Sarah Kain Gutowski, The Familiar, TRP: The University Press of SHSU, Huntsville TX, 77341, www.texasreviewpress.org, 2024, 93 pages

Walt Whitman wrote in “Song of Myself,”

The past and present wilt—I have fill'd them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.
Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

The implication here is not so much an egotistical reference to the self, which it is on one level, but to a larger self; one referencing the American experience. His is the song of the country and its people, Gutowski’s The Familiar is a song of the Self.

Sarah Kain Gutowski’s selfhood does not aspire to Whitman’s grand scale, an all-encompassing national self, but to a multi-layered, multi-dimensional, complex study of her Self.  Initially, these persons of the Self, (the Self being the vessel within aspects of that person are contained) concentrate on two distinct aspects or personalities. These aspects are the “Ordinary Self” and the “Extraordinary Self."

In general, Ordinary Self is orderly, domestic, predictable, is the kind of person who keeps a household functioning, gets the kids off to school on time, with lunch, packs her husband’s clothes for business trips and easily accounts for “why she is good at laundry.” The Extraordinary Self, feels more like a younger (though initially somewhat subdued/ defeated) earlier person of the self who is described as a “warehouse of unrealized dreams.” Extraordinary Self is daring, creative, prone to spontaneous demonstrations of extreme emotions/acts like a perpetually in motion dream machine.

These two facets of The Self coexist with Ordinary Self in ascendance in the early stages of the poem. This dominate posture suggests a life of long-established routines of child bearing, jobs in and out of the home, and a settled existence that needs to be maintained at the expense of the reckless abandon of Exceptional Self.  While Exceptional Self is suppressed, she is not completely shackled and subdued. As The Self, containing these two distinct aspects of her person, enters middle age, these dichotomous Persons of the Self, are in opposition. This adversarial relationship suggests a conflict to establish a personhood’s domination. As this opposition escalates, The Self states, “we need a priest.” But what for?
Given there are deliberate references to witchcraft and demonology, as early as the prefatory notes, the suggestion can easily be read as a priest for an exorcism. Gutowski’s cited a Random House Unabridged Dictionary definition that says, in effect, that The Familiar is a friend or an associate. More significantly, a familiar spirit is a supernatural spirit or demon often in the form of an animal to serve the witch. Most telling of all, in the Roman Catholic Church a familiar is an agent of the Inquisition employed to arrest accused or suspected persons.

My Dictionary of Witchcraft and Demonology (by Rossell Hope Robbins reprinted by Crown Publishers in 1969) expands on familiars saying they are spirits, or imps, the Devil provides witches, after a pact, for nefarious purposes up to and including death. These imps may take the form and shape of common domestic animals (in particular cats and dogs) but can be any creature great or small including a human.  Obviously this vague, but all-inclusive definition, ensures a desired result once the Inquisitors come knocking on your door.

So, who or what is (are) The Familiar(s)? Are they the Persons of the Self? Or the Self that contains the persons that expands to include The Inevitable Self who has a companion known variously as the rescue cat and the traitor cat? All of these? None of these. If personalities are jigsaw puzzles, clearly there are always pieces missing. And that is good thing as we are forced to ask, “What is the True Self?” Can anyone ever truly know the answer to such a fundamental question? 

Midway through this beguiling collection, the reader is forced to ask another fundamental question: is this fracturing of the mirror of the Self, a mental breakdown?  There are so many deliberately, carefully constructed, clear aspects of Self, that a Dissociative Identity Disorder has to be considered as one of those parts of this expansive complex personality puzzle. If this is a breakdown, it is more “Three Faces of Eve,” than Girl, Interrupted or Under the Bell Jar or the locked in, hopeless case denizens of Mary Ellen Mark’s photo essay Ward 81.

Ultimately, the acuity of the narrative voice belies a suggestion of dissimilation.  The tone of the collection is consistent, ironic, even occasionally bemused, too much in control to be trapped in a personal Infinity Box endlessly creating and recreating the Self.  That is unless The Self is master necromancer beyond exorcism and the “shrinks” that are mentioned as more necessary than priests. Maybe we are in a dystopian science fiction experiment like “Orphan Black”, where the Selves are clones in an ill-thought-out end game that has monsters like Caliban in it. More likely, the wry double-edged observation of Ordinary Self is closer to the mark: that she is a kind of Cassandra who predicts the future and no one cares whether she is right or wrong. The simplest succinct answer to the questions posed seems to be, “It’s obvious we are a clusterfuck.” I’ll buy that.

What is certain about The Familiar is that this wonderous, enticing, thought provoking collection that needs to be read slowly, multiple times, ideally with her previous collection, Fabulous Beast, which is a mythopoetic exploration of Femininity in ways that defy easy explanation. Read together or separately, it is obvious in just two books, Gutowski has created a formidable body of work.

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Andrew Kaufman, The Rwanda Poems: voices and visions from the genocide, NYQ Books,www.nyq.org, available on Amazon, 2023, 85 pages, $18.95

The Rwanda Poems is a book that we should not have to read, not because it isn’t excellent, vital, raw, and exposed as an open wound, all of which these poems are, but because of the atrocities it reveals. The horrific acts The Rwanda Poems describe, in the most graphic way possible, show just how evil men can be to other men and women. Part of the horror is the people who are butchered are known to the killers; are their neighbor’s for God’s sake. 
The violence against women is beyond brutal, involving the worst kind of savagery imaginable. Children are killed in the most disgusting, inhumane ways, worse than what you might do to an animal. The way many of these people are hacked to pieces suggests the killing was a kind of sport, something fun to be relished the way only pure evil can be enjoyed. That many of these marauding men with machetes were drunk on banana beer is no excuse.  If there was a limit to the kind of cruelty inflicted, it wasn’t from lack of trying, but a limit to the killer’s imagination.  And the government not only encouraged and abetted the massacres but often ordered its army and militias to carry them out. (Not so incidentally, the government received a massive order for machetes, the prime weapon used in these barbaric killings, from China.)  I guess that is one way to eliminate opposing points of view! There is a sickness in this that can only be understood in terms of genocide.

Even listing the acts is painful and they should be. What Kaufman has done is experience the trauma, the violence for us so we don’t need to. But beware, this book exists as a warning that we ignore atrocities at our own peril, that not seeing them is a kind of complicity because, Kaufman knows all too well, it could happen again.  And we must not allow it, in Rwanda or anywhere else.

Kaufman traveled extensively in Rwanda while the wounds were still visible and fresh in people’s minds. He says, and there is no doubt that he is correct, virtually everyone who was an adult in Rwanda, at the time of the genocidal attacks, is a survivor or a perpetrator or a perpetrator’s spouse or mother.  He spent six weeks visiting memorial sites, interviewing victims, imprisoned perpetrators, taking notes, and eventually composing this necessary book that is part oral history, part cautionary tale. Did I mention, everyone should read this?

Andrew describes The Rwanda Poems as “non-fictional poetry, a cousin to the non-fiction novel.” What he has set out to do is reveal a national collective consciousness and he succeeds, in my estimation, totally. The monologues of the perpetrators are chilling, maddeningly real. Kaufmann uses a range of poetic forms such as the sestina and the villanelle, to further emphasize points; repetition in this manner becomes incantatory, nightmarish, inevitable.

