New Books in Poetry

Tina Escaja‘s, Free Fall/Caida libre, translated by Mark Eisner (Fomite Press, 2015), is an exceptional example of poetry in translation as artistic collaboration. Poetry exists outside of the margins, and this often creates an insurmountable task for those seeking to relay emotion, realization, and epiphany across language barriers. The nuances and inflections of colloquialism and historical, cultural understandings can be lost. We, as readers of translation often wonder, what is kept of the music and what is kept of the intent? Translations can only bring us to the precipice–language allows us to take the plunge. We must trust our translators to be lovers of verse. Escaja works in an experimental form that is most likened to the cycle inherent in life, death, and rebirth. Even throughout the lines and stanzas, there is a stopping and starting again, a dropping off and returning. Recuperarnos quiero. Aprender a nacerme de otra en ti. Sin vuelta posible. Sin colchon salvavidas, sin suturas. Caidalibre. I want to recover us. To learn to be born of another in you. Impossible to turn back. No life vests, no sutures. Free fall. Beyond translating language, Eisner has taken on the task of translating experience. This is unabashedly a feminist text and a challenge that Eisner understood better as an opportunity. The least likely combination of writer/translator is a woman writer and a male translator (http://womenintranslation.tumblr.com/). These two have also collected, translated, edited, and complied (with the help of other talented folks) an anthology of Latin American Poetry of Resistance, furthering this work of artistic collaboration while focusing on social justice. Find out more information about these writers and projects at www.RedPoppy.net To the poet about to be translated, Escaja offers, “You must be open, patient, and generous.” To the translator about to embark on their first project, Eisner offers, “Think of it as an art and embrace it as a creative challenge.” Listen here for Tina’s readings of her pieces in their native tongue, and Mark’s reading of his translations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Every poet has their obsessions and for James Franco they are childhood, gender, sex, innocence, and the work place he knows best: the film industry. Within these poetic frames we’re introduced to various voices, landscapes nearly worn out with elegy, and a repertoire of imagery that is both tender and violent. Franco is our poet of earnest grotesquerie, favoring clarity to vagueness as he depicts the bizarre zones of early experience that crash against poems of adulthood that occupy spaces most readers do not have access to: film and celebrity. However, Franco’s poems seem to argue that a kinship exists between the world of the adolescent and the world of a movie set. In his poems, we see the intersection of both and the distinctions between sincerity and artifice are blurred and complicated by a speaker who seems simultaneously anchored in both of these perceptual districts. In addition to Franco’s fidelity to the bramble of childhood memory and glittering industrial complex of show business, his poems are deceptively musical, employing internal rhymes and capturing the tiny voltage of music inside every syllable, creating a sonic landscape one might miss if you don’t read the poems aloud. When the book Directing Herbert White (Graywolf Press, 2014) was first published, it made a big splash in the otherwise small pond of the poetry world, and it reminded me of what Franco does best: challenges society’s notions of the artist and the dynamic – and at times rigid communities – they inhabit. During out chat we talk about the relationship between childhood and violence, the creative writing workshop as a site of instruction, his various poetic influences, and so much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In Lady of the Moon (Headmistress Press, 2015), the reader is graced not only with the poetry of Amy Lowell, but with sonnets in response and a scholarly essay on the poet’s life, love, and work. Amy Lowell lived and wrote in a time when she could not be entirely herself, could not fully claim her rightful space among the great writers of love poetry and celebrations of the beloved. She had to reveal her truths by hiding them. As much as she cloaked her work, shifted genders of speaker and beloved, the truth of the poems resonate now as unabashed declarations of love and desire for her partner, Ada Russel. This collection places the relationship with Russel at the forefront in such a way that it honors what could not be honored before. But this is true of most of the work published by Headmistress Press: necessary voices are given the mic before it is too late, a safe space is offered for rumination on gender, sexuality, and all spectrums of identification, and the work of poets like Amy Lowell is given the truthful and critical analysis it deserved while the poet was living. We know that Amy Lowell wanted to be understood better as a poet. She did not want to hide her love, her body, or her desires but knew that