Local Lyrics - Featuring n.l. rivera

April 15, 2024 Brooke Palma

i don’t dance at family parties

by n.l. rivera

the thing about salsa
is that you never quite meet each other,
a practice in avoidance,
in averting your gaze,
in damming it all up tight and never opening your mouth and i think my family
has lived like this.
and i think i refuse their inheritance
and, even when i scream,
i think i like the quiet,
and i think this is okay.

when i was little i loved to dance,
until someone—tío, titi, una prima, mi hermana—
(i really couldn’t say)
told me i was doing it wrong
was too much in my own head,

so now i wait til midnight
when the house is asleep and unsuspecting
and i put in my headphones
crank up celia cruz
and dance with myself.
y ay mamá,
ay papá,

What are your muses? What drives you from all possible blank page to finished piece?
I mostly draw inspiration from the people around me (I minored in Psychology in my undergrad, and I suspect that may have something to do with it). I’ve always found myself fascinated by the way people function in this world, especially the people closest to me. Usually it’ll be something that comes up in conversation, or a memory I haven’t thought about for a while, and it’ll just get stuck in my head. When I find myself repeating it over and over, looking at it from different angles, that usually means that the only way to get it out, to fully process it, is to make it into a poem. Sometimes that works. When it doesn’t, I keep writing more poems until it does.

Do you have any quirky writing habits? What is your process like?
I feel like every writer is quirky in our own little way, so it’s hard to say! I used to be insistent on only drafting in fountain or gel pen, but I’ve found I’ve become less picky as I’ve gotten busier with life (although I do still keep a stash of Pilot G-2s in my desk).

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently thinking about my writing process—I’ve always struggled to be the kind of person who can just pick a time to sit and write every day. What happens more commonly is that I collect ideas as I go through life—a stanza in my journal here, a line in my Notes app, even voice memo rambles. Then, when the whim to write strikes me, I’ll look through everything I’ve gathered and see if there’s anything there. Sometimes the thought hasn’t fully matured in my mind yet, and I can look at something and say, “Well, I’ll come back to you later.” Other times, I’ll find a nice crunchy line, write it down, and find that I just keep going until there’s a whole page there!

You’ve worked as an editor for Glassworks Magazine and at Singularity Press. What have you learned from spending time on that side of the literary looking glass?
That the reception to your work, nine times out of ten, is not at all personal. I am a very, very sensitive person, and that scared me when I first started writing. I thought one rejection and it’d all be over for me. But I have read some really great things as an editor that I still didn’t think were ready to be published. Or I’ve fought very hard for certain pieces that just didn’t land with the rest of the group. I also know for a fact that I’ve been pickier on some days than others, depending on how I’m feeling. So I think that helped me compartmentalize my work a little bit more, and really understand that a rejection wasn’t about me, it just wasn’t the right place or the right time.

Another thing I’ve learned is that I love literary journals and the small press world. I have the utmost respect for every ragtag group of editors out there, because I know firsthand that this is hard, and sometimes doesn’t even feel that rewarding. Major props especially to the new journals that are popping up, even though everything in the world seems to be against creatives right now. Its people like that who are helping to keep the literary world alive, in my opinion.

Your work has a recurring theme of identity. Why is this theme particularly important to you?
I have spent most, if not all, of my adult life so far just wrapped up in my own identity. I grew up in a very suburban area, and I haven’t had much experience with anything outside of that. The rest of my family—parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles—spent most of their lives in very urban areas with a huge Latinx diaspora. That’s something that I never had. Toss in nine years of Catholic school, a decade-long gender exploration, and a desire to fill the golden child archetype, and you’ve got yourself the perfect storm of identity chaos. That’s not even getting into the mess of being a 2020 high school graduate (I have some theories on how that affected my self-image too).

All this to say, my identity is something I have been deeply engaged with these past few years, trying to piece together who I am, who I want to be seen as, how I’ve become more confident while still having so many questions. I think because of all of this constantly swirling in my mind, it often finds its way onto the page, whether I mean for it to happen or not. I’m embracing it at this point, and I hope that someone out there sees my work and gets that sense of solidarity, knows that we’re all trying to figure out this mess of who we are, and that it’s okay to keep asking those questions.

There are a lot of vivid images, colors, and textures to your work. What role does memory play in this sensory exploration?
Funnily enough, I feel like I’ve always had a very bad memory. I have some history of repression, too, so that’s a whole other thing that affects it. My first drafts are usually completely lacking sensory images, or are only sensory images, just the little things I can piece together. When it’s the former, I go back in afterwards to find the places where I could be more visual. A lot of my work, especially recently, deals with the ideas of inheritance, including inherited memories, so sometimes I pull from that, from the stories I’ve heard or the fantasies I’ve built from what actually happened.

