Books Received, Reviewed, Acknowledged

Barbara Ungar, After Naming the Animals, The Word Works, www.wordworksbooks.org, 2024,94 pages $19-

In the beginning was Kabbalah Barbie, an origin story unlike any other.

So let me tell you a story, before
bed, my pretty little head not much
emptier than yours.
What am I?
A toy, a doll, frail.
A mouthpiece
For a child.
What are you?
(from Kabbalah Barbie)

What indeed? That is the eternal question. The cycle of life is a circle of beginnings and endings.

The poet dreams of her elderly Aunt Vera riding a motorcycle the night she actually does dies and the cup she gave the poet as a wedding gift, the perfect cup, is broken now. Could the pieces be shipped to Japan and repaired and made into a new vessel more perfect than the original. I think not, not really. Nor does the poet.

We channel our inner Emily Dickison in a forced isolation during the plague years. There is love in a time of Covid diseases but there is the fear of dying of aging, of reclusiveness. The poet asks is Covid All My Fault? Of course, it isn’t, but it can feel that way when one is alone. The metaphor of brokenness, of irretrievable loss is extended throughout the collection. We, the human race, consider ourselves to have a divine right to own and despoil the world. We name all the animals and then we kill them as Audubon did for his drawings. The act of creation is actually an act destruction. We hunt species to near extinction,

Leviathan

whose deep rumblings travel hundreds of miles
underwater, so low we feel as much as hear them,
four note songs like humpback whales.’
No one knows what they’re singing,
maybe warnings, elegies, calling one another’s names.
(from Calling Blue Whales)

This is what loss feels like.

As it is for the last jaguar, the polar bears, hummingbirds that were stuffed and worn as ornaments on fashionable ladies’ hats, for Lonesome George the last tortoise of his kind.
The poet is glad that her father is not here to witness the ecocide that is modern life. It feels like “‘Currently, he said, we are headed to extinction in a shiny, driverless car and the question is: ”How do we exit this car?”’ (Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake).

This collection is how it feels to lose the ones you love, after writing your heart out, after naming all the animals.

Eleanor Kedney, Twelve Days from Transfer, Three: A Taos Press, www.3taospress.cpm. 2024, 104 pages $24

Now that childbearing has become a political issue, there couldn’t be a more personal, more affecting, more pertinent book that Kedney’s Twelve Days from Transfer. Eleanor’s book is unflinchingly honest and, at times, downright painful to read as it recalls having tried everything to have a child before finally resorting to IVF. The repeated failures are agonizing. We feel her pain, the repeated “violations” (the are so necessarily intrusive, they feel like invasions) of her body, the anguish of wanting something which is often so simple for other people, but impossible for her and knowing there is nothing she can do to remedy the situation. In her opening poem she writes of what it means to be an infertile woman,

We were named witches
the talked about, the barren,
wombs twisted, possessed
by Nurrti, Goddess of destruction,
our bodies drubbed by bloody
goatskin. Unnaturally fat
tight cervix, weakened
by not given birth,
they covered us in pessaries,
cumin, resins, and pity.”
(from Infertility Compendium)

As I write this, as I quote Eleanor, who like so many other women and men too, who desperately want children but are unable through no fault of their own. I hear politicians, and so-called religious leaders, issue proclamations attempting to govern the sovereignty of a person’s body, especially a woman‘s, and condemning people who do not conform to some artificial construct of what a family is. Daily, I hear some bitter, angry, ignorant, recriminatory statement, and I think of Eleanor. Of what she suffered to have a child and how she failed. I try to feel her pain as I try to feel others who have suffered as she has, but I can only empathize. I know it is not enough but it something. We need, as a society to feel others pain, to have rational thoguht, to understand there are reasons beyond a strict, unrealistic, “moral” code” no matter what we believe. “Love thy neighbor.” Is that so hard to try? It’s Biblical. You’ll feel better than hating your neighbor, really you will. How we feel we should all read Eleanor’s book as she suffers for all woman and we should be grateful she has gone to that dark, almost unimaginable place to verbalize her ordeal so that others may realize they are not alone.

Drew Pisarra, Fassbinder: His Movies, My Poems, Anxiety Press, email at athinsliceofanxiety@gmail.com or dxpisarra@gmail.com. Available on Amazon, 2024, 97 pages $15

A few years ago, Drew and I were discussing movies in reference to one of his submissions. He asked me, “What’s your favorite Fassbinder film?” I thoguht about it and said, “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one. Always meant to but haven’t yet.” Now I’ve seen roughly half of them thanks to our library and TCM. As I am an absolute movie freak, especially art house ones, I am grateful to Drew for pointing me in his direction.

Pisarra’s Fassbinder begins with a fan letter to a dead guy,

I’ve never written a fan letter to anyone.
How strange to write one now, even to try.
Everyone knows you’re dead. Everyone.
(from Dear Rainer)

After the fan letter comes the work. Fassbinder was a man of prodigious appetites, sexual (he seems to have been bisexual though more homosexual than bi) stimulants (drugs and alcohol and sex. In his all too brief life, he died before he was 40, he produced some 37 pictures including the epic multi-episode Berlin Alexanderplatz for television. There were also theatrical works and several picture productions in various stages of completion. Fueled by stimulants, sex and work, its small wonder he flamed out.) Needless to say, his ambitions, at times, far outweighed his accomplishments, which is a roundabout way of saying, his achievements were many but of uneven quality.

His most ambitious project, “Despair,” based on a Nabokov novel, is far more traditionally cinematic than many of his far better works. There are locations shots galore, elaborate production and a deliberate linear narration starring well known at the time, Dirk Bogarde. Despite all the best effort exerted, it was completely lifeless and barely watchable. Whereas a static, heavily theater of the absurd, Godard influenced “gangster” flick, “Love is Colder Than Death,” is far more interesting precisely because of the use of the camera, the framing and the stilted, over the top acting.

Pisarra is able to view all of Fassbinder, often in the theater where they should be seen. Each poem is a kind of stream of consciousness impression of all 37 movies including Berlin Alexanderplatz. Just seeing all of these is a prodigious research project and Pisarra is up to the task of seeing and creating his own inner Fassbinder.

Even Munich had Warhol-like beauties,
aimless rich kids who did silly dances
then swapped their pretty partners for sex.
Yet unlike The Factory’s high-end hopefuls,
Fassbinder’s forgotten superstars
wanted more than 15 minutes of fame.
These fashionistas ached for Forever.
(from Rio das Mortes)

Fassbinder, like Bergman and Herzog, preferred a stable of regular actors to work with. This ensemble were trusted to share his vision and who could be directed to do extraordinary things that other directors could ( such as Herzog with the madman, genius actor Klaus Kinski). You’d be hard pressed to think of any work, outside of Fassbinder’s for several of his principles, (von Trier regular, Udo Kier excepted.)

After a second reading of the book, I could see how the recurring themes Pisarra develops form a counternarrative to the impressions. Drew says, “God that eternally avant garde/indie filmmaker, says he’s going to/to shoot the story of my life.” From Like a Bird on a Wire. Fassbinder, as the creator, seems to be a stand-in for God as Pisarra says later on in the poem,

For my teen years, God opts for
the camera on his phone. He calls
this, “Cinema verité for millennials.”
He assures me the clips will be
clearer and sharper than expected.
Side note: I hate to mention this
but I’ve noticed that God oft times
shoots with a shaky hand. He’s also
overly fond of zoom features.

As we read on, we discover that this life is triple X rated, given his admiration of Genet, especially Querelle, which Fassbinder was working on when he died. “Querelle” is a very sweaty, blatantly gay, sailors on shore flick, not to my taste, but it a vital part of the narrative Drew is constructing. He is fascinated by the intricate, overlapping of themes and obsessions much like Fassbinder himself. A reader could see this collection as a tribute to Fassbinder, which it is, ( though poems are not necessarily commentary) while noting the Barthes-like subtext of the poet’s personal story. The poems are both a tribute to the filmmaker and part of a personal puzzle. However you read this, it is an extraordinary accomplishment, much like Pisarra’s previous collection, Periodic Boyfriends, a catalogue of lovers that somehow connects to an element on the periodic table. The intricacies of his work are a complex puzzle that an avid reader (and viewer )will delight in trying to unravel.

