New Books in Poetry

How do we mourn those we’ve lost? What are the rituals and rites that allow us to understand our loss? To feel the measure of it? To heal, if we need healing? To reach closure, if we need closure? For any of us who have had a loved one die, these questions are personal ones. Suddenly were faced with an emptiness we cant fill and, at the same time, an often overwhelming abundance of memory and emotion. And yet the questions are not only personal, because, when we become mourners, we fall back on the cultural practices of mourning that our society offers us. Here in America, visiting hours, funerals, eulogies, obituaries, and wakes are a few of the ways we reckon with our dead. Unsurprisingly, other cultures have other practices. In Madagascar, for example, the Malagasy people have a ritual called famadihana, where once every five or seven years families celebrate their ancestral crypts by exhuming the corpses and spraying them with wine or perfume. Its a celebration of their past, full of music and dancing, in which some of the living ask for blessing from the dead and others tell stories about them. As strange as such a ritual might seem to us, it also raises the question of whether our practices do our dead and ourselves justice? Is the way we mourn enough to help us through those we’ve lost? These are just the sort of questions, both personal and cultural, that Ashaki Jackson takes up in her poetry collection, Language Lesson (Miel Books, 2016). Inspired by the death of her grandmother, these poems begin on an intensely personal note, where loss is felt in the body and the bones. Gradually, that note deepens and expands to encompass other losses and other ways of mourning, eventually creating a poetic music that captures our collective losses and collects us in love. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

I had the pleasure of interviewing poet, Terence Degnan while he sat on a bench in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. For those unfamiliar, we refer to Sunset not as a park, but as a still slowly-morphing section of the borough. It is not difficult to find an entry point into Degnan’s writing, just as interactions with him can feel effortless.He understands the nuances of communication on and off the page and manipulates them into something familiar and comfortable. He is also a poet of such dedication that he went back in time to acquire a Gary Snyder quote for an epigraph, such perseverance that he drafted 300 poems to get down to the 30 or so that grace this collection, and such conviction that he lives his life as he lives his art. With the ambient noise of cars and people and the wind threatening rain, we spoke about the beauty of his collection Still Something Rattles (Sock Monkey Press, 2016), about trees, about lineage and language; we allowed the stimuli of what was happening around us to enter our conversation as we do our writings– all life is art in motion. The three sections of this , “Letters From Purgatory,” “Unicorn”and”Rome,”were written concurrently, but with three different minds. Degnan followed the trajectory of a piece or an idea until it was exhausted and then rebooted, reset and listened for the next internal cue. We learn quickly, in the first section, how the poet intends us to receive his work, even though he would resist the idea of a poet exerting will over a piece that has been released into the world. Maybe the poet is letting us know how he needs to be received: strange, you, revelation that my feral self stays here in the body’s trappings (how it pines to prowl) strange, you, boundaries you starry membranes that hold back prayer how the arrows ascend strange, strange this home yet this interloping bizarreness if you meet me tell me my name, point me to my loves which seem to be in each direction Degnan first discovered his love for poetry through Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,”so it is not surprising that he says “language is the conglomerate” and it is important to resist our impulse for pleasantries. Talking about difficult things can be a form of bettering ourselves. Pick up this work by a poet who is at ease with himself, his writing, and the place that each inhabits in the world, as adversarial as that may be. The poet’s place is often one of friction, doubt, and constant shifting–for many, this is better than apathy, complacency, and stasis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