Where can readers find more of your work? Follow you on social media?
You can find me on Twitter/X and Instagram at @nlriversss. I’m working on getting a website together, but in the meantime, that’s where I post about new work!

Nyds Rivera (published as n.l. rivera) is a queer Latino writer living in New Jersey. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bullshit Lit, Spare Parts Literary, Whale Road Review, The B’K, and elsewhere. One of these days he’ll develop a strong sense of identity, but in the meantime, they plan to keep writing poetry. Online, he lurks on Twitter and Instagram: @nlriversss.

John Wojtowicz grew up working on his family’s azalea and rhododendron nursery in the backwoods of what Ginsberg dubbed “nowhere Zen New Jersey.” Currently, he works as a licensed clinical social worker and adjunct professor. He has been featured on Rowan University’s Writer’s Roundtable on 89.7 WGLS-FM and several of his poems were chosen to be exhibited in Princeton University's 2021 Unique Minds: Creative Voices art show at the Lewis Center for the Arts. He has been nominated 3x for a Pushcart Prize and serves as the Local Lyrics contributor for The Mad Poets Society Blog. His debut chapbook Roadside Oddities: A Poetic Guide to American Oddities was released in early 2022 and can be purchased at www.johnwojtowicz.com. John lives with his wife and two children in Upper Deerfield, NJ.

Mad Poet of the Year - Lisa DeVuono

April 8, 2024 Brooke Palma

The Mad Poet of the Year blog posts share the poetry of a long-time Mad Poet. This year-long appointment provides readers with a deep dive of the writer’s work and thoughts on poetry. We are thrilled to have Lisa DeVuono serve as the Mad Poet of the Year for 2024.

Poetry Magnets

There’s a feast waiting to happen
on the outside
of my refrigerator.

For months
words cling like mouths from famine
waiting for me to transform
bread into body, water into wine
to mix nouns and verbs,
a dash of adjective, pinch of comma,
create a whole new recipe
of witticisms.

The miracle occurs without me.

Words fall off demagnetized
and slip into every crack
under floors and walls
into closets and bedclothes
among clutter and noisemaking.

I wash my face and they fall from faucets.
I drive my car and they sing on radios.
I go to work and they tumble from wallets.
I hand over whole sentences
for the paying of lunch.

It’s my body, it’s my soul.
We feed with poems
and the feast we put on
is not the Last Supper, but the First

April’s poem “Poetry Magnets” celebrates National Poetry Month and initiates my yearlong blog postings of poems and commentary as the new Mad Poet of the Year. Thrilled to be sharing with all of you.

The origin of this poem goes back twenty years. My office was the standard issue cubicle so to personalize it, I installed magnetic words on the outside metal walls. Within a few days, colleagues would stop by to ask a question and then pause quizzically, eventually staying long enough to shuffle words around and to form a clever sentence or haiku. Soon there were enough poems to submit to the company newsletter, and now employees from outside of my department stopped to introduce themselves and craft a poem. A real poetry rave.

Later when I moved on to another job and packed up my office, I noticed that many magnetic words had slipped onto the carpet, behind my bookcase, and I even found some in my desk drawers! Me thinks, I smell a poem. Thus the birth of the line “Words fall off demagnetized and slip into every crack under floors and walls,” and from there, the poem practically wrote itself.

These days, I see poems everywhere. In her poem “Valentine for Ernest Mann,” Naomi Shihab Nye invites us to do the same with her words, She advises, “Check your garage, the odd sock in your drawer, the person you almost like, but not quite. And let me know.”

Where do your poems live?

Lisa DeVuono is the 2024 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County. She was one of the founders of It Ain’t Pretty, a women’s writing collective that performed locally. She produced multi-media shows incorporating song, music, poetry, and dance, including Rumi in Song at the Sedgwick Theater; and Whole Heart Home, and Breaking Open Breaking Free, part of the IceHouse Tonight series in Bethlehem.

She led creativity and poetry workshops and has worked with teens in recovery and cancer patients. She wrote a peer-based curriculum Poetry as a Tool for Recovery: An Easy-to-Use Guide in Eight Sessions for facilitators working with persons living with mental health challenges.

In addition to the full-length manuscript This Time Roots, Next Time Wings, her poetry has appeared in the Mad Poets Review, Paterson Literary Review and the anthology Grit Gravity & Grace: New Poems about Medicine and Healthcare. She is the author of the chapbook Poems from the Playground of Risk published by Pudding House Press and was the recipient of an honorable mention in Passaic County Community College’s annual Allen Ginsberg Contest.

Recently retired, she has worked as an administrator, librarian and lay chaplain.

Review of West: A Translation by Paisley Redkal

April 3, 2024 Brooke Palma

West: A Translation

Copper Canyon Press

$26.00

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Jennifer Schneider

In West: A Translation, Paisley Rekdal shares an unforgettable collection of work, in poetic, visual, and essay forms. The hybrid text is the culmination of a project that first began in 2018 when Rekdal was commissioned to author a poem to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Transcontinental Railroad and one that will serve as a powerful teacher, and anchor of truth and history, long into the future.

