Mark Luebbers & Benjamin Goluboff, Group Portrait: Poems on a Photograph by Herman Landshoff, Parisian Phoenix Publishing available of Amazon, 2025, 32 pages, $15.95

Luebbers and Goluboff have previously collaborated on a full-length poetry project of brief lives of a wide assortment of notable personalities ranging from a Civil War General to Jazz musicians. In this slender, but fascinating chapbook, the poems are inspired by the cover photo, taken in 1942, of a group portrait of expats, mostly prominent surrealist artists.  The group were often more well known for their outrageous personalities than they were for their contributions to the art scene. If it weren’t for Peggy Guggenheim (top row second person standing from the right) many of those artists might well have perished during the Nazi reign of terror.  While Peggy’s taste in art remains unquestionably faultless and timeless, her personality left much to be desired. Max Ernst (second row seated on the end from the right) married Guggenheim to obtain an exit visa from Spain. Leonora Carrington third row second from the right seated) had been his lover though he abandoned her in Spain during a mental health crisis that saw her confined for an extended period of time (that confinement was the core of one of her most memorable stories, Down Below). Ernst immediately hooked up with another surrealist, Dorothea Tanning (not pictured), who became his life companion after the marriage of convenience with Guggenheim was dissolved (though not before she extracted her pound of flesh from Ernst).

The authors add their own speculative twists to this complicated mélange. They suggest gay photographer, and former student of Man Ray, Berneice Abbott (seated end of row two in a “Thinker” pose) was willing to be Leonara’s handmaiden for the privilege of just being near her.  Leonora’s passion for rocking horses is expanded upon in a strange, dreamlike poem.
Max’s son, an artist wannabee, laboring in the shadow of his outrageous father, was, at that time, striving for a relevant place in the circle of artists. Young Mr. Ernst is effectively evoked (end of top row, standing) with an amusing, and believable, closure where Peggy pinches him in the ass just as the photograph is taken. All in all, each artists depicted is given a vibrant creative snapshot in words.

Kurt Nimmo, The Blue Buddha and other poems, Iniquity Press/Vendetta Books, POBox 253, Seaside Heights, NJ 08751, available on Amazon, 2025, 54 pages, $9.99

Nimmo has been making the small press poetry seen forever, well if not forever, almost.  This collection evokes some of the darker moments of the last seventy-five years of world history mixed in with some personal history. While there is darkness here, it is not a depressing book, quite the contrary. The lead one, evokes the Japanese novelist Osamu Dazai’s post WWII novel of a conquered nation in severe decline. A book with the title, No Longer Human, suggests there won’t be too many light moments. Alcohol, madness, societies in decline are main themes in this collection, but in the end, there is a Buddhist sense of resignation of acceptance of things we cannot change which is not negativism per se.

I pick up the blue
heavy blue earthenware
Buddha statue
from the bookcase
and hold it close to my head.

If there is wisdom there,
it is stillborn.

I remind myself
that life is transition.

I cannot
fully comprehend
Samsara,

which is
the state of existence
I acquire while
going around
in circles.

Jennifer Lagier, Reelin’ in the Years: A Memoir, 2025, Cyberwit, www.cyberwit.net also available on Amazon, 49 pages, $15

Lagier’s latest collection is her most personal. Told in a way that feels like well-crafted journal entries, these prose poems follow Jennifer’s life journey through some harrowing adventures in two extremely bad marriages.  Some of the first marriage has been the subject of recent poems but the total isolation, loneliness, and increasingly dark thoughts, in the wilds of nowhere of the extreme Northwest, are particularly poignant here in ways we have not experienced them previously. 

Her second, sometimes violent second marriage, is an escape from one bad marriage into another. Eventually she liberates herself, defies her family, who insists she have children and stay by your man no matter what, leaving that marriage as well. Her escape includes working full time and pursuing an education. Any woman who has been subjected to the constraints of marriage and family expectations, will surely identify with Jennifer’s fight to become an independent woman with a professional career. Even then, she faces sex discrimination (see “Woman’s Body Is the Terrain on which the Patriarchy Is Erected”) Yet she perseveres, earns a PhD, and meets her life partner achieving peace in peace a successful third marriage.  Her poems detailing a California earthquake (“Loma Prieta”) and “My brief Life as Dean” are not to be missed.

In high school during WWII, mom and my aunts were cheated
of teenage dances and dates, got cannery jobs, married early, juggled
home, extended family, children. The men in their lives siphoned off
youth, energy, possibilities, left them filled with resentment, angry
about sabotaged opportunities.

I learn from matriarchal examples, reject fairytales, subvert
patriarchy, embrace independence, trust no one, carve my own unique
trail.  
(From Woman’s Body is the Terrain on Which Patriarchy is Erected)

David Rigsbee, MAGA sonnets, Main Street Rag, www.MainStreetRag.com, 2021,
78 pages

The unfortunate aspect of this horrifying book is that what Rigsbee compiled, edited, and made into sonnets, is equally as applicable now as the book was when it was written several years ago. Each sonnet is in the voice, and by in the voice, I mean the actual words, speech patterns, and incomprehensible verbal logic of Donald J. Trump. These habits of speech and verbal meandering stream of consciousness nonsense, now known as the swerve, is actually incomprehensible gibberish. At best.

I have read other collections of these “voice poems” like the poetry of Phil Rizzuto, poems garnered from actual play by play broadcasts of the former Yankee great also known for his ability to confound, confuse and speak of everything and anything, except baseball, which he was being paid to broadcast as a color guy.  Rizzuto was colorful, yes, illuminating, no, but great fun nonetheless.  Rigsbee’s book would be hilarious also if the topic, the subject wasn’t so batshit  crazy. That #47 is  the most powerful man in the world, with a huge nuclear arsenal awaiting his command, is terrifying. We dodged the bullet once when we elected him, then defeated him fair and square at the ballot box, so what were we thinking when we elected him again? 

But we had this young guy, handsome, really. He looked
like a male model. And this guy walks in and the fight lasted-
what was it?-one and half seconds, I think. Five seconds.
It was the quickest knockout in the history of the UFC.
No, it was like, ding! He runs across the ring, kicks
the hell out of him, right in the face. And I said,
we need more people like him, I can tell you.
we need people like him in our government.
   From UFC

In his infinite wisdom and never-ending project to further degrade everything (remember the observation, “Everything Trump touches dies.” which is the polite version of “Everything Trump touches turns to shit then it dies,”)  Himself is planning to host a UFC match on the White House grounds on his birthday during the 250th celebration of the formation of these formerly United States. Won’t that be something?

George Kalamaras, The Rain That Doesn’t Reach the Ground, Dos Madres, www.dosmadres.com, 2025, 200 pages, $26

Can an ode be an epic?  If it can be, prolific poet Kalamaras has written one celebrating the West, Colorado in particular, where he is moving permanently from his former home in Indiana. Much of the early work in this extensive, generous collection of excellent poems, recalls Whitman and his blood deep connection to America. Whitman is not the only muse for Kalamaras by any means: Jim Harrison, Richard Hugo, and William Stafford, are evoked to great effect.  This is a poet clearly in love, and in awe, of his subject.

            Stand on this piece of land.
Remind ourselves we are here. Now.

That when the rain rains it may not

always reach the ground, That the wind
tearing us apart can only rip into us

                        so far. That the sound of our mouth

is the sound of one vowel
beckoning another, scraping up

against our breath. One vowel

across clouds that may r may not break
open an evening sky so wet

                  we remain thrilled in the precipitating

moment. Even when the rain
raining right in front of us

never reaches the sound

of our one true mouth.

                        From The Rain That Doesn’t Reach the Ground

 

Jo Anne McFarland, American Graphic, Green Linden Press, www.greenlindenpress.com 2024, 100 pages, $30

McFarland has created a rare book that is a collection of art, literally hand sewn samplers photographed in color (mostly by 19th century black women) and juxtaposed with her brief poems. The poems are not simple descriptions, but a mixture of important history, social commentary, and exquisite language.  Slaves were domestic servants often employed to make dresses, decorative art, and quilts (some of these collected pieces are original collages by the poet.)  Other domestic slave chores including cooking and McFarland intersperses handwritten recipes from the first cookbook by a black person with her poems and other decorative work.  Without begin strident or preachy, McFarland delivers a clear message, that hard labor and underappreciated tradecraft skills were all but ignored for hundreds of years. McFarland seeks to, and effectively does, give long overdue credit to these creators. This is truly unique work well deserving of the Wishing Jewel Prize that it won.

Sara Ries Dziekonski, Today’s Specials, Press 53, www.Press53.com, 2024, 110 pages, $19

I am on record as saying, “I love waitresses.’ So, when a book by one who grew up, came of age, and worked well into her adulthood working in a family diner, I am all in.  Reminiscent of the modern diner classic, Waiting at the Dead End Diner by Rebecca Schumejda, Today’s Specials, features a readily identifiable cast of casual and regular customers. You get the entitled drunk college students, the long-haul truckers, day laborers out of work loafers, the whole nine yards of humanity looking for inexpensive food (greasy is always good especially for the hungover) and hot coffee (the hotter the better.) What is clear from this collection is just how hard the work is, how it drains you completely, physically, and emotionally, and how a family suffers when the father is literally married to his job. 

Mom sits by her magnifying
makeup mirror, flips on the light,
opens the novel of her skin.
She writes: I didn’t go to the diner today-
Couldn’t get out of bed. I’m not good lately.
I forget things and customers stare. I mx up words
and get slime around my mouth.

She traces each line with her finger,
stretches out her skin to erase them. Dad whispers,
Your mother stares at that damn mirror for hours.
It would make anyone look ugly.
                        From My Mother’s Mirror

The workers get old, the diner runs its course, the waitress who is always sneaking a few minutes to scribble stuff on napkins, that eventually becomes a poem, develops other interests. Still, it’s sad to see something that was such a large part of your life, go.  Always treat your waitress well, you never know what goes on behind the scenes where you can’t see them. Today’s Specials was the second-place finisher to Jackie Craven’s Whish, in the Press 53 annual book competition. 

Erin Murphy, Human Resources, Grayson Books, www.graysonbooks.com 2025, 108 pages, $18

Move over Phillip Levine and your What Work Is, there’s a new book in town.  Murphy’s Human Resources examines what it is like to work demeaning jobs that are hazardous to your health, do not pay well, have no benefits and, in the end, suck the life force right out of your body. As with Levine and other great poets on the subject of work, Fred Voss, and Jim Daniels, among others, Murphy gets inside the people who do the dirty work, here and abroad, in particular the devastating Rana factory collapse in Bangladesh (and piece work in China.)  Levine, Voss, and Daniels wrote about factory work in particular but Murphy’s book addresses the subject writ large; nothing is too menial for her incisive eye. Bad jobs are bad jobs no matter what the field is and each have their soul sucking potential built into the professional contract no one gets to see, (see bad pay, long hours, no sick time and so forth.) Yes, Virigina waitressing and bartending, are professions, while they can be fun and companionable, you sure as hell don’t want to grow old doing it said the man who did just that. Even highly skilled jobs in the medical profession can leach the life force right out of you, check out the poetry of Cortney Davis for an insider’s look at what nursing is.

I remain suspicious of erasure poems but Murphy makes exquisite use of the form, ferreting out the essence inside the polemics and deceptive manuals corporations use to subjugate the workers.

While all the poems in this book are memorable for their humanity, two in particular should become classics. The first I will never forget is “Indigo” where the experienced workers teach a child worker the basics of their jobs including the nuances of behaving “properly” so you won’t incur the wrath of the bosses whoever or in whatever form they may take. The second is “the Boys from Atalissa” where dozens of intellectually challenged workers are recruited and made to work in turkey factories for thirty years under the illusion a retirement on a ranch in Texas awaits them.

‘Bout 18,000 birds a day, more
‘round Thanksgiving time. We was
covered in blood and when you

couldn’t see no more, you stopped
to wipe your face, then did it all over
again. They say we make stuff up…

But I ain’t a liar.  They didn’t treat
us like they should. I got so used
to cockroaches droppin’

from the ceiling that even now
when I’m eatin’, I cover up my food.
Hang ‘em. Yes, sir. Hang ‘em good.

2-Company Manual Goals

To teach basic vocational skills through on-the-job training
in an agricultural setting and to improve self-esteem through
a normalized work and living environment.
   From The Boys from Atalissa

As the folk singer Donovan sang before he copped out and became some kind of psychedelic hippie whatever, “Here’s your gold watch/and shackles for your chains.”

Shelia E. Murphy, Escritoire, Lavender Ink, www.lavenderink.org, 2025, 116 pages, $19.95

I am devoted, decades-long fan of Shelia E. Murphy’s work. Her work is characterized by diverse subject matter that is always tightly constructed, honed to a sharp point and always provocative. I read, Escritoire, slowly over several days, never more than twenty pages at a time, generally fewer than that. Many poems required close readings two, three or more times and often felt like completely different pieces than the initial ones I had recently read. When I reached the end of these collections, one of the finest I have read, maybe ever, certainly since the onset of this magazine some fourteen years ago, I wrote down a partial list of sense impressions of the reading, 

Confounding, revelatory, mordant, sad, exultant,
capricious, luminous, funny, punny, grief stricken,
dreamy, musical, evasive, personal, impersonal,
elegiac, deliberate, dense, outstanding, oxymoronic

I am sure, if pressed I could easily add many more impressions as Shelia’s work contains multitudes. Who else could write an elegy to a loved one who has passed on in such poignant grief/love as Squeezebox

The gift
of you sings through the lonely dowry still,
a knapsack filled with thoughts and lightweight socks.
Revealing an affinity with things that rhyme
with blue.”
   From Squeezebox

While I am not a proponent of formal poetry as a rule, I can admire poets who slip into a style and completely master it. It is fair to say, Shelia knows forms, especially Ghazals and sonnets, a form I have gradually learned is only limited by the poet’s mastery of it. 

Murphy concludes the collection with an elegiac ghazal I will quote in full,

June Ghazal

New potatoes with peas in white cream sauce
moderate late afternoon with warm light.

Four reaming newborn mallards swimming
along the canal near ardent mother.

Prayer becomes awareness; equally,
the reverse. Hummingbirds spin at lightspeed.

Mentionable silence conforms to wit
connections logic won’t explain at once.

Choose the moment to call eternity.
make it so, intoned as a cappella

Reading Murphy is like listening to Bach, recapitulating fugues, themes introduced, explored, re-enforced by repetition until they become something entirely new.  Few poets can do this but Murphy, a musician herself, most assuredly can.

Years later, quiet at last, I look out
on palm and olive trees, with different birds in them.
I hear another music, rich and accidental,
with dark strands of melody, I sign, too,
finding threads of tune when I walk beyond
the clay and brush and watch the ducklings and
young roadrunners skittering across pathways,
competing with their intentional tiny feet and legs
with all other life forms, enjoined with
the comfort and complexity of it all.
   from Auto(bio)

(btw Shelia and Erin Murphy are not related.)

Virginia Aronson, Whiskey Straight Women: literary biographies, Cyberwit. www.cyberwit.net
2025, 60 pages, $15 also available on Amazon

In her ongoing probing into the deep waters of writers in extremis, Aronson, moves from the men to the women. These women suffered acutely at the hands of unfeeling spouses. Their indifference led to indulgences with alcohol, or lives of deprivation where shady means of survival limited their creative output. All were prone to alcohol abuse or were just a plain and nasty woman (Patricia Highsmith). Shirley Jackson was a much out upon, abused wife. Jackson’s memoirs of raising her children are being rediscovered and lauded while her short story, “The Lottery” is probably still a standard in high school English classes. Her novel, The Haunting of Hill House, was made into a movie twice (one faithfully and to great success and one absolutely horrible, newer one) while Highsmith was known primarily for her series of Ripley novels though she wrote dozens of novels that sold well and often were made into movies (besides Ripley, there is Carol and many others that vary greatly in quality) The poverty-stricken writer was a woman wrenched out of place from her little tropical island and relocated to the literally cold confines of the UK. Her various husbands invariably abused her, went to jail and she was often living a hand-to-mouth existence during the war on the continent and after.  Her drinking was legendary and was long thought dead until her classic novel Wide Sargasso Sea, about the first Mr. Rochester of Jane Eyre fame, was published.  Recognition came, her books were reprinted, money was made, but by then she was a shriveled old wasp of a woman lovingly, if scathingly, portrayed by David Plante in his memoir, Difficult Women.  Rounding out the collection are portraits of the uproarious wit, Dorothy Parker, and Marguerite Duras, the fabulist, novelist and screen writer known mostly for her novel, The Lover, and the screenplay for Hiroshima Mon Amour.

I wrote, said, was known for
my vinegar wit
my tart one-liners
my sardonic sophistication
speaking, writing my mind
competing with women
in the flapper 1920’s
the way I tossed off men,
love, death. So acerbic
but instead fluttered
a wounded baby bird

   from Dorothy Parker on Dorothy Parker

Oddly, Parker left her estate to NAACP, though she never advocated for equal rights for blacks at any time in her life. Ironically, her ashes were lost and turned up several decades later in a file drawer at an office in the organization. She probably would have found that hilarious. It was never easy being a woman in a man’s world, publishing, writing, and all the rest. It still isn’t.

Francine Witte, Some Distant Pin of Light, Cervana Barva Press, www.cervanabarvapress.com available from their bookstore www.thelostbookshelf.com, 2025, 78 pages, $18

Witte opens her excellent new collection with an analogy of a life like a print map suggesting that her borders are always shifting and that if you try to follow the lines you will likely end up in a lake.  Lives do not proceed in easily demarcated directions that can be categorized and delineated. What follows are dozens of examples, mostly from life experiences, to illustrate her initial point. Early on, one point resonated with me in several poems, “ the past is great except when it’s sick.” Her college roommate bears the child of a drug user who overdoses before the baby is born and they lose touch for decades. Her Uncle Hank is a constant presence at family functions and is always an inconsiderate, boorish drunk. Her mother lives a life of quiet constraint that feels unrealized and wasted because of her reticence. An early teenage date, one she wanted more than anything else in the world, stands her up and she realizes it was all a cruel joke at her expense. A mature anti-love poem The Year of You Gone vividly details the end of an intense relationship. 

Witte embraces larger themes through everyday occurrences. Power Out uses a general blackout as a metaphor for life. We never have enough of the things we need in case of an unexpected emergency: power packs, candles, matches, dry food….She extends the metaphor to a much larger context suggesting we are all waiting it out, life that is, for the ultimate darkening. Sheep in a parking lot have a post-apocalyptic feel to it. When Charley Says Goodbye expands a 60’s obsession, playing albums backwards, is essentially, searching for proof of something that doesn’t exist. If you play the record backwards enough times maybe you will get  different result than the one you are getting. Life doesn’t work that way and she knows it. Username is at triumph of making the mundane profound. We are all familiar with prompt username and we type whatever one we is appropriate,

Powerchick? Or maybe I went with the truth? I think
how every day, people around me or on the evening news

are putting their usernames on hospital charts, on grave markers.
I think back to my mother, last time I ever saw her, had no idea

what her own user name was but still she was putting red lipstick on.
The nurse’s aide stood next to her repeating my mother’s username

careful and loud. My mother stared into a pocket mirror, at the lips
of a stranger pouting back. Locked, forever, of the rest of her life.
   (from Username)

Resilience in the face of adversity has a key place near the end of the collection. Witte records the interview of a 100-year-old race walker who was asked how she does it, “I put one foot in front of the other and then I do it again.” Sounds like a great, practical way to proceed through life to me.

Brief Reviews

Carol Graser, Prayer for the Sorrowful Brain, Kelsay Books, www.kelsaybooks.com, also available on Amazon, 2025, 103 pages, $23

As the long-time host of the Caffe Lena for Wednesday open mic for poetry, (20 years and counting,) Graser has probably heard as much spoken poetry as anyone. She has put her well-developed ear to good use with this wide-ranging second collection that is reflective, deeply personal, often amusing, and always political. Her husband, to whom the book is dedicated, has Parkinson’s and some of the treatments he has endured to try and improve the quality of life are detailed in ways that thoroughly engage the reader.  Other poems reflect lessons learned working with the late poet and teacher Bernadette Mayer, whose unconventional way of thinking and ways of looking at the world in general, and poetry, specifically, yield unexpected results. There is something for everyone here. From joys of being a mother and grandmother, to the loss of a child who did not survive birth, to political activism where marching in the street is not a one-off thing but represents a lifetime of rallying against injustice.    

Guy Reed, Time Under the Overlook, Bushwhack Books, www.bushwhackbooks.com, intro by Will Nixon, 2025, 82 pages, $20

Will Nixon’s introductory essay to Reed’s poetry establishes the importance of place to the poet. Reed’s sense of being, literally and metaphorical, exists in the shadow of Overlook Mountain.  While not a native to the area, Reed’s adopted home is the life blood, that is the essence of who he has been, who he is now, and who he will be in the future. Not merely nature poems but verse imbued with spiritual significance that is, literally, life blood infused. The connection to the natural environment is deep and fruitful, well amplified by evocative photographs by Katie Cookson. Throughout there are intimations of deep loss and sorrow also suggested by the loss of a partner which deepens the connections to place.  These are thoughtful, well-crafted poems lovers of Nature poems with a soulful heart will enjoy.

From Roadside Press:

All books available from www.roadsidepress.com distributed by Magical Jeep (the publisher)and available on Amazon

Dave Newman, Better Than the Best American Poetry, 2025, 172 pages, $17 paperback, also available as hardback $25

One thing you can count on, Dave Newman is going to get right in your face with his poetry. He’s alternately rude, crude, vulgar but most of all honest to goodness, Dave Newman at all times. The key word is honest. There is no bullshit, artifice, or Fine Arts crap in these poems but there is down and dirty realism that is life lived in the bars and on the street as well as in the classrooms. Isn’t a bar room the classroom without the diplomas tacked up on the wall? A liquor license instead of a college certificate? Sometimes there is blood on the floor, and if there is, it is always life blood. I can honestly say, and I spent seven and half long years studying literature in college, that I learned more being locked in a Men’s Room with two extremely large college Varsity basketball players and a football scrub with my head held down in a toilet for less than sixty seconds, than I did in all those years in college. Dave’s poetry is like that.

Aleathia Drehmer, Little Graveyards, 2025, 66 pages, $15

Little Graveyards is a small, easily transportable book that will easily fit into your purse or back pocket. I highly recommend taking the poems with you, reading a couple at a time, and saving the rest for later. Aleathia works in health care, if these poems are all based in fact, which I am sure they are, is mostly with aging, near-death people.  Even when she is dealing with significant cancer issues of her own, she is thinking of others. The proportion of poems here devoted to herself (one ) to the people she tends to (most of the rest.) is significant. There is no hand wringing or “woe is me,” for this lady. She is that rare person who feels, and conveys, total empathy for someone, clearly dying, who wants someone to respect their life memories as important; their lives mattered, small and as unknown as they may have been, simply because they are human. When she is moved to tears at a person’s deeply felt memories of loved ones you feel moved with her. When I reach the end of the line I would like someone like Aleathia there to hold my hand or just to be that kind face, that someone who really cares.

Richard Vargas, The Screw City Poems, 2025, 136 pages, $18

If you were expecting heavily charged erotica here due to the title, Screw City you will likely disappointed.Not that there isn’t sex, there is some, married, break up sex, hook up sex but Screw City refers to  a small midwestern city (Rockford, IL)that was once known for manufacturing screws ( much like the town where our son taught Westfield, MA is “buggy whip city” (really!) and once upon a time Utica, N.Y. where I went to college, was “Handshake City” )

This collection is a kind of “Best of Vargas” compiling poems from four previous collections that were published over the years. These are all crisp narratives often depicting the drudgery of working nowhere jobs that everyone needs to do, at some point, just to get by. Vargas is as good as anyone at revealing just how demeaning, senseless and frustrating these jobs can be.  The collection closes with an excerpt of a prose work in progress that has a promising direction though you just know the bar hookups (those St Pauli girls) are going to get you to a place you don’t want to be, somewhere along the line.

Christy Prahl, With Her Hair on Fire, 2025, 42 pages, $15

You expect a certain amount of urgency from poems that suggest the author’s hair is on fire. While these are not five alarm prose poems exactly, they are high energy, spirited, deep diving into relationships and life.  While the format is pocket-sized the poems are full-sized.

Mark Young, Melancholy, 2024, SurVision Press, www.survisionmagazine.com, available from LULU and Amazon, $8.46, 36 pages

If you don’t know Young’s work, visual and verbal, you should. This brief collection is an excellent way to start a magical journey into a world that defies convention (this collection won James Tate Poetry Prize for 2023). Young’s work is a kind of magical mystery tour, of puns, deep images, subtle metaphorical allusions, and unusual formats (as in poems in the spaces of a checkerboard that can be read in a multitude of ways though there is none of that in this collection). Just check him out and see for yourself.

Kathyrn Rantala, The Exhibitionist, 2024, Sleeping Monkey Press, 42 pages most of her books are available on Amazon (though I bought this collection and others directly from her website)
No price listed

Rantala, an artist, poet and former editor of a cool lit mag, Snow Monkey, literally takes us on a trip through an art exhibition that features several of her own assemblages among the poems.  There is a lot of white space between these prose poems and the well-framed art work and that is a good thing. The narrator (a device she uses often and effectively) speaks to the reader like a tour guide in the first person in a glib but informative way that, despite being an artifice, feels appropriate. We have been guided but isn’t that what writing does, anyway? And art: you are presented with objects (words, poems, assemblages) and you form impressions. Take the tour, you won’t be disappointed.

Robert Cooperman, August 24, 1957, Finishing Line Press, www.finishinglinepress.com, 2025, 24 pages, $17.99

Cooperman’s youthful exuberance, as a twelve-year-old boy in Brooklyn, almost cost him his life.  A storm in his current Denver home leaves broken glass on his patio that evokes a traumatic memory. He accidently put his arm through a glass door in his apartment building. One cut to his right wrist is so severe he only survives due to his mother’s quick reactions and the convenient location of the family doctor one block away.  The aftermath, experiences during ten days in hospital, and after, form the body of this small chapbook that vividly recreates the old adage: that we are all lucky to survive the follies of our youth.

Jack Phillips Lowe, Brautigan’s Blue Moon, 2025, Instant Oblivion Press, 42 pages, no price listed

Lowe’s latest foray into zany characterizations is a glossy oversized, handsome book featuring an actual blue moon in a vast dark sky.  Most of these people he writes about are what you would call, local losers, with limited visions, and a low ceiling in life.  Literary allusions are kept to a minimum beyond Bukowski, Carver, and Brautigan, who trafficked also in the lower regions of American life. Lowe, though of a cynical nature, is more of a tongue in cheek kind of guy, than say, an in-your-face hard life in the skids like Carver and Buk and not quite as fanciful as Richard B.  If you’re looking for deep or dark visions this is not your book. If you appreciate an old Irish joke this might be the one for you: ”Mike is standing next the grave of his late departed drinking buddy, Pat. I brought you a bottle of Jameson’s to pour on your grave as I said I would. I just hope you don’t mind if I filter it through me body first.”

George Searles, Escape from Jersey City, Clare Songbirds Publishing House, www.claresongbirdspub.com, 2025, 106 pages, $14.99

There are very few books of poetry you can say, “I really enjoyed that.” As in, the poems were witty, wry,  a bit sarcastic, funny, literary (yes, Virgina, literary can be funny) and pretty damn good as poems.  As with any comic endeavor, there are some clunkers that fall flat,  but the collection as a whole stands up which is a are in a mixture of brief, as in a couple of lines, to standard size extended narratives.  Escape from Jersey City is a quick read but not one you are tempted to skim, as you might in a slight collection, because you might miss something good. Searles is the long-time editor of the journal Glimpse, one of the few reaming independents with a strong narrative focus. Check out the mag and the book.

The Mouths of Babes

Why do infants cry so much?
Because they are smarter than they look,

and they know they have
their whole lives in front of them.
   Quoted in full (from really short poems section)

(be sure to see Charles Rammelkamo’s full-length review of this book)

Jose Enrique Medina, Haunt Me, Rattle , www.rattle.com, 2025, 40 pages, $9

Medina’s title says it all. He is literally haunted by his tios, tias, abuelo, abuela and they will not let him go nor will he let them settle quietly into their spirit world. They appear to a mostly benign lot, they are close blood relatives after all, but who needs to be sharing your everyday life with dead people?  Apparently, Medina does, like it or not. These are alternately wild, somewhat surreal poems. They are also witty but not without real feeling for the people he was closest to growing up and, apparently, still is. These are poems by a guy who takes Los Dias de los Muertos seriously not just in November but every day of his life.

Laura Ann Reed, Homage to Kafka, The Poetry Box, www.ThePoetryBox.com, 2025, 47 pages, color illustrations, $16

Drawn from the life and work of the master of reluctance, Reed aptly captures he mood, tenor, world, of the hesitant novels whose incompleteness feels just right in their lack of clear resolution. Each poem has an abstract color work of original art accompanying it by Paul Klee. Lovers of Mr. K. will find much to admire here and so will readers not overly familiar with his work.

Richard David Houff, Shaking Hands with the Dead, Dead Man’s Press, Ink, available on Amazon, 2025, 67 pages, $14.95 paper, available on kindle

Veteran small press poet Richard Houff comes through with a solid compendium of from-life poems. Early poems are coming of age stuff, the one with the girl with the beehive hairdo that had a life of its own is classic. Other pieces describe experiences on the road in the U.S. and abroad. Many are tight, descriptive poems of life in the winter of The Northwest (St Paul) where snow and cold are a life force that must be reckoned with.

There are ups and downs , a series of melancholic moments (nothing says melancholy like September Song as sung by Nat King Cole) including one where his best friend is the column of a building that holds him up when drunk. An unforgettable Christmas Blues poem is contained by  the first card he gets is from the Cremation Society offering him a  once in a life-time opportunity to save money. As if you could be cremated twice?  At least it wasn’t a vote for me flyer from the prospective “Action Coroner” who was running for office in Albany when we lived there. I often wondered what an action coroner did, as opposed to an ordinary one, say?  At times Houff likens himself to Walter Mitty’s worst nightmare.  Houff is too good a poet to be that guy. Hopefully, he’ll gather more poems together from long buried collections and issue a longer more inclusive book than this one so we can share more of Houff’s life journey.

Meg Kearney, Cardiac Thrill, Green Linden Chapbook Series, www.greenlindenpress.com 2025, 22 pages, $10

Kearney’s latest is a true chapbook, that is brief, 22 pages, but what it lacks in length is made up for in depth. The cover is The Funeral of Shelley by Louis Edouard Fournier depicts, in vivid detail, the burning of the poet’s body after he foolishly drowned, on a pyre on the beach where he washed ashore. A crowd of friends and hangers on watch for a while, though they would be forced to fall back by the overpowering stench except, in the stuff of legends. His ne’re do well friend, and poet, Trelawny, will soon jump into the fire to rescue Shelley’s heart (which reputedly, would not burn.) Kearney’s poems do burn with elegiac verses for relatives, friends, noted figures but mostly her beloved teacher Bill Matthews. Admirers of Kearney’s poetry, such as myself, will celebrate this collection of linked verses that uses the closing line for one poem to begin the next emphasizing the connectivity of lives, and the inevitable deaths to follow. This book is a must for all lovers of poetry.

Alan Perry, The Heart of It, Kelsay Books, www.kelsaybooks.com, also available on Amazon, and as a kindle book, 2025, 52 pages, $20

Perry work is a kind of return to the basics of life in the first of two sections. There is nothing fancy or formal, just the facts of a loving family, some memories revisited, no pondering of deep philosophical issues. The second section, however, goes deeper. There is conflict, a terrific portrait of a woman weeping in an airport that is never resolved. The image is poignant and the grief real and, somehow, more satisfying not to know the cause of her grief. A scene of tending parental graves with his grandchildren transcend the potentially mawkish trivialities of mourning when the girl child sees a kind of orphan small stone and says she will take care of this one.  It is so real you can’t help but be moved.  Nick vividly details what make-up can’t conceal on the face and body of a battered woman and “Tapestry” literally interweaves the poet’s art and the quilter’s work as acts of parallel creative acts; one results in a poem for words, the other with a poem in cloth.

Julia Bouwsma, Death Fluorescence, Sundress Publications, www.sundresspublications.com, 2025, 124 pages, $20.95

When the cover of a book shows a slightly demented looking girl, who would have been at home in the Wisconsin Death Trip, in a dark Gothic setting, bears the name “Abyss” and you see that cradled in the girl’s lap is a rat, you know you are in for a wild ride.  Death Fluorescence, is a poetic epic exploring connectivity at base levels as in genetic, hereditary, epigenetic, and cultural connectivity. The design of the book deliberately re-enforced the connectivity with an image of a spiraling rope linking sections.  Bouwsma never met a form she didn’t like, and try to master, ranging from untitled sonnets, erasure poems, poems with square spaces in the middle, spiraling poems, poems with mirror imaging indicating a mastery of the language that is conducive to superlatives like stylistic tour de force. I couldn’t agree more.  She is no shy, retiring, backwoods Maine librarian, though that is her location and her profession, but a wild woman on the page, and if her biographical poems are any indication has lived a full life. She’s relatively young yet, her resume of publications books and articles, (check out Midden for one) is impressive, and there is sure to be more exceptional work to come. Expect great things. 

Also from Sundress Publications

Jose Hernandez Diaz, The Parachutist, 2024, 104 pages, $16

Diaz begins this eclectic collection with some loving, tribute poems to beloved family members both here and in his family home in Mexico.  As he moves on from more familiar ground to more hyper-real, even surreal poems, the language becomes more charged and stranger than the earlier ones. There are groups of persona poems including my particular favorite, the Man in the Pink Floyd t-shirt. This David Gilmore stand-in who does everything but leap over buildings with a single bound and does it with a sense of humor.  The Wall in these poems, has many connotations. There is the one that seeks to block people from coming to the United States, the psychological walls that is both figurative and real on the borders of the mind and bodies.  The later voice poems are all prose poems and are an exciting use of imagistic language. 

Just in

Charles Rammelkamp, The Tao According to Calvin Coolidge, Kelsay Books, www.kelsaybooks.com, 2025, 108 pages, $23

Rammelkamp’s biographical, historically based poetry collections are always informative and packed with illuminating revelations and anecdotal tidbits that enliven the subject.  I confess my knowledge of “Silent Cal,” as he was known, was limited to the probably apocryphal anecdote; A woman at a dinner engagement said to Coolidge that she was bet that she couldn’t get three words from him, to which he replied, you lose.  While that sums up the nickname, it doesn’t give you deep insight into the man and why he was the antithesis of the modern, TV age, garrulous presidents. (making you yearn for less is more….) He was not a man of great ambitions, including the vice presidency. He succeeded Warren G. Harding, only when the latter died suddenly and had no interest in pursuing the office after his term expired. Ultimately, he was a family man who preferred a quiet life with his wife and remaining son and his family.

Coolidge was a man who believed in not speaking when there was nothing worthwhile to say. Sometimes silence is more eloquent than well-chosen speeches and as effective. What Rammelkamp reveals is a man who concealed great emotions beneath a taciturn exterior. He also shared a great personal tragedy with other better-known presidents known for their words and deeds: Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Rosevelt. All three had lost a cherished son at an early age and never completely recovered from the loss. After reading this collection, I feel as if I have learned something that makes me appreciate the man, and his life, in ways I could never have previously imagined.

Lenny Dellarocca, Pandemonium, Slipstream, www.slipstreampress.org, 2025, 32 pages, $15

Pandemonium is the winner of the annual Slipstream chapbook contest, and the title is well-chosen. These brief, dream sequence prose poems, move seamlessly from one strange place to another, evoking places we’ve never been before, but all recognize. Characters appear and disappear without explanation; dramatic things happen and none of it makes any logical sense which is what dreams are; bits and pieces of our psyche connecting in surreal ways. 

My therapist says pay attention to how I feel in dreams. Especially
the strange ones. I told her I dream about gravity waves again.
It’s said they travel at the speed of light and make invisible ripples
in space. They squeeze and stretch anything in their path as they
pass. That’s word for word from Wikipedia, I tell her. I wonder if
that’s why I felt like I was on the other side of déjà vu.
   From “Waves Dream”

These are all strange dreams. Lenny’s therapist was right; we should all pay attention.

Prose

Nicholas Claro, This Is Where You Are, Roadside Press, www.roadsidepress.com distributed by www.magicaljeep.com, 2025, 155 pages, $18

Claro’s first book comes burdened with a blurb , “reminiscent of Raymond Carver’s classic story collections” and “In the tradition of Carver and Dubus.”  I say burdened as those two guys are the masters of the hard-nosed, gritty realism that dominated the short fiction scene in the closing decades of 1900’s.  Fortunately, Claro is up to the task of replicating the master’s work with equally as vivid, ordinary people usually in the late stage of a disintegrating relationship.  As I read these, basically read the collection straight through, I kept thinking oh, yeah, Carver.  There are going nowhere marriages, losers, drinkers, shattered families unable to cope with life-altering emergencies, heinous neighbor’s wearing A2 t-shirts and owning 14 (count them) raucous dogs who never, ever stop barking.  Even the brief, one is only a single paragraph, pieces are effective and well appointed. Realism in fiction is alive and well and Nichloas Claro belongs in the forefront of the next wave of short fiction writers of note.

Also from Roadside:

Shaun Rouser, Let the Scaffolds Fall: short stories, 2024, 164 pages, $15

Rouser’s collection features six stories. The first two are extremely short, a few pages.  If you think inheriting a house is a good thing in your life, Inheritance, will definitely change your mind. It’s a dream house if you like nightmares and endless unforeseen complications.  The longer stories are more deliberately developed such as Chris, where an older new hire at start-up cannot get his work partner to stop addressing him by the previous occupant of his work station’s name to the point  that feels like an extreme mental health issue. I had my doubts this conceit would lead anywhere but, in the end, I was convinced.  The Man Who Loved My Dog, was less successful for me as I felt it really didn’t feel consequential and felt unresolved.   The Fragment of a Lost Patient is by far the highlight of the book. A psychiatrist take a vacation and when she returns, one of her patients has died. Accident or suicide? You aren’t sure until the last paragraph. The anxiety the psychiatrist feels is real and well developed with an interesting narrative arc. The final story is the longest, The Last Dictator was slow developing for me and once the joke is revealed you wondered if it couldn’t have taken less time to make clear why he was being recruited.  Still, this tongue and cheek realization of a lifetime desire to be the star of the show, has some excellent moments.

Mary Biddinger, The Girl with the Black Lipstick, Black Lawerence Press, www.blacklawrencepress.com, 2025, 108 pages, 21.95, A novella in linked short stories

Ah, to be young and feckless. By which I mean, totally bat shit crazy, embarrassingly feckless in deed, mannerism, and dress. Biddinger dares, in the parodic mode of Weird Al Yankovic,) to bestupid, (stylishly but not academically as both of them are in a PhD program they will complete) Biddinger is aided, abetted, and encouraged by her equally as feckless grad school roommate. The details are specific, dressing up or, down, in weird combinations from slovenly casual I-just-woke-up, to Salvation Army retro, to French whorehouse on a Saturday night is rendered in ways to make the whole of the lifestyle, the nostalgia of it, seem to be one that was a good idea at the time. And time is crucial, as the author is looking back a vantage from twenty-five years later, with tongue firmly in cheek and her considerable sense of humor intact (as readers of her several excellent collections of poetry will attest.) It would be unfair to the author to think, she was just so well, immature, so gauche, so, I don’t know, grotesque. Of course, Biddinger wants you to make that precise connection, as the writing is so intimate and so believable and yes, so funny. They were young, what of it?  I love them both.

Anthologies, Mags etc.

Lee Gurga and Scott Metz, Haiku 2025, Modern Haiku Press, www.modernhaiku.org, unpaged roughly 80 pages with an essay by Jim Kacian, $10

If you like brief poems, not necessarily by-the-book haiku (one liners, formal poems, and the like) this is a collection for you. The selections are eclectic, amusing, descriptive, evocative, and strictly haiku with an excellent overview at the end.  There are 100 poems representing notable poems from the year 2024 culled from a wide variety of magazines online and in print. A couple of random examples:
Pathologicasual Friday only five dead
Lorraine Padden

cloud drift…
an afternoon
of non-billable hours
   Julie Schwerin

Deadly sins
she narrows the choice
to two
   Jenny Shepherd

Zen garden
waiting for them
to move out of the photo
   Laszlo Slomovitz

If you want to triple your reading experiences of the same kinds of work check out a much larger collection by the same editors at the same press:

Gurga and Metz, Haiku 21.2, 2025, 275 pages, several excellent intro from previous collections/ essays follow over 200 pages of poetry, $25

George Franklin, Poetry & Pigeons: short essays on writing, 2025, Shelia na gig Editions, 86 pages, $16

From the intro, “Why am I writing poems these undefinable  creatures that refuse to do what they’re told to and never give us the answers we expect? This book began to take shape last April when I was sitting in an outdoor café in Madrid watching pigeons hop up on the tables and demand potato chips or anything else they could get. It occurred to me then that our poems are a bit like that. They are strange creatures with wings who like to take off on their own and don't care much what their poets want or hope for. When we first start to write poems, we're amazed these creatures exist at all and don't ask questions. Later on, though, we ask ourselves what poems are, what they do, and why and how they do it. “

Short, common sense, lyric essays n craft and the mysteries of an indefinable form from a master craftsman of the Art.

Etc

Punk Collective Issue #1 July-November 2025 Yage Punk Collective on Facebook order from jaredfurman723@gmail.com  Instagram: Emmanuel Colucci

This is a newspaper style journal with color covers and punk related zine style format including interviews, news of long-time punk bands, and where the will be a and what they are up to. There is no obvious publication info included like a price, no pagination appears to be roughly 50 pages. If punk is your scene this could be a valuable source of information on what’s up these days.  Interviews are informative. Not really my scene. I suggest checking them out on Facebook

Received, Read, Not Reviewed

Jack Chubb, Insatiable, 2021, Newman Springs Publishing 320 Broad Street, Red Bank, NJ, 07701, 88 pages, no price listed, very short stories

Mark Danowsky, Take Care, 2025, Moon Tide Press. www.moontidepress.com, 55 pages, $15

P.B Bremer, Tough Skins, Redhawk Publications, www.redhawkpublications.com, 2025, 106 pages, $15, dedicated to his brother and all the suicides.  Much more than suicide inside.

Antonio Gomes, Love in the Shadow of Death, 2025, Spuyten Duyvil, www.spuytenduyvil.net
358 pages, $25

I haven’t had a chance to read this novel yet as I really don’t have time to review unsolicited books of three-hundred-page plus length. The subject is a worthy one, and a potentially fascinating one, exploring the intertwined lives of doctors and their family members as they come down with COVID.  Beyond the family issues are the general suffering and lonely deaths of patients plus long-term brain fog consequences for survivors. The author is a practicing doctor in New York City so his perspective reflects first-hand experience.

Steven Grey, Perseverance, Roadside Press, available on Amazon and from the publisher at Magical Jeep Distribution, 2025, 370 pages, $24

Steven Grey is a musician, writer, and artist hailing primarily from Chicago, where he lives with his very good dog, Koda. He graduated as a film major and has worked with noteworthy writers and directors throughout the industry. Steven is the lead singer, primary creative force, and sole lyricist behind the band Shards of Grey, which led to his becoming a producer for several other musical acts. Blending these two art forms, his first album with Shards of Grey and his first book are tandem concepts that tell the same story through the lens of different mediums.

Perseverance: The Making of a Musician by Steven Grey is available at https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/perseverance/200

I have not read this one yet either.

Also recently in that I am just looking into:

Joe Taylor, Back to the Wine Jug, Sagging Meniscus Press, www.saggingmeniscus.com, 2020, 154 pages, $18.95 also available from Amazon

Fiction. Poetry. Hybrid Genre. In BACK TO THE WINE JUG, Joe Taylor, author of the comic verse novel PINEAPPLE, returns to the form with a tour de force of wit, erudition, and earthy imagination.

Dateline: Hades, the Underworld, where things go bad. But things are going even worse up top with red/blue states, Brexit, the Middle East, Hong Kong, and college football. Diogenes, still toting his lantern in search of one honest (wo)man, is appointed by Lord Hades himself to teleport up to lovely Birmingham, Alabama, and mollify mundial matters, accompanied by his Doberman Pluto and Victoria Woodhull, the suffragette and 1872 presidential candidate. The trio is on the case to right the world's confusion. But, Lord H. being a consomméed plot-thickener, they find themselves followed in the transporter by commie-hating troublemaker J. Edgar Hoover....
( quotation from the Amazon site book description).

Looks like a very elaborate, farcical satire that is all too relevant in a world where politics have become the new theater of the absurd.

The Biannual T.K. Splake Compendium

Talking Trash with God, Shoe Music Press, 2025, 151 pages. Hard bound no price listed

I guess when you are almost ninety years old and still pounding the keys, you can talk trash with God. Splake continues his Farewell to this Good Earth Tour with four more nuggets of poetry. Talking Trash with God feels like the strongest and deepest of the four new collection from the prolific bard of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Long time readers of his work will recognize the ongoing arguments with the vagaries of contemporary life: whole generations of younger lives with obsessed with their phones and Reality TV. He rails against the folks who do not read, have never seen a movie with more intellectual content than a car chase or meaningless adventures of superheroes.  The actual weather, as well as the cultural one, is COLD dominated by the long white; snows that begin in September and continue until May. Unfathomable amounts of snow.  A few of the many highlights of these three-line gems are excepted below,

young girl’s shocking magenta hair
like fancy wrapping of Christmas gift
with nothing inside the box

 

after warm beer breakfast buzz
undressing television weather woman
warmly slipping and sliding into perfect day

 

last high school reunion
students haven’t seen each other in years
now waiting graduation to death

young girl reading communion gift bible
using post it notes to mark special passages
looking for god’s permission to have sex

 

city lights bookstore old photograph of young writers
kerouac ginsberg brautigan ferlighetti literary rebels
now quiet ghosts in beat heaven

dead poet’s library his cemetery
with several chapbooks on shelves left behind
each title small personal tombstone

 

Poet’s End Game, Angst Press, contact the author at splake@chartermi.net, 152 pages, no price listed

The cover image is of a chessboard with the black king face down indicating the game that was being played is over and the man playing black has lost.  Playing chess with Death is a favorite image of the poet’s derived from his viewing of Bergman’s Seventh Seal, where Death cheats in his match with the knight.  Death always wins. But until then, the poet writes on.  As with Talking Trash with God, this is a rich, large collection of three-line poems, one per page to insure each poem has plenty of white space to breathe in.  One poem, by no means the only one that stands out, but the one that stands out as saying it all is quoted in full below,

t. kilgore splake granted honorary mfa degree
from albert camus university of existential philosophy
poet now recognized as mother fucking artist

Death Poet’s Whore, Transcendent Zero Press, contact the author at splake@chartermi.net, 48 pages, no price listed

The arresting, though muted greys and blacks, full color photo of Death Poet’s Whore is of a chiseled image if Christ on the cross etched onto an old weather gravestone.  The image is apt if only because the poems feel like, and are meant to, coffee infused railing against the coming of the dark. This is one poet will not go gently into the good night,

artist remote location

real estate prices cheap and property taxes low
every small town has splendid coffee shop for poet to write
computer connections to anywhere in the world

now achieving modest poetic success
having long passed younger wildest dreams
graying senior’s life rapidly disappearing
no longer worrying what literary critics say
poetic voice and vision totally free
because now who the fuck cares
   (from bardic reflections)

And yet the poet writes on because this is what he does

Rat Bastard Time, Angst Press, contact the author at splake@chartermi.net, 26 pages, no price listed

In the end life is always a struggle with rat bastard time. An alarm clock graces the front cover while a parallel image of a clock with no hands graces the back. We can almost hear the clock ticking as we read. And then we don’t.

nights listening to owls
distant forest hoot hootings
coyotes singing love songs
echoing through evening darkness
splendid forest music
drowned out by generators
nosy atv riders
eating wild blueberries
Kingston plains breakfasts
shared with lumberjack ghosts
hiding in pine stump shadows
one morning writing poem
while drinking coffee
sitting around campfire ashes
   (from nirvana revisited)