Do see as many of the Fassbinder movies as you can. Even the bad ones are worth watching for their POV. I’ve decided I don’t have a single favorite Fassbinder but love the three parts of the BRD Trilogy: Marriage of Maria Braun, Lola, and Veronika Voss.

Charles Rammelkamp, Trapeze of Your Flesh, Blaze Vox Books, www.blazebox.org, 2024, 174 pages, $20

This rollicking, historical, celebratory study of the time honored American past time of stripping, is a subject clearly near and dear to the author’s heart. This hefty, oversized book, featuring cover art by Gene McCormick, scours the historical archives for the life and loves of the striptease artist. From the world-famous Gypsy Rose Lee, (did you know she wrote novels?) to the infamous Fanne Fox ( a footnote in American History for being the reason then ultra-powerful Wilbur Mills chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee lost his chairmanship and declines to run for office again in disgrace for frolicking in the Tidal basin with Ms. Fox. Remember when a politician could be disgraced for an untoward sexual escapade?) to Candy Barr (consort of gangsters) and well, hundreds of others, infamous, famous and all but forgotten. The heyday of the art was the post war era when men’s magazines were sold under the counter in brown wrappers and someone could go to jail as a purveyor of smut for possessing, much less selling stuff, that is time on the smut scale compared to what a kid could find on the internet today. Yes, the striptease venues are smoke filled, boozy and sleazy but it also represented a exclusively male coming of age rite of passage to have been able to say, “ I saw Heaven Lee at the Inferno before it burned down.” As I can. Hey, I watched Professional Wresting, Roller Derby and remember when NYC had three professional baseball teams too and two football teams that actually played in NYC. You watched stuff like that (when your life totally sucked) when television was a new thing, a novelty and that’s what passed for cultural entertainment (Suskind and GE live theater was for egg heads). Hell, I remember when you coudl afford to go could to the old Garden, catch a double header of basketball games and the Knicks wouldn’t be one of the teams. There were Friday night prize fights in those days you didn’t have to pay top dollar to see on closed circuit TV Now RAW is War and I guess, big money, flash and cash, glitz, and steroid infused big money show biz crap. Instead of plain old cheesy crap. The rest is porn and there is nothing even remotely magical about that.

Jim and Carol McCord, Time and Place + West and East, Shanti Arts Publishing, www.shantiarts.com. 2024, 178 pages $28.95

Time and Place represents the third in this husband and wife’s artistic collaboration of cherished places they have visited, lived in, and returned to often. As with the two previous volumes focusing on their travels abroad, both Jim’s poetry and Carol’s exquisite color photographs are equally featured. This volume displays the natural world of western and north western United States and you could, as I did, thoroughly enjoy leafing through the book first to view Carol’s photos to get a sense of the places that will be written about in the book. You’ll see landscapes, beachscapes, and Carol’s garden: flowers, wild life and still lives from nature. Proceed directly from the pictorial representations to the highly textured, refined poems, and enjoy the images and the verbal imagery simultaneously. Any reader who loves nature would cherish this book and even non-poetry readers should find these poems to their liking as they are easily accessible and a pleasure to read.

Picture Window View

First light pokes sluggish day,
Mudflats stretch like the sky.

Spiked tufts of eel grass sway,
Pilings defy decay.

A light wind nuzzles dock awry,
Blue herons breakfasts on the bay.

Earth returns again for me.

Howie Good, frowny face: poems and collages, Red Hawk Publications, www.redhawkpublications.com, also available from Amazon (but if you buy a couple of books directly from publisher you can get free postage. Wouldn’t you rather buy from the publisher than Amazon) 2023, 88 pages, $15-

Howie Good scores big with this collection of mostly absurd, wild, and unpredictable, weird poems with accompanying equally as bizarre collages. I see a lot of Max Ernst in the collages and read an influence by the modern master of the prose poem form, Russell Edson in these never off-target poems. Good lulls you into this dreamlike state and hammers you with poems referencing the camps and the deaths of murdered forefathers that are as devastating as they need to be. If you aren’t reading Good’s many books, why not?

Mosab Abu Toha, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, City Lights, www.citylights.com ,
2022, 128 pages $15.95

If you needed a reason to protest what the Israelis are doing, have been doing to the Palestinian people, read this book. Even if you don’t need a reason, read this book. Just read it for what it feels like to be under constant assault. To see your homeland destroyed, ravaged and everything you loved destroyed, and the people you know killed. Why does he go back to the Gaza strip? Because he loves his country. Why does he leave again with his young family? Because he has to. Don’t take my word for it, just read the book.

Roxanne Doty, Hours of the Desert, Kelsay Books, www.kelsaybooks.com 2024, 62 pages $20

The Arizona desert is littered with the detritus of the unnamed migrants, of war machines, wild life that could not extend their lives in an environment that does not favor or sustain life. Their remains are bleached by the sun and the wind skeletons, twisted rusted metal, a trail of backpacks like suitcases found in an attic that once belonged to people committed to an asylum found years after they have died. They are like the piles of shoes in holocaust museums of people who were murdered by the Nazis. Efforts to aid these people are actively discouraged, legally and by vigilantes, who prey upon the people undertaking La Jurnado del Muerto (the journey of death). These poems follow these trails of tears, death marches, betrayals by so-called guides, those hunted by self-styled warriors for the purity of the American state. Oh, the humanity!

But there is no humanity in the desert, just border guides, ICE agents, Intolerance Zones and “border walls.” No papers, no sanctuary. Water is scarce, edible plants are non-existent and hundreds of thousands, millions of people have tried to navigate this inhospitable landscape and untold multitudes of the seekers for a better life, of any kind of life, have failed. The whole of the first section, “The Border, is a cry of pain, of empathy for the dispossessed, the twilight of humanity where basic human rights go to die.

A man of the cloth, gun rack in his pickup
showed me the Ironwood Forest, trails
and layover spots, trees draped in black
plastic shields from the sun. Walk at night,
rest during the day. Bottles with water
or urine. Never waste fluids. He drew a map.
This is where they cross. Added clusters of red
dots. This is where they die.
(from “Sketcher High Tops”)

The remaining two sections are devoted to the city of Phoenix and, briefly, to the land. The city is a panorama of people, places, and things, in flux, teeming with life that feels disconnected and sterile. There is dive bar called Bardo which feels like a step beyond purgatory where the beer is always warm and the whiskey watered down. Memorial Day at Starbucks features a mentally unstable street person causing a fuss that no one will help. The poem “Lead Me Home” is like a vignette from Mary EllenMark’s iconic Streetwise (movie and book) about the lost teenagers, child prostitutes and budding criminals, many of whom will die their teens.

The Land is ravaged. There is the dry desert floor, cracked and parched, intense heat, and it no longer protects the wolves that once roamed the earth nearby. Of course, the humans had a lot to do with that as well. Still, if you listen closely, you can hear the mountains.

An Appreciation

David Chorlton, Dreams the Stones Have, Bitter Oleander Press, www.bitteroleander.com 2024, 88pages, $21

As I read Chorlton, I am reminded of Arizona poet, Richard Shelton’s “The Stones”: “I love to go out on summer nights and watch the stones grow.” The time Shelton speaks of is a time, in the mind, where anything is possible, where the seeds of creativity are growing. The earth is vibrant with possibility, the skies are filled with birds, the desert and the mountains are alive with wildlife. It is also the time when the ghosts of those who have gone before us, animal, bird, and human, still inhabit the land in spirit if not in form. They are the growing stones.

There is a window in the poet’s mind window through which he can see the earth evolve and devolve. In a very real sense, the window is a canvas of still lives the artist animates, “Leave the ashes in the hearth to dream of being born again.” Dreams are as solid as the objects outside the window, are the subjects of a watercolor, or an oil or a poem that becomes like the path of birds and their memories of flight.