it would only be safe to be fully realized after her death. She left the door open for us, as readers. You will sit here, some quiet Summer night, Listening to the puffing trains, But you will not be lonely, For these things are a part of me. And my love will go on speaking to you Through the chairs, and the tables, and the pictures, As it does now through my voice, And the quick, necessary touch of my hand. (From “Penumbra” by Amy Lowell) As scholars and poets, Mary and Lillian came together to create this homage not only to Amy Lowell but to her long-time relationship with Ada Russel. So much care was paid to this union that it is Ada’s photo that graces the cover. In Mary’s 27 response sonnets, the reader is offered an opportunity to have the veil lifted somewhat– maybe even to afford Lowell the transparency she craved. Who among us does not want to celebrate our love for another person? Who does not want to jump up, yell it from the rooftops? Maybe Lowell trusted that her poetry memorialized their relationship and that her declarations of love would truly be understood long after she and Russel were gone from the physical world. And even in the daylight sky, your streams Of light show through the ruling blue, and give, Making the world more hopeful than it seems. Inside my lines, your love and beauty live, Etched in my books, with nothing to forgive Or be forgiven for, an ancient light That lasts forever. You should know, I give My fortune, house, and heart, to keep you bright When I am gone. (From “Sonnet 27” by Mary Meriam) For any who wished to understand more about Amy Lowell and her work, who felt the gaping holes in the teaching of her writing and life, should pick up this collection. The poet is honored by showing plainly her reverence and desire for Ada Russel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Winner of the Gazing Grain 2015 Chapbook contest, BIG BROWN BAGby Marisa Crawford is our final Chapbookapalooza installment. And what a way to end a glorious month of celebrating this small form. Set within the behind-the-scenes confines a fictional department store that rings true as a multitude of department stores, Crawford brings us an inner monologue in conversation. Does this seem counterintuitive? Think of the way we engage with society and community. Think of the struggles we endure to locate ourselves within and without those groups. “Goody’s” is less setting than state of being. There is a long history of poets as cultural critics, poets as clear, focused lens and Crawford has learn to trust her subjectivity or at least quiet her mind enough to understand it. Her speaker grapples with the things we need to do in order to survive while remaining clear-headed about boundaries and priorities. By internalizing criticism, the world I processed in bits and pieces. The poems have a colloquial ease that the trained reader knows as hard-won. The content leaps fuse together through the life of the poem and of the collection. Who do we call out to when we are the only person in the room who understands our perfectly human and flawed selves? Or is it the duty of the poet-as-observer to issue warnings against what we have been enacting on each other for millennia… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Dynamite (Bull City Press, 2015) is transit distilled. Anders Carlson-Wee‘s poems employ movement as mechanism and movement as reverence in a journey that most dream of making yet few ever do. On a cross-country train trip, brothers Kai and Anders armed themselves with a video camera, a secret language of bird calls, and minds tuned to verse. Watch the coal-dust cook in the wind-eddies. Watch it linger. Watch it spiral thinly as it bruises the blue-faded mind of the buffalo sky. We must be the pupil that swells in the coming darkness. The cargo worth carrying across the distances. There is not a single moment where it is safe to pull yourself from the collection, not a moment to disengage with shifting landscape, memory, and the ruthless bonds of family. This chapbook will make you want to write and remind you of when this country was experienced viscerally, when we refused the lure of complacent stasis and chased pure adventure. Watch their video here and wish them well at the Nappa Valley Film Festival next month: “Riding the Highline.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