There is a rich and horrible literature of atrocity and The Rwanda Poems belongs near the top of the list. Books that kept me up at night, but I read anyway, because they were written for the same kind of reason that Kaufman wrote this one: Borowski’s, This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman, Andrew Loyd’s My War Gone By, I Miss It So,( a non-fiction account of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, civil/religious wars featuring  Serbs, Croats, Muslims murdering and pillaging at will,) the Babi Yar chapter of D.M. Thomas’s White Hotel, Bolano’s 2666 with  hundreds of pages of haiku like elegies for the disappeared young women of Ciudad Juarez. And, now, The Rwanda Poems.

Reading these poems recalls a visit to The Wall in DC where the simple listing of names of the dead (or hearing them read by the traveling Wall) is a profound statement about the absolute futility of war. That’s why we listen to Shostakovich’s Babi Yar symphony, which almost seems  too melodic for what it depicts. Still, there is a kind of solace in a musical metaphor we can’t find anywhere else. We must not become complacent because, as the author notes, knowing the history of one holocaust suggests there will be another. And then one after that. And so on. You need something like Kristof Penderecki’s dissonant “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima,” to listen to while you read Kaufman’s book. Penderecki’s music physically hurts to listen to: wailing siren like atonal tones of death, like a sustained musical scream.These are poems that hurts you to read them. They are supposed to hurt. Feel the pain, know what our humanity is capable of.  

PS: Oddly, and maybe the saddest thing of all, the vast majority of the victims were devout Catholics who did not lose their faith after the massacres. They saw these massacres as a time when Satan was in control. Where was God, one wonders? The victims maintain: “God never deserts his people.” If there was a God at work in these massacres, I don’t want to see any more of his work.  Faith may be the strangest human trait of all.

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Red Hawk (aka Robert Moore) Book of Lamentations, The Bitter Oleander Press, www.bitteroleadner.com,, available on Amazon, 2024, 96 pages $21
In a time where there is so much noise, so many distractions, so much inconsequential, perverse focus on cultural and political issues that simply don’t matter, or are designed to create mindless emotional reactions, it is almost impossible to find a book arrive in your mailbox that not only matters, but rises above the distracting noise of modern life. Serious writers have debated the issue of whether poetry matters, I am thinking of Dana Gioia and Ben Lerner , among others, who debate this issue to great effect.  Yes, poetry does matter though probably only to the people who write it. Seriously, in the world we live in now, does poetry touch our daily lives? Does it change us? No, poetry clearly does not, but it should.
I do not delude myself that people actual care about this topic, people simply don’t read and when they are not reading books, they are definitely not reading poetry. Oddly, there seems to be more people than ever writing poetry. Unfortunately, their writing, their thinking reflects their ignorance of the form and their writing suffers from it.
This prologue to an appreciative review, feels necessary, if only because most writers won’t take the time to delve into this carefully written, deeply considered and, dare I say it, morally complex book. Red Hawk’s lamentation is a document of mourning, not only for lost loved ones, but for the world and the people who seem determined to destroy the environment that sustains us. He is no tree hugger, in the sense of a derogatory nature lover (as right-wing desecrators of all things natural would have it) but a transcendentalist in the sense Emerson and his cohort knew it. The world we have been blessed with is a spiritual creation, a place where all things are meant to exist in a harmonic, co-existence.  In a very real sense Red Hawk sees our world as being hell, a hell that can be transcended if we care to make the effort. 

The Earth is a sentient Being, with
a vast intelligence and a vital body:
organic life is its organ system,
trees its lungs, waters its blood, as we

are its nervous system.  Each organ
gives off a unique force crucial
to the life of the body. If one organ dies,
another must take over its function

or the Earth dies.”
(from “The Cost of Killing the Animals”)

Killing the animals is an act of extreme hubris.  He laments that man has lost his way. That he has no respect for other living creatures, not to mention himself. There is no reverence, no compassion, there is only the misreading of the Biblical edict that Earth and all its glories were meant for man to utilize which they seem to interpret as to ruthlessly and heedlessly to despoil.  What happens when the fossil fuels run out? What happens when the climate has passed the stage where it can no longer support our way of life? Leaders have fallen into the ultimate trap of power: using it for its own sake, for short-sighted, ill-thought-out personal goals at the expense of others. No one ever gets to paradise following the path of violence and yet that appears to be the complete focus of our culture; read the news (or watch it, I momentarily forgot, no one reads anymore except on a phone).  Watch the ads also ( the multitude of pharmaceutical alone are enough to make you want to end it all as they imply: this could happen to you!) and choose your own destruction through war games, mass shootings or by IED.  No wonder Red Hawk is composing a book of lamentations.

And yet by paralleling the desolation with a choice, series of parable like stories, and a carefully delineated moral landscape, he offers the reader a clear choice: use the world kindly as was intended, create a life that eschews the superfluous values of violence and commercial commodities, live dangerously: as a rational moral man in an irrational immoral time. As he concludes in the final lines,

“The trees bear silent witness to this desolation
and do not resist deforestation;
they provided the substance of the cross
and humbly bear the burden of its loss;

when they are sacrificed and turned into post or beam,
they do not scream.”
(from “The Moral Landscape”)

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Robert L. Penick, The Art of Mercy: New & Selected Poems, Hohm Press, www.hohmpress.com available from Amazon, 2023, 128 pages $18.95     

The Art of Mercy, is the first volume in the new Beggar Poet Series from Hohm Press. Penick gives you a good idea of who he is in the introduction as follows:

“What I hope these minor poems show is that there is opportunity for
goodness and mercy in any situation. The worse the situation, the greater
the opportunity.

So be kind. It doesn’t usually cost much.”

One of the pleasures of reading a new and selected, is to revisit old favorites and to discover collections you had never seen previously and a generous, almost half the book, new work.  Penick is remarkably consistent in his world view, writing style, and compassion for others. There are quite a few busted relationships remembered as melancholic breakups, inevitabilities, always told with generosity. If there is rancor in these poems, it is generally reserved for himself as he could have done more to made himself a better person, than hostility towards others.

As many of us have done, Penick worked a variety of unfulfilling jobs, reads books, and writes to stay sane and to get his butt off the bar stool before he ends up as an extra in a remake of “Barfly” or “Trees Lounge.” Aptly, the collection concludes with a series of When You Are Old  poems. Old, doesn’t mean defeated, but of mourning those who have gone before. He feels old cherished memories fading further away, begins getting his affairs in order, and describes just getting on with getting on. In the writing of these, Penick subscribes to the “I’m not dead yet theory” of life.  We go on, we go on. As he says at the close of a previous sequence,

“It is small comforts
that move us forward.”

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Dan Provost, All in a Pretty Little Row, Roadside Press, Magical Jeep Distribution, available on Amazon, 196 pages, 2023, $15

All in a Pretty Little Row, collects ten of Provost’s chapbooks published over the past 20 years. Some of these are rarely seen, extremely limited editions, so this recent trend by prolific poets to reissue previously obscure editions is a positive one. Dan tells us quite a bit of who he is: a common man, albeit a large one, as in a former football player (lineman), finding himself working jobs that require assertive personalities, though he is not overtly aggressive himself. Quite the opposite, in fact.  He was a kind of disciplinarian in a home for troubled youths, which is euphemism for a half way house on the road to hell/incarceration for crimes to be committed as an adult. These are vivid poems showing a means-well idea for dealing with youth in crisis that, in real life, rarely ends well. Having known people in this field, with the exact same job, who used to say, “The kids are getting bigger and tougher. One kid has a brother who is an NFL lineman but this kid is bigger and meaner. I’m getting older but the restraints are the same and they still work but it would have been a good idea to get out a long time ago.” Coaching football for 24 years was a much better alternative to thumb restraints.