West: A Translation revisits and reveals historical realities through personal stories, visual illustrations, photographs, and collections of documents that weave together, in complex and layered ways, the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad, the political and cultural realities of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882 - 1943), and the harshness of American history. Pieces spotlight the voices, lived experiences, and violations of transcontinental railroad workers, Chinese immigrants, detainees, and other impacted parties in ways that reveal, perhaps as no other work has before, the tensions, hidden truths, and challenges that time can never heal and that are deeply embedded in the realities of a collective past.

The work translates, via a single Chinese character at a time, “Notes Toward an Untranslated Country”, an anonymous Chinese poem that had been carved into a wall of the Angel Island Immigration Station. The station served as the California detention center for Chinese immigrants to the United States. It was a site of deep heartbreak and harm, including extended detentions as well as suicides. For each character of the poem, Rekdal’s translation opens windows, accessible in ways never before, to a range of emotions, complex and layered, and experiences that extend far beyond any one voice or reality. The pieces humanize experiences in ways only poetry can and simultaneously span and expand upon a spectrum of human suffering as captured, conveyed, and retold throughout the collection.

The pieces are as detailed and expertly researched as they are sweeping commentaries that lift curtains, heavy in weight and time waiting, on long-concealed truths. Each poem works in, and of, multiple layers to spotlight, raise awareness, and crystallize collective experiences and loss as the voices featured in individual pieces travel alongside the railroad’s history. Individual poems, which vary in form and style, are accompanied by poignant and powerful images and detailed explanatory notes that inform and inspire, while also serving simultaneously as a critical reminder of, and educational tool for, histories that are often underexplored.

噩耗 Sorrowful News

Sorrowful news sings the telegram
and Lincoln’s body slides from DC
to Springfield, his third son, Willie,
boxed beside him….

裹 Wrap

Dear Margaret: It is called Scarletteena the disorder
is all in the throat. The boy I said
is a son of Henry’s that lives with us
he has another James lives with his mother
this boy is about 8 years the other between 6 and 7
Dear Margaret I cannot find words to express
at all times in sickness in death Dear Margaret
We are sorry about your house being burned
we hope you have got another

思鄉 Miss Home

Ways to die: blasting accident, derailment,
border crack. Crushed between trains crossing
in the night. Electrocution,
bad food, heart attack. You can work
yourself to death…

when we hit Rock Springs? Don’t you miss
your home?
Miss home? I told him.
I’m hoping to miss it entirely.

The work’s epigraph – “It is impossible to grieve in the first-person singular” (Cristina Rivera Garza) orients and situates the work as a testament to the human spirit and the collective nature of loss, labor, struggle, and suffering. Essays and extended notes detail the often hidden and haunting history and development of the railroad. Violations are described throughout, in connection with both translation (see, for example, p. 125) and humanity (see all), as well as the work itself (125).

In spaces where oppression meets resistance, suffering meets innate curiosity, and humanity confronts the harsh realities of history, West: A Translation transports as it informs and creates a visceral experience alongside an exquisitely painted landscape of poetic prowess. Sorrow is exquisitely captured in sweeping brush strokes that pair varied voices, blend literary styles, languages, and documents, and paint a masterpiece in hybrid form. The expertly researched and documented poems and essays are paired with an associated website where video poems extend the experience in immersive and multi-sensory ways. See: https://westtrain.org/

The collection highlights the extraordinary power of poetry to not only promote more intentional grounding in the present but also as a powerful teacher of the past. West: A Translation elevates and expands the hybrid form and takes readers on a journey across time and physical space, while also creating an anchor to which readers can regularly return for extended learning. Future readers, enjoy the journey that is West: A Translation and this remarkable collection of history.

Jen Schneider is an educator who lives, writes, and works in small spaces throughout Pennsylvania. She loves words, experimental poetry, and the change of seasons. She’s also a fan of late nights, crossword puzzles, and compelling underdogs. She has authored several chapbooks and full-length poetry collections, with stories, poems, and essays published in a variety of literary and scholarly journals. Sample works include Invisible Ink, On Habits & Habitats, On Daily Puzzles: (Un)locking Invisibility, A Collection of Recollections, and Blindfolds, Bruises, and Breakups. She is currently working on her first series, which (not surprisingly) includes a novel in verse. She is the 2022-2023 Montgomery County PA Poet Laureate.

Mad Poet of the Year - Tonita Austin (aka Toni Love)

March 25, 2024 Brooke Palma

The Mad Poet of the Year blog posts share the poetry of a long-time Mad Poet. This year-long appointment provides readers with a deep dive of the writer’s work and thoughts on poetry. We are thrilled to have Tonita Austin (aka Toni Love) serve as the Mad Poet of the Year for 2023.

