier work—The Catastrophe of Rainbows, The Arrangement of Space, and Some Things Words Can Do— was often written in received forms: sonnets, couplets, tercets, quatrains. Much of it approached its subjects from a distance ("Still night. Still / stars. But the chart / is mechanical, tin turned / in a tipsy circle…") This earlier work didn't presage Collins' fearless observations in Blue Front. The subject of lynching is one over which some African American writers, artists, and musicians have exerted a proprietary claim by virtue of having been the historical victims of this most brutal of injustices. However, many of Collins' poems manage to channel Gwendolyn Brooks in their fragmentary musical notation on the page ("in 1883 they marched they got their own high school in / 1946 they sued got equal pay for teachers in / 1953 they staged a protest got the movies in / 1963 they got the swimming pool the skating rink but when / the pool was opened to all no whites would come it closed"). Other poems take exception to predictable syntax ("two years later his father would quit and never / his mother would join the WCTU they would leave / for another town where twelve years later he / would join the at least associate with the ride / around town with twelve years after his father / quit…"). Still others make use of journalistic commentary of the period ("That punishment is most effective which follows quickly. A so-called mob outbreak is as much a magnificent and grand natural phenomena as a cyclone or an earthquake, or a thunderbolt or a flood is, and is much more unerring, more just, and more terrible. Belleville Illinois News Democrat 1909 "), making it obvious that white America has to come to grips with the same legacy as do African Americans. Braiding these elements highlight this poet's unwillingness to minimize the horror of the event by hiding behind formulaic circumvention. The result is powerful, as evidenced in this excerpt from an untitled piece: Often they cut off parts for souvenirs. This time they cut out the heart they sliced it up. Sometimes they cut off fingers they cut off toes. They cut off other parts to cut them off. Once they made the victim eat those parts. Made him take them eat them made him chew. And Collins confronts her personal ambiguity about her father's conduct later in life when she writes with pathos and candor: it is probably true for him in 1924 it wasn't just blacks but someone anyone different or maybe just something to do to join he paid his ten dollars and maybe attended barbecues dances three day Klantaquas or Klan Konclaves or maybe rode around town

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Collins is a poet fully utilizing the full range of her craft to depict collective guilt as mirrored in a single incident. The collection then is not merely a compilation of poems—sometimes lyrical, sometimes narrative—but is a compelling montage of our common history. * Johnson, a Jamaican by birth who's resided in England since his youth, is even more revolutionary— note how he's re-shaped this state of mind in his spelling of re-value-shanary— in conceptual approach. In this American debut, he tackles a different black experience with racism (and other "isms") in Britain and beyond. He depicts a broad swath of unspeakables while writing in an initially-difficult-to-parse Jamaican Creole. As Russell Banks asserts in his introduction: "Jamaican Creole is a language created out of necessity by African slaves…[I]t is a powerfully expressive, flexible, and, not surprisingly, muscular vernacular, sustained and elaborated upon for over four hundred years by the descendents of those slaves who, like LK, have migrated out of Jamaica in the second great diaspora for England, Canada and the United States." Thus, readers should not be put off by the unfamiliar because their persistence will be rewarded by the poems' lyricism. Enjoyment of the text will be heightened by reading it aloud and in one sitting, allowing the unavoidable music of the language to engulf the reader. "All Wi Doin is Defendin" begins: war…war… mi seh lissen oppressin man hear what I say if yu can wi have a grievous blow fi blow wi will fite yu in di street wid we han wi hav a plan so lissen man get ready fi tek some blows These two stanzas exemplify how music and poetry can be virtually indistinguishable when one suspends belief about what some say is the English language. "Defendin" appears early and prepares the reader to "translate" later poems like "Hurricane Blues": longtime lovah mi feel blue fi true wen mi tink bout yu blue like di sky lingahrin pramis af rain in di leakin lite in di hush af a evening twilite wen mi membah how fus time di two wi come een – it did seem like a lang lang rivah dat is wide an deep Johnson's caress of the language that informs his life is critical to conveying the pathos, anger and confusion of the black immigrant. To write in the "King's English" would undermine the truth the reader must accept when reading such lines as "now you se fire burning in mi eye / smell badness pan mi bret / feel vialence, vialence / burstin outta mi; / look out! / it too late now: / I did warn yu." Thus, the only misstep in the collection comes in Section III, with the poem "Seasons of the Heart," which reverts to more “recognizable” English; unfortunately, that decision breaks the cadence and structural integrity of the work as a whole. Nevertheless, it forces the reader to confront the fact that Johnson's success on the page lies in his unwavering admonition to listen, listen. *

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When Terrance Hayes' Wind in a Box is added to the conversation, the dialogue becomes laced with jazz. Hayes, "a train wreck of a sentence jammed inside a throat," uses language to blow narrative off the page, to engage the reader in memories and in what can't be remembered. He has no issue with putting himself in the middle of the mix, as in the three poems all entitled "The Blue Terrance." After all, he has tipped you off in the first lines of the first poem: This ink. This name. This blood. This blunder. This blood. This loss. This lonesome wind. This canyon. Suddenly, we are all participants with him. We recognize— what? As with Collins and Johnson, a collective responsibility for the dark side of American history? In "A Postcard fro Okemah," for example, Hayes expresses the same pained wonderment that haunts the work of Collins and Johnson: Turned from the camera's eye, hovering, between river & bridge, the hung woman looks downstream, & snagged in the air beside her, the body of her young son. But the reader should not rely on this poem as evidence of a narrow Hayes’ vision; his concerns traverse the boundaries of race and circumstance: I think of a string of people connected to one another and including the two of us there in the basement linked by a hyphen filled with blood linked by a blood-filled baton in one great historical relay. Through prose poems, list poems, edited epistolary communications and other stylish stylistics, he conveys the broader cultural divide of race, identity and culture between individuals ("and then the two of us were in the wet grass / wrestling beneath a star clogged night / like two heads fighting for the same body / or maybe like two bodies fighting / for the same head…"); between individuals and their environment ("On the Animal Channel, an Asiatic Black Bear adheres to a pear tree. How close are you willing to get, if it means getting eaten?"); even within himself ("I remember what the world was like before / I heard the tide humping the shore smooth"). His interest, after all, as he defined it for NPR in 2006, is in "a Whitmanesque notion of poetry". Perhaps this is why he wrote "at the end of a life filled with music we all go without singing." This collection of poems embodies—as do those of Collins and Johnson—what Hayes has described as "the expression of emotion / intellect…re-imagined, refined, re-mastered… ." Read them for their mastery as well as for their commentary on monstrous human behavior.

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A Worldly Country By John Ashbery. New York, NY. Ecco 2006 Reviewed by Fred Moramarco

John Ashbery’s very first collection of poetry, Turandot and other poems, published by the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1953, includes four drawings by Jane Freilicher. Both Freilicher and Ashbery at the time were budding artists of the New York School their long and successful careers ahead of them. Now, over a half century later, a detail from Freilicher’s lovely, muted, Afternoon in the City graces the cover of Ashbery’s 25th book of poems, A Worldly Country. Their’s has been a lifelong friendship and sometimes collaboration—Ashbery wrote an introduction to Jane Freilicher, a sumptuous book sampling her work, and he has long been an admirer and advocate of her paintings. The painting on the cover of A Worldly Country complements the mood of the poems within perfectly, and underscores the contraries expressed in the book’s title. It portrays a New York City landscape in earth tones of brown and beige, a grey-brown haze drifting in front if the Jersey shore across the Hudson. The colors of the painting are its attraction: these are not urban shades at all, but rather “country colors” associated with rural landscapes or pastoral scenes. Yet this is unmistakably an urban scene, buildings crowded together, a rooftop view of New York. There is order and symmetry here, but also randomness and a kind of unexpected calm. That last sentence might serve as a description of Ashbery’s poetry as well. I first heard Ashbery read his work nearly half a century ago (can it be?) in 1963 at Julian Beck and Judith Molina’s Living Theater on 12th Street in New York. The Tennis Court Oath had just been published and it was clearly (at least in NY) the “in” poetry book of the year. His first book of poems, Some Trees (Turandot was actually a pamphlet rather than a complete collection) selected by W.H. Auden (Ashbery has said recently that Auden didn’t like the book, but accepted it grudgingly and wrote a decidedly lukewarm introduction to it) showed some formal innovation, though most of the poems were written in traditional forms, usually with a particularly contemporary twist. His sestina, “The Painter,” for example, clearly shows the influence of Abstract Expression and reflects his long association with painters and other visual artists. But the innovative elements in Some Trees were slight compared to the radical linguistic disjunctions of The Tennis Court Oath. It seemed as if every young poet in New York was crowded into the theater to catch a glimpse of this new avant-garde poet who had just returned from Paris and set out to revolutionize the craft (if not the art) of poetry by imitating the manner of the French surrealist, Raymond Roussel, the subject of his Master’s Thesis. Here was a poetry of seemingly pure language, words stripped of their conventional associations and lines leading anywhere but where a reader might expect them to lead. Yet it was also a poetry of subtle but insistent allusiveness (beginning with the allusion to the French Revolution in its title) and showing a broad and deep command of French, English, and American literary traditions. Since that time, Ashbery’s poetry has taken many turns, but each successive work remains distinctively his own style. A Worldly Country is certainly Ashberian, and like Freilicher’s paintings, which often take the perspective of views from her New York window, a vase of flowers set against the New York skyline, it underscores the duality of the book’s title. The title poem opens the collection with a playful pairing of contraries: things from the city and country, humanly made things and natural objects, culture and nature, rhymingly juxtaposed in inventive couplets that connect “insane clocks on the square” (a humanly constructed series of things from insanity to keeping time, to an urban square) with “the scent of manure in the municipal parterre,” an ornamental garden smelling of manure. You can almost see Ashbery smiling as he rhymes “square” and “parterre.” (And later in the poem as he rhymes “novel” with “hovel,” “doing" and "ungluing” and “chickens” and “dickens.” ) This is the whimsical Ashbery of “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape” an early poem drawing on imagery from his upstate New York childhood. This duality is also a reflection of Ashbery’s lifestyle and living arrangements. For many years he has had an apartment in New York City as well as a “country house” in upstate New York, and the success of his poetry has taken him throughout the world as a kind of American cultural ambassador. “A Worldly Country” is a late-in-life poem, retrospectively accumulating images and events from various life phases, trying to come to some understanding of the piled up bric a brac of life. The wildness

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of youth (the Ashbery of The Tennis Court Oath) has turned into the quietude of age (the Ashbery of Chinese Whispers and A Worldly Country) and a revolutionary style has become a widely recognized artistic signature. The noise, stench, and commotion and upheavals of the first part of the poem (insane clocks, scent of manure, great parade, squawking geese, a world in which “all hell broke loose” [another of Ashbery’s ‘literal’ clichés.] by evening have become calm again. The narrator surveys this scene: As I gazed at the quiet rubble, one thing puzzled me: What had happened, and why? One minute we were up to our necks in rebelliousness and the next, peace had subdued the ranks of hellishness. The poem’s final quatrain captures both the fragility of age (life as a “pathetic skiff”) as well as its inevitability and even, in a Whitman-like way, the desirability of death. (“To die is different from what anyone supposed,” Whitman wrote, “and luckier.”) The image of waves “anchored” to the bottom of the sea implies both the passage of time and the steady connection of one moment to the next. (It’s an image Ashbery is especially fond of. One of his books is called A Wave.) The quatrain reverses the traditional imagery of land being associated with life, and the ocean with death. Here our lives are the times we have been battered around in the sea, and death (and freedom from life) comes as we reach the shallows, a place where we can finally be at home. So often it happens that the time we turn around in soon becomes the shoal our pathetic skiff will run aground in And just as waves are anchored to the bottom of the sea we must reach the shallows before God cuts us free. Many of the poems in this newest collection have this retrospective “looking back at life” quality. Here are a few openings that walk us into the past: For a while we caught the spirit of things as they had drifted in the past. It all happened long ago— a murky milky precipitate of certain years then drawing to a close, like a storm sewer upheaval We wandered in and out of the lobby of a large house in history. There was little to see at first, then our eyes growing accustomed to the darkness we could make out figures on a bridge This last marvelous summation of the human state of affairs (will we or will we not enter that large house in history and will we get to know something about those figures on the bridge?) is from a poem called “The Ecstasy” (from ex-stasis—to put out of place). These are the poems of a man who has literally made a life of words outside the body (written rather than spoken) and whose words have become a surrogate for the state of the language in our time. Ashbery turned them into a “published city,” as he calls his canon in Flow Chart, and now they have become “a worldly country,” encompassing the books he has read, the movies he has seen, the places he has been, the people he has known, and the events that have constructed a life. In his introduction to Jane Freilicher, Ashbery comments specifically on the painting on the dust jacket of A Worldy Country, and like much of his commentary on visual artists, the words relate to his own work as well: The pathos and grandeur of this small painting, 12 by 14 inches, are extraordinary. I’m not sure if it was painted before or after September 11, 2001, but the vulnerability that moves us now when we look at the city’s skyline is certainly there. Perhaps it was always this way. New

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York after all is an aggregate of people and buildings that just go on and on until they stop. The hushed moment enshrined here is the product of infinite works and days and the compounds thereof that constitute a life. The hushed and noisy moments enshrined in A Worldly Country are also the product of the infinite works and days that constitute John Ashbery’s life and what a pleasure it is and has been to have the ongoing chronicle of that life transmuted into the words of his poetry, and to have that archive present in the large house of history we all inhabit.

A Complex Bravery By Robert Lipton. Grosse Pointe Farms, MI: Marick Press, 2006. Reviewed by Lee Rossi “My skin feels full of liquid,” Rob Lipton tells us in his first full-length collection, A Complex Bravery, “like a drowning victim / or like always being 17 / in my parent’s kitchen / hamburger helper set to simmer.” As if he were returning to the 1970's, the era of the deep image, but this time determined to do it right, Lipton's attack is an angry sifting of fragments, with all the ferocity and vitriol of a Rush Limbaugh monologue. Of course, he’s got family on his mind, or at least the fallout from the nuclear family: his brother the pot dealer “with his hands / resting on his open legs, palms up . . . waiting like a submariner Buddha / for the depth charges to explode”; his mother, who “had her toes painted / by the devout Filipina grandmother . . . [and] would shout for her little angel / to ‘get a load of the funny accent’"; his “Stepmommy,” who “hovers over my dad / like a Swiss Guard at the Vatican. / Funny clothes, weapons from / the wrong century, vigilant / eyes watching over someone / already dead”; and, of course, Dad, whose Purple Heart was “self-inflicted / done with the panache / of the desperate.” Yet the contamination registered by this Geiger counter of a poet spreads from Ground Zero into every corner of society. High culture and low are implicated. Popular Magazines (“Sassy”) and performance poets (“Nice like Death”) spread the poison: “smooth and hushed, a stage whisper, a winking sigh, beautiful syllables pile up like decorative pillows, a place for the damned to rest their heads.” We live, he seems to say, a deathlike dream which shelters us from the real deaths we inflict on others, specifically Palestinians (“Shaheed”) and Iraqis (“Not Me in Nablus”). “I wasn’t the boy shot through the hand,” he tells us in the latter poem, nor the girl with “circular rubber bullet bruises,” nor the uncle “hung by his feet . . . until blood bloated and blushed his head.” “I am still telling this story,” he reminds us, “an insightful, and more to the point, living narrator / who lets you believe death / is for someone else / in some other place.” The writing is clean, the jokes sting like the bitterest chocolate. Lipton knows what he wants to say, and can barely say anything else. His is a poetry in which “The detail is astonishing, the precision suspect.”

Fire Baton By Elizabeth Hadaway. Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 2006.

Cures Include Travel By Susan Rich. Buffalo, NY: White Pine Press, 2006. Reviewed by Jan Wesley Elizabeth Hadaway's debut book, Fire Baton, is so honest and probing it rubs the skin raw, leaving as many "…blisters, tics, and every cicatrix," as a fire baton. Her poems are fueled with a voluminous vocabulary, her rhetoric’s accusatory, full of hereditary anger "beyond / a trite Darwinian propensity" and language is tinged with regionalism and wallops of geographical and societal distress. Hadaway is from Appalachia, and she's "talking American Viscose, / Magic City Mortgage Co. / …moonshiners who read Cicero…," writing with both despair and fondness of this often abused area, using a wealth of contrasts to create emotional tension. Hadaway's wildly divergent language is absent of delusion and her poems are

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structured like nesting boxes where phrases open to images, images to narratives, all beautifully formed by social awareness, love of history, the imprints of ancestry, like the great-great-grandfather marked by a “blue tattoo… [of] his own name.” Hadaway's artful uses of double entendre and internal rhyme combine with vibrant verbs to enhance narrative construction. In one of many poems that examines un-romanticized youth, she uses short phrases and squealing turns in line breaks to render succinctness and speed in building the narrative: Now the state is making him a quick example: out of school and into prison. Soon. The sentences come down in mandatory order and he is just the sort of guy who stays to be found guilty. She refers effortlessly to mythology, legends, and notorious characters that ballads are written about, everyone riding shotgun with danger and reeling in complicated connections. "A Scratch" opens as the narrator fumbles with a record, then moves to reflection as "spirals pour / endlessly into the center, thin but substantial . . ." With a swift shift the poem erupts into a breadth of historical narrative, involving Cesar Frank, Proust, and even a reference to James Dean, with spurts of rhymes: "spouse," soused," "dead" and childbed" before the poem weaves onward to 1995 and back again to a character who "tells herself what does not hurt / cannot be beautiful." In one of many surprising endings, there is a musical enactment of a skipping record as we hear, "even the music / even the music / even the music / is no escape." Her poems go beyond effect to what I think of as after-effect, where cohesion allows us to linger in another level beyond the levels the poems have already created. There is a resonance of marred geography in the "worm-wired house," and religious disenchantment when "the crunch of bone is what religion thrives on." There are disturbances left by "Artifice in all its forms, economies / and other opaque faiths," an omnipresence of Civil War history, indulgent grieving for a NASCAR driver, the demise of both family pets and old boyfriends she thinks of in the way "a tongue / continually roves / half of a broken tooth." We understand the smoldering effects of lousy self-image and dead poets, a flawed and hapless lineage, and others who have let her down. Though the world Hadaway observes is crumbling and malfunctioning, there is also a deep tenderness in her poems that glows beneath the surface. In "Public Transportation," a disjunctively structured poem that creates wonderful unity through the several ways that the lines could be read, Hadaway writes, "we would manage to meet and immediately / know we were it… our hands held / solemnly braced / …on the seatback before us / …. in ecstasy pulled / through the tunnels." In a world where "we were doomed and glorious," there is also "the soul / he saw blaze into grace." As Hadaway repeatedly "steps to the edge," with her clarity and wonderful craft, we reap the benefits of her unstoppable twirling, her "hands reached, resolute, / into the fire." * “Listen, what if we could leave here….” asks Susan Rich in her new book, Cures Include Travel. “On the ascent I let go – / let my life drift / to the side like litter…To where imagination holds / the small blue craft of conversation.” Via a constant drive for voyage, she uses three sections in the book to guide us to understand the people she comes across, to fill us with geography, and, in the last section, with a notion that the first two sections have operated through flashback. In the Sahara there is “the language of drift and dune”; in Kismayo, “an articulation without shame.” We are privy to the trials and tribulations of war and homelessness, of beggars with “gorgeous hands,” the many “strong-stemmed survivors” Rich has met, as well as the men she has loved and lost in her travels. While her subjects transform constantly, travel changes Rich too, as she seeks new perspectives and satisfies her deep yearning for, as Rich herself calls it, “the external journey of the traveler and the internal mapping of the poet.”

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What seems very important to Rich is transformation: “I seem no longer / myself, no longer Susan, no longer / a soft turquoise dress waiting / to answer to the weight of her own limbs.” Tender and seeking, the vocabulary of the traveler is always “Sponging up new nouns in a new country” as well as the blunt, intolerant language of those she meets who might say “Go back where you came from,” or those who are more inviting, where “the phrases linger / reassembling into light / branches of laughter.” It’s hard not to be moved by the electricity of the senses, when “She conjured human voices, / smoke-filled cars, the pepper scent of men…” Creating common experience in this book is its key. We can understand “as a worried mother licks her son’s elbow / …to see if the boy / had been diving in the sea.” Because of the author’s interest in her hosts, we can imagine, with more than merely horror, “two hands bathed in the white light / of a letter bomb, a girl choking / chickens as she stands in the coop / desperate to stay alive.” Whether the stranger is a baker, a Bosnian growing begonias, the women in Kismayo “telling their men / to take action, to do something / equally bold” or a mother who can “disappear dust / on two bent knees bearing down on a faux marble floor,” we are all in this together. We are all “the flint and fissure of our / times’ brutality.” The traveler’s language and the hosts’ language become fused in deeper rhythms than a compilation of information. The traveler may exclaim, “This globe is mine.” The host may ask, “Who are you, yaa tahay, who are you?” And the internal journeyer might ask, “What does the truth taste like?” In this book, questions and answers cohere: we are all of similar experiences if we just listen, if we just pay attention and hear the stories that everyone has lived.

A Faithful Existence By Forrest Gander. Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005.

Collected Poems By Lynda Hull. Introduction by Yusef Komunyakaa. Afterword by David Wojahn. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2006.

the book for my brother By Tomaz Salamun. Orlando, Austin, New York, San Diego, Toronto, London: Harcourt, Inc., 2006.

Exceptions and Melancholies Poems 1986 – 2006. By Ralph Angel. Louisville, KY: Sarabande Books, 2006.

Poem of the Deep Song By Federico Garcia Lorca. Translated by Ralph Angel. Introduction by Greg Simon. Louisville, KY: Sarabande Books, 2006. Reviewed by Sarah Maclay “The basic gesture of my writing is a listening.” So writes Forrest Gander in A Faithful Existence. “I come to consider language by how it uses me.” Ostensibly a book of essays, this incredibly lyric, spacious piece of writing feels more like a book-length poem, or a series of aphorisms braided with journeys, and I keep coming back to it for the same reasons I return to the poetry that most opens me—very quietly here, as though it were a limpid pool, offered for our bathing: “Shifting my perspective, poetry reconstructs my relationship to the world and to the future. I am torn awake.” Just as Emerson’s definition of self-reliance turns out to be different from what it might mean if we had received a collection of his essays from a well-meaning parent or boss who had not actually read the book, Gander, too, has something unusual in mind when he thinks of what it might mean to be faithful, and it is tied, essentially, to his work as a translator: “A translation might be merely dependable, replacing one word with another in syntactical units, or faithful where faith is a form of intuition and openness.” The nearly religious gesture implied in a radical listening is hardly tied to some pre-founded idea of religion or, in fact, anything, but tethered, loosely, to a state of being: “We must force ourselves open to discoveries across the

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grain, contrary to what we comfortably ‘know.’ In this, we may be best led by silence, an almost religious gesture of openness.” Even formally, it’s refreshing to find so many of the essays opened up on the page, paragraph to paragraph, by white space—a space and silence that we need to absorb the revelations of each densely aphoristic pod, however sparely put, before moving on to the next. To do otherwise would feel greedy, gluttonous. As a collage—of the personal, the aphoristic, the travelogue, even the pilgrimage, with literal side trips to Mexico and Bolivia, figurative ones to the striking, rediscovered poems of Besmilr Brigham and the weirdly synchronous views of Traherne and Merleau-Ponty, and even a backtracking to geology, Gander’s first love—what becomes obvious, in the reading, on the road, is that the book, the take, the percevoir, regardless of subject or momentary form in the movement from essay to essay, section to section, are all startlingly congruent—and so, we are being initiated into a world view, quite literally—a way of looking, a way of listening/opening. One of the most interesting side trips reflects on a literary hoax, “The Strange Case of Araki Yasusada.” Gander talks elsewhere about “the self-obliterating ecstasy of translation,” the way a translator “allows herself to be led away from a world familiar by consensus. For her journey is nothing less than a burial in that silence in which words were begotten.” This self-effacement becomes literal in a different kind of way with Yasusada, published widely and celebrated as a Hiroshima survivor, who turned out to be fictional. Of the many responses to this fact, Gander considers the way in which the writings of “an author who does not exist about a place that was once blotted out” might be “a radical contemporary aesthetical response to one of the worst human atrocities”—in fact, “a poetic act of empathy.” In “a gesture of impossible solidarity,” he theorizes, the still unknown writers “relinquished their own identities as authors and became invisible.” “Are you aware that the glow generated by light-producing organs on the undersides of some fish acts to countershade them, erasing the shadow cast when they are viewed from below against the lighted water above?” Gander asks, in an essay on the act of translation. “Just so, the translator must disappear.” It is just this kind of curious attention, of generous stillness, just this embrace of erasure that allows the voice of this author to be so beautifully, skillfully present. * Thanks to Graywolf and to series editor Mark Doty’s decision to publish the Collected Poems, you could throw a dart and, at any point, hit a cache of prototypical Lynda Hull: gorgeous in its surfaces, shattering in its urgency, unflinching in its taste for disclosure, and compelling in its music, which serves to pull a reader through cascades of lengthy sentences strewn across multiple lines that both heighten the intensity of the imagery and create the sense of momentum so intrinsic to the experience inscribed in these pages. For the Hull-struck among us, it is a relief to have her work collected, finally, in one place. Simply: it’s about time. After years of trading stories about how we’ve managed to come across out-of-print copies of single volumes, thankful for Iowa’s re-release of Star Ledger, guilty as charged for slipping Xeroxed copies of stray poems from the other rare volumes or aged litmags into, yes, even snail-mailed envelopes that moved from one part of the continent to another, it is astonishing and heartening to see both the consistency and mastery of this voice, as it makes its way across the poems of the three slimmer volumes represented here, and to see how the poet was moving, by the end (the foreshortened end—no one who is moved a hair’s breadth by this work can avoid being confronted by this loss). Progressively elegiac, the work is not only profuse and startling in its swirl of imagery, but increasingly tight and risky in the line to line chances taken in editing and syntax, as well as notable for its inclusion of a broad sweep of dictions—even, in the seven-part elegy for a friend dying of AIDS, “Suite for Emily,” daring to sample that other Emily (Dickinson) at significant points in the midst of a sweep that feels more Whitmanian—at times, Ginsbergian (specifically, parts of Howl and “America,” most prominent in the “Address” to the Death Angel). This poem mourns, but also celebrates, the painful but, more importantly, shared past and present of Hull and her friend, bonding time and emotion, while, formally, rubbing together the two poles of American poetry.