Outside of work Provost is drawn to working class bars, unhappy women and bouts of insomnia that leads to more drinking,

“The sea still parts
ways with the waves
at 6:04 A.M., after an
all-night drinking binge.

Looking to the water for mental comfort

I still seem to be losing the battle.”
( from “Epiphany at Age 41)

No doubt Provost is of a melancholic temperament, a borderline severe depressive at times, but beneath the minor keys of these odes to daily life, is the heart of a compassionate man who is driven to write, to clarify, to make the best of it, and to move on.

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Susan Oringel, Carnevale, David Robert Books, www.davidrobertboks.com available through Amazon, 100 pages, 2023, $19.25

As with her previous book, My Coney Island (Finishing Line Press), Carnevale is a collection of family histories, vivid portraiture, sometimes tinged with nostalgia, other times, with strong feelings of loss.  As with all family histories, the living and then the dying, is the essential purpose for the work. People, once vibrant and alive, succumb to a variety of debilitating illnesses, injuries, and death. There is a fading away, there is the loss, but all are remembered cherished and never forgotten,

“It rains: I buy and hold
my own umbrella, my strides
unchecked. I don’t see your favorite
Broadway shows, but miles of art,
Murillo and Velazquez

at the Met; Klimt, Shiele
Schad, whose sexual
energies make, me ache;
Dickinson’s turbid, dreamlike,
canvasses of loss.
from “New York City (Without You)

Still, there is joy in remembering: the Coney Island family, workshop, dinners, and bemusement mixed with disgust  as in “Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest ( is there anything more disgusting than that? Yes. Showing it live in ESPN.) There is a fair bit of anger at life’s unfair consequences,

“We are so fucking mortal.  It kills me.  My student, did he die
accidently, accidently from drugs, or mean to kill himself?
I am haunted, as if knowing would help.  Deb just got diagnosed
with Lyme’s again.  We’re both scared. She’s also angry.”
From Some Things Seem to Last

Susan is diagnosed also, but she survives her ordeal, finds solace in memories of Coney Island, her home, where she recalls the avenues, the beach, waves, places, “land where my parents/played and I began, begin again.”

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Bunkong Tuon, What Is Left, Jacar Press, www.jacardpress.com, 2024, 28 pages, $14

Editor David Rigsbee has revitalized a series of Greatest Hits, begun by Pudding Publications editor Jennifer Bosveld, that was discontinued when she passed away. The original series, which numbered well over a hundred chapbooks, myself included, were modest chapbooks sporting a drab yellow cover. Each volume offered a brief overview of the poet’s work with explanatory notes at the end where the poets could reflect upon the poems and what they meant when they were composed. Rigsbee’s revitalization sports a bright blue cover with a white silhouette of a tree in the wind, losing its leaves.

Editor Rigsbee sums up Tuon’s book as well as anyone could,

“With stirring clarity, modesty, and understatement, Tuon shares the feeling of what it must have been like at one end and what words can light up the next mystery. Most of all, he finds a place for himself under the law of love, its duties, and deferrals to the other, its sanctifying power.  In images that will last, the poems reimagine personal experience as our most civilizing act.”

I have long maintained the Tuon’s first collection, Gruel, published by NYQ Press, is one of the finest first books I have ever read. In it he sums up the experience of being  a child, escaping from the murderous Cambodian holocaust, carried on his grandmother’s back.  What Is Left, offers three poems from that collection that should be an incentive for the reader to track down the whole collection.

Now an assistant professor of English at Union College and the proud father of two, Tuon’s work celebrates his new found joy of being a dad. “On the Anniversary of My Fake Birthday” remains a personal favorite and should move anyone who has been a parent or sympathized with people who are forced to flee their homeland in order to become one.

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Briefly Noted

Two from Sundress Publications:

McKenzie Berry, Slack Tongue City, www.sundresspublications.com, 2022, 111 pages, $16

Sprightly Odes, sometimes elegiac, other times celebratory, to her hometown, Louisville, KY

Stacey Balkun, Sweetbitter, www.sundresspublications.org, 2022, 92 pages, $16

Growing up in New Jersey in the brownfields of Union Carbide and other corporate polluters complete with a timeline of what these corporations knowingly did, when and how they pulled out and said, “see ya cancer victims.”  Not a diatribe so much as coming of age in these modern times. A word of caution folks: do not accept “clean fill” from corporations. Pittsfield MA primary schools wholeheartedly agree. 

Eight From Roadside Press:

Michael D Grover, Walking Away, Roadside Press, Magical Jeep Distributions, also on Amazon, 2023, 72 pages, $15

Grover’s daily existence is a keeping on, keeping on walking away from cancer, writing to stay sane, always searching for the light at the end of the tunnel.

Anastasios Tsonis, Scars, Dos Madres, www.dosmadres.com2023, 80 pages, $22

Scars is a rare combination of art, ekphrastic poetry, technical observation, and deeply felt emotion. Love and loss are often twinned, literally, in an elegiac poem to his younger twin. Another evokes a dying, much loved woman, all in conjunction with original artwork much of it by the poet himself.  If you were to look up Tsonis’s other available work, you will find technical texts books and scientific studies. To all those clinging to the C.P. Snow thesis of the distinct separation of the artistic and scientific mind, will learn this distinction is not universal. Tsonis can do both equally as well, with grace and beauty.

Scot Young, They Said I Wasn’t College Material, Roadside Press, Magic Jeep Distribution, available on Amazon, 2024, 132 pages, $15

Young’s latest collection is a selected, mostly culled from before 2009. The title comes from an actual conversation with a guidance counselor who failed to see Young’s potential as a student. Scot, in addition to being the editor of the longstanding online poetry site Rusty Truck, has been an educator sensitive to the needs of students who often fall between the cracks as he almost did. His poems reflect a downhome in the Ozark’s personality who boozes, chases girls, is subject to all the foolishness of being young and feckless but who embraces a relationship that becomes a life partnership and mature adult. These poems are narratives told in everyday language of life lived  without pretention, often with humor and insight for those of us who like our poetry without garnishes, and a musical accompaniment you might find on your local bar’s jukebox.

Todd Cirillo, Disposable Darlings, Roadside Press, distributed by Magical Jeep Distribution and available on Amazon, 2024, 84 pages, $15

Reading Cirillo put me in mind of working in the neighborhood bar and hanging out with the regulars. When I dedicate a book, as I often have,  “to the regulars as they made life bearable and you know who you are,” these dedications were not idle or facetious gestures. Over 25 years I worked the last bar, regulars saved my butt, made me laugh, never failed to tip, bought me drinks when I was drinking, hung out, and provided moral support when I needed it. While Todd was not literally one of those guys, I can see him as simpatico, as a guy who would have been someone you could shoot the shit with, talk sports, or writing, or just about anything else that came to mind. Needless to say, his poems have the same kind of easy, vernacular feel to them. None of these are overly literary or self-conscious in a way that makes you feel like you are being talked down to. When he references himself, it’s as much to make you laugh along with him or share his pain. In short, Cirillo is a regular guy and that his high praise where I come from.