The desert, where the wild life lives, is transcendent. All life in the poet’s mind is a transcendental action painting that reflects the glory of the artist who renders its likeness on paper. Shadows have edges that can be razors, that weave wounds that dreams can repair. Or not. Each shadow dissolves as it evolves into something else. That’s what the birds are for; to carry the message to the mountains, where the coyotes and the ancestors of the native tribes that once lived here lived. The objects rendered are metaphors for what is both inside and outside of us. They are equally, elusive, and allusive, as all spirit things must be. “Every bird’s piece of sky came down to earth.”

Light is carrier of the message the sky brings to the earth every day and then removes it to remind us that all things are transient. The earth and all its creatures are timeless, but man’s part in it, his history, and minor glories, are fleeting. The birds understand there are no borders, something man has yet to understand. Men by create artificial barriers where none had been but it is the nature of man to cross borders, natural or otherwise. Think of the burrowing owl whose homes are disrupted by the earth movers who destroy their habitat. Consider how once that burrowing owl went some place that man could never go. Watch the cliff swallows enter their homes in the bluffs at speed sun unimaginable to us humans. Our bodies are limited by their corporeal bodies but our imagination is boundless. Think of the Chorlton’s hawk on New Year’s Eve who can see through time, something man could never dream of.

In the shadow hours there are dream worlds, textured layers of existence that cannot easily be apprehended by anyone, that “animals are running with shadows in shards between their teeth.” Uncommon monsoon rains attack the air. It’s the earth’s fault. Or is man involved? These same monsoons mirror the rage that humans feel on the highway as they inflict mindless damage in rages the way the rains do. We can know, feel, as the poet does, what it is like to be hit by a car while walking. To not remember a moment of the impact, the injury, the aftermath, knowing only the blankness that comes with a coma that is nothingness, a state that can never be retrieved. One wonders about all the lost stories, “where have all the songs gone?” And find, “they are stacked in a neighbor’s garage,” at an estate sale where all things are at the end of the mind. Remember, as Shelton did as he watched the stones, as Chorlton does when he says, “the land isn’t empty, it’s thinking.”

Jackie Craven, WHISH, Press 53 Winner of the Press 53 Poetry Selection, Press 53, www.Press53.com, 2024, 74 pages $17.95

“Clocks can’t be trusted in the electric city” is the opening title line of Craven’s through the looking glass tour of an electric city. The physical place referred to is Schenectady, N.Y, so called The Electric City, as Thomas Edison set up shop for his General Electric at the dawn of the age of interior lighting by electrical current. Craven’s city is one of elective affinities, is a place where nothing is quite the way it seems or should be. Time is flexible, mutable, hostile; events bend and warp in whimsical ways. Corridors of memory are dreamscapes that never quite adhere to our thoughts in rational ways. Inherently, this time and place in flux should be disorienting and, while it is, the effect is darkly humorous, absurd, and oddly funny the way true absurdity should be. It’s like being in an episode of the Twilight Zone where everything seems familiar but slightly off. It is as if we are trapped inside a funhouse mirror that is reflecting the inside of our heads instead of our outside features. The poems are extremely visual, richly detailed, and are appropriately highlighted by a cover image by her sister with the title, Mass Confusion. The painting, as with much of her work, is painstakingly rendered, detailing done with the finest brushes that often took months to complete. Jackie’s previous book, Secret Formulas & Techniques of the Masters, riffed on her mother’s artwork. She was a lifelong teacher of painting. Craven draws the reader into an often-abstract personal universe you can wander through, much as Alice did in her underworld, where everything was askew but so palpable and real, the details are always memorable, as they are immediate. These are wondrous achievements and, WHISH, may be the most wondrous of them all.

Gary Metras, Marble Dust, Cervena Barva Press, www.cervenabarvapress.com 2024, 116 pages, $19.95

Metras employs a lyric tone that evokes the ancient world in modern times. The dust he kicks, that sticks to his shoes in Greece, is the stuff of civilizations long gone whose remnants cling to us literally as soemthign from a deep, almost unimaginable past of ancient worlds. You can feel the summer heat, see the blue Mediterranean, see the white marble of the ruins not just in and around Athens, but in Rome, Austria, The UK, Ireland and elsewhere where history is literally imbedded in the soil in ways that they are not here. His ruminations on St Francis of Assisi were previously published as a standalone chapbook but is well served in juxtaposing with the surrounding sequences. Gary has always been an excellent poet, but this collections feels particularly fine,

After days tramping the Salisbury Palins,
he crept to the center of the stone puzzle,
the point of honor in an antique calendar
of the unknown, and lay himself down
on soft grass to sleep.

The dance of diurnal starlight ignored,
The moon’s form deranged, the ghosts
Of hooded men silent in an obsolete universe,
He joined the slow dream of stone.
(from “Age 23 Wordsworth Sleeps in Stonehenge”)

John Amen, Dark Souvenirs, NYQ Press, www.nyq.org, 2024, 88 pages, $18.95

How to describe the suicide of your brother? And how it felt to be the one to find the body after he killed himself with a gun. “I snatched the bottle from his hand/ three weeks before he bought the gun.” If that doesn’t get you attention, I don’t know what will. The shot that kills his brother haunts him. Needless to say, the whole incident, in his younger years severely fucked him up. At the time he was rootless, drinking too much, drugging, harboring dreams of becoming a musician far removed from club dates. The gigs on the road with bands that were okay but, realistically, was he good enough? Were they going to make it big? The answer makes up the bulk of this often-eye-opening collection is: what happens after the dreams of youth die. There’s a lot of blood under the bridge before he finds peace in poetry and the love of a good woman. There’s a lot to be said for stability. Amen is a hard-working traveling poet performing his poetry all around the country. He has even cut, at least one that I know of, CD of his songs. Catch him when he reads out if you can.

Linda Rocheleau, Heartwood, Gasconade Press, no publishing information, 2024, 66 pages, $13

Heartwood is a series of highly readable, easily relatable, narrative poems spanning the country from Florida to California with many a road trip in between. Each of the four sections is prefaced by an appropriate quote from a literary forefather (Harry Crews, Charles Bukowski, Margaret Atwood and finally Thomas Wolfe). You can see Wolfe’s influence in the ultimate section as she is a traveling girl, jazz aged, and observing the fast lanes and the slow lanes she passes on her way from place to place. Rocheleau leads off with a poem about a Dew Drop Inn, a name that comes with certain universal prerequisites suggesting dive bar and Linda has seen her share of those. Not that she is a party girl, but life in the poetry world seems to overlap with those kinds of places more than your average profession. Her journeys lead to hooking up with The Blues Brothers of the small press poetry scene: Victor Clevenger and John Dorsey at a gathering of poets. And later, doing a reading in California only to be interrupted by a very drunk Linda Bukowski. At the same reading she almost hooks up with Gerry Locklin, but not quite. Her poem portraits are always raw and vivid such as a poignant poem to her Dad, “W.A.R.” and another of watching “Looking for Mr. Goodbar” with him. There is loneliness and despair, what poet of his or her salt, has never experienced both of those? But there is also a lively sense of humor. Rocheleau is a keen observer of her of time and places which makes Heartwood, a distinctive collection.

Karl Koweski, Abandoned by All Things, Roadside Press, www.roadsidepress.com
Distributed by Magical Jeep Distribution, available on Amazon, 2024, 136 pages $15-

Koweski’s journey in life travels from the Midwest to the deep South. He observes Alabama’s barely sentient senator Tommy Tuberville as “the mostly evil, largely senseless/senator of Alabama” whose modest credentials for elective office,( to us Northerners, who could give a rat’s ass about college football,) was as a relatively successful coach at Auburn. Koweski’s musings about life are from the point of view of a guy who never completely, “straightened out and flew right, “as a football coach would demand. In fact, he was what you would call a fuck-up, but one became an unpretentious, regular guy. He’s a stand-up dad and husband who remains a devoted Chicago Cubs fan, which once was, until recently, the ultimate exercise in futility. One could argue lifelong Cubs fans know loyalty beyond the boundaries of common sense ( a sentiment Red Sox fans can appreciate) but ultimately paid off. The Cubs are and continue to be, an extension of the family, one could argue, which makes the poem for the late Ron Santo, a symbol of hardnosed, unflinching toughness as a player that transferred to his life and a fatal battle with a disease that claimed parts of his body piece by piece, until he died. Fittingly, a fantasy poem describes how the poet is faced with a choice by the deity who governs the afterlife, “Cubbies winning the World Series/or Trump losing the presidential election…”(of 2016) Of course, the poet chooses the Cubbies winning the World Series. Somewhere Ernie Banks is smiling ….As Koweski mused, “how batshit crazy could Trump/truly be?” Alas, we are finding out now….The bottom line was, remains, it was an impossible choice and you had to choose something. He lady or the tiger? Koweski is a poet for the reader who grooves on the stuff of everyday life.

Joshua Edwards, The Double Lamp of Solitude, Rising Tide Projects / Canarium Books, www.risingtideprojects.org Available on Amazon 2012, 112 Pages, $20.00
                        , The Exhausted Dream, Marfa Books, Marfa Book Company 300 South Kelly Street, Marfa, TX 79843, 2012, 128 pages $10

The Double Lamp of Solitude is a field trip, that is a walking tour (of the landscapes)of the birth and death places of three artist/poets: Friedrich Holderlin, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Miguel Hernandez. These evoke the spirits of the artists places they occupied with biographical information linking them to the landscapes. A major component of these poems is the author’s spiritual connections with each of these writers in a quirky prose narrative. Separating the open section with the second longest of four (including a brief inclusion of two translations ) of what are random (I think, random?) photographs of stuff, presumably sighted along the walkways. ( Sebald, anyone?) This stuff includes: trees, dead flowers, a hut or two, a scatter of bottles…. I say random stuff as the author seems enamored of the idea of taking photos at regular intervals, such as once an hour, wherever he happens to be. The second section is Lamps. These 27 Lamps are connected with life and creation in often humorous progressive sequences and seem to be lights shining (from the imagination? Of the imagination? Creative impulses?) on people, places, and things. Perhaps, walking tour is a metaphor for the creative sprit exploring the various aspects, places, people, and things of the imagination as exemplified in the final poem, “Gestures,” evoking the spirit of doomed romantic poets, principally Keats and Shelley. The final section is Five Plans for Walking Around a Mountain, in particular the Mount Rainier Wonderland Trail. These highly idiosyncratic, expressive pieces, are the most successful and evocative for this reader. The author’s talent for random photographs is highlighted in conjunction with his 36 Views (evoking Hokusai) though these appear to be more of 36 views of nothing in particular as opposed to of Mt Fuji.

If you are going to read The Exhausted Dream (the fulltitle is the somewhat exhausting: A Monthly Account of the Year Leading Up to the End of the World, by AGONISTES, Prophet and Fulfiller or The Exhausted Dream while accurately descriptive, is a mouthful. Perhaps and suggest this with a straight face it could have been The Exhausted Dream or a Diary of a Madman) I suggest you read it all at once or, at most, two long sittings as I did. It’s not that hard as each of the twelve section has no more than a dozen twelve lined poems per section, The narrator has a dream, he has seen the mountain top, I mean the end is near and there is nothing to be done about it but live your life as if nothing can be done about it. I kept thinking of the Lars von Trier ode to clinical depression, “Melancholia” where the world is, literally, about to end. While the narrator is clearly not clinically depressed as in the movie (as is the director?), he is lucid, but not firmly connected to anything we might think of as reality. He improbably falls in love with a tour guide who accepts his hand in marriage. But all’s not well for reasons that have nothing to do with von Treier’s asteroid/moon, or catastrophic cataclysms, but makes perfect sense in the kind of world we live in where dreamers are not encouraged. The book concludes with a brief section of “Fugitive Pieces” that could be aphorisms of the madman in question. Or not. Who knows, really? Thinking that seemed the most likely conclusion to make. Here the random photos of the sky suggest the narrator searching the heavens for the answers to his cosmic riddles.

Also from Canarium Press

Which I haven’t read all of yet:
Anthony Madrid, Whatever’s Forbidden the Wise, Canarium Press, 2023, 84 pages $17
A collection of Ghazal and other formal poetry

Matsuo Takahashi translated by Jeffrey Angles, Canarium Press, 2023, 142 pages $17
Appears to be a long sequence of prose poems ,like journal entries, centering on trips to Greece where the poet feels as if ancient history is ever present in the now; when the Gods were real and the Greeks were the center of culture.

Judy Kronenfeld, If Only There Were Stations of the Air, , Shelia na gig editions, www.shelianagigblog.com also available on Amazon 2024, 62 pages 2024

I think it would be fair to say that the time of the pandemic was one for reflection. Kronenfeld recalls watching a Nature video of time lapsed flowers sprouting from the earth and growing to the flowering stage in the space of a few seconds. In this forced state of hibernation, Kronenfeld chooses not to give in to the impulse to dwell a state of negativity but chooses instead to celebrate the birth of new life. There are many aspects to Judy’s pandemic experience: recalling her son at two, a cousin’s friendless death, the ennui that accompanies a state of uncertainty and confusion that has no known end.

Then comes an unthinkable diagnosis. Not Covid but cancer, a disease that knowt no season just ask poet Rebecca Schumejda who lost her husband and her mother in during Covid to cancer.

Still there is comfort in poetry and her husband by her side.

I think of the words of poems
in the warm milk light
of dawn, when, anxious,
I awake. Frost,
Shakespeare, Yeats.
Though nothing gold
can stay, and an old woman
is a paltry thing, and I weep
to have what I fear
to lose, my lips move
in my mind till these human voices
lull me, and I sleep.
(“The Words of Poems” quoted in full)

The treatments are debilitating but fruitful in that she is able to continue living in remission. In the time left, she has hope, renews old connections, writes knowing intimately the intimations of immortality that writing is. She is thankful to be alive and this collection is a celebration of the fact that life is both temporary and precious.

Robert Cooperman, Steerage, Kelsay Books, www.kelsaybooks.com 2024, 103 pages $23 Also available on Amazon

Cooperman continues his family saga, this time reaching back to his Jewish ancestors who escaped the bloody Cossack purging of the Jews. While the Abramowitz story is based on actual family history, Cooperman says many of the stories in Steerage are apocryphal. He sincerely hopes his maternal grandfather would get a kick out of the vivid portraits he paints.

Simon Abramowitz is a bit of a wastrel, taking daily constitutionals on deck where he ogles the girls and generally enjoys himself. Down below, his wife Rivka, guards the meager food and money they have, all the while suspecting exactly what Simon is doing. Their two kids run wild on deck. The kids generally make nuisances of themselves as kids will. Eventually, they all make their way to America and pass muster at Ellis Island for entry,( not a given as many immigrants learned the hard way.)

Not only are the streets not paved in gold, they are covered in dung and finding work is difficult in early 1900’s New York. The Jews, like the Irish, Italians and all the other races forced to migrate to the New World, find themselves reviled, hated, and discriminated against. But somehow, they do make a living. Their stories are lively, relatable, often humorous, and particularly American. Out family origin stories all may be different but most of us came from somewhere else and to deny a particular group of people their history is a despicable thing, all too common today. I don’t know how and when my family got here, but I am glad to know the kind of struggles another’s family had to endure to escape from certain death to make a new life here.

Gerald Locklin, requiem for the toad, selected poems, edited by Clint Margrave, NYQ Books, www.nyqpress.org , 2024, 243 pages $21.95 available from Amazon

Editing Gerry Locklin’s poetry is clearly a labor of love for his former student, poet Clint Margrave. It is also a formidable task given how prolific Locklin was. The current collection feels like a definitive one. Here are poems that were basically one liners, even a one worder. They are, like Locklin jokey, nostalgic, riotous, astute, bumptious reflecting the drinker and the performer he was. Gerry adopted he persona Toad, for his riotous behavior, though later, as the sober, but still lively father, teacher, and master of the accessible poetry he is more reflective. Gerry loved life, his kids, his wife, his colleagues, and wasn’t afraid to express these feelings. At times these poems can feel slight, lacking in depth or seriousness but, hey that was Gerry. Ultimately, what this collection feels like a well-rounded self-portrait of the poet as gathered from his published work.

Ryan Quinn Flanagan, These Many Cold Winters of the Heart, Roadside Press, www.roadsidepress.com , also available on Amazon, 2024, 210 pages, $18.00

There is such a thing as being too prolific. Readers of Bukowski know that. I think it is evident towards the end Bukowski (and his editor, John Martin) rode his rough and tumble, down and dirty, horse right into a ditch . Often the tone of Buk’s later work reeked of, “ I made it and no one else of our kind did, I drive a Benz and you don’t. Plus, I have a beautiful young wife in my bed.” Just when you are about to scream, Hank give it a rest, he rips off a poem that is so good it takes your breath away and you forget all the stuff you had to wade through to get to it. I mention Bukowski as think Ryan is so prolific it’s tough not to write some clunkers. Maybe even stinkers once in a while. I certainly could have lived without, “Bukowski Writes Like Ron Jeremy Fucks.” It would be crass of me to ask which Ron Jeremey? Jermey had two distinct careers, like Elvis, the young, handsome cocksman and the fat Elvis stage, where he is just going through the motions (literally). I’d classify that one as a “throw-away” poem; just because you wrote it, doesn’t mean you have to publish it.

I am also thinking of the clear distinction between the early Bukowski, say, You Get So Alone, as compared with the later, posthumous Bukowski, the Abel Debritto edited collection excepted. That said, Ryan has a poem like “Aliens” rips your skin off, reminds me of early Bukowski at the race track where he was a keen observer of humanity (and never, not once, wrote a bad race track poem).The fanatics, the obsessed, the weird and crazy among us are amply represented by Ryan’s poems as they were by Bukowski. Other excellent poems are the “Target Calling the Elderly and New Widowers,” “Hopscotch in the Rain,” and ” The Yellow Bed,” where the narrator is told to consider himself lucky to have a bed in a nuthouse, are all first-rate pieces. All this said by someone who has been accused of being too prolific for my own good. Maybe I was just supersaturated with Flanagan having read close to 400 pages of his work in a short period of time. He has the goods and should be read. There are gems here and the cover art is terrific.

Robert Perchan, Last Notes from a Split Peninsula, Uncollected Press www.therawartreview.com 2020, 133 pages, $15-

The peninsula Perchan refers to here is Korea where he has lived for decades after wandering about working for the US Navy’s Program for Afloat College Education (PACE). He claims to have settled into “a life of reflective if occasionally perplexed peninsularity.” Opening with a mind boggling, one-sided conversation with a Marine Sergeant, Vietnam vet about how tough the “Kor REE ahn bastards are,” would seem like complete and utter bullshit were it not typical of the way vets from that conflict talk. Whatever it was, must have made Robert wonder what he was getting into. The perplexed part of Perchan’s life in Korea clearly shows through in his highly amusing tales of teaching English as a second language to Koreans. There are odd cultural clashes, a hugely funny tale about how Allen Ginsberg’ schtick as a performance poet that does not play well with the natives. This tale in particular has a strong sense of Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America updated to a foreign land minus the cute. The Korean morays are often as foreign to him as foreign gets. There are amazing mangling and misunderstanding of regular and idiomatic English. The best example of the confusion and misuse of the language is the hilarious “Dear Bob Letter.” The final section moves away from the common themes of foreignness of the first two sections, to a more surrealistic blend of the cultural clashing of linguistic armies in the night in ways that Matthew Arnold, the poet, and the educator, could never have imagined. Perchan is a veteran of the small press scene and a large book like this one is a welcome addition to the poetry shelves if only as an antidote to MFA poetics that seems to be the all-pervading norm these days.

Four From Iniquity Press/ Vendetta Books, PO Box 253, Seaside Heights, NJ 08751 all available on Amazon

Tom Obrzut, I’m No Okay With This Life, 2024, 108 pages $12

Obrzut, has one of those jobs: he works as a psychiatric social worker in a short-term psychiatric facility.   It’s crazy, by definition. Many of the poems, especially the first half of the collection, are suffused with a palpable sense of low-level depression; life sucks but we keep on getting on anyway. That said, the pieces about the patients he encounters are extremely vivid. Everyone wants to know when they will get out but that’s not the point of why they were there or how long they will have to stay; the point is they had some kind of psychotic episode and they need to be evaluated, calmed down and referred. It’s his job to help in the evaluation process, to ease with transition back into the world, to listen and, in many cases, to console, as his poems indicate. He feels their pain. In fact, pain is the motivating impulse that generates these poems. Good friends move away, die ( his poem “Steve” about jazz poet Steve Dalachinsky, whom I corresponded with for over 15 years, died suddenly of a heart attack and whose obit was in the New York Times, is a gem). Mostly, the all-to-early passing of his wife is always on his mind. While minor keys seem to be the ones pressed most often in this collection, there is some humor, flashes of sly wit and a much more enjoyable life before his wife died. Near the end of the collection the opening to the poem “No Way” said it all for me,

There was no way
I was going happily
into that shoprite
Where all my memories
The times I lived other places
Old emotions
Beliefs I’d long since lost
Bizarre mirrors
My own youth
They were all there
In an aisle
Where everything was marked half off

I feel his pain.

Anthony George, root for the humans, 2024, 68 pages $10

In an age that has become increasingly more dehumanized, run by the machines, our devices that we are mercy to,( as the installation cable guy described our current state as humans to me not long ago, they control us, not the other way around) rooting for the humans does not sound as absurd as it might sound at first. If we don’t root for our fellow man, who is in charge? Remember HAL in 2001? “Don’t do that, Dave.” The computer is warning the astronaut not to disconnect him. Dave knowing the computer’s perceived mission is to eliminate all the flawed human machines on the space ship, he ignores HAL. At the end of the process, Dave is the last one standing though what happens after that is, well, nebulous to say the least. At least he isn’t floating in deep space forever.

Kubrick directed that film in the late 60’s and here it is fifty plus years later and we have AI and algorithms that use our personality traits, our shopping and viewing habits against us, to sell us stuff. If you don’t think these technological “advances” are going to get more threatening as they advance, read Hum a recent novel by Helen Phillips which further extrapolates these tendencies by our devices.

root for the humans

root for the humans
remind them of things
they have forgotten
feelings and truths
they are neglecting

the humans need a new way
some place where it’s only them
no defeats no victories
just an aptitude for the moment
root for the humans
they’re the only chance we have

Cheryl Vargas, Repeat Slowly, Like Dance, 2024, 31 pages $10

Vargas offers a compilation of brief poems of what it was like growing up, living, loving, and losing love in New Jersey.

Iris
Roots planted deep,
the equinox held promise.

Pushed hard to break ground she abandons
Her cold bed. A new bloom.

Joe Roarty, funhous, 2024 123 pages$12 available on Amazon

He’s back. Maybe not like Terminator, more like Wordanator! With his free style, madcap adventure in spirited wordsmithing, Roarty assails the page with poems that beg to be heard aloud. They are musical, hip hoppy, slam poetic. He’s funny, political, lovelorn, off-color and sometimes a little drunk but always lively and original.

I saw neechuh
th will 2 powr was all n pieces
evry piece made a nois
he playd the noises
( from I saw nietzsche)

Now that’s one for the books!

Rebecca Schumejda poetry, Photographs Jason Baldinger, Hope Is a Prison, Kung Fu Treachery Press, 2024, 74 pages, $15

Hope is a Prison is a collaboration of author and photographer with the body of the text equally divided between the two. The working relationship is so close it seems as if Rebecca is responding directly to Jason’s photos rather than Jason providing illustrations for her poetry. The result is a close, tightly knit, oversized chapbook, on the always uncomfortable subject of sexual abuse of children. Spanning generations, the abuse of a parent is replicated in the child, not by the abuser but by a parent who condones her partner’s abusive behavior by ignoring it much as her own abuse was either not believed or denied. The logic of such behavior feels particularly perverse as the mother seems to be saying something along the lines, of, “now you know how I felt (feel).” The poems are horrific, detailed, unforgettable, as are the accompanying photos.

Chapbooks

Catherine Norr, Goat Farm Road, Finishing Line Press, www.finishinglinepress.com, also available on Amazon, 2024, 32 pages $17.99

Brief, mostly nature themes poetry centering around her remote domicile in the Adirondacks and the surrounding countryside. A series of excellent haiku, are an excellent vehicle for her vision.

Low-flying heron
Crosses the length of the lake
Its mate follows close

Tin roof amplifies
Raindrops from hemlock and birch
Distant Barred Owl hoots

On Lily Lake Road
Porcupine plods as we near
He speeds to a trot
(from 10 Haiku)

Some personal poems suggesting a cancer diagnosis mars the otherwise idyllic setting. There are snakes everywhere, even in paradise.

Beth Copeland, Shibori Blue: Thirty-six View of the Peak: poems and photographs, Redhawk Publications, www.redhawkpublications.com, 2024, 51 pages, $18-

It would be difficult to imagine a better combination of image and text than Copeland’s tanka, a slightly longer variation of the haiku (5 lines) to compliment the photos. Channeling Hokusai’s views of Mt Fuji is not a stretch here as The Peak, the largest mountain in the North Carolina area of the Blue Ridge Mountains where Copeland now lives, becomes as lucent and as vibrant as Fuji. It’s not often you get to see a book you can describe as a work of art, but this one fills the bill.

Eric Kocher, Sky Mall, Rattle Press, www.rattle.org, 2024 40 pages $9-

All these poems reference flying to his family, with them or away from and are told in crisp couplets, sometimes witty, sometimes melancholic but always well done and easily relatable. Sky Mall was a Rattle chapbook winner and continues this excellent series that hasn’t had a loser yet.

Mather Schneider, Much More Than Time, Slipstream Press, www.slipstreamorg, 202428 pages $10

Much More Than Time won the 2024 annual chapbooks award from Slipstream, a series that has been going strong for forty years. Readers of Mather’s work will recognize the people, places, and themes. His marriage to Natalie is kaput: no sex, no companionship and soon, due to a long, protracted illness, no more Natalie. Despite the down tone of the summary the book is lively, spirited and not as hopeless as his relationship has become. We can’t go on, we go on.

Brief Overview of Mini Chapbooks and the like

Press runs of Riverdog chaps are generally in a run of 80 to 100 and are available by subscription. Inquire for individual titles.

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.

Also from Riverdog 2024

S.A Griffin, Suckers and Losers, 2024, no page numbers, www.thezineriverdog@yahoo.com
Ten poems by hard working screen and television actor, veteran small press poet Griffin scores with his usual dark humor and well-drawn portraits of real-life people. Format is tall and skinny as is the previous collection.

Howie Good, Death Song: Poetic Essay, no page numbers, roughly 24 pages
Part deeply personal memoir, cancer diary, and rumination on poetry, Good, the prolific prose poet and collage artist, scores big with this piece. I’ve read it twice and I will read it again. I am a fan of his work in general and this brief but intense one, in particular. Pocket sized format

Justin Hamm, The Angels Reclining in My Ears Tonight, no pages numbersroughly 24 pages
Also, a pocket sized small chap with a striking cover; part sparkly blue snow flakey and black is eye catching. The poems inside are terrific too.

Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, Chiron Poems, no page numbers roughly 24 pages, pocket sized, fine edition of the venerable “Okie “poet who settled in California to escape the dust bowl drought/famine. Her poems are short, crisp, crystal clear and as vivid as effective as ever. I briefly corresponded with Wilma, who was going blind, near the end of her long productive life and she was one tough old lady. And just maybe the finest poet to come out of that era. As the title indicated these poems were all published in Chiron by ed., Michael Hathaway

Jakima Davis, Doomsday Vibrato, Iniquity Press/Vendetta books, po box 253 Seaside Heights, NJ 08751, no page numbers , 8 pages folds out into one broadside like format so each of the eight poem can be read as a broadside or as a mini-book, no price

Songs of my poetic (imaginary) self, ranging from the “Birthday Bleus” to the Ntozake Shange inflected, “I For One Forgive Those Colored Poets Who Consider Suicide During Slavery”. Davis is a hardworking, jazzy poet whose poems cry out to be performed, sung, read, savored.

Others in the series include all in the same format:
Alex Ragsdale, We Aren’t Revolutionaries, a longish political rant poem

roibeard, QAnon told me so, several political poems that all appeared in the Blue Collar Review, a workingman’s friend; a happening zine scene the late 90’s

Dave Rokos, troglodyte team party, editor Rokos channels Rimbaud. Witty cover features fifties all American family having dinner with a chimp

Dave Roskos, Future Plumbers of America ed. Roskoswrites a tribute to Jesse Brian Windle, one of the future plumbers, a memory of crashing at his ex’s at 3a.m. oversleeping to kids doing what little kids do: flushing rolls of toilet paper down the toilet and using the plunger to facilitate the process. Of course, neither accept the responsibility though both are soaked and one is holding the plunger. Been there and done that with my kids; moving and effective, and funny too.

Late Arrivals from Cosmic Monolith

After years of doing a zine, then concentrating on books from the Upper Midwest music scene editor Theron Moore has branched out into publishing poetry books and essay collections. As the son of small press legend, Todd Moore, Theron has access to previously not gathered in book form essays by Todd which he collects in two books,(so far). One is a collected essays and the other Blood on the Screen, Blood on the Page. Todd outlines his idea of Outlaw Poetry in terms of the renegade films he revered. The key to understanding the American psyches is in our reverence for the bad guys, the outlaws and the violence that surrounds them. While not glorifying the violence, per se, he posits you can’t ignore it, as the American myth of the man with a gun, defying the odds and breaking the codes of normality as an outlaw, is hard to deny. Otherwise, why do the legend of Billy the Kid prevail, Bonnie and Clyde, the man with no name, the confederate rebel fighter of lost causes (as personified by John Wayne) the Wild Bunch and most of all John Dillinger. Todd’s epic poem featuring Dillinger, has never been published in full but many sections have and I have them all including the infamous one’s with blood spots from Kangaroo Court. Todd sees poetry as essentially cinematic, as small movies and anyone familiar with his work knows the graphic nature of his work. It is hard hitting, often brutal, sometimes oddly tender, and funny( but often with a heavy ironic, bite.) They are indeed small movies and as collections, they are feature length productions. The essays all are essential reading for anyone who interested in the oral traditions of poetry and the myths that makes America what it is today.

I haven’t had a chance to read the collected essays yet.

Two new poetry collections by the press, one by Dennis Gulling, an apt adherent/successor to the Tood Moore expressive way and Theron’s poetic psychedelic journey through the drugged out 60’s and beyond are reviewed elsewhere in this issue.

Prose Briefs

Rosalind Palmero Stevenson, Soul, Ghost, My Absolute, Rain Mountain Press, www.rainmoutainpress.com 2024, 92 pages, $19.00

Stevenson’s previous books always have evoked dreamy sensations that take you to unexpected places and Soul, Ghosts, My Absolute is no exception. The title story, which I am reading for the fourth time, is like an inner movie assembled from film clips. For me it is an imagistic evocation of particular scenes, places, people that are extraneous to the words on the page that are intimately connected. I wrote down my some of the brief scenes from mostly black and white films seen long ago that I thought of as I read: The old man in the woods remembering his youthful love in Wild Strawberries, momentary Scenes from a Summer Night, then Through a Glass Darkly. A family picnicking on the edge of a forest, literally, just before a Nazi invasion , troops ascending, unseen no far from where the picnickers are dining, then the theme of Elvira Madigan, Mozart’s Piano Concerto #20, as an unearthly counterpoint to the impending doom. I feel as if I am a particular kind of hell, something from a Virgina Woolf novel haunted by World War I like The Waves or To the Lighthouse orwith Mrs. Dollaway, anticipating something like A Woman in White or du Maurier’s, Don’t Look Now. And before long , we are in another Stevenson story, in an actual film script, “The Foghorn” that is a textured kind of dream that suggests the cited quote, “the dream is true. All dreams are true. (Anton Artuad). There are, literally, split screen, dual narratives, a brief tale, “Valcour Island” which feels like a Poe fragment , “The Lighthouse” (or the incomparable , eerie movie, The Lighthouse). The people, the evocations of places are in and out of time are; incandescent on one hand, oddly barren and forbidden on the other. Life is not a dream; it is a nightmare.

Paul Luikart, The Realm of the Dog and other stories, J. new books, available on Amazon, 206 pages, $20, 2024

Luikart can write, no question about that. His strengths are immediate and ability to establish almost connection with a place, readily identifiable characters (narrators) and situations. Engagement with his work is not guaranteed due to the length of some of the shortest pieces, and he can mix dark humor with drastic, even tragic situations. On the minus side some of these pieces barely give you a chance to connect as they barely qualify as flash fictions. I’m not biased for or against brief stories, but Luikart’s style works better for me in the three pages or longer format. That said, this is the kind of book that compels you to read it pretty much straight through without interruption as I did. Most of these are set in backwoods, out of the way, Southern locations with a wide variety of losers, deviants, and the odd psychos; the kinds of people you’d rather read about than know.
Dave Newman, She Throws Herself Forward to Stop the Fall, Roadside Press, Magical Jeep Distribution, available on Amazon, 200 pages, 2024

Poet and prose master Newman scores big in this collection of seven tight stories. While these people don’t know each other, they probably would make instant connections. Most of them are at an age, pushing 30, unmarried, working loser jobs, half-heartedly finishing college degrees in something with a vague dream of bettering their lives at some, unidentifiable point. They are invariably women, though not always, neither really good looking or unattractive, casual drug users, alcohol abusing, one-night standers or in nowhere relationships. They are increasingly aware this life is going to offer them nothing if they don’t get their asses in gear and yet… And yet they lack motivation the will to do so. These people are not hopeless or particularly exceptional, they are just, well, people, people I have known, hell, I might even have been one of those. Once a book I wrote based on real-life experiences was rejected with a scathing rebuke among the many, often right, alas, observations was the main character has no plans.( I cut that part out and it became the book I wanted it to be so it wasn’t a complete loss) He has children, degrees, a crappy job but he has no real plans, well, sweetheart if you were draft eligible during the early 70’s with a family or not, you’d be lucky to have a crappy job, because no one would hire you and only the government could provide the much-needed assistance to see you through to the next crappy pay check… Newman’s people could be my children. They are not but they could be. Read Newman, he knows of what he speaks. He also has a books scheduled with J. new books in the near future.
Collaborations and other wild things

Simone Muench and Jackie White, The Under Hum, Black Lawrence Press, www.blacklawrence.com 2024, 76 pages, $17.95

Disguised as mil-mannered professors, who could have taught your 400, 500 and 600 level classes are really wild and crazy gals. These poems range from the bizarre, to the really bizarre, to so far out there, words are inadequate to express the far reaches of their imaginations. This is a real dynamic pairing. They uses forms, probably invents new ones, and generally create poetic mayhem of the highest order. I was equally bedazzled and thrilled by all of these poems.

Carol Guess and Rochelle Hurt, Book of Non, Broadstone Books, www.broadstonebooks.com 2023, 74 pages, $23.95

What is a Non? Well, there is the Non-Mom, the non-conformist, the noncompliant, the consensual, noncommittal and, well, you get the idea, they are the not something but very much the Non-Mom. The poets explore the role of the Non-Mom in particular, women who chose not to be mothers for whatever reason. One of these women is gay, the other is not, it really doesn’t matter which is what. The important part is they have made a choice and the book is all about choices made, or not, and the refusal to give into gender roles and societal norms. Not a popular choice these days but since when has poetry been about winning popularity contests? Not now. Hopefully not ever. There is a lot of non-sense in the world these days and both women react to it in this highly original, excellent merging of poetic voices.

Alexis Rhone Fancher and Cynthia Atkins, Duets, Harbor Editions/Small Harbor Publishing, no publishing info included, ISBN 978-1-7359090-,2022 48 pages, $15 from the author (Fancher)

This is an in intrguing blending of two disparate narrative voices in an ekphrastic collection of ten poems each responding to ten original photographs by Alexis. The photos range from street scenes, a woman standing in a doorway, a moth on a screen and a portrait of a woman in a white lace gown that could be a bridal gown. If so, she isn’t happy about it. Whatever. The poems are lyrical, imagistic, kick ass responses that show the versatility of both poets. The music is in the disparity and with the photos we have a multi-dimensional duet.

Andy Clausen and Pamela Twining, Two Hearts Beat, New Generation Beat Foundation Publishing, available on Amazon but also from press directly, 2024, 104 pages $15

Clausen and Twining were partners in life, in love and in poetry. Both recently deceased, this collection is a final tribute to their creative life together. The poems in both collections are a testament to their love but mostly strident, political poems, raging against the totalitarian state that oppresses free thinking people everywhere. Clausen’s long poem, “Ace in the Hole, that concludes this book, is as good as anything written by the Beat generation of poets.

Received: brief thoughts,

Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Sky Water Gravy, Marathon Books, no press information provided, Available on Amazon, 2024, 133 pages $14.99
Cool surreal cover collage clues the reader into the strange world, the always raucous, everyday life of R.Q Flannagan

Jay Hopler, Still Life, McSweeney’s, www.mcsweeneys.net 2022, 63 pages, $18.00
Finalist for Pulitzer Prize, Long listed for National Book Award, and for Book of the Year by NPR. I list these credentials as Hopler’s book is his final statement by a poet of what it is like to live under the gun of a terminal cancer diagnosis. Easily right up there with last words by Claudia Emerson, C.K. Williams, Audre Lorde….

Aleathia Drehmer, We Don’t Get to Write the Ending, Roadside Press, www.roadsidepress.com, distributed by Magical Jeep Dist. Also available on Amazon, 2024, 166 pages, $15
Living, loving, losing, living, loving again, losing again, but never giving up hope, a personal journey.

Morgan Vo, The Selkie, The Song Cave, www.the-song-cave.com, 2024, 104 pages, $18.95

Strange, evocative, weird, humorous, intriguing , changeable are some of the adjectives that come immediately to mind after having read the tale of the selkie. If you like something offbeat and original with challenging points of view this is a must see.

Hiromi Yoshida, Green Roses Bloom for Icarus, Roadside Press, www.roadsidepress.com, distributed by Magical Jeep and available on Amazon, 2024, 148 pages, $18-

Mythic, iconic, hieroglyphic, psychedelic, ekphrastic, surrealistic and everything in between. And beyond with a New York City inflection #stopasianhate

Editors Leon Horton and Michele McDannold, Gregory Corso: Ten Times a Poet, Roadside Press, www.roadsidepress.com distributed by Magical Jeep and available on Amazon, 2024, 268 pages, $22.95

Simply put: If you have ever had even the slightest interest in Beat poet Gregory Corso, this is The book for you. Insightful essays, critical work, diary entries, an occasional poem, you name and it is here. Fascinating and essential.

Jennifer Juneau, Maze, www.roadsidepress.com distributed by Magical Jeep and available on Amazon, 2024, 164 pages, $15-

Maze is an eclectic assortment of wild eclectic short stories ranging from hard boiled realism, Kafkaesque cookouts, mock philosophical examination along the lines of if a tree falls in the first…., to faux noir and to the maddening days and nights with the mean girls primed, “Eight Days with the Yakatori Sisters “which provides ample evidence never to say to a person in crisis mode, “what can I do to help?” This is an entertaining collection offering something for just about any reader imaginable.

Anthologies, and mags

With the publication of the third, and final volume of the Selected Works of Nerve Cowboy 2012-2022, we bid adieu to one of the most read, always lively, consistently excellent small press journals. Fifty issues of a print magazine is an accomplishment that can only be marveled at in this publishing environment. Beginning in 1996, Nerve Cowboy ran until 2022. They also published a series of annual chapbook contest winners that mirrored the excellence of the magazine. I was privileged to be in all three anthologies and was first turned onto the is fledging publication at its inception by the late, great Albert Huffstickler who remained a guiding light for the editors Shields and Hagins, and, later Elissa Yeates. Each volume is perfect bound and at $25 dollars each for roughly a 175 pages of kickass poetry, seems like a bargain to me. Contact at www.nervecowboy.com

Another venerable small press standard is Chiron Review published by Michael Hathaway out of St John Kansas, chironreview2@gmail.com for ed Hathaway of www.chironreview.org to access the magazine. Subscriptions for 4 issues a year are $60. Each issue is perfect bound and features upwards to 160 pages of printed material an issue of poetry, short stories and the occasional review, essay, and interviews. As this is the #133, (with a rare, candid phot of Buster Keaton on the cover) Chiron is built to last as it has metaphorized from a newsprint fold out known as the Kindred Spirit to the glossy, small press standard it is today. Past covers have been works of art and who could forget the recreation of the famed Beatles Abbey Road cover with D. Trump inserted, walking the other way that the fab four?

Clutch edited by Robert M Zoschke, Street Corner Press, 10781 Birchwood Drive, Sister Bay, WI 54234 190 pages in the 2024 (annual) edition .

Editor Zoschke has outdone himself with the graphics featuring dozens of original, in color paintings by Gene McCormick, Chad Horn, photos by Chirs Felver (who shot the cover of Miles Davis) T.K. Splake and others. This glossy annual is always lively and original mixing some vintage poetry from long gone small press legends such as Huffstickler, Kell Robertson, Dave Church and the occasional appearance of folks like Bukowski and Ferlinghetti (though not in this issue). T.K. Splake is a mainstay of Clutch as is Dean McClain, Marge Piercy, Dan Barth, Ed Markowski and Sarah Elizabeth Buskey among others. Clutch is always a magazine to look forward to but this one literally blew me away. Stayed tuned for another volume of Zoschke visits Splake from Sister Bay, WI to the wilds of the UP.

Eric Greinke, editor, Speaking for Everyone, An Anthology of “We” Poems, Amazon, 2024, 200 pages $15.95

Speaking for Everyone, is a community of poetry in the strictest sense; every poem eschews the singular for the us. A generous selection of well over 50 poets have been chosen by editor Greinke and several fellow editors from Presa Press, Adastra Press, Schuylkill Valley Journal and Pilot Press Books. The range of these poems is considerable and is both exciting and illuminating. I have two poems included. If I have an objection to the book, it would be the formatting leaves something to be desired. Rather than having one poet with their poems following, they run together with different poets beginning mid-page rather than having clear breaks. I get the format is to save space and limit the amount of pages but it hinders clear readings although each poet and poem are clearly delineated. That aside the anthology has much to admire and to contemplate including more than a few poets I was not familiar with previously.

Dave Roskos, Big Hammer #23, Iniquity Press/Vendetta Books, PoBox 253 Seaside Heights, NJ 08751 online www.outlawlibrary.blogspot.com

Remember the zines? They were everywhere for everything: fanzines, poetry zines, zine zines in, 80’s, 90’s and then they pretty much z’ed out when everything went online. Everything but Big Hammer which has that cut and paste, collage art effect after all these years. Except now they Big Hammer looks like a real perfect bound zine zine: the cut ups are still there, original art by Jen Dunford Roskos, Angels Mark (who did yeoman’s work on the layout) and Michael Shores among others, lots of photos by the late Don Catena and most of all zillions of poems. There are so many small press “names” here it would do a disservice to leave people out by naming a few of the outstanding poets. Most outstanding was David Cope’s two elegies for Andy Clausen and Michael Pingarron, Shiv Mirabito’s “Xerox Revolution,” excerpts from Ed Sanders Charles Olson narrative, Chris Stroffolino’s “Cordelia at an Empty Military Cemetery on Memorial Day,” and generous selections by Lamont Steptoe and Jakima Davis that hit the proverbial nail on the head. In honor of Banned Books Week I chipped in a piece on books we loved that find their way onto the list which included a nod to The Story of O only because I can’t imagine how it got to a Salvation Army. Speculations on this topic are welcome. And find out from Dave how much this great, BIG magazine costs and get one for yourself.

Etc.

Jared Forman, Down the Punk Rock Highway, Earth Island Books (UK), www.earthisland.com, available on Amazon, 2024, 144 pages, $26.99

Down the Runk Rock Highway, collects the miscellaneous writing and interviews with, I hesitate to say this not knowing the scene well at all but using name recognition as a guide, second tier punk groups from the early days of punk rock. There is a definite and deliberate fan zine as the author previously edited one ( as in he, no doubt, pretty much wrote published and distributed his punk fan zine all by himself) feel to the book. There are collaged, often out of sequence conversations that often look like a dot matrix print out, literally pasted onto pages, along with flyers for gigs, posters, ads galore, that were significant forty years ago, and the like. Common themes recur: up the establishment, anti-war, anti-imperialism, anti-materialism, and ,well, anti-everything, with occasional Nazi symbols and other arcana of a similar nature. I’m not sure how seriously to take those and what they might mean. If you are looking for influencers, the usual names are evoked, first and foremost: The Ramones, Dead Kennedys, Jenna Jett, Blondie, Black Flag….Clearly, there is a lot of serious energy here, and I do mean serious, as all the performers represented in the period black and white photos, are shown exerting maximum effort to such an extent that you can almost feel the sweat. And hear the noise as you know it won’t be melodic. One band even admitted; they played gigs with instruments they didn’t know how to use. Hmm gives new meaning to “self-taught.” (To be fair, they admitted they weren’t very good and they got better once they learned how to play them. On their own, of course). Anyway, if this is your scene, this is a book to evoke nostalgia from the early days of punk when turnover was high, the band names were amazing, and you never had to fear; the people you loved in one brief shining candle of a band, would be back, in another group reborn as something else.

The Biannual T.K. Splake Compendium

I have on hand four new books by the indefatigable Splake with the promise of four more in progress.

First the hardcover

Slow Moving Toward Heaven, Snow Music Press, available on Amazon, 2024, 156 pages, $17.95

Now would be the time to make a hot cup of green tea, crank up some Bob Dylan especially the now classic Knock Knock knocking on heaven’s door (though the Warren Zevon version works just as well, and read this outstanding collection of haiku like Splake poetry. I marked some twenty plus poems that were among Splake’s best. Here, chosen at random are a few,

happy hour tall stool riders
lonely people staring at bar mirror
drinking to escape life’s ugliness

st vinnie’s and goodwill shopping
women trying on dead people’s clothes
no ralph lauren originals

wasting time preparing articles
about poetic vision or writer’s block
instead writing goddamn poem

hiking beyond trail
following invisible footsteps
poet looking for himself

beyond darkness, Transcendent Zero Press, contact the author for purchasing info splake@chartermi.net 2024 approx. 30 pages

Longer poems with the feel of a long poem with many parts that all belong together as the poet, well into his 80’s prepares for the great beyond.

yooper haiku, contact the author for purchasing info, 2024, 92 pages

More of the signature three-line poems centering on his permanent home in the wilds of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

from the author’s introductory note:

during recent years I have been writing three line
poems, a format influenced by the Japanese haiku
poetry form. Like the original oriental style my works
have emphasized simplicity, intensity, and directness
of expression.

warm autumn breeze
tiny leaves falling
poet’s soul dancing

one more once, Cyberwit, www.cyberwit.net, 2024, 36 pages $15 with color photos by the author

duct taped shoes
holes in red socks
uncombed hair
scruffy beard
glasses super glued
sweat soaked body
not taking showers
body with tattoos
small village outcast
eccentric maybe crazy
poet living alone
without close friends
during quiet moments
writing down demons
secrets in his heart