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Marked by its characteristic balance of saturation and measure, veering across the page and the globe in webs of frankly glorious sentences, “The alto’s / liquid geometry weaves a way of thinking, / a way of breaking / synchronistic / through time . . .” It makes impressive sense to discover, in David Wojahn’s beautifully restrained afterword, that Hull, whose favorite poet was Hart Crane, master of mind-bending sonics and vivid, metaphoric visuals, actually memorized The Bridge in its entirety. And the sentences, in length and momentum and cavalcade, have learned from the trumpet solos of Chet Baker, another hero, keeping the music alive for as long as possible without taking a breath. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out your horn. So ends “Ornithology,” in which the speaker and “Eric in casual drag” search for “Bird’s grave.” Bonnard and Picasso, “tiles / ultramarine to viridian,” Marilyn and Clift, the “sherried autumn air” of Barcelona, “the blue lights / of emergency,” the “AWOL junkie lover,” the “Night Waitress,” “the room a cage of rain,” the bent spoon and “the match’s wavering blue tongue,” “that drenched grisaille of morning,” “Fever, down-right dirty sweat” and “Rude armfuls of orchids” all find their way into these pages, this life, “the mind’s blind odometer,” this urgent gorgeousness. * I think of Tomaz Salamun’s poems, which regularly amaze me, as creating a kind of associative expanse, like rooms where the mind can bloom with vigorous leisure because of the way their parallel structures, surprising image collages and zinging bursts of emotion get stirred together in an almost incantatory, shocking yet oddly calming surrealism. the book for my brother, still full of circularity and wild juxtaposition, as well as points of extreme tenderness and longing, is also a deeply unquiet book, somehow less given to creating an experience of space, within the poems themselves, than an expression of colossal density—as each moment ricochets uneasily to the next in an attempt not so much to “shore up fragments,” a la Eliot, as to place them in momentary, uncomfortable alliance, where they resist both coherence and obvious closure as the world seems increasingly tied together only by “silk and glue.” The poems are relentless in expressing an unease that feels deeply rooted, if “rooted” is even possible now, in the barrage of the last few years, as the lines rifle through moments flung from different continents and eras, from both the dreamscape and the quotidian, beautiful, precise, increasingly bizarre world of everyday observation, in a wild embrace of dictions and tones, with a pulse that leaves us breathless and disoriented. In other words, this would be realism, if realism’s project were to depict the way it feels to live in these times from the inside out, using a battery of correlatives from every possible realm. Raucous urgency, each line slapping the canvas with its energy, with its interior and imagistic cacophony, like a van Gogh brushstroke, gives this collection its more than usually nervy-and-unnerved signature—and, curiously, it’s in the poem “Fou de Vincent,” very near the end of the book, that we actually get a few moments of relative calm. But bringing up Vincent suddenly illuminates the texture of the rest of the book as a reminder of how very alike the brushstroke of its pages is to the brushstroke of this poem’s namesake. Working with a whole band of translators (ten of them), including Christopher Merrill, Joshua Beckman, Anselm Hollo, Peter Richards, Elliott Anderson and a number of others, Salamun achieves, in translation, a striking consistency of voice and style among the poems that follow this pattern of urgency, with occasional rest stops where momentary lightness or humor, or even downright, absurdist hilarity (“Dog! what do you do with your hair?”), allow us a bit of breath before the next dash into a sprint through the wreckage of the tied-together world. Even God doesn’t fare too well here, as we see in a persona poem from his perspective: “To be God is first class. / / Do you understand the title now? / / It’s provisional. The true one / is MURDER.” It’s all a staccato elegiac, a tonic to prod us awake, stuccoed with diamond aphoristics: “Fear is / only a quarrel / about property.” “The coins are drops of sweat poured out in silver.” “Lots of geniuses / killed themselves because light / tore their heads off, but that’s unhealthy.” This poetry is anything but “reflected in tranquility.” On the contrary, it’s a kind of stream-ofconsciousness jeremiad—not didactic but full of the urgency of warning and alarm that is too great to contain in any one psyche—an unfettered collection built, it seems to me, to risk standing on the very edge

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of danger and nonsense that the world seems, increasingly, to have become—and it begins, appropriately enough, with a startled close-up of the devil, looking lonelier and more human and seductive than we might have imagined—and only inches away. * Even the crow, in his raucous song, creates space in his singing. It is those moments of silence that help to create the piercing quality of the caws that come between—that give them, even, measure—that build in us a sense of expectation, even dread. And so, when one thinks of flamenco, and if one is lucky enough to hear it, even a recording of cante jondo (deep song—the guttural, deep-seated, piercing growl that, historically, precedes and informs flamenco), it becomes apparent that what we remember—the sudden, feisty, lashing steps; the cry that seems to come up from the soil—is given the precision of its being, the privilege of its intense registration, as a result of the way it is flung across space, in time. It’s the old story —matter punctuating “negative space,” the yin and the yang of it—but in this case, played for ferocity: in the case of Ralph Angel, an incredibly lyric ferocity—an elemental tenderness. It is a difficult blessing to have two books released in the same year—in this case, Angel’s translation of Federico Garcia Lorca’s Poem of the Deep Song and his own, ample and seamless collection of selected and new poems, Exceptions and Melancholies. Having had the good fortune of being able to actually hear poems from both books read aloud on several occasions, I have become increasingly aware of how these two books inform one another. Compare, for instance, the following passage from “Tidy,” one of the last poems in Exceptions . . .: I miss you too. Something old is broken, Nobody’s in hell. Sometimes I kiss strangers. Sometimes no one speaks. Today in fact It’s raining. I go out on the lawn. It’s such a tiny garden, Like a photo of a pool. I am cold, Are you? with his translation of Lorca’s “Ay!”: The cry leaves shadows of cypress Upon the wind. (Leave me here, in this field, weeping.)

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The whole world’s broken. Only silence remains. (Leave me here, in this field, weeping.) The darkened horizon’s Bitten by bonfires. (I’ve already told you to leave me here, in this field, weeping.) The utterance declares itself, simply. It does not explain itself. And then, over space, over silence, there’s the leap. The next utterance, the next observation, the next image comes. It adheres, without effort. There is, in both of these poets, an incredible sense of trust in the moment—the moment of the emergence of the poem, the moment in its already presented correlatives, in its internal and external exigencies, in its simple facts. Lorca’s parallelism is approximate in Angel’s pulse, the small changes in line break (true, as well, in the Spanish) subtle and deadly. In the afterword at the back of the Lorca translation, Angel writes that “Lorca referred to cante jondo as ‘a stammer, a wavering emission of the voice . . . [that] makes the tightly closed flowers of the semitones blossom into a thousand petals . . .’” Later, he notes that “the cry is essential to cante. Not unlike the guitar, in fact, the voice of the cantaor is considered an instrument of the cry, the cry that dares to break the silence, just as the hands are an instrument to break the silence, as are the feet.” Listen to how Angel’s English version of “The Cry” (“El Grito”), approximates the harsh yet haunting resonance of a guitar, Lorca’s revered instrument—so like an inner human voice, deliverer of duende: From the olive trees a black rainbow veils the blue night. Ay! Angel has wisely preserved the Spanish exclamation here—which repeats, in spiky punctuation, across the poem—with all of its suddenness, its open-throatedness, rather than trying to translate it. But curiously, the many “s” sounds in the Spanish original of the same three preceding lines (“Desde los olivos / sera un arco iris negro / sobre la noche azul”) soften the sound, like a breeze whispering through leaves. Oddly, and I’ll risk a second of heresy here—the very sound of the largely s-stripped lines in the English version, honor, in translation, the larger sense of what Lorca is getting at, I think, in these poems as a whole. After all, “The guitar / makes dreams cry” (“Six Strings”). “The cry of the guitar / begins. / The wineglasses of dawn / are broken” (“The Guitar”). One cannot out-Lorca Lorca. But it is possible to actively translate the tone of that resonance, the tone of that cry, the tone of that guitar, the bit of resonance in the air after the string is plucked and let go—and it happens, in our current version of American English, without the “s,” as though the guitar is allowed to open its whole mouth. It is an arid space through which these sounds must travel— these human sounds—whatever instrument releases them. Losing much of the sibilant procures the chance for echo.

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Angel disarms us, poem after poem, by opening in media res, in the middle of things, without explanation, trusting anyone who might encounter it to get what they need, as in, for example, the poem “Twilight”: “That he might just snap was part of it, blind himself, and, well, you’re there.” Or, on the facing page of Exceptions . . ., in “Interior Landscape”: “In the blink of an eye, a light rain. / Among the ten-thousand synapses, the sound of rain, but / delicately, the sound of leaves.” It had not occurred to me so specifically, until seeing these books together, that Lorca, too, engenders the same kind of trust when he begins: “In that house, they defend themselves / against the stars. / The night is thrown down” (“Cordoba Barrio”). Above all, duende is central to Angel, as to Lorca. Much has been said about the way Angel’s poetry operates like jazz—that there’s a moment-to-moment improvisatory quality about it—and it’s worth remembering here that “improvisation” means, among other things, “to make or provide from available materials” as well as the way it involves moving into unforeseen territory—the sort for which one cannot prepare or recite for in advance of its own happening. This is part of what gives his work an incredible sense of intimacy—we are let in, not in the same profuse catalogue-of-external-detail way as with, say, O’Hara—but like O’Hara, we have a sense of being in someone’s skin, walking around in there, in the shower, on the streets—with all there is to celebrate or to be wrong about, or un-heroic about. And we are given the moment-to-moment shifts in perception—as, it seems, they occur. Angel points out that much of the American jazz he listened to, along with Andalusian cante jondo, while doing this translation, can be thought of as “American duende.” He quotes Lorca, in a 1933 lecture in which “he described duende as a ‘black sound,’ saying, “I have heard an old maestro of the guitar saying, ‘The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you from the soles of the feet . . .’ ” Perhaps improvisation itself—this commitment to being in the moment of the process, beyond form, completely open to it, as it occurs—is a way to tap into duende, because no one can prepare us for the shock of what, in each new moment, turns out to be true. “And so, another cover bursts into flames. / And so, even nakedness / is only symbol of doors opening.” The movement in Angel’s poems, moment-to-moment, poem to poem, line to line—it’s all finally about “Getting Honest.” The poems in Exceptions . . . , in our current American idiom, are a model of negative capability, as Keats first coined and defined that phrase: “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after facts and reason.” They are luminous with the “mystic lyricism” we find in Rilke and they have taken to heart Ashbery’s radical embrace of process; by now, their various kinships with Lorca and O’Hara should be clear. But they are also wholly their own, now stretching beyond any canvas we can make for them, as the opening lines of the book, by skewing the boundaries of sequence and causality, declare: “Whoever has a quiet mind / / up on the roof the season turned the bath towels purple. / / Quiet is the demolition. The neighbors got to know each other/ someday soon.” And they are also wise, as a poem like “Love’s That Simple” reminds us: “We either forgive one another who we really are / or not.” Ralph Angel is a poet who can change the way you breathe. Confronted with this body of work, much of which has become personally classic to me already, I can say now too he’s a poet who can make you weep. It’s not because the poems are sad, exactly, though some of them are. It’s because of the place they come from. It’s because they’re so damn true.

The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets By Ted Kooser. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. Reviewed by Steve Kowit Art is the work of a lifetime. Well, usually. There are exceptions. Arthur Rimbaud that spoiled brat of a genius on the Paris streets was damn good for a teenager & folks like Keats & Ernest Dowson were writing pretty remarkable verse in their early twenties. So let’s just say the accomplished skills necessary to create great art are —for most of us— the work of a lifetime. For writers, any and all books that try to teach those skills are of use, however misleading some of the written advice may be. The notion that you can’t teach

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people how to write poetry is probably as silly as saying you can’t teach people to play the violin. That doesn’t mean you can teach someone to be a master, as good a poet, say, as Ted Kooser. Kenneth Koch’s poetry writing teaching books written in the 60s and 70s —he sort of initiated the genre — were terrific guides to writing a kind of free-wheeling, playful, surreal poetry. He tried to free his readers from the rigors of linear development and taught them to grow wild and imaginative. Though most of Koch’s manuals were about teaching poetry in the grade schools, his best work in the genre was his book about teaching in a retirement home— undoubtedly because his “students” were people with both articulate language skills and a lifetime of emotionally charged memories. As I recall, the work they turned out for Koch was less surreal and more humanly weighted with the heartprints of lived experience. They were far less interested than his grade schoolers in “playing” with language. Of course, like Koch, all teachers of poetry bring to the task their own prejudices, predilections, idiosyncrasies, and particular powers and blindnesses. Ted Kooser’s recent addition to that field, The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets (University of Nebraska Press, 2005, $10.95 cloth), is, of course, no exception. Since I’m a huge fan of Kooser’s poetry, believing that he has perfected a kind of metaphysical poem, the poem embodied in a single conceit, that many other poets have been trying to write, with middling success, for the past half century, I was pleased to read a book of his that chatted engagingly about the process of poetry, to read his ideas about how one makes the language sing as so many of his remarkably successful poems manage to sing. Is anyone in America able to write that sort of luminous extended metaphor with the precision and vividness of Kooser? The book, written with beginners in mind, deals with particular facets of poetry –audience, openings, emotion, memory, imagery and detail — and leaves the technical matter –form and meter—for other books to explain, though he does spend about a page discussing rhyme—but in general terms and with great casualness. He mentions, in passing, partial rhymes, assonance, alliteration and consonance but tells the reader, “I don’t intend to define those here. Any good dictionary can explain them in a phrase or two.” I confess I would, had I been his editor at the U of Nebraska Press, have urged him to spend three or four pages on those absolutely essential qualities of linguistic music. But then, I would have urged him to speak more about the music of poetry —and of course that would include form and sound — throughout the book, since those are matters at the very heart of verse. He doesn’t bother much with meter, either, though he briefly discusses it in the context of examining a fine sonnet by Kim Addonizio and discusses form in general —again very briefly—using a syllabic poem by Ron Rash. But for beginning poets that sort of cursory presentation is probably unhelpful. For whatever reason, perhaps because he did not wish to impose all that technical stuff on so chatty a discourse, Kooser decided to keep those musical and technical issues pretty much out of this little vademacum for beginners. But it’s a lack that somewhat limits the book’s effectiveness as a teaching guide. He has chosen a casual, personable and altogether friendly tone and the book is pleasurably free from academic rhetoric. It’s talky, familiar and thoroughly unintimidating. Which of course is all to the good. And of course, too, there’s lots of good advice: he urges poets to let the ideas and feelings emerge from the process of writing the poem; to beware of openings that are simply moving “toward the poem”; to attend to voice and presence; to be careful not to bury the poem by constantly embossing the language with rhetorical flourishes; to concentrate on specific, unpredictable “authenticating” details; to use imagery to clarify rather than obscure, and so on…. Just the things all of us poets need to chew over while learning our craft… or chew over whenever we’re working on a new poem— since with every new poem we are struggling again as beginners with the same problems! His initial prejudice, which of course permeates the book, appears on its very first page: “Poetry’s purpose is to reach other people and to touch their hearts. If a poem doesn’t make sense to anybody but its author, nobody but its author will care a whit about it.” Amen! This means, of course, that poets with postmodern aspirations, poets who have fallen in love with theory courses at the local university, need to avoid this book, or risk that greatest of all postmodern sins: writing brilliantly coherent poetry meant to move the reader! But Kooser at once modifies his remark: “That doesn’t mean that your poems can’t be cryptic, or elusive, or ambiguous if that’s how you want to write, as long as you keep in mind that there’s somebody on the other end of the communication. I favor poems that keep the obstacles between you and that person to a minimum.” I confess that I’m sorry he pulled his punch, though a few pages later he says it perfectly: “Though it can be a lovely exeprience to write a poem that pleases and delights its author, to write something that touches a reader is just about as good as it gets.” In that same opening section he quotes with pleasure Seamus Heaney’s remark that “The aim of the poet and the poetry is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual work into the larger work of the community as a whole.”

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Kooser exemplifies his points throughout with a careful selection of short poems, many of them quite wonderful. I wish he had spent more time chatting about those particular objects, pointing out how the poet accomplishes one or another task. He’s right on point when he uses Joseph Stroud’s marvelous 6 line poem “And I Raised My Hand in Return” as a model of how powerfully a title can operate in a poem and, discussing the poem of observation in which the narrator remains invisible, the use of David Ray’s terrific poem “At the Train Station in Pamplona” seemed a perfect choice. In his discussion of “anecdote” poems that fail for lack of ambition, he uses, as a model of a poem that looks up from its triggering subject to see something larger, Jane Hirshfield’s splendid poem “The Envoy.” There are delicious poems by, among others, Yehuda Amachai, Maurya Simon, Susan Mitchell, Joseph Huchison (a one-liner!), Anna Akhmatova, and the superb poem “Breakage,” by Mary Oliver. But not the least of the model poems are by Kooser himself, a master of that richly imagistic sort of poem that comes closer than anyone in the States has yet come to what Pound was talking about in the days when he was touting imagism. Many of the models from his own poetry are a joy to read. When discussing how ideas often come unbidden from an accumulation of specific details, Kooser uses the following typical piece of his own as a model: A Rainy Morning A young woman in a wheelchair, wearing a black nylon poncho spattered with rain, is pushing herself through the morning. You have seen how pianists sometimes bend forward to strike the keys, then lift their hands, draw back to rest, then lean again to strike just as the chord fades. Such is the way this woman strikes at the wheels, then lifts her long white fingers, letting them float, then bends again to strike just as the chair slows, as if into a silence. So expertly she plays the chords of this difficult music she has mastered, her wet face beautiful in its concentration, while the wind turns the pages of rain. Of course he could have used that poem in his brief section about strategies for avoiding sentimentality or in his section on the objective observation with a narrator who remains silently behind the curtain, or his section on the power of precisely modulated figurative language. Though I share Kooser’s basic premises, I confess that a few things he says about poetry and language seem questionable. He quotes the poet Leonard Nathan (a fine poet!) to the conventional point that sentimentality is “a kind of disproportion between excessive feeling and its object.” A page or so later Kooser admits that a precise definition is difficult to come by. But to me, that notion that there is such a thing as “excessive feeling” dissolves upon examination. A good poet can make the reader weep over the death of a cockroach or a broken cup. No genuine human emotion is excessive, although often the poem’s language fails to make it believable, either because of banality or inauthenticity. A harried housewife stressed about her daughter’s health might well weep over a broken cup and a decent writer will easily make the moment perfectly credible. An inept writer can make a woman weeping over her daughter’s death sound sentimental by the inauthenticity and/or platitudinous nature of the description. Except in cases of extreme pathology the trouble is usually that we feel too little, not that we feel too much! Kooser’s remark that an example of excessive feeling might be a poem in which an excess of emotion is lavished on a floor lamp made me think at once of Billy Collins’ marvelous “Memento Mori” in which Collins sadly notes that none of the items in his sunny little room will attend his burial: not even this dented goosenecked lamp with its steady benediction of light,

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though I could put worse things in my mind than the image of it waddling across the cemetery like an old servant, dragging the tail of its cord, the small circle of mourners parting to make room. In short, done well, any image, any idea, any emotion at any intensity can work! Like all smart poets, Kooser tells his reader that “all rules are meant to be broken,” and he is one of those humble souls who knows full well that the rules he lays down in The Poetry Home Repair Manual are simply rules of thumb, general principles that poets should consider— rather than descriptive rules for the art of poetry. Similarly, one must take his notion that poets should break their lines at natural pauses, or at the end of phrase units, as one poet’s way of handling that complex issue. Many other poets prefer breaking lines for a variety of other reasons. I’m also a bit suspicious of his notion that metaphors convey more confidence and authority than similes, though I think he’s correct in suggesting that similes often feel more casual and conversational, more like everyday speech. That is probably because, in fact, we tend to use similes more often in conversation (“that whole damn thing suddenly exploded like a bomb…”), and that metaphors are generally a more self-consciously literary gesture (except of course for those numerous dead metaphors that are part of the currency of the language: the root of the problem; the business has been eating at her; he gave a glittering performance, etc.). Of course Kooser is well worth reading on the subject of metaphor, even when he’s addressing inexperienced poets—simply because he’s a master at its use. This is particularly true of the metaphorcentered poem which is his forte. In his discussion of indirection he uses the following poem of his own, remarking that it was one in which he went out of his way to express the weight of a loss without stating it. Because of poems like this I would suggest to any poet trying to learn the craft to read Kooser’s chatty, informal book, but more importantly, start reading the best of our contemporary poets to learn one’s craft — and that, of course, includes Ted Kooser. And poems of his like this one: After Years Today, from a distance, I saw you walking away, and without a sound the glittering face of a glacier slid into the sea. An ancient oak fell in the Cumberlands, holding only a handful of leaves, and an old woman scattering corn to her chickens looked up for an instant. At the other side of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times the size of our own sun exploded and vanished, leaving a small green spot on the astronomer’s retina as he stood in the great open dome of my heart with no one to tell.