Belinda Subraman, Full Moon Midnight, Roadside Press, distributed by Magical Jeep Distribution, available on Amazon, 2024, 100 pages, $15

I first met Belinda way back in the early 80’s when she was running a publishing venture, called Gypsy Press while she and her husband were living in Germany.  I shared the Gypsy Press  chapbook contest winner with Gerry Locklin in 1986, one of my earliest books, reflecting some of my starkest and darkest bar experiences to date. Seeing her work so many years later is like visiting an old friend, unseen or heard much from in many years. Belinda remains a literal breath of fresh air, a person who still has maintained her faith in Humanity, is still writing of her personal experiences and, most importantly, universal truths.  Her poems that have a mystical edge to them are not poses, but deeply felt based on long followed principles of harmony and spiritual grace. As a former hospice nurse and peace activist, Belinda doesn’t ignore the harsher reality of loving in a time of Trump, a time that values the exact opposite kind of earthly pleasures that is so prevalent in Belinda’s work. She manages to be more graceful in her criticism than they would ever be of her.  Like many of us in our senior years, she can’t help revisiting the past, her loved ones, loved places and her sharing her experiences compliments her spiritual work. 

Susan Ward Mickelberry, and blackberries grew wild, Roadside Press, distributed by Magical Jeep, available on Amazon, 2024, 100 pages, $15

Susan is essentially a narrative poet reflecting on her past in the many places she has lived in and visited as an army brat, over a long and eventful life. A strong sense of loss attends many of these, especially that of her beloved husband and family members now long gone. There are exotic locations, scents, and sounds, and more staid, though still lush, at home poems in Florida. As life is a journey, Susan has a rich one to share touching upon locations and experiences many of us can only visit by watching travelogues or hitching a rich Rick Steve as he journeys from one exotic locations to another. He may wax lyrical but he is no poet as Mickleberry most definitely is.

Miles Budimir, Licorice Heart, Roadside Press, distributed by magical Jeep, available on Amazon, 2024, 58 pages, $15

Men who work are at the center of Budimir’s Licorice Heart with a particular emphasis on his native Midwest.  There are street fairs, 4th of July celebrations, BBQ’s, and flea markets. And, of course, work. As a dedicated ABY (anybody but the Yankees baseball fan) this little snippet caught my eye,

But nothing beats
October in New York,
walking down Broadway the night
the Yankees lose their
American League Divisional Series
(from “October in New York”)

John Pietaro, Innocent Postcards: poetry ciphers, verse, Roadside Press, distributed by Magic Jeep, also available on Amazon, 2024, 87 pages, $15

Moving back and forth throughout the Cold War years to the present, Pietaro’s unusual, but affecting collection, effectively renders a state of mind that was dominated by Cold War politics.  I remember as a young child watching a goon from Wisconsin conducting a mock trial of sorts as chair of the House Unamerican Activities and thinking this mealy mouth demagogue was someone to despise as was everything he stood for. I was maybe 7 then and I didn’t know what a demagogue was but I sure as hell could recognize a hypocritical, two-faced liar in a way only kids can.  Nothing that happened since has changed my original impressions.

I grew up doing atomic air raid drills, ducking and covering under desks or assembling in the hallway where there were no windows, wondering how was this going to survive as we lived well within the blast range of an atomic bomb drop on NYC. Those were the years of above ground testing in the desert, exposing troops to the aftershocks and the radiation just to see what would happen. Those were years of naivety and innocence and the worst kind of “we don’t know what the hell we are doing” years. Not really. And we still don’t. I used to think the MAGA folks wanted to return to the 50’s, assuming it was the 1950’s they aspired to. I was right only about the 50’s, though recent events have shown I had the wrong century. Pietaro knows all this, lived though most of it and gives us a chaotic representation of the life and times of the Cold War era.,  As Ed Sanders said in an informal discussion 15 or so years ago, “I’ll put my FBI file up against anyone’s”. By which the meant size and depth. And a few years later introducing a Fugs poem/song “CIA Man” that has the line “someone is tapping my phone/line….”: he claims, they are still tapping mine. The implication was the 50’s/60’s  aren’t over yet. I fear he may be right. Innocent Postcards is a book for anyone who shares the same misgivings.

James Duncan, Cistern Latitudes, Roadside Press, Distributed by Magical Jeep, also available on Amazon, 2024, 84 pages, $15

Duncan’s narratives often put me in mind of late 50’s, early 60’s cafés featuring traditional folk singers. These were usually solo acts playing acoustic guitar with artists singing traditional  ballads and the occasional original song. Not that Duncan is a balladeer, per se, but his subjects often feature a rambling man, crossing the country, usually alone missing someone, or searching for someone new as most of those songs did.  He is often lonely, close to despair but not a defeatist; there is always another day, another ramble, new places to go and see and hopefully, a new love to find.

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Rachel R. Baum, How to Rob a Convenience Store, www.cowboyjamboreemagazine.com 2024, 49 pages, $9.99

In these finely tuned, pointed poems with an agenda, Baum tries to make sense of the impossible to understand: gun violence.  Having lived in two different rainey gun friendly states, where everyone carries (Montana and Texas), she is acutely aware of the prevalence weapons. When she writes about the 4th of July it isn’t about the parades but taking your children and running, running away from the guns. When she speaks of sitting shiva it is for the senseless massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue. Probably the most chilling of all is the true price of linseed oil, an essential ingredient in cleaning of the guns. Nothing says it better than “We Carry.” The verses are incantatory, pile driving, an ode to senseless toxic masculinity. What do we need these guns for? I guess it is to rob the convenience stores, or for the mall massacres/school shootings. Now we justify having a handy gun in order defend ourselves and feel good about ourselves as good guy with a gun. Seriously though, how can you tell the good with a gun from the bad guy with a gun? A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book are donated to the Giffords Law Cener to Prevent Gun Violence. Buy it. I did.

Richard Berlin, Tender Fences, Dos Madres, www.dosmadres.com, also available Amazon, 2024, 120 pages, $21

Berlin writes in his title poem of revising his med student lecture notes on Models for the Doctor-Patient relationship. He feels there is something missing from his model when he recalls a neighbor, a post-op dairy farmer too weak to milk his Girls. They cry out to be milked and he cries with them eventually they escaped from my neighbor and wander back home. 

“they escaped from my neighbor
and wandered back home. He laughs,
It’s a good thing my neighbor has tender fences.
Yes! Tender fences will be my model­­-
barriers that create space for healing,
placed close enough to hear everyone’s
cries of longing and love, a boundary
strong enough to hold tight before it bends,
yielding in time to get back home.”
( from “Tender Places”)

What more do you need to know about your doctor, your psychiatrist, your poet, than this?

Connie Johnson, Everything Is Distant Now, Blue Horse Press, www.bluehorsepress.com 2024, 60 pages, $12

The poetry of Connie Johnson is sensuous, redolent of scents and sounds, intimate, like cool jazz in a dark club, on a summer night.  She’s kind of blue, full of gin and sin, grits and grease and sizzled relief.  The more I read, the more I could hear the music, feel the lush sound of her words that felt like a cool breeze on a hot night and I thought, this is what deep in the skin love feels like. She’s seductive and whimsical, loving and sometimes lost, but she always bold, sassy, and appealing with seductive words that steal your heart and your mind.

“Jackleg preacher
Midnight teacher
Three tokes of something newsworthy

Play me some Nina and let’s talk about how your soul
was one million years old compared to mine. Who loved me,
who I loved. It’s the only thing that interests me now.
Africa in your profile, Congo Square in your
roots and rituals; it’s all jazz to me now.”
(from “When Nina Sings”)

Walt McLaughlin, Behold the Unspeakable: Selected and New Poems, Wood Thrush Books,
www.woodthrushbooks.com, 2024, 126 pages, $14

Walt McLaughlin is a wild man by which I mean a man who seeks solace, comfort, and inspiration from wild places. He is an avid hiker, camper, observer, and philosopher of the all things natural and untamed. His most recent philosophical work, Confronting the Unknowable, is highly recommended as it is pleasingly readable, (brief essay collection formulating his thinking based on a lifetime of contemplating), when most philosophical writing is not. My personal favorite is his adventures in the Alaska outback,  Arguing with the Wind, though Ialso highly recommend hisexperiences walking Vermont’s Long Trail end to end, Forest Under My Fingernails. I mention his prose works in terms of his poetry for the simple reason that much of his poetry reflects the thinking that can be found in his “wild man” in nature writing only in a briefer, short poetry form.  Early works are typical of a poet finding his was way while, later, uncollected one, are much more assured and accomplished. The core of his poetry seems best expressed in selections from his Timberline collection, A Hungry Happiness. If you haven’t sampled his work, check out a full catalog of his available titles on the website. You won’t be disappointed as Walt is an amenable companion for a trip into the wilds of the mind.

David Bergman, Plain Sight, Passager Books, www.passagerbooks.com, available on Amazon 2013, 106 pages, $18

I mistyped pain for plain as I began this review and I wonder if this was a kind of Freudian slip.  Bergman is one of those rare writers/artists who has made art out of his infirmity. Diagnosed with Parkinson’s, which appears to be quite advanced, as he writes these books (samples of his handwriting are included in a postscript that are revealing) of the progress of his affliction. Far from being overwhelmed by his disease, he manages to maintain a sanguine point of view that sees the humor  what many of his would consider a debilitating condition. Hallucinations are common but less scary than might be expected, become part of the new world view he is meant to live with.  While the bulk of the book deals with his degenerative condition, early poems deal with his youth, family, friends  and loves lost and found.  Bergman is a courageous man who has made the most out of the cruel fate his body has dealt him and is to be admired for producing this compelling collection.

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Jordan Trethewey, These Are the People in Your Neighbourhood: Fredericton Poems, illustrated by Eva Christensen, Roadside Press, distributed by Magic Jeep Distribution and available on Amazon, 2023, 198 pages, $20.95

While Trethewey’s neighborhood is in Canada, as the title makes clear, it could be any neighborhood, yours, mine, or anyone else’s. The characters are vividly drawn often with credit given to the real people who inspired these narratives. Much like The Spoon Rover Anthology in its day, and Winesburg, Ohio, in prose, we glimpse the everyday realities of a small city in all its nooks and crannies, with attendant joys and sorrows. Of particular note are Christensen’smany realistic watercolors scattered throughout the book giving the written work colorful complementary images that make this collection a must for people who have an interest in slice of life and everyday reality.

John Dorsey, Holocaust Agave: Selected Chapbook 2021-2023, Cyberwit, www.cyberwit.net 2024, 144 pages, $20

If you know John Dorsey’s work this collection will be just what the doctor ordered. If you don’t, this is the perfect place to start. Showing  his range from humble beginnings in rural PA, from trailer parks, to cross-country trips before he settles in the heartlands of Ohio and, now, Missouri, we see John’s versatility. He writes of poverty, of lost loves, could have beens, should have beens, and never weres, without self-pity or bombast always emphasizing his basic humanity.  His recent bouts with serious brain cancer tumor that cost him an eye, Dorsey is never self-pitying but clear-eyed and revealing of the kind of guy he is; one who picks  up and moves on. No one gets on with it like Dorsey who is known for his peripatetic poetic wanderings across the country to promote his poetry, to do readings, and hang out with poets everywhere he goes. Not even the cancer stops him from his treks across the country made more remarkable by the fact he doesn’t drive. Celebrate life with John and buy this book.

Joe Weil, Saint World, Iniquity Press/Vendetta Books, PO Box 253, Seaside Heights, NJ, 08751, available on Amazon, 2023, 108 pages, $12, illustrated by Anges Mark and Michael Shores (covers)

Weil describes himself as malpracticing catholic, a designation the late atheist poet, Bernadette Mayer, found amusing.  Weil writes of driving her from her remote ramshackle house in upstate to NY to NYC.  The long poem, “Poem to Replace My Misery” is typical of Weil’s rambling style touching on the personal, reflecting of the old times of a Native American girl he fancied, the twists and turns of life and  the unexpected curves on the literal journeys in life and those he cares for. In addition to being a poet, Weil is a professor (whatever that is, he wonders) a parent of two special needs children. He is a former caregiver to a severely autistic brother, as well and the kind of lapsed Catholic who hasn’t quite kicked the habit of spirituality. He may not be religious but he does have strong sense of duty, a moral compass, and more compassion for  disadvantaged people than most of us. All of these poems are relatable in a discursive, first thought, best thought style that feels largely unedited resulting in a genuine poem that does not feel worked or artificial. As a result, some of these poems feel unresolved but the pleasure is in the journey as much as the destination. Reading them is sort of like someone sitting at a gathering spontaneously relating personal stories that haven’t been thought through completely. Poetry purists on both sides of the coin (spontaneous versus cleanly edited) will either love or hate these but I don’t think Weil cares one way or the other. They are, as he is, what they are.

Pui Ying Wong, Fan Ling in October, Barrow Street Books, 2023, 66 pages, $18

Pui Ying Wong takes us on a journey home to her native Hong Kong at the beginning of the Chinese crackdown on the freedoms of the citizens of the small former British colony. Her journey is not a sentimental one, though places visited recall family and friends long gone.  All of these pieces are strongly evocative. All the places she writes of are imbued with deep personal connection, as are the poems of her new home in the United States. She also travels to Europe with her husband, poet Tim Suermondt, making deep connections wherever she goes. She reads classic Chinese poets Meng Chiao and Tu Fu, slakes a Zen Hunger; has the rare gift of creating the artfully measured line, the spare yet vibrant  poem.

Anthony George,  future lost past found, Iniquity Press/Vendetta Books, PO Box 253, Seaside Heights, NJ 08751  also available on Amazon, 2023, 68 pages, $10

As we get older, retrospection seems to be the thing we do almost without thinking. The past often feels immediate especially in a future now that seems incapable of clarity and seems less settled and more unbalanced with each sound byte or tweet. Consequently, George’s looking back feels more vivid that his present-day poems.  We read of a developing love affair that becomes a marriage that endures, a son lost but we aren’t told how, not that we need to know, the fact of it is enough. Present day is more muddled, as are our lives that feel caught in the long shadows cast. This image is reinforced by a series of photos scattered throughout the book of a lone man standing in various places, sun behind him, shadows in front, looming and growing taller even as the tide of life recedes. Also, prominent, and a major feature of this book, are what I would describes as political/socially acute observational collages reminiscent of moments in a Godard movie in particular the seemingly endless panning shot of the traffic jam in “The Weekend.” George, like Weil is one of editor Roskos’s prominent living in, or native of, New Jersey, series of poetry books. 

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Walker Rose, An Umbrella Costs the Same Even When it Doesn’t Rain, Zeitgeist Press, www.zeitgeist-press.com, 2023, 120 pages, $20

Walker Rose is a peripatetic traveler of the West, a young man searching for and finding adventures wherever he goes. In this, he is a Neo-Beat writer celebrating life, the adventures, loves and high times. A photo spread mid-book, riding the rails, compliments the poems as do candid pictures of friends and places visited do throughout the book. His travels have the feeling of Kerouac’s desolation angels in search of a kind of personal truth amid the wreckage of the American dream. The strongest poems are ones of death and loss with a “A Dying Industry” the most affecting closing with lines: “when I die/ I’d like to be compost, I’d like to rise/up and see the sunshine again/before someone else gets some other big idea.”

Carl Kaucher, UGH, Iniquity Books/ Vendetta Press, PO Box 253, Seaside Heights, NJ 08751 also available on Amazone, 2024, 125 pages, $12

Kaucher is a vagabond poet traveling hither and yon though mostly based in various locales in Pennsylvania. He works at odd jobs, never settling on one place for long. His work is straightforward in everyday language with absolutely no hint of literary pretention. Rather than describing him, I’ll let his own work sum up his life and style,

“I am the poet of broken chairs,
the Sunrise Yoga poet,
the poet of information systems,
the poet of closed coffee shops.
I am the voice harmonized boom tickity tack
whack of Hispanic bop car poet.
The pothole, crosswalk, orange hand, white man
breakfast, lunch, and dinner diner poet.
The trash can, parking lot,
dog bar, shopping cart
Dollar Mart, drug store hometown hero,
zero and I am a practitioner of silence
and rotted logs to sit upon.
(from “R3 East”)

George Bilgere, Cheap Motels of My Youth, Rattle Poetry, www.rattle.com, 2024 40 pages, $6

Bilgere is a winner in Rattle’s annual, ongoing, chapbook contest.  His verse is rich and atmospheric, easily relatable, depicting how it was growing up. There are early first sexual experiences, boys being boys hijinks, as well as tales of later years, such as the gathering of old men for coffee who keep an empty chair for one of those who is no longer here in body but remains present in spirit. The book exudes life, good humor, and a vibrant love of life by a careful, experienced writer, which is all you need expect from a book.

Lazar Laszlo Lovetei translated by Paul Sohar, Iniquity Press/Vendetta Books, PO Box 253 Seaside Heights, NJ 08751 2023 45 pages, $12

Translator Paul Sohar left a lasting contribution behind through his tireless translations of modern Hungarian poetry which numbered over 20 books. No doubt his own poetic work, considerable in its own right, suffered somewhat because of the time devoted to bringing the work of his fellow countrymen’s poetry to an English-speaking community. Lovetei’s brief but entertaining book has a wry sense of humor that ranges from the bawdy to outrageous, absurdist. The Black-Market Gigs of the title are brief vignettes of pointed humor that as an understated political message suggesting in order to make a living under the table work is the only kind most people can get. He makes fun of just about everything, especially preening poets, lord help us, how vain we can be.  Sohar will be missed by all who cherished his work and many thanks for editor Roskos for keeping the fire burning after the passing of a devoted lover of poetry in all its many voices.

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Flash Fiction

Francine Witte, Radio Water, Roadhouse Press, available from Magical Jeep Distribution (the publisher) and Amazon, 2024, 94 pages, $15

Someday I’d like to sit down and have a discussion with Francine and Thad Rutkowski about what exactly the difference is between a prose poem and a flash fiction. Is there even a difference? I get that length of flashes. They might be a bit longer than prose poems and, maybe a bit more of a “traditional” story line, but these seem to be minimal differences. Maybe it is because both Francine and Thad are also poets who write fiction. Or are they fiction writers who also write poetry.  I once attended a prose poetry lecture at AWP that dealt with those issues that eventually concluded: no one really knows what a prose poem is.  Maybe the same holds for flash fiction but I guess everyone knows it when they see it.

Radio Water is a superb collection of often transformational fictions. They put me in mind of a Modern Grimm’s Fairy tales often told from a child’s point of view. All of these are off-beat, as in odd, strange fables often focusing on bad family dynamics where relationships range from bad to worse often culminating in a murder. When you have a story title with the inspired notion of “Lady Macbeth at the Nail Salon” you know things are going to go south in a hurry. There is ”drunkdaddy,” In Another Language, Your Name Mean Murder,” ”Father Nails the Doors and Windows Shut,”” That Time Planet Exploded” and so on, violence and mayhem is to be expected. And Francine does not disappoint.

This is not gratuitous violence, though, yes, there are bloodbaths a plenty, but in a way that feels fabulist as opposed to literal, more like Edward Lear than Stephen King. There are a lot of stinking fish images, out of water floundering fish, decaying in the sun, smelly, old fish, as exemplified by one of my favorite piece, “Bad Fish.” The effect is more metaphorical than disgusting and it works as a device in every instance. What could be more effective to categorize a terrible situation than bad fish at the heart of it. One piece, I was going to write poem, was the extremely short fiction, “Milk,” where a simple history of the home delivery of milk being replaced by the cartons, we buy in supermarkets becomes a heart-breaking image of a grievous loss of a loved one.  Francine is a master of the short form as she proves again with her latest collection Radio Water.

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Fiction Briefs

Mather Schneider, The Bacanora Notebooks, Anxiety Press, available on Amazon, 2023, 230 pages, $16

f late, prolific poet Mather Schneider has been turning to prose. His collection of related stories 6x6, details some of the crazy nutbags he encountered driving for a call-in cab company (not to be confused with Uber) in and around Tucson Arizona. In this freewheeling novel, a similar persona is still driving, making do, but just barely. He is drinking and drugging until he falls in love with the beautiful McDonald’s front-end manager. While the attraction is deep and immediate, several complications readily become apparent. Natalia has a not quite Ex, who is both out and, in the picture, often with violent repercussions She doesn’t have a green card, and her application to obtain one is denied, leading to her deportation to Mexico. Henceforth, Mather’s persona is forced to travel back and forth from Tucson to Hermosillo, journeys which are often fraught with outlandish complications, high anxiety, and bad craziness, as Hunter S. Thompson used to say. Natalia’s extended family is as colorful as the characters that used to be his cab fares in America. Maybe more so. The novel is episodic with some chapters no longer than a paragraph but all of them are colorful and told with a laid-back sense of humor that makes even the most brutal and dangerous episodes seem like they were all part of a day in a life. And whatever you do, stay away from the Bacanora which seems to be some kind of near lethal Mexican moonshine combining the toxicity of mescal, tequila, and a healthy dose of grappa. The first time the couple tries it they wake up to a kitchen fire they are lucky to survive though they survive to imbibe again.  Riotous, rollicking prose that has the distinct sense of being autofiction. Whether it is or is not, is irrelevant to this reader. One expect more from this former cab driving  cowboy in future.

Dan Denton, The Dead and the Desperate, Roadside Press, Magic Jeep Distribution, available on Amazon, 12023, 268 pages, $20

An arresting cover of a skull surrounded by the details of the narrator’s life: an open beer can, a metal ash tray with a butt going, with super imposed factory smoke stacks belching cancer causing smoke, pretty much tells you what a factory worker’s life is all about. Denton is writing in the bleak, but accurate, tradition of portraying of the life of a guy at the bottom of the worker chai The Dead and the Desperate belongs on the same shelf with Jack London’s The Iron Heel and Down and Out in Paris and London.