When Denise Levertov called Lynn Strongin a “true poet,” she recognized an awareness that transcended the young poet’s age. This very human awareness can come with suffering. Inflicted with Polio as a child, Strongin speaks with a voice that understands states of varied ability, that knows real pain, and has navigated the way relationships change in the face of illness. Composed entirely in singlets, The Burn Poems (Headmistress Press, 2015) pull at strings of understanding until meaning has unraveled and reassembled itself. There is a longing that emanates the pieces, a longing well-learned and well-developed that shifts its focus, but never loses intensity. I want her to stay Close Not paralyzed like me But content in her apron of photography: printed, filmic security The image holy, holy, holy. Bliss comes like flare of lit match And can be blown out as quickly: By word It is rare for one to realize their conversation is inhabiting a moment of history-yet-to-come as it actively engages the present. When speaking with Strongin, I heard a voice that has resonated for generations and will continue to resonate for many to come. She has tapped into the undeniable, fragile force that makes us human and she allows that well-spring to flow. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Alexis Rhone Fancher‘s State of Grace: The Joshua Elegies (KYSO Flash Press, 2015) is not an “easy” collection. This is not a group of poems that you can take on the train for mere entertainment or to pass the time. These pieces demand the reader to be present, open, and willing to inhabit the suffering of another human being. But in this presence of mind, connections are made. Since the death of her son in 2007, Fancher has written fourteen elegies that create a road map of her grief spanning eight years. These poems can be difficult to absorb, I often found myself needing to retreat from their content, literally step away from the page. I think of “poems as process,” meaning the need to express is greater than the need to retreat. I think of “poems as companions,” meaning that these pieces reach out to others deep in grief. I think of appreciation– this poet has contributed to poetry in a significant way. This poet is brave. I liked the pain, the dig of remembering, the way, if I moved the dagger just so, I could see his face, jiggle the hilt and hear his voice clearly, a kind of music played on my bones… She offers this sentiment to her readers, “All life has tragedy, the best we can do is learn from tragedy. And maybe have some sort of shared joy in overcoming it.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

The poem fragments in Hope Wabuke‘s Movement No. 1: Trains (Dancing Girl Press, 2015) function more as meditations than portions of a whole. They meditate on movement’s power over the body and mind. What are the vessels that carry our bodies through cities, from home to beyond? Who are the people inhabiting our thoughts, moving our mind from idea to emotion to dream? the city is color electric, neon; the humming static pulsing further away. and she understands the way a charge moves through air in the meeting of two bodies, but she does not understand the afterwards, the pressing of a thing into the shape of something else. These poems appear gentle but do not be deceived by the calm voice. Trains shudder and jolt, tracks shift and bump. There is a recognition of longing present each time the beloved is invoked, and a reluctant understanding that when in motion, the familiar becomes foreign. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In her macabre pastoral landscape Fiddle is Flood (Blood Pudding Press, 2015), Lauren Gordon conjures up a persona far-reaching enough to grapple with loss, grief, and the shock of intense change. But the poet does not hide behind the personal, instead she allows the speaker to become loss, become grief, and quake at the shock of a life turned on its head. Using colloquial language and the cadence of hymn to a mesmerizing affect, Gordon pulls the reader into a melding of prairie, nostalgia, and memory: …endless, endless prairie for corn and mud and loss and dirt and the seeds and the silky tassel of half truths and how you find God in the middle of a haystack naked and crouching and warm and how you found yourself in love with a doll make out of a corn cob whose skin became your own, dried and sheared and real. Childhood musings of Laura Ingalls Wilder and “Little House on the Prairie” fuel the mixing of real and imagined, of the body before loss and the body after. This collection only appears gentle, it means to wound. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Think of a place you have visited and to which you feel a connection. Now think of that place in utter ruin and devastation mere months later. You feel a pull, a pull to return, to help, and to make sense of the heavy fist nature can bring down on us at any time. Tomlinson personally gathered hours upon hours of eye-witness accounts, conversations, and testimonies. Translated and then transcribed, he pulled the poems directly from the transcriptions, as a sculptor would uncover a human form from within a block of marble. These poems go beyond what we understand as “poems of witness” and become “poems of testimony,” life rendered into verse in the purest sense. we saw the barge as well as the darkening of the world my house was nothing the barge was on top of our house and the houses were gone my house it was nothing anymore a little portion of a steel bar Through the disassociation needed to survive such trauma and begin to reshape rubble into a life, moments of clarity and realization are apparent, he lifts these moments so that we may see them clearly. This collection is labor of devotion and should be celebrated. Tomlinson reminds us that art is life, elevated. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry