Books Received, Reviewed, Acknowledged

Stephanie Dickinson, Harlow Smith: Postcard Icons in Black & White, Rain Mountain Press, www.rainmoutainpress.com., available on Amazon, 2024 94 pages $19

Having read most, if not all of Dickinson’s work, I can categorically state that she has a thing for doomed creative people. She writes movingly, in an interview structure, of actress Jean Seberg, finds deep connections with her namesake, the reclusive genius, poet Emily Dickison ( her full name is Stephanie Emily Dickinson) of outsider poet Georg Trakl ( in her award winning Blue Swan/Black Swan: the Trakl Diaries) her non-fiction portrait of young woman’s path from abused child caught up in The System which leads to her imprisonment in Razor Wire Wilderness, to her own searing self-portrait, the memoir, Girl Behind the Door. Now we have Harlow and Smith: Postcard Icons in Black & White. The Harlow in question is Jean Harlow whose star, in the Keatsian sense, burned brightly and briefly. She soared to the top of the movie industry but under all the Hollywood glitter and glitz, lay a literal heart of darkness. Each brief vignette is prefaced by a quotation from work on or about Harlow, providing a factual context to the prose poems, like “post card” paragraphs, that follow. The portrait Dickinson creates in this brief rendering is white hot, memorable, and suffused with a sense of doom that brims with a life, and all the attendant sorrow, of one which offered so much promise but achieved so little.

The Smith is Bessie Smith and Stephanie uses a similar technique of brief key phrases, quotes or titles that serves as a “headline” for the text that follows. As a black artist with an unforgettable voice, Smith has to overcome, with varying degrees of success, the usual racial hatred, roadblocks, and discrimination to achieve a remarkable body of work that still resonates today. Without question, Dickinson has given us an indelible, if short portrait, that still manages to feel comprehensive despite the brevity of the sequence. The writing is precise, incisive, even musical, and once again I must ask, if you aren’t reading Stephnie Dickinson, easily one of the most versatile, accomplished, and lesser-known writer’s today, why not?

Laurie Blauner, Swerve, Rain Mountain Press, www.rainmoutainpress.com.,2025, 141 pages, $19 also available as kindle book.

A trip with Laurie Blauner is always time well-spent as you never know where you are going to go, how you are going to get wherever it is you end up, but as you travel, you know it will be time well-spent and you will have seen, felt, and discovered something you never knew before. Laurie’s essays are invitations to strange occasions in a constant state of transition. Each essay, down to the sentence level, feels as if your unconsciousness is rising to your consciousness. Changes in perspective feel like an altering of the mind’s chemistry, as perceptions, world views, stories told, are in constant flux. This continual state of upended flexibility makes for exciting reading and some mind-boggling connections.

The subjects matters of these essays, chosen at random, range from “A History of Murmurations” to “My Museum of Inconveniences” to “Misadventures of Mannequins” to “Curses of Crooked Teeth” to “A Thief’s Thought Catalogue.” Laurie observes that “I can kill anyone in my novels but not in memoir.” Yes, we know this but the way she frames it, makes you feel there is some regret to being restricted (somewhat) by form as in,” You know, I wouldn’t really have minded killing so and so off before he or she did any more damage.” Hence, writing novels for Blauner is kind of obsession to sustain her interest and claims she feels lonely without characters, even if they aren’t real like false teeth. Now that is a connection I would never have made!

Aspects of the essays are personal referring to a very difficult, larger than life, aged mother, a long absent, now deceased father, and strong relationships with her sister and husband. While we learn facts about them all, what is all this writing really for? Distractions. You could call life a distraction but from what? In a very real sense our memories, our writing, living, is a function of ourselves as a temporary, movable museum of pieces of things. Everything in life, swerves, spills into everything else and becomes one large kaleidoscopic image cluster. And that’s a good thing when a master craftsman like Laurie Blauner is showing us around the museums of her mind.

James Griffin, Failing to Fall, 2024, Roadside Press, www.roadsidepress.com distributed by Magical Jeep and available on Amazon, 178 pages, $15-

The typesetting of Griffin’s latest poetic offering immediately establishes the feeling of old-time small press books. Eschewing the current standard fonts such as Times New Roman, we are reading what looks like an old dot matrix print out (and believe me I had, still have, my share of those in my hard copy archives.) And that’s not a bad thing as Griffin feels like the kind of guy who would be more at home roaming about as he did, does, without deep roots anywhere. His bio suggests he is a punk rock poseur and an armchair anarchist, the kind of guy who isn’t deeply committed to anything much and has a sense of humor about himself. That said, he also is a melancholy man whose relationships generally run of steam, fail miserable and whatever job he has or had, is not sustaining, or satisfying. His poetry reflects the failures that can be summed up
in the closure of his longer poem “the king of nowhere,”

the 4:00am fury
of a woman standing over me
shouting to be heard
above my indifference
and yes
perhaps the leaving that
left me clutching the phone
like a lover
turning words to weapons
to win a battle I thought
I had already won
only to realize
in the absence
of your brush
and your silence
I had ransomed
the queen of my heart
to become
the king of nowhere

He’s not terminally depressed, he’s sad, yes, but now he’s moving on to wherever and to whatever happens next.

Hugh Blanton, Chicken Bones and Snot Rags, 2024, Anxiety Press, available on Amazon, 149 pages, $16

I confess that I was put off by the title. I’ve always thought a title creates, or at least, it should create, an impression that will make a prospective reader want to look inside. Instead, I’m wondering about the sensibility that would choose this phrase as a hook. I’m thinking an immature, Bukowski wannabee drunk, probably young, and relatively new to the writing/ publishing game. As Blanton’s preface makes abundantly clear, none of these expectations would be true. He is late middle age, a drinker, yes but not a Bukowski reveling in his depravity. He has been writing for decades but only recently begun to publish with any regularity. He defines poetry as a narrative that should entertain and inform. He eschews modernist, opaque, image laden, metaphor dense poetry as deadening, as well he might. I wouldn’t argue that point as there is nothing more soul deadening than that kind of poetry (Hello Ashbery fans, wake up and smell the coffee)? And Blanton’s poetry delivers on his purpose. His writing is not sloppy or dense, though at 140 plus pages, began to feel repetitious.

He’s a solitary man, not so much lonely and reclusive, as he is comfortable not being a social animal. At times, he compares himself to Genet and Rimbaud which feels like a stretch.(though I haven’t read his chapbook Genet and Me: Thieves of a Feather, which, presumably explores this connection in greater depth.) Being alone more often than not isn’t necessarily a recipe for literary genius. He doesn’t watch TV, though he reads constantly, and apparently writes ceaselessly. And that isn’t a bad thing. For instance, “The Bitter Washerwoman “ is a classic. Others less so.

Three points feel appropriate here 1) is this book would be better served with a judicious cutting roughly a third of the poems. None of them are what could be considered amateurish or bad, but many of them make the same point in slightly different ways that don’t feel particularly illuminating. 2) Blanton feels as if he is stuck in the rut. His subject matter doesn’t change, grow, or vary. It’s as if he has written himself into a cul de sac and he can’t figure out the best way to get out. 3) Blanton continually refers to himself as a writer who drinks. The further you get in this collection, the deeper the impression became that he is a drinker who writes. There is a difference and it doesn’t end well. Believe me, I have been on both sides of that equation and only by becoming the writer who used to drink, am I still here to write these lines.

Robert M Zoschke, Love Songs From the Road, 2025, Street Corner Press, 10781Birchwood Drive, Sister Bay, WI, 54234, 42 pages $15

Zoschke’s latest is a slick looking, high quality, lavishly illustrated chapbook with original art and photographs (most by Clutch magazine staple Chad Horn) of the life and lost loves of the poet. The cover is a photo of the poet sitting in the back of his pickup on the road to Splake country. Zoschke, much like Michael Moore, accurately predicted the heartland was going to go overwhelming for The Orange Jesus based on the kinds of businesses and signs he was seeing along the road from rural Wisconsin to nowhere UP where Splake lives. I recalled the vivid descriptions and enumerations of these small businesses to the point I made a long list of names and phrases associated with these places and thought, “Oh, no, here we go again.” Which is neither here nor there in terms of these narrative poems in the “footsteps of Kerouac and Petty.” There are Honky Tonks, unforgettable bar babes, knock-you-dead hitchhikers running away from her man, until she has a change of heart, Florida hot stuff, humor and grit, and sorrow like well, a really good Tom Petty song. Perhaps, the most moving poem in the collection is the agonizing birth of his twin daughters described in almost brutal detail. As a father who waited for a child to be born by a wife who couldn’t give birth naturally to a child over six pounds (he was closer to ten.) There is no more helpless feeling than the suffering your wife must endure and you can do nothing to help. The wife survives, the twin girls, who are Down syndrome beautiful young women now survive and thrive though the marriage does not. That poem is titled, “What Matters Most” after Bukowski’s, What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire.

Mark Terrill, The Undying Guest, Spuyten Duyvil, www.Spuytenduyvil.net, 2023, 84 pages, $16 available on Amazon

Terrill was a merchant seaman so when you think of the phrase, “been there, done that,” it applies to him. These poems range far across the globe, from the west coast where he was born, to Morocco (where he studied with Paul Bowles and smoked kif with him and his Moroccan co- writer/lover) to Germany, Holland, and any port city you can think of on several continents. Terrill likes complex sentences to the point where all 62 or so poems are one long sentences largely eschewing commas as well. As one editor once said to me, “you seem to be advocating a Beware of the Dreaded Semi-colon” by which he meant most, if not all, punctuation marks in general. I think he was kidding. Maybe. Many of these poems have a breathless, headlong quality that don’t feel as rushed as they might and are often quite funny, always vividly descriptive, and full of wry commentary. His description of “maybe the greatest Whorehouse in the world” makes you think well, yeah, maybe it was, no matter what your general opinion of that time-honored profession may be. Not all of these work however. Some feel flat and lifeless but those are a minority. Yes, you could accuse Terrill of dabbling in prose masquerading as poetry, as most critics who don’t really get prose poems will, but the bottom line is you can sit and read this collection straight through and enjoy the panorama for what it is, a polished, professional poetic job.

Three from Carbonation Press, ed Greg Bem Books are printed by and available from Lulu.com

Winter in America(Again: Poets respond to 2024 Election, a team of eight editors, 2025, 280 pages $20

The highest praise I can think of is that Winter in America (Again is a much-needed update of Carolyn Forche’s classic anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness. As the title indicates, this collection assembles some of the best poets in America to respond to the election of a man who proclaimed that he would be a dictator on the first day. Clearly, along with I Am Your Retribution, his goal is to turn America white and inhospitable to anyone not to his liking. If only he had spent time acquiring knowledge to back up all the outrageous policies he proposes. A few weeks into this administration and we are way past “the heading towards a constitutional crisis,” or “on the verge of autocracy.” The saddest thing about this political nightmare is that we did it to ourselves; we committed mass political national suicide.

That said, it would be safe to say, the approximately 110 poets and photographers who contributed to this anthology for the ages, would agree. There so many outstanding pieces it seems unfair to pick out any that were better than others as they all have something pertinent to say. Martin Espada’s “Ode to the Soccer Ball Sailing Over a Barbed Wire Fence” is the one that struck home the most. I recall an exhibit of photographs of Latin American photographers at the State Museum of New York at Albany in mid-80’s that showed detainees playing soccer in confinements (along with locker rooms where their stuff were stored, accommodations et al) that was equally as moving. I remember writing a poem not unlike Espada’s about these deplorable conditions that were later collected in a chapbook, Juchitan Medusa (Cervana Barva Press); alas, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Rhea Melina, found confetti, 2024, 167 pages with color photographs by the author$20

As I began reading this collection, began jotting down thematic words that seem to apply to Rhea’s writing: trauma, survival, coping, stabilizing, growing, damaged...She asks, remember when you were a kid and you believed you could do anything?” Don’t lose that, she thinks. Create, become, write, live, write again with a new sense of wonder, then repeat. Tellingly she writes (these poems) are pictures, headshots, mug shots.

I have been the maiden, the slut, the mother, the trophy.
I am the witch, the nurse, the doula, the baby, the addict,
the healer, the nothing, the wife, the teacher, the clown,
the poet, the painter.

The poems become a life history, a slow reveal of what this self-description means, this resume that seems so fraught and deeply self-destructive can become the healer, the lover, the new woman beyond, but not free, of her life traumas. “Poetry is not just a thing of place/ it’s a place to put things/ Things that don’t fit anywhere else”

As I read these lacerating poems of self-discovery, I felt Rhea was saying, “if you survive what you were like when you were young you might write like this. Or else you would be dead.” She would be the legendary wild woman who has the blues you heard of as one bright ball of self-extinguishing light but somehow survived the fire.

The beauty of this book is how the poems gain momentum, delve deeper into her past until you reach the primal scream in the poem, “Thinking of human trafficking.” To me this is the core, the soul of the book. This is Rhea laying it all out on the line, reading her inner being to an audience that is spell bound transfixed by the strength of a woman who has seen the inner workings of hell and emerged a stronger, vibrant person because of it. As I read it to myself, I could hear her reading it as if she were in the room with me. Clearly, this is meant to be a performance piece. The poem, the book is a remarkable achievement, you can move on from the worst kinds of indignities of racial shaming, slut shaming, drug addiction, sex work and be a productive person. You don’t have to renounce what you were or what you wrote regarding it, as she speaks of in an interview at the conclusion of the book, but you need to learn from your mistakes and become who you need to be.

Chath pierSath, Echoes Lost to Wind, 2024, 118 pages, $15

Echoes Lost to Wind begins with an overview of the world as told by an astronaut in awe of how beautiful the world is and he wonders why anyone would want to destroy such a work of art. Marooned on the planet as we all are, can be a hostile place especially for a lonely, introverted, gay man looking for love. His quest is not a sex thing so much as a genuine need to form vital human connections given he has always been an outsider from birth. The poet escaped from Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge reign of terror establishing himself as a refugee, a perpetual outsider no matter how assimilated he may become. His otherness is his life.

Later, returning to Cambodia is a nightmare of dried bones, ashes, stark reminders of a world he could not hope to survive in. There are vivid descriptions of a mother’s physical ailments, a father’s senseless murder, a legless beggar he formed a deep connection with who inexplicably disappears. Ultimately his writing can be summed up to a closure in his poem, “Oh, Son of Earth”

Where to work and be
A man of some worth
Even when life isn’t all that special

What more should we ask from life?

A small quibble and I do mean small, the print in this book is like 6 point, at best, which is extremely hard to read for those of us who are no longer in the flower of our youth.

Jeff Royce, Angel Trumpets, Bitter Oleander, www.bitteroleander.com, 2025, 80 pages $18-

Royce begins his book of tight, self-contained narratives, in deep mourning for his late father. Overall, the tone of the book is in a minor key, examining the closest connections in the poet’s life. He is a man who cherishes his solitude, examines the connections of the body, and the natural world, making some odd, startling juxtapositions; winter is nightmare, morning has a broken arm. The poet is an extension of the natural world, a kind of cosmonaut, who is solitary and weightless, yet always exploring. Though weightless he is tethered to the world, part of the process of discovering, yet distinctly apart.

All this examining and abstraction, shifts directly to personal ruminations on family life. While he is deeply engaged with the people he loves, he is always somewhere else in his mind. Apartness is more a remove than an emotional absence. Deep imagery, metaphorical structures, become a philosophical pondering of the world; there is music, and joy but it always feels as if it somewhere else and that leads to a questioning, where is here, exactly?

A series of American Dreams catalogs a world out of balance giving way to its worst instincts. Amid all the strife, of knowing, tomorrow we will rename all the animals indicating there is an exciting world of fresh experiences awaiting us. I sense a deep ironic turn of mind and phrase in this reimaging of the everyday world where the spirit is not quite as functional as we might like. And yet, despite all the strife, the deep thinking, and disconnections, there is much to love. His Wittgensteinian Blues is a kind of witty ditty, and there is light in the darkest poems as in the touching, symphonic elegy for a cherished friend, the poet Duane Locke. Though we all end up in the grave, there is a subtle humor, double set of meanings to the final Grave Poem which is an excellent summation of Royce’s art,

But no mausoleum.
No tombstone or tumulus.

Just fill up a hole with a whole lot of nothing
Not even my body which

is itself a good grave.

Short Takes

Juliet Cook, Revolting, Cul-de-sac of blood, www.culdesacofblood.com , 2024, no pagination roughly 24 pages, no price listed

Cook is master of disambiguation, of obsessive images featuring detached body parts, doll’s heads, and the like, sort of like a nightmare of disarticulating dream states. Often the reader feels as if the words, the body parts in the poems are revolting against the poem/the self. It’s uncomfortable but it’s always eye opening and intrguing. Not your standard poetic fare.

Jon Wesick, Explaining Humanity to Electrons, Alien Buddha, wwabuddhapress.com, order from Amazon, 2024, 70 pages, $11.25

Wesick uses math and physics for satirical/humorous (mostly) purposes in this unusual look at humanity from, literally, inside the human experience by the smallest parts of existence. Tongue firmly in cheek works especially well in the opening poem, “Parable of the Electron Sea” in the manner of Allen Ginzburg. My personal favorite is “Subatomic Poetry Workshop” which takes all the absurdities of these kinds of encounter groups, with agendas, to their absurdist end. Later poems evoking physicists (Feynman, Einstein) are amusing. One wonders how to “Gravity of Death” and “Universe on its Deathbed” given current world conditions.

J.R. Solonche, Night Visit, Dos Madres, www.dosmadres.com, 2024, available on Amazon though buying it directly from the press is the right thing to do, 96 pages, $21

As usual Solonche is a poet with a distinctive point of view whose work feels effortless, naturally flowing from whatever subject comes to mind. Generally, these poems are short in a manner that recalls A.R. (Archie) Ammons, witty, pointed, bluff , though they can offer a sting when the poet feels motivated to do so. I read this right through, too quickly, I realized, and went back for a much less speedy read, savoring words, expressions, images. J.R. Solonche is the kind of poet who’ll sneak up and grab you from behind if you‘re not paying close attention.

Also, from Dos Madres (see Charles Rammelkamp’s full review and information for purchase)
Davd Giannini, Stones Are the First to Rise

In keeping with the arresting original, cover art, the stones literally appear to be rising. The early images are a way transformative seeing that become alternately celebratory and elegiac to friends, neighbors, and acquaintances whose, often, long lives were well lived.

Steve Luttrell, Paper Boats, Igneus Press, contact info@igneuspress.com , 2024, 101 pages, $20

Luttrell is a long-time warrior in the small press trenches. He is a kind of neo-Beat at times, and at others, a Lorine Neidecker like student in observatory technique, and at, other times, whimsical and witty. Regardless of whatever associations you chose to make, Luttrell a long-time editor of Maine’s fine, long running small press mag, The Café Review, is always engaging. His closure to the poem The Gravedigger’s Hands will remain with me for some time,

The gravedigger’s hands
can offer no redemption

but can and will
fulfill one’s final needs.

Treat yourself to some unexpected poetry pleasures, buy the book, pour a good cup of coffee and relax and enjoy the read.

George Wallace, Last Bacchanale, Roadside Press, distributed by Magical Jeep available on Amazon, 154 pages, 2025, $17

The latest massive collection of the ever-prolific Wallace has the look, and often the feel, of prose. Some reach the length of flash fictions but there is a distinct rhythm a cadence to the words that assure the reader that this is indeed, poetry. As usual the poetry is eclectic in tone, subject matter, and ranges far and wide from the personal to the contemplative. Wallace has his eyes on everything making his books must reads for his legions of admirers.

Kat Lehmann, no matter how it ends a bluebird’s song, Rattle, www.rattle.com, 2025, 44 pages, $9- A Rattle Chapbook Prize Winner

Lehmann is a master of the short form, mostly haikus and one-line poems, in this collection. There is a great deal of white space on these pages but it serves her purpose well, helping to express an ominous sense of absence, of foreboding that is not clearly articulated but darkly hinted at. There is beauty and a celebration of the seasons but the transitory nature of good feeling and joy is readily apparent. The chapbook can easily be read more than once in a single go. It is well-worth the readers while to finish the sequence and begin again once you have finished and read again savoring the spare, evocative lines.

Two by Jack Foley:
Creative Death: an octogenarian’s wordshop, Igneus Press, www.igneuspress.com 2023, 126 pages $25

Foley with collage artist Mark Fisher, EKPHRAZZ, www.igneuspress.com2024, 70 pages $20 well-illustrated with original color collages by Fisher

Foley may be old and physically infirm, but there is nothing wrong with his mind. He is a living relic of the San Francisco poetry scene who distinguished himself in a one-of-a-kind category: Jack Foley. There are Beat influences, anarchism, French surrealism, street poetics ala Micheline and Foleyisms that defy any and all categories. Those are all good things in my mind, as Foley has a supple mind, a terrific sense of humor, and a broad, basic Humanity that distinguishes him as living legend. He is unrepentant in his iconoclasm and I salute him for being the one and only Foley artist.

EKPHRAZZ is just what the title suggests: an adventure in surrealism. The poet and artist blend their particular talents for the absurd, the outrageous, the visually arresting, in word and image. The cover art is a photo collage of a kind of Count Dracula figure with a clock instead of a head superimposed on an urban setting of row apartment building overlooking an El with a business man walking on the railroad tracks with his briefcase and a flesh color scantily clad (but not overtly lewd) woman. A quote accompanies the collage: “Yes, I was young once too.” Weren’t we all? Foley’s imagination has not dimmed with age and his companion gives him an ample selection of arresting images to ply his ekphrastic art.

Erin Murphy, Fluent in Blue, Grayson Books, www.graysonbooks.com 2024, 96 pages $18

I was drawn to Erin’s book after reading her Reader’s Choice Award winner from Rattle, “The Internet of Things,” a wondrous poem that opens this rich, expansive collection. I don’t rank poetry books but if I were to do so, Fluent in Blue, would rank in the top 10 for the past couple of years if not longer. Given I read around 200 poetry books a year, there is a lot of stiff competition. On a personal note, Erin’s poems inspired not one, but two poems of my own. There are personal poems, dream poems, joyful ones, love poems and painful ones; in short, this poems the stuff of life, a complex, varied, well-lived personal envisioning.

John Bradley, As Blood Is the Fruit of the Heart: a book of spells, Dos Madres, www.dosmadres.com, 2025, 116 pages $21

Bradley’s latest is an instruction manual for sleepers in a dream state. Drawing on the surrealistic art of Remedios Varo, Bradley conjures up a complex Magik universe for lovers of the otherworldly. The imagery comes directly from one subconscious to the next and is a journey unlike any other. Each poem is literally a trip.

Ron Whitehead, Tapping My Own Phone New and Selected Work, New Generation Beat Poetry Publications, Available on Amazon, New Generation Beat website appears to be corrupted, 2024, 144 pages with photos $15

Whitehead is the inveterate nay sayer. He says no to societal oppressions, no to autocracy, yes, to his rebellious nature, and is always true to the idea of being a free man in an unfree society. His poems reflect his philosophy and are a spirited, often elegiac voice of reason, in a cruel unreasoning world. Read Ron Whitehead buy his book(s), listen to what he has to say. There aren’t many real-life individuals left in this world and we have to cherish those we have left.

William P Haynes W Elliot, Beat, Writings & Ramblings, 2025, 93 pages, $9.95 also available as a kindle edition.

There is a definite 50/60’s Beat vibe to Elliot’s work evoking the coffee houses, the Kerouac groove, the beat poets in all their hip voices. You can almost taste the coffee, smell the cigarettes, and the tea smoke emanating from all the dimly lit gathering places people got together to hear jazz and speak poetry. Elliot is a true drop out, leaving school in his teens, making the writing scene in The Village and around the city, until he could no longer afford to live there. He published extensively back in the 70’s but most, if not all of those poems were lost. He is reclaiming his poetic voice after 30 plus years trying to make it as a novelist. Despite good reviews and three published novels, he achieved neither fame nor fortune with his prose. I know how he feels. The poems in this collection are raw and infused with the energy of the night. Elliot’s rambling spirit lives on, still cranking after all these years.

Iniquity Press/vendetta books Dave Roskos ed. Po Box 253 Seaside Heights, NJ 08751

Periodically Dave prints a series of poetry pamphlets that harkens back to the old cut and paste days of small press publishing. These pamphlets are described, accurately as consisting of “small press b&w art rants manifestos zines.” Some of us miss these. I know I do. Included in this series are: “What Country Is This?” ( a rant by the late Andy Claussen at his most lucid best) “For the parking Lot Kids (Damian Rucci deriding the soulless establishment yuppies and, most of all, getting clean) “Think about the Bears Believe in Charity” Tom Obrzut raging against the machine in livid color) “Robots (Tom Obrzut killer poem from his last book in a Brave New World voice) “Find Your Inner Wobbly” (Dave Roskos down but not quite out in America) “Ask the Inferno (Alex Ragsdale heathens of America united)

Also from Iniquity Press, Joey Leonardis aka Slayer Joe The Art of Seduction, 2025, 24 pages with collages by Michael Shores, $8

Writing about love and sex, especially in poetry, has to be the most difficult subject to tackle. Everyone tries it, to some degree or another, and almost no one does it well. I can speak from experience, I’ve tried it, the results were embarrassing at best.

I use a text of love poetry from the late 40’s by Walter Benton, This Is My Beloved ( you get a kindle copy for a few bucks or your own hardback on Amazon but why would you?) as the standard for: what happens when the erotic and cliched writing clash on the page and writing happens. Well, there are fireworks and celestial events and launched rocket ships and an occasional rude word or two but it is not art. I’m not even sure it’s poetry anymore but I am not going to argue that point. What it isn’t is sexy.

The Art of Seduction strives for an eternal love story that spans generations and maybe even life cycles, though I’m not clear about the occasional references to Dracula and dark love and otherworldly goings on. All the right body parts are there, the sweat and the juices and the love potions, but none of it adds up to anything that could be remotely considered sexy or seductive sort of like a sophomore creative writing exercise gone horribly wrong. There are even a couple of computer proofreading errors that add unintentional humor to the enterprise: pedals of a rose and welcome to my alter (where sins are absolved). The Shores collages, however, are appropriately dark, suggestive, seductive, and surreal id images. When love/sex poems go bad they feel like parody. Nothing is worse for the intended purpose of the writing than that.

Small Press Veterans Book Section

Kurt Nimmo, Texas & New Mexico Selected Poems 2015-2025, 2025, independently printed, available on Amazon, 147 pages $13.99 Kindle $5.99

Nimmo’s poems are hard driven, hard boiled narratives of contemporary life in Southwest and environs. As a former editor of two small press journals, Planet Detroit and Smudge plus a long running chapbook series, Nimmo is a true veteran of the small press scene poetry wars. His people and places teem with life: eccentrics, drunks, wild women and more sedate moments of humor and reflection befitting a man on the North side of 70. These poems are crisp, assured well worth checking out of a craftsman at the top of his game.

Michael Flanagan, Days Like These, Luchador Press a division of Spartan Books, available on Amazon, 128 pages, 2021 $15.00 Kindle version also available

Bronx native Michael Flangan recounts many of the memorable people he grew up, many of whom died extremely young. These portraits are indelible characterization of what it was like, probably still like, growing up playing stick ball, street hoop, and chasing the same precocious girls. That most of these people only see each other at funerals, years later, is not surprising but have a kind of odd survivor’s guilt for being there at all. They make the usual promises to get together soon knowing they never will.

Flanagan relocates to Virginia where he raises a much beloved troubled daughter with his wife. The most vivid poems, for me, two of which were published in Misfit, are the scenes in Locked-In wards and other institutions where Flangan’s daughter ends up for one reason or another. There is nothing more painful than witnessing a child suffer and knowing you can’t do anything to alleviate that suffering. Flanagan knows this as well as anyone and his poems express the deepest emotions a parent can feel, as well as anyone could.

Jon Bennett, Leisure Time, independently published, available on Amazon 2021, 89 pages $5

Leisure Time is anything but laid back and relaxed. As I read these in-your-face narratives, I wrote down pairs of thematic concerns in the poems that sum up the focus of the book: crackpots & posers, drug dealers & users, lottery losers and addicted gamblers, pathetic drunks & put upon pedestrians, drunk AA sponsor & skin diseased live art model, the dead & the dying drugged and otherwise. My favorite poem in the collection is “Strip Club Bouncer” that tells the story of a bouncer buying a fake crab salad sandwich to eat,

“to sit on his stool below the neon lights
where dreams are only
a lipstick smear
and a few dollars
away.”

It’s only five bucks, buy the damn book.

Books Received:

Fram Cathexis Northwest Press, www.cathexisnorthwestpress.com
postage paid by press also available from Amazon

Bailey Blumenstock, Leaving the Religion of Self-Harm, 2025 57 pages $15
Andi Myles, Fractured Symphony, 2025, 66 pages $15

Samuel Gilpin, Self-Portrait as Reddening Sky, 2025 38 pages $12 presumptive winner of most sardonic bio of the year.

Just In
Suzanne Cleary, The Odds, NYQ Books, www.nyq.org. 96 pages, 2025, $18.95 on Amazon
Winner of the annual Laura Boss Poetry Book Competition. Strong narratives: wistful, compelling, heart-felt, accessible, with never a false note; a winner in every respect.

Rachel Feder, Daisy, Northwestern University Press, Triquarterly Books, 2025, 140 pages $18
Retelling of the Gatsby story by a 17-year-old high school student, Daisy is set in the 90’s. While the details are great altered, the story will be familiar. This is an intrguing riff on a true American Classic, is essentially one long poem of connected parts.

Prose, Fiction etc.

g. emil reutter, On the Other Side of Goodbye, Alien Buddha purchase on Amazon, 2025,
93 pages $11.25

On the Other Side of Goodbye, falls into the etc. category as it combines poetry, flash fiction and full-length fiction. The poetry tends to be bucolic, nature oriented, focusing on everyday existence. The flash fiction tends to follow the what’s happening in daily lives around the neighborhood and nearby places without much in the way of meaningful conflict. No one would confuse these flashes with Ray Carver with one possible exception, “Antennae TV” where an old man early A.M. drinking in a bar faces harsher realities of life,

“Everyone he knew was dead, everyone he watched on TV
was mostly dead and the guys at the bar were breathing but might as well be dead.”

Seems to me, reutter could just as easily have said, ”they didn’t know they were dead.” Maybe the old men should watch live sporting events instead of rerun serials on TV.

The final section features five full-length stories: a flea market find yields an unexpected meaningful treasure, a surprise party unexpected happiness, Mom rides into town and saves her extended family with her checkbook and they all live happy after ever, and a ‘don’t let the badass storm let you down’ story and the jarring, given the previous rather precious pieces, “Cadillac Motel” which reads like a failed pitch for an episode in the Friday the 13th franchise. Have you ever seen the end of “High Plains Drifter”? Here you go: burn baby burn, only seedy motels instead of a western town movie set. I guess revenge is sweet if you like that sort of thing.

Westley Heine, Cloud Watching in the Inferno, Roadside Press, www.roadsidepress.com distributed by Magical Jeep also available on Amazon, 2025, 116 pages $17

Heine’s latest collection is a selection from the best of his work from 2022-2024. The collection is roughly half fiction and half poems and has the feel of an early Jim Morrison song, “My Eyes Have Seen You,” that is part Honky Tonk Woman, part Punk Angel. There are bars where a capital improvement is replacing bar stool duct tape with electrical tape. There are holographic sex workers and he knows kids these days that don’t have no respect as in, when I get back to the planet where I am from, it’s gone. The stories are often spacey and surreal though the best of these is one that has a noir, gritty one that reminds me of Leonard Gardner’s, Fat City, and the stories of F.X. Toole. Some of the stories feel uneven to me but they are consistently hard edged as are the poems. The general overall feeling I get from the poems is life in hell, a feeling re-enforced by the illustration by Anthony Christopher which, if you’ve ever experienced dt hallucinations, you’d be right at home here. The full color cover image reinforces this uneasy feeling. I guess, ultimately, being drunk in hell isn’t so bad if you never have to sober up.

Danny Shot, Night Bird Flying, Roadside Press, www.roadsidepress.com, distributed by Magical Jeep also available on Amazon, 2025, 130 pages $17

I might as well get this out of the way up front, if I had to create a list of the top ten small press mags since I stared publishing in the 70’s, Danny Shot’s Long Shot would be on it. Wormwood will always be number one because the incomparable editor Marvin Malone. We should aspire to and try to be half the editor he was. After that, well there was some great ones and Long Shot had it all going especially around the time of 9-11 when everything was turning to shit in a major way. I guess this is a roundabout way of saying, they published me several times, so if that suggests I have a conflict of interest, well, so be it. I do my best to be subjective.

So, okay, I loved this book beginning with the whacko cover girl with the lightning bolt underarm hair, holding down the fort by a café table covered in empty Bud cans cigarette butts, an almost empty cheap bottle of Vodka; the usual detritus of a night of hard drinking. We later meet the cover girl as Cinful Cindy, gonzo pal of his lost love Carla, the subject of the longest story in the book, “What a Wonderful World.”

I confess I have a thing about Night Bird Flying, the title of the book, which conjures up memories of Allison Steele the night DJ on WNEW FM in the late 60’s early 70’s who is a minor background character in “What a Wonderful World. I can still hear Allison’s tag line,

The flutter of wings, the shadow across the moon, the sounds of the night, as the Nightbird spreads her wings and soars, above the earth, into another level of comprehension, where we exist only to feel. Come, fly with me, Alison Steele, the Nightbird, at WNEW-FM, until dawn.

Those of us who came of age in those halcyon years, later recalled the sixties were largely overrated (especially if you were military draft eligible or about to be). The thing about the 60’s really was “the only truly great stuff that came out of that era were sports (especially New York sports) and the music.” And when you think of the music, you think of prog rock, smoking doobies, and Allison Steele. She was like the Maltese Falcon. She was the stuff dreams were made of.

Danny Shot gets this.

Early stories in his collection take place in Dumont, NJ where he grew up. I have a personal connection with Dumont as back I the late 60’s my Summer job was working in a soft ice cream/ Italian Ice stand on Sunrise Highway on the Island in Lynbrook NY. Kitty corner to the stand was a triangular point behind the Esso station that had, for one summer, a sculptor renting the property. It was my bright idea to commission a concrete ice cream cone for a Christmas Present for our beloved boss, Don “Bonehead” Wilson and to deliver it as a surprise staff gift to his home in Dumont NJ. And we did, somehow managing to transport it across the Verrazano Narrows bridge along with three adults in a Nash Rambler. Do you know how much a four-foot high, custom-made concrete ice cream cone weighs? I don’t know precisely, but a lot covers it. So, if you ever drove by a house in Dumont in the late 60’s that had a giant concrete cone on the porch, it was all my fault.

Growing up in Dumont was a lot like growing up on Long Island, as I did, around the same time as many of these stories. I am a few years older than Danny and the drugs weren’t quite as prevalent as they were in his day (though they would be soon). By mid-60’s, if you knew a guy, who knew a guy, who knew someone else….and there were rumors of heroin around, but not that anyone actually saw any. Of course, in a couple of years, guys from the National Honor Society were getting busted in their dorm rooms. I can relate to all of the experiences the young narrator tells us to the point you wonder what is fiction and what is memoir. The opening story hooked me right in, “Ich bin ein New Yorker.” He then proceeds to outline all the ways he is not, geographically anyway, actually a New Yorker but, in fact, a Jersey boy and everyone from New York knows: People from Jersey suffer from New Yorker envy.

Personally, I grew up in the shadow of New York and the first thing I wanted to do, once I was old enough, was to get the hell out. But that’s just me. My dislike and disdain only grew after years of working Upstate, N.Y., working with the spawn of the City’s elite. They all seem to think because their dad works in finance and is a white-collar criminal, or he works for the mob and is an actual criminal, they are beyond special. All the rest of the people in the world, are service workers who don’t count, because my dad can buy their dads and everything they thought of owning. Whatever. I used to love telling them your credit is no good here. But I digress.

There is no question the final piece, “Death of a Poet,” is fact or fiction. It is clearly a memoir piece and it burns a hole in your heart. This essay/memoir is an absolutely shattering piece about the last days of Neo Beat poet Andy Claussen and his partner Pamela Twinning. I read with both of those guys a couple of times. I saw Andy read elsewhere and that was an experience that is rarely duplicated as few poets could outshine Claussen on stage. I can’t say I knew Andy or Pamela well, but having read both the books Shot speaks of in this essay, their final publications, I feel close to them in spirit.

The essay tells the story backwards in twenty short sections beginning with Andy near the end of his steep decline, asking if he is dying. Clearly, he was, but the real genius of the piece is the traveling backwards in lives well-lived, to the beginning of his and Pamela’s decline. All stories end the same but it is the getting there, the telling of it, that makes the story special. Shot has created one of the most completing tribute essays to fellow writers I have ever read.

On the negative side, Shot includes a throwaway, a male fantasy piece, that I can only compare with Phillip Roth’s unfortunate Kafka the stand-up comedian pastiche, The Breast. Shot’s is called “The Big Dick.” Enough said. It is especially jarring as it comes directly after the Bob Dylanesque, “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” evoking long story about his lost love, “What a Wonderful World.” That story feels so real it has to be true even if it isn’t. Ever love madly, truly, deeply? This is the story for you, then, and while it is doomed from the outset, it doesn’t feel either sentimental or maudlin; a rare achievement. “The Big Dick.” Well, The Breast wasn’t funny either.

Lori Jakiela, All Skate: True Stories from Middle Life, Roadside Press www.roadsidepress.com, distributed by Magical Jeep also available on Amazon, 2025 158 pages $18-

These twenty-three brief, but intimate, essays span the troubled days of a somewhat wild youth, to settling down into steady work and, finally, married with children, all told with incisive wit and telling observations. Health scares, in the form of a cancer diagnosis, treatment and aftermath reveal a resilient spirit, wounded but not undone by adversary. She is able to move on with the aid of a loving husband, writer Dave Newman, and their children. Lori’s health issues by her having been adopted through a Catholic adoption service which refused to reveal details about her birth parents. Nothing is more frustrating than trying to establish a timeline for health without information and these roadblocks, which still exists today, are an unnecessary hinderance as other recent memoirs I have read by women clearly show. (see Jan Beatty’s excellent “adoption” narrative American Bastard”)

Jakiela’s essays reveal of full life well-lived. Having enjoyed previous book about her life as an airline hostess, the essays on this peripatetic life-style continue to amuse given she is a keen observer of human behavior. Her essay, “You can tell A Lot About People from the Way Behave on Airplanes.” Airplane travel is a closed system, a microcosm, that reveals the lack of impulse control of so many chronologically adult people who seem driven to exercise their presumed sense of personal entitlement in outrageous ways. Witness people trying to fit oversized baggage into overhead storage containers, boorish behavior during drink service, forced sexual contact in closed spaces and on and on.(You haven’t lived until you get on a non-stop flight from Baltimore to Phoenix with someone who claims to have been drinking since Panama and smells and acts like it, as he spews pathological lies about anything and everything until you wonder if the air hostess is going to recommend an unscheduled passenger drop off at 35,000 feet over Kansas City. I know Lori knows the feeling.) She does not suffer fools gladly and is not shy about the close to the bone put down of improper behavior. The lifestyle of airline hostess, grossly underpaid as they are, is vividly described and is often hilarious, but just as often lonely, and unrewarding, despite the fringe travel benefits.

Lori’s reminiscences of Bread Loaf, as a scholarship worker/waitress, reveals the other side of the glitz and glamor of star power writers and high-powered agents meeting with aspirant poets and writers. What could be more embarrassing than spilling a glass of milk on John Irving’ lap? Trying to clean it up.

Once again, I must conclude that there is no such thing as a “good” workshop experience for non-sponsored, high profile writing program writers or “rising” writers of all stripes. I can say, from first-hand experience, luckily not as a worker, that these Summer Writer’s Conferences are little more than a well-paid vacation gigs for established writers and a chance for those “rising” writers to network while the rest of us plebian folk get to eat stale cookies. This actual, unfortunate observation I made at my conference, led to all kinds of back-handed recriminations from the program director, once she heard of my remark from her narc, and main squeeze, a grad student who couldn’t write a decent poem if his life depended on it. Still, he got a nice gig as a University Magazine editor thanks to the schmoozing. And despite all the petty pointed remarks and genial hostility, we did get fresher, better cookies the rest of the week, which was something.

I read Lori’s book straight through enjoying every essay equally. When a memoir such as this one makes you feel as if you know the person, want to read more of her work to get to know her better, you have to conclude what she is doing is working and you want to recommend all her books to your friends.

Brief Fiction Takes all from Roadside Press

Karl Koweski, Thrift Store Jackets, 2025, 130 pages, $17
Sara Glasser, The Things We Tell, 2024, 142 pages $15

Koweski’s stories are Bunyanesque in a local cracker kind of way. Big Dave appears in a couple of related pieces as the six foot six three-hundred-pound schlub who delivers pizzas in a small Korean beater car he hates. At one point someone with the street tag of Herpes, spray paints a big crude dick on the driver’s side causing consternation and some amusing conversational repartee. Dave is bad drunk, and he is often drunk, so he has no real relationships with the opposite sex; many pizza related acquaintances but few friendships. His mishaps while drunk range from gross to stupid and are best left for the reader to discover. The title story explores these in gross detail as he discovers the boss coat, he bought second hand at a thrift store mist be returned it to its rightful owner. The highlight for me was the hilarious, AspIre writing ap where the hapless, budding author persona, signs on with a writing bot to construct a noir novel from his bare bones, cliché of a novel opening. How could this go wrong? The story begs the question can an AI ap be a plagiarist?

Sara Glasser’s first book explores the female experience from a large variety of ways generally involving relationships. Men are not always complete assholes but often are. Some women are jerks as well so there is balance among the sexes. Relationships are fraught with tension no matter which side of one you are on and Glasser is more of Humanist than a Feminist. There are brief vignettes and longer fully fleshed out stories that are often amusing and always relatable.

Also new from Roadside Press

Jason Alexander, Apocalypsing, 2024, 306 pages, $20

This is a wild ride. I kept thinking it is sort of like well if Lincoln in Bardo got mixed up with a PK Dick novel, take your pick which one, say, Ubik or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and had a Naked Lunch while tripping on acid, something like this might emerge. Maybe. The cover photo of the author shows this ordinary man in a gray suit you could imagine teaching Algebra in high school or helping you fill out your ss form or maybe even running a small caps company but inside that guy is a world On Fire, well many worlds, multi-dimensions, and almost unlimited horizons.; boundaries we don’t need no stinking boundaries!

Jen McConnell, Current Disasters, 2025, 98 pages, $17

Current Disasters is a collection of brief stories and flash fiction that generally address the title description of often hapless people beyond their limits in relationships and life, interacting and generally managing, without major resolutions or achievements. “The Jumping Off Point” was my favorite, about a young man with a terminal cancer diagnosis wrestling with life decisions without reaching answers to his questions. Could there even be answers? Some of the flash pieces felt inconsequential but two are priceless, “Stuffed Peppers to Please Everybody” and “Family Vacation Definitions.” Overall, this is a highly readable, easily relatable group of stories, I found myself compulsively reading. That feels like a book that has accomplished it’s mission.

Another collection of stories Shaun Rouser, Let the Scaffolds Fall, 2024 154 pages, $15 I’ll read when I figure out where in the hell I put it.

And a miscellany of non-fiction

Josh Olsen, Things You Never Knew Existed, 2024, 166 pages, $15

Olsen writes of a life of mundane things: pro wrestling mags, struggling to make rent, living on the margins of just getting by, kids, marriage, well, life. There is nothing profound here but no one said life had to be profound, just lived. He’s an ordinary guy, often humorous and these little snippets of writings should be taken for what they are meant to be, nothing more or less

It's extremely rare these days for an independent magazine to celebrate 100 issues but that’s just what Rich Soos’ Cholla Needles recently did. Cholla Needles, out of Joshua Tree CA, focuses on Southwestern US but has room for poets from everywhere. Each issue generally has 10 to 12 poets with a generous selection from each one. There are black and white photos or graphic art interspersed with the poems. David Chorlton is a name familiar to readers of our humble enterprise but readers may not be familiar with his art. #100 features his exquisite pen and ink drawings as well as poetry. Cynthia Anderson’s poems are prefaced with the introductory statement, “towards impermanence” and her appropriately contemplative poems amply demonstrate her quest. Tobi Alfier’s poems have the feeling of life fully lived “in the attic of her own mind” which is definitely not filled with junk. Juan Delgado’s family experiences are vivid and painful as are Miriam Sagan’s life as an ESL teacher. There are ‘devious whispers” and screams in whispers by Romaine Washington whose deep engagement in the black community is personal and effective. “Mist in time” is Bonnie Bostrom’s image for a full life well lived. Cholla Needles is consistently one of the strongest, most compelling independent voices in poetry in a world where the printed word is rapidly being supplanted by the online mags.

Ed note : the next six issues are going to be curated by guest editors for personal reasons. Hopefully editor Soos will return to the helm after the hiatus as prime mover of the magazine.

Independent Journals

Clutch, edited by Robert M. Zoschke, Street Corner Press, 10781 Birchwood Drive, Bay City, WI 54234 156 pages, heavy stick, illustrated with color art by Gene McCormick, Chad Horn and photos by Zoschke among others $25

The roster of editor Zoschke’s latest annual is impressive, as always. There is an excerpt from Sam Pickering ( model for the book and movie Dead Poets Society) a generous selection of poems by the late, great Albert Huffstickler, poet laureate of Austin Texas for all times, small press stalwart the ageless T.K. Splake, and many others including myself. Zoschke has set a high bar with each succeeded issue including full color original artwork and photography plus the iconic photo portraits of Chris Felver. Somehow, with each issue, the editor always leaps over that high bar. This issue is no exception.

Chiron Review issue 136, Spring 2025, Michael Hathaway, Publisher, ww.chironreview2@gamial.com subscriptions are $59 for one year (4 issues) $100 for patron status which includes the four issues plus a listing in the magazine. Individual and sample issue are available at reduced price. You can buy issues on Amazon but why would you when you can get them from the press? Each issue is roughly 140 pages, sometimes more depending upon the topic as they have had recent retrospective issues that were much larger than 140 pages. If you are not reading the best representatives of small press writing today, why not? There are short stories, occasional reviews, and tons of poetry by well-known and lesser-known poets writing outside the mainstream today. The pages are slick easy to read and the issues always arrive on time. What more are you looking for? Subscribe.

Just in Big Hammer #24 edited by Dave Roskos. I haven’t had a chance to read this anarchist’s coffee table sized anthology of small press poets, artists and rebels, “publishing against power since 1988.”

The Biannual T.K. Splake Compendium of New Releases

Contact the author T.K. Splake, 25214 ash street, calumet MI 44931 or splake@chartermi.net
for publication and purchase information

soft core dreams: existential reality , 2024, 132 pages

The soft core dreams of splake’s latest exploration of human relationships, in three stanza poems, is primarily concerned with men and women together and apart. The work is more Hemingway than haiku, in a voice that resonates under the rubric, “carpe diem hardass.” Relationships between men and women are often seen as more about mastery and control; men seek to dominate and possess, women to withhold sex as a way to control their men. The book cold be considered Erotica of an old man that some have found unseemly. I wonder exactly why can’t old men write about sex given what a large part it has had defining major relationships through a long life that included several marriages? There is a distinctly morning-after existential blues quality to this collection: the poet drinks in the morning to cure the shakes, the new day feels like a “select all and delete” or

sky covered with heavy black clouds
leaves falling in strong chilling wind
perfect day for divorce or suicide

driver pausing in morning traffic
black hearse reminder
we are only passing through

The farewell poetry tour continues with

final journey home, 2025, 148 pages

As befitting the subject, there are some somber thoughts amount of time left, the never-ending battle with rat-bastard time, the narrowing horizons left but despite the end is near vibe, the poet can still celebrate the journey; the never say die spirit of the poet who intends to keep writing until the end.

night moon’s brightness
lighting paths dark shadows
helping poet find way home

graybeard poet too old
to climb cliffs and porcupine mountains
still alive in his dreams

turning off phone leaving window drapes closed
quiet early morning when rest of world sleeping
poet goddamn busy writing

pages whispering dreams, Cyberwit, www.cyberwit.net 2025, 30 pages $15 with several photographs

This tight little collection celebrates what could be described as a clean well-lighted bookstore. Where would be without these independent retailers of books of all sorts. The store in question “artis books” is in Calumet Michigan. The poems here are of various lengths including one exquisite “long poem” of an old man collapsing in the street that is a Splake classic (“greatest generation shadow.”)

alone in nursing home wheelchair
turning pages of national geographic and rand mcnally atlas
remembering when he still had a car

had decent jump shot and rebounded well
competing in each contest with quiet zen mindset
winning not important than playing better

coffee shop jesus fest

young virgins drinking mattes
ready to discuss bibles scriptures
several pages with post its
beatitude moment holding hands
whispering morning prayer
tiny crosses around necks
to insure spiritual blessing
saving them from vampires
also graybeard poets

beyond autumn light, Cyberwit, www.cyberwit.net 2025, 40 pages $15 with several color photos

A Zimmer frame amid fallen autumn leaves is an appropriate cover image on this leg of Splake’s Farewell Tour. Exquisite photographic images of forest paths with leaves, fall colors on the hills, in the valleys, of creeks and old deserted walls enhance the usual three lined meditations of Splake’s poems. Some startling images, lives in thee lines are among the dozens of Splake gems:

silent hospital emergency ward
doctor removing dead fetus from other
who still hears new baby crying

early morning men in forest with guns
masculine egos needing animal to kill
new trophy like last night’s tavern fuck

haunting damaged needy woman
spending life making other people unhappy
enjoying having them feel like her

splake with swiss ex-pat wife olga
frequently fighting like f. scott and zelda
wondering who’s damned or beautiful

last dance poems, Transcendent Zero Press, 2025, 52 pages,

The last dance is one where your cards is filled with just one name yous and the man with the black cape and scythe. Near the end, Splake continues to meditate on images past and with a chilling image of a future out of a Leonard Cohen song.

death like bergman’s clock without hands
every day’s time being the same
always empty endless nightmare

john muir and uncle walt
believing souls finding peace in nature
worshipping butterflies’ and wildflowers

small press literary publications
important freedom for creative new ideas
producing books fascists want to burn

time before election and life after
memories of palmer’s raids and joe mccarthy’s ghost
waiting government detention camps for artists