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Two Views: The Imaginary Poets Edited by Alan Michael Parker. Dorset, VT: Tupelo Press, 2006. Reviewed by Lynne Thompson Poetry gets the bum rap: incomprehensible, too surreal, too much love and death. Well, when the scofflaws peruse The Imaginary Poets, they'll get just what they've always suspected—terrifically so. Here are poems you won't find referenced in Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia because twenty-two poets took Alan Michael Parker's challenge to "translate a poem into English, offer a biography of the poet, and then write a short essay in which the poem, the poet, and the corpus are considered—and make all of it up, without once indicating you have done so." They've followed Tafida Zeinhum's vision of the dream world as "a mad magician's garage"; accepted "the Aristotelian idea that poetry should delight as it instructs" as exemplified in the work of Jan DeKeerk. Who wouldn't want to tag along with Mark Strand, David St. John, and a host of other poets who disappear behind a cloak of linguistic skullduggery? And if readers know anything about any of these poets, they will revel in the apparent contradictions in their adopted styles as well as in the depths to which they have embraced their created personas. Or is there true contradiction? Take Annie Finch for example. Quoted in 2006, she said: "I feel that the timelessness of the pagan themes throughout my work unifies poems from different times in my own life as part of an eternal spiritual present." Is it surprising then that she tells us of Rose Elbow Souris (1894-1969) who, after pregnancies and abortions, completed "the first two of her ‘Abortion Studies,’ poetic sequences that use the incantatory power of sound to explore the personal and social repercussions of her experience"? Sin sin so uuuuuuuuuuuurkinquinohaho D.A. Powell, on the other hand, pulls the reader into his web of pretty lies by relying on the authority of a well-respected translator when he tells us that he is "indebted to Willis Barnstone and his volume The Selected Pudim…which first brought Pudim's work to my attention….I spoke with Barnstone at a conference in Chicago. He generously sat with me at the bar of the Michigan Avenue Hilton, through round after round of watered-down gimlets, and restored all of the missing nut references." João Pudim, "one of the great heartthrobs of Brazil" is Powell's Charlie McCarthy but references to Barnstone in an anthology celebrating translation as well as to the all-too-familiar bar at a literary conference pull the reader so neatly into his web that Pudim's re-imagined past rings true. As editor Parker notes in his introduction, "the past remains many poets’ great subject after all, the present turned into the past as soon as the writing happens…" Many of these poets rely on that magical premise of discovering lost work: Garrett Hongo—"these marvelous poems came to me, out of an unchronicled history, by way of accident and fate"; Barbara Hamby—"I found this poem several years ago when I was doing research in Mantua, in the archives of the Gonzaga family"; Kevin Prufer—"I first came upon Sixteen Poems for a Dying Land at Cecil Court Books, a small antiquarian bookstore near London's theater district." Josh Bell even goes so far as to invoke memories of his own work, "Poem To Line My Casket With, Ramona” ("the times you visit and kneel so pretty on the grass above me, that's not scratching you hear. It's writing") when describing Saurah Joan Mao (who wrote three memoirs "none of them completed and all of them seemingly written by, and about, vastly different women") and who, at the time of her murder, had in her pocket "an unfinished letter to a woman named Juliet Montana, and a handwritten translation of Mayakovsky's `The Backbone Flute' ". Mao wrote:

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Guilty me, I burn the bed I lie in, a fever of vampires in the looking glass, my lines turning on each other, like dogs, in the poems I've left behind. Behind the looking glass of The Imaginary Poets are marvelous treasures: go, find them.

The Imaginary Poets Edited by Alan Michael Parker. Dorset, VT: Tupelo Press, 2006 Reviewed by Lee Romney The directive was a “call to charms” – an exploratory mission that dispatched some of this country’s most respected poets into the creative chasms beyond identity and language. The volume’s editor framed it this way: “Translate a poem into English, offer a biography of the poet, and then write a short essay in which the poem, the poet and the corpus are considered – and make all of it up, without once indicating you have done so.” The creatures, retrieved with sporting good nature by contributors, run wild inside the loose parameters of their fictional boundaries. Fanciful experiments and conundrums fill the slim volume, some of them magical and preposterous. As if the layers of masks posed by imaginary poets in translation were not enough, David Kirby writes in the imaginary – and extinct—Finnish-derived tongue of “Dirja” as the early 19th Century island fisherman “Kevnor.” In their search for the right alter ego, many contributors sought liberation through the personas of the long dead and long suffering. There is even one Hungarian WWII war criminal who, in psychosis or poetic transmutation, went to his grave insisting he was a Polish Jew and writing poems in that voice. “Wait, the wayworn / quavered. Away! / wailed the wayward , / undissuaded. / Always away!” writes Andrew Hudgins’ imaginary poet, Alan Lutiy, in his opening stanza, conveying haunting fears and traumas. Some poets (the real ones) attempted actual translations and explored quite literally the responsibility that it bestows: Laure-Anne Bosselaar, writing as the executed French WWII resistance fighter AnneMaelle Mathieu, shares the French version and two alternate English translations of her fictional heroine’s haunting war-time work. (The final line in version 1: “How beautiful the morning, now I’m seized with hope” Version 2: “How beautiful this morning, how hope seizes me.”) Martha Collins, writing as a Vietnamese poet who hid behind the pseudonym Hoi An, struggles with this dilemma in her translation: nuroc in Vietnamese is the word for both “country” and “water,” posing a choice of political and geographical import. “Someday fish will fill the ponds / The waters will be ours,” she chooses as the poem’s end, shunning the more heavy-handed “country.” The collection is playful and ambitious, and the contributors gamely follow the rules, never once indicating they are complicit in imaginary creation. The impact of the contributor’s masterful effort to never let on, is, of course, diluted, since the reader is fully in on the game. Still, once we meander behind all the curtains and trick doors, it is fair to ask: does it accomplish a goal? The aim, we are promised, is to offer “another way to think about the writer as ventriloquist.” Here is the act of fabricating self, with the double cloak of translation, as our real poets navigate through the uncharted meanings between languages (even fictional ones). Many poems seem liberated by the exercise, floating free of the constraints of true experience with a sharp authenticity: “I walk my open world bright amid its ashen colors / The spot of blood on the dry world’s far horizon is you,” writes Kisaru Gashe, an imaginary Massai from Kenya’s Massai Mara game reserve who, creator Jennifer Michael Hecht informs us, she translated from Swahili. But some biographies and essays have a way of obliterating the clarity of the poetic experience with the layered falsity of the heavily costumed imaginary poets they seek to explain. Khaled Mattawa’s imaginary Arab surrealist, Tafida Zeinbum, seems to agree, counseling wisely from the pages of his essay that reality’s anchor Is essential. “We must begin with the real, and start consciously dressing the real with the masks that fit it,” Zeinbum wrote in an imaginary 1951 essay. “We create metaphors, but I would hasten to add that these

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masks of the real must be porous enough that we see the skin of reality under them...Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s what the dream world can help us achieve.â&#x20AC;?

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Ad Art and Title: Contributorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Notes

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Naveed Alam's first book of poems, A Queen of No Ordinary Realms, won the Spokane Prize in Poetry (2003). His work has appeared in several magazines and journals including the Prairie Schooner, Hubbub, Cafe Review, The Seattle Review, and The Windsor Review. He lives in Spanish Harlem. Nin Andrews is the editor of a book of translations of the French poet Henri Michaux entitled Someone Wants to Steal My Name from Cleveland State University Press. She is also the author of several books including The Book of Orgasms, Why They Grow Wings and Midlife Crisis with Dick and Jane. Her book, Sleeping with Houdini, is forthcoming from BOA Editions. John Bargowski is the recipient of a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Distinguished Artist Fellowship and the Theodore Roethke Prize from Poetry Northwest.. His poems have been published in Poetry, Gettysburg Review, Poetry East, Prairie Schooner, and Journal of New Jersey Poets, among others. Margo Berdeshevsky lives in Paris. Her poetry collection, But a Passage in Wilderness was published by The Sheep Meadow Press in 2007. Her honors include the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America, The Chelsea Poetry Award, Kalliope’s Sue Saniel Elkind prize, and places in the Pablo Neruda and Ann Stanford Awards. Her writing has appeared in The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, Agni, New Letters, Poetry International, Margie, Pool, Siècle 21, Europe, Nimrod, Rattapallax, Women's Studies Quarterly and more. A novel, Vagrant, and an illustrated collection of short stories, Beautiful Soon Enough wait at the next starting gate. B.J. Best’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, including The Cream City Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Nimrod, and West Branch. His chapbook Crap is available from Centennial Press, and a second, Twenty Short Poems about Smoking, is forthcoming. He teaches at Carroll College in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Don Bogen is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Luster (Wesleyan, 2003). A Fulbright lecturer in Spain in 2003, he teaches at the University of Cincinnati. Anne Buggey is a Canadian citizen now residing in Memphis, Tennessee. She’s been published in both the Tulane Review and the Clark Street Review. Buggey earned her M.F.A. from the University of Memphis. Patrick Carrington is the poetry editor for the art & literary journal Mannequin Envy (www.mannequinenvy.com). His poetry is forthcoming in The New York Quarterly, The GW Review, The Eleventh Muse, Poetry Southeast and other journals. His new collection, Rise, Fall and Acceptance (2006) is available at Main Street Rag Publishing 174

Tom Chandler is poet laureate of Rhode Island emeritus. He has been named Phi Beta Kappa Poet at Brown University and has been a featured poet at the Robert Frost homestead. His poems have been read by Garrison Keillor on National Public Radio on several occasions. He is the author of four books and is a columnist for The Providence. Peter Conners is author of the prose poetry collection Of Whiskey and Winter (White Pine Press), and the forthcoming story collection Emily Ate the Wind (Marick Press). He edited PP/FF: An Anthology (Starcherone Books) and is founding co-editor of Double Room. He lives in Rochester, NY where he works as an editor at BOA Editions. Anne Coray is the author of Bone Strings (Scarlet Tanager Books) and Soon the Wind (Finishing Line Press). Her work has appeared in The Southern Review, Poetry, North American Review, Seneca Review, and on the Verse Daily website. She is the recipient of grants from the Alaska State Council on the Arts and an Individual Artist Award from the Rasmuson Foundation. She lives at her birthplace on remote Qizhjeh Vena (Lake Clark) in southwest Alaska. Patty Crane’s work has appeared in a number of literary journals including Atlanta Review, Kalliope, RUNES, The Sow’s Ear and West Branch. She has recently moved, with her family, from the hill towns of western Massachusetts to Sweden. Barbara Crooker’s book, Radiance, won the 2005 Word Press First Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize. Line Dance is forthcoming from Word in early 2008. Her poems appear in a variety of literary journals and many anthologies, including Good Poems for Hard Times (edited by Garrison Keillor, Viking Penguin). She has won a number of awards, including the WB Yeats Society of NY Prize (Grace Schulman, judge), the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Prize (Stanley Kunitz, judge), and the Rosebud Ekphrastic Poetry Award. Christopher Cunningham was born in Van Nuys, CA and was educated at Stanford University and Duke University, where he received a Ph.D. in Literature. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in a number of magazines and anthologies, including Black Warrior Review, West Branch, Meridian, Ninth Letter, The Iowa Review, and Best New Poets 2006. A Pushcart nominee, he teaches English at The Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, where he lives with his wife and two children. Philip Dacey is the author of eight books of poetry, including his latest, The Mystery of Max Schmitt: Poems on the LIfe and Works of Thomas Eakins. After 35 years in Minnesota, he moved in 2004 to Manhattan's Upper West Side. More of his poetry can be found at www.philipdacey.com. Glover Davis, Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing at San Diego State University, has published the following books of poetry: Bandaging Bread, August Fires, and Legend.

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His poems have been published in many journals including The Southern Review, Poetry, The New England Review, and The Journal. MacDonald Dixon was born at Castries St. Lucia on October 1st, 1944. He spent 32 years of his working life as a banker. Dixon has also been actively involved in literature and the Theatre in his native Saint Lucia in the West Indies and was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award for 2006. Sean Thomas Dougherty is author and editor of ten full length books of poems and prose including the forthcoming novella The Blue City (2008 Marick Press), Broken Hallelujahs (BOA Editions 2007), and Nightshift Belonging to Lorca (2004 Mammoth Books) a finalist for the 2004 Paterson Poetry Prize. His awards include a 2004 and 2006 PA Council for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. He teaches in the BFA Program for Creative Writing at Penn State Erie. Lynnell Edwards is the author of two collections of poetry, both from Red Hen Press: The Highwayman's Wife (2007) and The Farmer's Daughter (2003). Her work has appeared in Poets Against the War and other literary journals including: Poems & Plays, Southern Poetry Review, Poetry East, and Dos Passos Review. She is a regular reviewer for The Georgia Review, Pleiades, and Rain Taxi. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky where she teaches at the University of Louisville. Ann Fisher-Wirth is a transplanted Southern poet and scholar who teaches at the University of Mississippi. Her books include Blue Window: Poems, The Trinket Poems, and William Carlos Williams and Autobiography: The Woods of His Own Nature. Her scholarly work has concentrated primarily on William Carlos Williams and Willa Cather, but she has published on other writers including Cormac McCarthy, Louise Gl端ck, Robert Hass, and Anita Brookner. Lisa Fox was born in Long Island, New York. She has won awards from the NEA and the AWP. Lisa has studied at Nassau Community College in Long Island, NYU and Breadloaf. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Willow Springs, The Penwood Review, The Long Islander and The Mom Egg. Lisa Fox lives in Sistersville, West Virginia with her husband and children. Charles Freeland teaches at Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio. Recent work appears in Cream City Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Hollins Critic, Poetry International, Arabesques, 42opus, and The Pedestal Magazine. A chapbook, Where We Saw Them Last, was published by Lily Press. His website is charlesfreelandpoetry.net. Jeannine Hall Gailey is a Seattle-area writer whose first book, Becoming the Villainess, was published by Steel Toe Books. Her poems have been featured on NPR's The Writer's Almanac and Verse Daily, as well as in journals like The Iowa Review, The Columbia Poetry Review, and The Evansville Review.

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James Grinwis is the publisher of Bateau, a new journal. His poems have appeared in Mississippi Review, Indiana Review, Conjunctions, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. C. G. Hanzlicek is the author of eight collections of poetry, the most recent of which is The Cave: Selected and New Poems published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2001. Robert Hedin is the author, translator, and editor of twenty volumes of poetry and prose, most recently Where One Voice Ends Another Begins: 150 Years of Minnesota Poetry(Minnesota Historical Society Press). He serves as director of the Anderson Center, an artist retreat, in Red Wing, Minnesota, and edits Great River Review. Marc Elihu Hofstadter was born in 1945 and has a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California at Santa Cruz. He has taught in three universities and has published three books of poetry: House of Peace, Visions, and Shark's Tooth. Charlotte Innes has published poetry and prose in The Best American Spiritual Writing 2006, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and The Hudson Review. She has poems forthcoming in The Sewanee Review, The Pinch and Knockout Magazine Christian Knoeller holds an MFA from Oregon and a Ph.D. from UC-Berkeley. His work has appeared recently in Permafrost, Journal of New Jersey Poets, South Carolina Review, Southern Humanities Review, South Dakota Review, and English Journal. His collection Completing the Circle was awarded the Millennium Prize by Buttonwood Press in 2000. He serves as Associate Professor of English at Purdue. Steve Kowit’s The First Noble Truth won the 2006 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. The author of several collections, including In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet’s Portable Workshop, he has received two Pushcart Prizes and an NEA fellowship. Li-Young Lee was born of Chinese parents in Indonesia. He has lived in Chicago since 1964. His work has received many honors, including three Pushcart Prizes, the Lannan Literary Award, and the American Book Award. His collection Book of My Nights was the winner of the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. Elizabeth Levitski lives in the northwoods of Wisconsin. Her poetry has appeared most recently in Atlanta Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Sou'wester, and Nimrod. She has recently completed her first collection of poems, River of Gone. Sarah Luczaj is a British poet and translator, living in the Polish countryside. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Cream City Review, and, in translation, in various Polish, Croatian and Serbian journals. She has translated the poems of the Polish poet Halina Poswiatowska, and the Ukrainian poet and novelist Yuri Andrukhovych. She works as a psychotherapist.

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Sarah Maclay’s work has appeared recently in APR, FIELD, Swink. and The White Bride, her second book, is due from University of Tampa Press in 2008. She received a Special Mention in Pushcart XXXI, and is a visiting assistant professor at Loyola Marymount University Morton Marcus’s new book of prose poems, Pursuing The Dream Bone, and his literary memoir Striking Through The Masks, will be published soon. He also edited In A Dybbuk’s Raincoat: The Collected Poems if Bert Meyers, with the author’s son, Daniel Meyers. Recent poems have appeared in Hanging Loose, Poetry East, Luna and the Denver Quarterly. Mojdeh Marashi is a San Francisco Bay Area writer and visual artist. Her work is deeply influenced by the ancient and modern history of Iran where she grew up. Marashi holds an MA in Interdisciplinary Arts and a Masters in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. She is currently working on a number of literary projects including co-translating a collection of poetry by her uncle, H.E. Sayeh, one of the most influential contemporary Iranian poets. She has traveled twice to Iran to work with Sayeh directly. Marashi’s prose was included in the celebrated anthology, Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora. Julio Martínez Mesanza was born in Madrid in 1955. His books of poetry include Europa, Las trincheras and the forthcoming Entre el muro y el foso. Carrie Messenger graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Moldova, where she learned Romanian, and lived in Romania on a Fulbright research grant. She is currently working toward a Ph.D. in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her translations of Romanian poetry and prose have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, The Literary Review, and Salmagundi. J. Morris has published fiction and poetry in many literary magazines in the U.S. and Great Britain, including The Southern Review, Missouri Review, Five Points, Prairie Schooner, Northwest Review, Subtropics, Fulcrum, and Pleiades. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and reprinted in Twentieth Century Literary Criticism. A chapbook, The Musician, Approaching Sleep, appeared in 2006 (Dos Madres Press). His musical project, Mulberry Coach, a collaboration with singer and lyricist Katie Fisher, is recording its fourth CD. Mulberry Coach CDs are available at www.cdbaby.com. Mihaela Moscaliuc, a native of Romania, has published poetry reviews in TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Georgia Review, and Fugue; poems in Meridians and Crab Orchard Review, and translations in Arts & Letters, New Letters and Hayden’s Ferry Review. Jim Natal, teacher and co-founder of Conflux Press, is the author of two poetry collections, In the Bee Trees and Talking Back to the Rocks (both, Archer). His poems have appeared recently in the Bellingham Review, Runes and Paterson Literary Review.

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Sudie Nostrand recently published The Paris Poems (March Street Press) and has appeared regularly in such magazines as the Green Hills Literary Lantern, the California Quarterly, North American Review, The Mid-American Poetry Review, The Greensboro Review, and The Birmingham Poetry Review. The Fales Collection at New York University is archiving her work. Gregory Orr is the author of nine books of poetry, including Concerning the Book That is the Body of the Beloved, and he teaches at the University of Virginia. Leonard Orr teaches literature and is Director of Liberal Arts at Washington State University Tri-Cities. His work has appeared in many journals including Black Warrior Review, Fugue, Poetry International, and Poetry East. His first poetry collection, _Daytime Moon_, was published in 2005 (FootHills Press). Fred Ostrander is poetry editor of the magazine Blue Unicorn and resides in Oakland, California. An avid hiker and mountain climber, he has conquered mountains in Nepal and Bhutan. His poetry has appeared in a variety of magazines in North America and Europe including the Asheville Poetry Review. Ostrander’s book, The Hunchback and The Swan, was published by Wolmer/Brotherson. Nathaniel Perry’s poems and translations have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Sonora Review, 32 Poems, Absinthe: New European Writing, POOL, and elsewhere. He is the managing editor at lyric and lives with his wife and two dogs in Bloomington, IN. Emily Lupita Plum is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing and the Environment at Iowa State University. Her poems have appeared in Lyrical Iowa, StringTown, and Sketch. Emily’s work has received commendations in Forth Genre’s Editors’ Prize and the Pirate’s Alley William Faulkner award. A bilingual collection of her poetry, Water and Stone 水と石, was published in 2004 (Koumyakusya Press, Japan). www.emilyplum.com José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes was born and raised in the Philippines, and holds degrees from Ateneo de Manila and Columbia Universities. He was featured in the most recent New Writers issue of The Hudson Review, and his poems and translations have also appeared in Caracoa, Circumference, Michigan Quarterly Review, Natural Bridge, Philippine Studies, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, Rattle, and other Philippine and U.S. journals and anthologies. His translation of “How the Word Was Made” won the DerHovanessian Translation Prize. Brady Rhoades’ poetry and short stories have appeared in Amherst Review, Antioch Review, Appalachia Review, Blue Mesa, Red Rock Review, Windsor Review and other publications. He lives in Southern California. Oliver Rice has received the Theodore Roethke Prize and was twice featured on Poetry Daily. His poems appear in three recent anthologies: Ohio Review’s New

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and Selected, Bedford/St. Martin’s Introduction to Literature, and Random House/Billy Collins’ 180 More, also available on the Library of Congress Web site. Lee Romney is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, covering Northern California news out of San Francisco. Her poetry has been published in the Squaw Review Lee Rossi, author of Ghost Diary (2003), has published poems in The Sun, The Beloit Poetry Journal, and Poetry East. His reviews and interviews have appeared in ~88~ and Pedestal Magazine. A computer programmer, he lives in Culver City, California. Patty Seyburn, author of Mechanical Cluster (Ohio State UP, 2002) and Diasporadic (Helicon Nine Editions, 1998), is an assistant professor at California State University, Long Beach, and co-edits POOL: A Journal of Poetry based in Los Angeles. Andrew Sofer is a past winner of an Atlanta Review International Poetry Competition Merit Award and the Margaret Haley Carpenter Poetry Prize. Sofer has also has been a finalist in the Howard Nemerov Sonnet and Southwest Review Morton Marr poetry contests and a three-time semifinalist for a poetry prize co-sponsored by The Nation. Under a commission from the Brooklyn Friends of Chamber Music, Sofer’s poem, “Wandlebury Ring,” was set to music by award-winning composer Kevin Beavers. Sofer is an assistant professor at Boston College where he teaches courses on drama and creative writing as well as poetry. Matthew J. Spireng’s poems have appeared in a number of journals including the Alaska Quarterly Review, Southern Humanities Review, Poet & Critic, Yankee and Wilderness. He’s an editor for the Kingston (N.Y.) Daily Freeman. Chad Sweeney is the author of two books of poetry, An Architecture (BlazeVOX, 2007) and Arranging the Blaze (Anhinga, 2009); and four chapbooks, most recently A Mirror to Shatter the Hammer (Tarpaulin Sky, 2006). He is coeditor of Parthenon West Review and poet-in-residence at the School of the Arts (SOTA) in San Francisco. His work has appeared in journals such as Colorado Review, New American Writing, Slope, Verse, Denver Quarterly, and Black Warrior Review, and his translations of Sayeh, with Mojdeh Marashi, have or will appear in Crazyhorse, American Letters & Commentary, Indiana Review, Subtropics, Seattle Review and 14 Hills. Jason Tandon is the author of two chapbooks, Rumble Strip (sunnyoutside) and Flight (Finishing Line Press). His first full-length collection Give over the Heckler and Everyone Gets Hurt was a finalist for the 2006 Kinereth Gensler Award (Alice James Books) and the St. Lawrence Book Award (Black Lawrence Press). His poems have appeared in many journals including The Adirondack Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Laurel Review, Red Cedar Review, Euphony, and Poet Lore. He is an intern poetry editor at the Paris Review. Mark Terrill is a native Californian and former merchant seaman stranded in Europe since the early 80s, where he's been scraping by in various guises including shipyard

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welder, road manager for rock bands, cook, postal worker and translator. Recent books include Bread & Fish (The Figures) and Kid with Gray Eyes (Cedar Hill Books), both available from Small Press Distribution. Lynne Thompson’s Beg No Pardon won the 2007 Perugia Press First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Indiana Review, Runes, Cider Press Review and Solo, and she’s a Pushcart nominee. She’s the director of labor and employee relations at UCLA. Melissa Tuckey is an Ohio Arts Council Grant Recipient and has previously been resident in the Blue Mountain Center. Her poems have been published in Beltway Poetry Journal, DC Poets Against the War: An Anthology, Poet Lore, Gathering of the Tribes, Southeast Review, and Terrain. She’s a graduate of George Mason University’s MFA program where she teaches writing. Susan Varnot’s recent work has been published in Beloit Poetry Journal, Cimarron Review, RHINO, Southern Poetry Review, Sou’wester, The Spoon River Poetry Review, and Zone 3. She lives and teaches in northern New Mexico. Ann Walters holds a Ph.D. in physical anthropology and lives in the Pacific Northwest. Her poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Pedestal Magazine, The Tipton Poetry Journal, Poet Lore, and Carousel. Afaa Michael Weaver’s tenth collection of poetry, The Plum Flower Dance/poems 1985 to 2005 came out this year (University of Pittsburgh Press). Weaver teaches at Simmons College inn Boston, where he hosts an international conference on Chinese poetry. Charles Harper Webb's book Amplified Dog won the Saltman Prize for Poetry and was published in 2006 (Red Hen Press). His book of prose poems, Hot Popsicles, was published in 2005 (University of Wisconsin Press). He is the recipient of grants from the Whiting and Guggenheim foundations, and he directs the Creative Writing program at California State University, Long Beach. j Marcus Weekley is currently living in Fort Wayne, Indiana, though he grew up all over the North and South of the U.S, including (but not limited to) Beloit, Wisconsin, Athens, Georgia, and Niceville, Florida. He recently graduated with a PhD in English from Texas Tech University, and received a B.A. and M.A. from The University of Southern Mississippi. Marcus' writing has appeared in Poetry Salzburg Review, Fire, Agenda (Broadsheets online), The Iowa Review, and Quick Fiction, among other places, and his photographs accompany the essays of Gail Folkins in the forthcoming book, Dance Hall Revival (Texas Tech University Press, 2007). Holly Welker has published poetry, fiction, and nonfiction in a variety of literary magazines and journals, including Black Warrior Review, Cumberland Poetry Review, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Gulf Coast, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Iowa Review, Other Voices, PMS, Sunstone, and TriQuarterly. “Satin Worship,” an essay about textiles, is included in Best American Essays 2005 and her poetry was honored as a

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Distinguished Entry in the 2005 Campbell Corner Poetry Prize. Her first book of prose, The Rib Cage, is a memoir of her experiences as a Mormon missionary in Taiwan and her eventual break with the church. Welker’s first collection of poetry was a finalist in the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Prize. She has taught writing at the University of Arizona, the University of Iowa, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai. Welker has an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Arizona and a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Iowa. Welker teaches Creative Writing at Penn State Erie. Jan Wesley is the author of Living in Freefall (Main Street Rag, 2007). A Pushcart nominee, her poetry has also appeared recently in the Iowa Review. She currently lives in Austin, Texas, where she’s been proofing bills for the state legislature. Jackson Wheeler, host of the Arcade Poetry Series at the Oxnard Carnegie Art Museum, is the author of Swimming Past Iceland (Mille Gracie Press, 1993) and A Near Country: Poems of Loss (Solo Press, 1999). He is also a social worker residing in Oxnard, CA. Anne Pierson Wiese’s first collection, Floating City (Louisiana State University Press, 2007) received the Academy of American Poets 2006 Walt Whitman Award. She was a 2005 fellow in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts and was also a winner of the 2004 Discovery/The Nation poetry prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in many journals, among them: The Nation, The Hudson Review, Southwest Review, Prairie Schooner, and the anthology Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn (New York University Press, 2007). Reed Wilson directs the Undergraduate Research Center for the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at UCLA, and teaches poetry writing in the UCLA English Department. His poems have appeared most recently in Paper Street and Natural Bridge, and are forthcoming in The Chattahoochee Review. Martin Woodside is an Associate Editor at Poetry International. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Thought, Limestone, The Hazmat Review, Poetry Motel, The Connecticut River Review, and Guernica.

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