What is the best way to be a feminist? What is the best way to be a poet, a musician, or a painter? As a woman, what is the best way to be a friend to other women? The very idea that these water marks of success exist, goes against the nature of being biased and beautifully flawed humans who have been formed and informed by our lived experiences. Humans do not fit into neatly framed boxes. We are messy, shape-shifters–we resist social constructs and sometimes we resist our very definitions of ourselves. Bashaar employs a colloquial cadence to bring the reader into a conversation about defining oneself outside of these relationships/schools of thought and then in terms of them. This isn’t some sisterhood bullshit, some wannabe salvation for Eve, some half-assed claim that before god grew a cock there was no war, because I know there is violence in all of us–don’t try to tell me I wouldn’t slice a thing open to watch it die I would be remiss if I didn’t call attention to one of the most noteworthy, non-craft aspects of this book: it has been made available, for free, for anyone to download, print out and keep forever. Bashaar and Agape Editions understand that art is important and granting access to arts is a responsibility that falls, partially, on the artist. Artists can circumvent the broad cuts to funding in public institutions. Publishers can provide access to under-served groups. We all can foster a culture that elevates the arts and humanities to a central space. We may not know the best way to be a feminist or a poet, but I think we are pretty damn close to finding the best way to be an artist and citizen when we give our labor to feed the culture’s need for connection through art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

The “coming of age narrative” will never lose its allure because we are constantly drawn back to the moments that shaped us into the adults we are today. Nostalgia, many argue, is the most powerful human emotion. It not only memorializes eras but intermingles fact with memory and emotion we even remember the feelings memory elicits and the realities we longed for. In My Bedside Radio (Deadly Chaps Press, 2016), coming of age is informed by music that in turn, informed an entire decade. The musicality of the lines mimics the musicality of a 1970s adolescence. The speaker learns about love, relationships, and our national culture by juxtaposing what was taking place in his home with how music was responding to current events. There was no internet and no way to broadcast knee-jerk responses. Musicians and other artists had to take time to process and understand. Their “art as response” actually depicted a thought out and measured response. Coming of age stories will continue to take on many forms– we can only hope for more “poetic forms” as these. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In Pull Yourself Together: The Gena Rowlands Poems (Dancing Girl Press, 2106), Amanda Deutch reminds us of the current and historic importance of the muse. Something draws writers the page, painters to the canvas, and musicians to their instruments. Sometimes it is subtle, sometimes urgent. A self-proclaimed cinefile, Deutch stayed up into the early morning hours watching 70s films and drafting her pieces. She unlocked the smallest details to show how they can be pulled and opened into something much larger. These details draw us, perhaps because of memory or an analogy that only our subconscious could decipher. But once we are entranced, we are forever connected with the piece of art or media that pulled us outside of ourselves. It is always the way the cigarette/ hangs from your lips in each movie that makes you look a little bit tough/ and compels me to keep watching you move. You hold it just so, smoking/ with no hands. You search your pockets and purse for something./ Always searching. Keats saw the delicate etchings on a Grecian Urn, Deutch saw something in the way Gena Rowlands inhabited characters. Maybe they both saw an authenticity in art–the way it can both reveal and produce vulnerability. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Greetings, Pushkin! Stalinist Cultural Politics and the Russian National Bard (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) by Jonathan Brooks Platt explores the national celebrations around the centennial anniversary of Pushkin’s death in 1937. Platt structures his book around the dichotomy of what he sees as two different approaches to temporalities and modernity: monumentalism and eschatology, which celebrate, respectively, the formative moments of cultural narratives as opposed to their ruptures and changes. This theoretical framework engages deeply with the work of such scholars as Mikhail Bakhtin, Susan Buck-Morss, Katerina Clark, and Boris Groys. Through the discussion of the planning and the execution of the jubilee celebration, Platt analyzes the pedagogical practices and the role of teaching of Pushkin at the time; the attitudes of Soviet intellectuals to the phenomenon of the national poet; and the way the life and death of Pushkin were re-imagined in contemporary visual arts, literature, and drama. The concluding chapter of the book traces the transformation of the figure of Pushkin, as well as the memory and legacy of the 1937 jubilee, throughout 20th-century Russian literature. A particularly remarkable aspect of Platt’s book is his decision not to inscribe the Pushkin jubilee celebrations in the historical context of the era of “ezhovshina” and Stalinist purges. Platt argues that the cultural development around the jubilee celebrations demonstrates that the temporal logic that arose in the Stalinist period, is much more complicated than usually believed, and that the jubilee case demonstrates how different perceptions of time and the project of modernity in general could co-exist side by side in Stalin’s time challenging, thus, our established notion and representations of this era. Olga Breininger is a PhD candidate in Slavic and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. Her research interests include post-Soviet culture and geopolitics, with a special focus on Islam, nation-building, and energy politics. Olga is the author of the novel There Was No Adderall in the Soviet Union and columnist at Literatura. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Where personal history and shared history intersect, we are left with the figures of memory and myth. These poems seek to reclaim the portions of personal history where we were mere spectators of our lives and the parts of cultural history that define us, even now, without our consent. But what about the figures of myth that once walked the earth? What right do we have to ownership, what bond can be formed through reclamation and fictionalizing of their lives? Westhale claims the right to make art of, from, about our legends–whether they be people or the stories passed down from nation to family and to child. This “cavalcade” marches us to the intersection of “ours” and “theirs,” of “real” and “imagined,” but most importantly, this cavalcade is a procession of history that puts us on the sidelines. From here, we see how our individual waking, breathing, and moving interacts with every history we were born from and into. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

I am not going to lie to you, dear reader, this collection will require you to be fully present. With each layer of the speaker that is revealed, you will shed a layer of yourself. This revealing will bring you knee to knee, eye to eye–two bodies recognizing one another as cosmic dust. What do we allow to confuse this empyrean understanding of one another and of ourselves? we’re what they call a two body problem, it’s like double planets but I was out there at the far end and what you didn’t know but I did: that the stars are far apart that far and with my hearing stretched as far as I could there wasn’t a whisper, not a murmur, not even static that I might’ve called something more or even evidence of something more. Illness compounds time and time is the gatekeeper of our relationships. Noah Stetzer’s poems chronicle the constriction and dilation of understanding. They elevate in lieu of masking. They witness in lieu of reshaping reality into comfort. And these pieces come together to teach us about the fortitude of the human body. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Now in its fifth printing of a very short life, Ashaki Jackson’s Surveillance examines the relationship between acts of violence, the witnessing of violence, the witnessing of the witnessing of violence, and the internalization of all three. Media offers no escape from trauma, instead it creates a cyclical nature where the traumatized are re-traumatized and forced to live out fear after dread after terror. Written over the course of 3 months, Surveillance stretches the far-reaching arms of community to tap into a universal empathy. The collection nearly demands that this empathy exists, almost calls it into being through faith and continued presence. After reading this collection, I thought of the Nikki Giovanni poem Allowables which ends with: I don’t think I’m allowed To kill something Because I am Frightened Our own fear can pull us away from this universal empathy and understanding. The hyper-anxiety mode we are placed in by media rendering of violence, social media proliferation of those renderings, and the vitriol that ensues over our subjective views only positions us in an oppositional stance. Paranoia is heightened and exacerbated until we wonder who among us is human at all? Jackson touches on this very experience: You ask the screen where is the Black body’s god as if it is missing God is there demanding that the Black body get up Like you it is disappointed that the black body too is human Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

  With a genre-bending hybridity that Czerwiec is well-known for, Sweet/Crude: A Bakken Boom Cycle (Gazing Grain Press, 2016) takes the structure of a heroic crown of sonnets and retrofits it for the prose poem and lyric essay. The repetition throughout entrances the reader into the dream state of industrial dystopia that one might find Orwellian but Czerwiec knew as home. The question and answer format is more of a call and response where the speaker ushers you through the duality of truth: what I see is different from what you see, but what lies beneath us is the same. What and who do we level in the wake of our greed? Start reading it for the pleasure of the form, but keep reading it because this is a piece of our history as a nation and society that needs to be held in the tight home of lyric. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry