Christopher Stolle

Poetry is:

Christopher Stolle

conversations I have with my alter egos

how I share my tweets without character limits

the priest to whom I confess everyone else’s sins

historical sketches of memories of people in my family tree

where I store my collections of dreams, foul balls, and concert T-shirts

what happens when you’re not very good at math

a place where my father can figure himself out

where I decide the length of the words in my Wordles

why I still have hope in the soul and love in the heart

the paper towels I use when I spill the dictionaries

Christopher Stolle’s writing has appeared most recently in Tipton Poetry Journal, Flying Island, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, The New Southern Fugitives, The Alembic, Gravel, The Light Ekphrastic, Sheepshead Review, and Plath Poetry Project. He’s an editor for DK Publishing and he lives in Richmond, Indiana.

Review: Shopping Cart Dreams by Gene Twaronite

Reviewed by Barry Harris

Title: Shopping Cart Dreams

Author: Gene Twaronite

Year: 2022

Publisher: Kelsay Books

Gene Twaronite offers a mix of free verse, sonnets, sestinas, prose poems and ekphrastic poetry which invite us to look at life through different lenses.

His prose poem, “A Street Named Wherever,” warns about “what happens when you do things automatically” and you stop seeing what is actually around you. During a five o’clock walk, the poet notices a crack in the sidewalk rapidly widening into a deep gorge with blue river far below. He peers inside the gorge and observes a suddenly different world.

… And in that moment, I suddenly understood all the mysteries of life and death and the pull of a river that could make someone follow it wherever it leads. I felt an irresistible urge to join them. It was then that I realized that the gorge was slowly closing as the hidden world zipped shut beneath me, leaving nothing but a crack in the sidewalk.

Twaronite entices us with clever poems that deliver unexpected takes on our ordinary world. In the title poem, “Shopping Cart Dreams,” the shopping carts, which once dreamed of useful and meaningful lives, now face a different sad dream where they end up discarded and filled with the “detritus of all they once carried.”

Many of Twaronite’ s poems document the absurd, but are 0ften, as you get into the spirit of things, more like thought experiments. He invites us to consider what it might be like to actually share a brain with another 58

person in “One Brain Between Us.” With a Twilight Zone mentality, he imagines a day in the future when an artist will paint a “Future Portrait of Dark Matter” and hang it in a distant art gallery and what might happen to an observer compelled to look deeply into the black canvas. Or what if in “Spare a Heart?” you open your front door to a well-dressed stranger who asks “Mister, can you spare a heart? My doctor says I need a new one but there’s none to be found. Please help.” And you move from thinking it a joke to offering some money for the stranger to go away to whimsical negotiating. And then the stranger pulls out a leather case containing actual surgical tools for the task at hand. Or what happens if you buy a new pet at a pet shop and go walking your dog in “Food Chain.” But it's not really a dog, but a banana slug? People are more accepting when I tell them it’s a dog rather than a slug. They’re always coming up to me, asking what breed it is. “It’ s a miniature banana poo,” I tell them. “It’s adorable,” they say. Twaronite, who lives in Tucson, Arizona, wanders with us through a nearby saguaro forest of hundred year-old giant saguaros in his poem “Willed to Science.” He first shows us cactus bodies …riddled with bullet holes or oozing black rot, shrouded in brittle gray skin over white spongy innards, crumbling away to reveal sollemn silvery ribbed columns… Then he considers the ultimate disposition of his body.

Would that my body were not promised to some medical student I will never meet (alas) to probe and dissect the plaques and tangles of my brain or whatever gets me in the end, and that I could rest here instead among these departed friends, my withered innards slowly disintegrating to reveal my silvery rib cage waiting for the desert to take me back. And wouldn’t I make a fine lamp.

And, on the subject of saguaros, here is the entire text of “Arms at NinetyFive:”

What if we grew like the saguaro and waited until fifty to grow an arm, or not even grow one, a lovely spear standing tall against the sky?

Or we could wait until ninety-five, sprouting little baby stumps still learning to reach out and take hold of something worth holding.

Gene Twaronite is a clever but compassionate poet. And he tells us plainly, in “The Poet’s Job, ” how to do it.

Watch through the window to write of things in plain view like the lone black thong flapping defiantly in a sea of white briefs.

… turn everything into something else. Make the words go incognito until their true identiities are revealed.

… Mourn the spaces left behind when there are no words.

Twaronite’s poems subtly suggest a choice – we are free to see a unique world within a sidewalk crack or, facing an unhappy dreamscape, to choose a better, different dream.

Gene Twaronite is the author of four collections of poetry as well as the rhyming picture book How to Eat Breakfast. His first poetry book Trash Picker on Mars, published by Kelsay Books, was the winner of the 2017 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for Arizona poetry. His newest poetry collection Shopping Cart Dreams was published by Kelsay Books in 2022. A former New Englander, Gene now lives in Tucson, Arizona. Follow more of his poetry at https://genetwaronitepoet.com/ or https://www.instagram.com/genetwaronitepoetry

Barry Harris is editor of the Tipton Poetry Journal and four anthologies by Brick Street Poetry. He has published one poetry collection, Something At The Center.

Married and father of two grown sons, Barry lives in Brownsburg, Indiana and is retired from Eli Lilly and Company.

His poetry has appeared in Kentucky Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Grey Sparrow, Silk Road Review, Saint Ann‘s Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Boston Literary Magazine, Night Train, Silver Birch Press, Flying Island, Awaken Consciousness, Writers‘ Bloc, RedHeaded Stepchild and Laureate: The Literary Journal of Arts for Lawrence.

He graduated a long time ago with a major in English from Ball State University.

Editor

Barry Harris is editor of the Tipton Poetry Journal and four anthologies by Brick Street Poetry: Mapping the Muse: A Bicentennial Look at Indiana Poetry; Words and Other Wild Things and Cowboys & Cocktails:Poems from the True Grit Saloon, and Reflections on Little Eagle Creek. He has published one poetry collection, Something At The Center.

Married and father of two grown sons, Barry lives in Brownsburg, Indiana and is retired from Eli Lilly and Company.

His poetry has appeared in Kentucky Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Grey Sparrow, Silk Road Review, Saint Ann‘s Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Boston Literary Magazine, Night Train, Silver Birch Press, Flying Island, Awaken Consciousness, Writers‘ Bloc, Red-Headed Stepchild and Laureate: The Literary Journal of Arts for Lawrence. One of his poems was on display at the National Museum of Sport and another is painted on a barn in Boone County, Indiana as part of Brick Street Poetry‘s Word Hunger public art project. His poems are also included in these anthologies: From the Edge of the Prairie; Motif 3: All the Livelong Day; and Twin Muses: Art and Poetry.

He graduated a long time ago with a major in English from Ball State University.