Denton is the guy who keeps the product line moving at minimum wage, or just above, who has no benefits, no job security, and no future. You drop by your machine and they drag you away and plug someone else in. It’s like “Metropolis” only grittier and artless.  You know this book tells it like it is because Denton has been there, worked the jobs, got the emotional scars, and the real ones also. He’s had the busted marriages, the addictions to, well whatever was available, and whatever he can afford, at any given moment. Which isn’t much. His relationship in the novel with the pregnant girlfriend, who remains nameless known only by her stages of gestation, is based on sex. At one point he states outright that they don’t know each other well and that they  really don’t like each other very much. Outside of bed that is.  He’s a total asshole to her but she’s no prize either. The more we learn about her, the less sympathy we have for her until we wouldn’t have any at all if it weren’t for the children they conceived.  The narrator, boozes, cheats, hooks up and somehow usually makes it to work. Until he doesn’t and gets fired. The divorce lawyers he eventually confront, hates men, and stick it to him but good. His favorite bar is described as follows,

“That’s the thing about dive bars that Cheers didn’t understand. The
regulars are orphaned travelers waiting at bus stop-dive bars, just
waiting out their time. Waiting for the next round. The next lover.
The next town.

Home is where they let you back in, no matter how many times you’ve
been orphaned and divorced.”

Denton is so right about that bar. I worked there for decades. Despite all his friends either dying or getting hooked on dope, he preserves. He has his Wednesday going nowhere hookup with his favorite, already married bartender, works a temporary job earning a fifty cent raise above minimum and despite the hopelessness of his situation, you root for him, want him to straighten out and find some stability in his life. The very fact this book exists is a testament to the inner strength a man must have to survive his worst instincts and the system that is designed to chew up workers like the replaceable parts they are, and find new ones, all the while maintaining a healthy bottom line. 

Westley Heine, Busking Blues: recollections of a chicago street musician & squatter, Roadside Pess, distributed by Magical Jeep and available on Amazon, 2022,  262 pages, $15.

I started reading this book when it first came out, put it down for a while and only recently found it again. No reflection on the quality of the book but more of the answer to the question: How do you lose a book completely in a house? Well, as my pre-school oldest son said once upon a time, “I live in a library house.” Multiply those books by oh, fifty years of heedless acquisition and you have a very lost particular book. Anyway:

If you look at the photo of Westley on his Chicago Street Performer License, you would see a young man with a black eye that is still partially swollen,  smirking for his photo.  You find out why ,roughly half way through this highly relatable novel.  My first impression was, he got beat up but no, he was drunk, fell off his bike and Then went to get his license.  This incident and subtitle give you a brief summary of what life was like for this young musician  from Wisconsin trying to live the dream in Chicago. No one said it was going to be easy, and boy, where the ever right.

Westley is reduced to sneaking up the back stairs of his former girlfriend’s digs to crash in her attic.  It's either beastly hot or freezing. Once he manages to sock away enough money to finally rent a studio space to record the demo that his immediate musical dream depends on. He is forced to illegally use the studio for his living space also. He manages to work out a system for the security cameras that survey the building at all times, where upon, he always wears to same clothes coming in and leaving, creating the illusion he has been working all night instead of crashing.  Musicians keep strange hours, so this illusion is effective.  But with winter coming on, this space is no longer viable as there is no heat.  He is lucky enough to hook up with a wild young college student to cuddle with for the winter; a kind of Chicago convention: girls keep a man for the cold months to cuddle with and keep warm. By Spring she is off with another guy and its back to the studio he goes. 

The tales are many but all variations on the travails of trying to make it, even at a barely subsistence level, in a large city that doesn’t really give a shit one way or the other. The city has a bazillion regulations, including licenses for different locations. No, the Street performer license he has doesn’t cover them all. Say if you want to perform at the City Zoo. You need a different permit. The system seems set up to give the police an excuse to hassle anyone they feel like on any given day sort of like state liquor laws which seem to cover every possible permutation of life in a place that sells alcohol. At least it works that way in NY as I read the damn book and it was a chore believe you me, and that’s the bottom line you come away with. But I digress, Westley’s vivid recollections seem to me barely fictional based on knowing at least one person mentioned in the book but that does not lessen the reading experience.  After all that’s what autofiction is all about: improving the life story where it needs to be propped up for the sake of the story rather than for twisting the facts.

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Received but unread as of this posting

Zoltan Boszormenyi, translated by Paul Sohar, Ripped Apart, Iniquity Press PO Box 253, Seaside Heights, NJ 08751 available on Amazon, , 2023, 325 pages, $20.00

Also Noted

Franny Choi, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, Haper Collins, www.eccobooks.com , 2022, 132 pages, $17.99

Survival is the great theme of these highly imaginative, lyrical poems ranging from the Korean War her parents lived through, relationships the poet has been in and her moved on told with verve, wit, courage and unflinching grit and honesty.
Wendy Rainey and Curtis Hayes, Astroturf, Riverdog, 2024, not paged (roughly 24 pages , 5 poems each) www.thezineriverdog@yahoo.com Contact the editors for availability, price
Five killer poems by two hard hitters. Wendy’s “Reconstructing the Moon” about breast reconstruction after cancer surgery is a poem of the year, every year, in my book. All of these are raw, personal, accomplished pieces well worth tracking down.

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Anthologies

Kaveh Akbar & Paige Lewis, Another Last Call poems of addiction & deliverance, Sarabande Books, www.sarabandebooks.org 2023, 130 pages, $21.95

Roughly twenty-five years after the original Last Call, the project has been revived. As I read through this book, I thought about my unchosen career in the bar business and as a former drinker, and I wondered just how many last calls I had been a part of.  My guess was well over a thousand. Easily. Anyone with an interest in first hand personal stories of the horrors of addiction has to read this carefully curated, comprehensive collection of poets who have been there, done that and been to the meetings. Akbar is recovering addict himself and along with his co-editor, his life partner, have a deep understanding of the effects of their addictions not only on the person addicted but, on the people, they love and are loved by. Poems by sam sax, Diane Suess, Joy Harjo,  Ada Limon blew my socks off as did lesser-known poets Cyborg Jillian Weise and Anthony Ceballos. All in all, these voices become a chorus of lived pain shared by all so that others may avoid or, at least, understand what they, and all addict, have suffered.

Raymond Luczak ed., Yooper Poetry, Modern History Press, www.modernhistorypress.com, 2024, 158 pages, $19.95

“Mommy, what’s a Yooper?”

The answer is a neologism, an amalgam of U.P. which is the Upper Peninsula of Michigan known far and wide as the U.P plus er and you have a person from that area: a U per, pronounced Yooper. Got it? The U.P. is a unique culture with its localism and particular rich history from the now long defunct mining industry, whose left-behind mines and deserted factories, are scattered about the region. Many of the miners came from Scandinavia with their particular language and cultural particularities blend together for a hundred and fifty years or so and you have Yooperisms. And a  rich, beautiful forested areas with hills, stunning views of the great lakes and small towns that seem stuck in time somewhere around 1950. 

All of the nineteen poets represented in this anthology have an intimate connection to the area. Many have been born there and moved away while some are imports who couldn’t imagine living elsewhere. All of them project their intimate knowledge of the landscape, the way of life and the peculiarities of the region.  As with any general anthology the quality varies: there are short haiku like poems of T.K. Splake and Ellen Lord along with longer narratives of Kathleen Carlton Johnson, to snapshot, journal entry poems like those by Gala Malherbe. Malherbe is a hearty soul who risks living on her own, in a shack, without running water and most in an area known for its brutally harsh winters with epic snows. While most folks at Malherbe’s time of life are thinking about their condos in Florida, she’s roughing it in the UP. More power to her. Florida doesn’t appeal to me but heat, hot water and indoor plumbing do.

In general, there is a great deal of fishing, as might be expected, and hunting also. There is a deep respect for nature, which can dump a couple of hundred inches of snow in winter (which does seems to really to last from September to June) No one likes the summer tourists but how is that different from anywhere else? It doesn’t. Anyone curious to learn a bit about this unique area would be well advised to pick this volume up.

Petro, c.k. editor, Dadakuku #1, www.dadakuku.com , 224 pages, 2023, $12  available on Amazon

Dadakuku is a collection of poems that lived by the motto,” Life is short and weird. Poetry should be too.” All the poems ones published on the site in 2023 are represented in this ,hopefully the first of many, collection.  Imagine of Basho was rewritten by Dali and the Marx Brothers and you have something like what appears in the anthology dedicated to Microdadism, Nanononsense and Minisurrealism.

Sunny Side Down

Nam and eggs
old war menu
     Stephen Kingsnorth

 

Jurassic Park

In
pursuit of
a prehensile epiglottis
     Mark Young

The Sociopathology of Love

she unbuttons my skin
one freckle at a time
     Michael Brownstein

Inspired nonsense!

The Biannual T.K. Splake Compendium

Robert M. Zoschke, The Splake Path, Street Corner Press, 10781 Birchwood Drive, Sister Bay, WI 54234 2024 118 pages, $14

Poet, novelist, and editor Robert M. Zoschke has been dedicating a great deal of his creative time to the life and times of the venerable bard of the UP, T.K. Splake. (Zoschke’s other major efforts include writing novels and editing his fine annual print magazine Clutch which collects poetry, prose, and photography.) In recent years, to research his Splake books, Rob makes a Fall pilgrimage from his home in Sister Bay, Wisconsin to the near mythic UP of Michigan where Splake hangs his poet’s beret.  Looking at a map, one wonders why is the Upper Peninsula of Michigan actually Not part of Wisconsin. Well, it’s a long story, all you need to know is it isn’t. What it is, is remote.

I made a list of road signs and business names that Zoschke notes in his travels North to visit Splake. They felt like details from Midwestern humorist Jean Shepard’s Burma Shave signs and mid 50’s Americana from his dozens of incomparable, and eternally funny, radio monologues he translated into hilarious fictions collected in In God We Trust All Others Pay Cash, and Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories…. In many ways, especially off-season in October, the UP is still in the 50’s, and damn proud of it. It is a fitting place for the eternally (up)Beat poet Splake to live and work. As Zoschke knows, and his many admirers, myself included, know, Splake is the last of a dying breed of iconoclast writers who gave up career, family, and home to follow his muse wherever she would lead him.

An October trip to the UP can be an adventure as the cover photo of the then 87-year-old Splake shoveling a path to his door, shows. If nothing else, the UP has a well-earned reputation of being one of the most inhospitable, forbidding, often snow bound locations in all of the continental United States. It would not be unusual for two hundred inches of snow to fall in any given “long white” season. The snow season, as all natives knows, begins in September, and ends in July and then it is black fly season.( Ten months of winter and two months of summer is not an exaggeration either.)   Splake also notes it is the time of an invasion of “tourista bastardus.”  What the UP, Calumet in particular, offers an artist such as Slake is solitude, the time, space, and peace to do battle with elusive muse while battling that rat bastard time that defeats us all in the end.

The Splake Path is copiously illustrated with photos of the artist’s working space, the piles of manuscripts, books, copying machines, computer, so that one gets a visual representation of the single male at work; a man obsessed with getting it all down while he can. Having been blessed with relatively decent health,(considering he seems to live on a diet of low sodium SPAM and yogurt) and despite mobility issues of old age, Splake is ready and willing to keep on keeping in as long as he remains fit and fertile. You have to love it. And Zoschke clearly does as the narrative of  three days with Splake clearly shows. 

While Zoschke is much younger  their shared interests and comraderies is genuine and engaging from the 7 a.m. “existentials” (black coffee) at the Rosetta Café (Splake is, if nothing else a creature of habit) and his rounds to post office, super market (you can never have enough SPAM) and back to the Poetarium with occasional side trips, weather and Splake’s arthritis permitting.

Having read all the books Rob has written about Splake, I think of them now more as a series of historic documents than as strictly biographical tributes. Zoschke has captured a place a time, a life style of a certain place, and a time that will never be replicated nor does it exist anywhere else. Much as Splake’s local history projects, these are invaluable additions to Michigan lore. (Splake has written about historic Gran Marais hotel, the deserted air force base, the restored railroad station, and the many photo essays of abandoned factories falling into ruin along with the many mines that are scattered about the area.) This reader fervently hopes for yet another volume in this sequence in the coming year, as do Splake’s legions of fans.

Final Espresso, Cyberwit, www.cyberwit.com, 2023, 28 pages, $15

The Splake saga continues evoking the spirit of his poetic home with illustrations (photos) of some of his seminal writing inspirations: Brautigan and Kerouac, a pocked sized notebook for scribbling observations at his morning existentials at the Rosetta Café, publications from his  adopted home such as the UP Reader.

deer season opening day

pasties poker Leinenkugel farts
“hustler“ magazine in two-holer
dreams of seventeen-point buck

last stop calumet

greyhound at john’s family restaurant
with bus passengers who failed in their lives
starting all over again at the end of the world

thank god its Friday

            ice cold draft beer
clack of pool balls on green felt
hank waylon merle’s voices rising

which segues us to

behind the 8 ball, Cyberwit, www.cyberwit.com 2024, 36 pages, $15 (copiously illustrated with crisp images of new felt topped tables and the stripped balls at rest)

Calumet may not be the end of the world, but as far as the United States goes it is as close as you will ever need to be to that end point.  The area is dotted with deserted mines, empty factories and small-town stores, a café and a bar with pool tables. It is also near the Porcupine Mountains, untamed woods, views of a Great Lake, a place for an artist like Splake to seek comfort and inspiration:

quiet wilderness moments
feeling special holiness
nearness to something

            silent solitary morning
listening to the language of forest animals
learning new words for death and beauty

     driving orange convertible top down
hammer on the floor speedometer buried
poet trying to out run death

            face in the bathroom mirror
poet alive one more morning
graybeard heart beating

            nervous men in urologist office
thinking of vasectomies erections and prostates
unread magazine in laps

            hospital laboratory results
positive pap smear and pregnancy tests
new life racing death

    regular sunday church member
at life’s final moment god saying
sorry asshole no one’s home

We’re all behind the 8 ball.

long white silence, Cyberwit, www.cyberwit.com., 2024, 44 pages, $15

The latest Splake collection of brief haiku like poems begins with an elegy for his friend Paul Lehto, who recently died. Bracketing the collection is a Zimmer frame, seen on the cover almost completely buried in snow, prompting the viewer to wonder what in the hell is that? Then seen throughout the collection: in Fall, early Winter in stages of snowfall until the frame is completely buried.  Given the subject of Splake’s ongoing battle with rat bastard time, the image is both apt and powerful. long white silence covers the well-trod ground of these themes with some killer variations, a couple of which I will quote below,

perfect cast thing of beauty
trout fly floating through air
soft stream music

after storm rainbow’s reflection
filling stream with bright colors
trout resting in dark shadows

morning hangover pain
brain remembering last call
stuffing beer bottles in coat pockets

poet achieving nirvana
lightness of being
like quiet after rain

sacrificing everything
in order to create art
fuck plan b

The last poem reflects, as well anything, the poet’s credo; the Splake Ars Poetica.