Remember Me

i want my life to be more than memories splattered/
pain and sorrow screaming too loud for my heart to heal
strong women build legacies
remember me when faith and courage and joy is spoken
my pain transformed to beauty
sacrifices and sorrow drowned in grace
i want my life to speak love

It has truly been an honor to be chosen as the Mad Poet of 2023-2024 and I appreciate the opportunity to revisit and share some of my favorite poems.

I came across this poem recently that I wrote in the summer of 2019, just a few weeks before my book Toni's Room ; a poetic journey to restoration would be released on Amazon. I must have been thinking about how far I had come on this journey called life and how important it is to make sure you don't leave the story, the poem, or whatever your heart desires within you. Poets wear their heart outside for all of the world to see and it's both scary and gratifying. I didn't add a title to this poem in my journal, but I think I'll title it “Remember Me.”

Tonita Austin also known as “Toni Love” is a gifted poet, singer, activist, and writer born in West Philadelphia. While attending Columbia University, Tonita was a student of Amiri Baraka and performed in Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls” as the Lady in Orange. Her writing is influenced by both experiences. She is a contributor to the anthology The Black Body and featured poet in the 2018 and 2020 Winter/Fall edition of the Philadelphia Arts and Urban Literary magazine. The Restoration EP is her first published recording; Toni’s Room is her first published book. Toni currently resides in Media, PA. For more info, visit www.tonitalove.com and https://tonilove.hearnow.com/.

Review of Mystic Orchards by Jonathan Koven

March 20, 2024 Anthony Palma

Mystic Orchards

Kelsay Books

$20.00

You can purchase your copy here.

Reviewed by Sean Hanrahan

Jonathan Koven’s Mystic Orchards is dreamy bildungsroman overflowing with luscious language celebrating family, memory, and love. This work is divided into five sections: 1. Spirit of Growth, 2. A Dark Horizon, 3. Sylvan Memory, 4. Deepest Blue, and 5. Awoken in a Field of Light. Through this review, I will explore a poem from each section, which is a challenge of sorts since all the poems in this collection are so gorgeously and meaningfully interwoven, it is hard to pick apart its illuminating, gossamer strands. But, dear reader, I will try.

Koven’s adept use of language is evident from the first titled poem, “Stilled Wings,” in Spirit of Growth. It brings to mind a child’s first brush with disappointment, even morality with the evocative lines: “Past the farthest knoll I drag/ sacks of dead fireflies/ No longer do their strobes glow.” His language is so visceral, so visual that the reader can imaginatively walk the scenescape. After tossing the dead fireflies into a wishing well, he ends the poem with the haunting stanza: “In the cold black water/ moonlight envisions gardens/ their stilled wings will soar.”

“Oftentimes the Still Sad Music” is my favorite poem from the A Dark Horizon section. In this poem there is faint, yet palpable, backdrop of political unease:

The bell tolls. Mad clown’s diatribe warps high
over the trackless nation, across the soot
sully, through gunpowder plume, home;
wrapped in a hideous blanket of ineloquence.

What intrigues me here is the sonic energy carried in this stanza: the plosive “p”s mixing with the sibilant “s” and the overall consonance throughout. This stanza is alive and creates an uneasy and powerful effect. The political context and intriguing soundscape continue in the following stanza:

Defer to the turnstile regarding ennui
to sadness more sublime; candles for teeth,
suburban cinemas over indigenous graves,
lovers’ hands and not antennae mad for power,
thieving tomorrows, one after the next.

Sylvan Memory contains the surreal, sexy poem “I Read a Name in the Sun.” The aforementioned soundscape mixes with some deliciously idiosyncratic images from Koven:

through timeless gullies
those august glints ever dashing
high with gnats loud on peaches
sexing under crackling suppressed sky
relapses to summer psychedelia
to spite the very choice
in daily resurrection

This poem blurs by like a quick yet endless summer afternoon. When I read this poem, I imagine myself under dappling leaves dreaming about then eventually discovering love. Koven’s Edenic garden brings all sort of fond memories to mind. This section spoke to me the most—a tour de force.

Full disclosure: I am a sucker for prose poems, so for the Deepest Blue section I would like to spotlight “Writing on the Wall.” This poem uses the paragraph to maintain its impressive momentum with lines such as “You believed, heaven is a fast/ car flooded in music, an exposed spine, dry heaving, a goodbye/ said tomorrow afternoon,” or “Love slipped over suburbia—arguments/ of bored siblings, first wanderlust, pale rooves juggling stars, bulbs/ chirring like rain,” and last example (it’s hard to pick only three) “Gazed at the ceiling washing ashore your canvas, listening/ carefully to tremors in arrested white, a heart’s thrum became/ voice’s muted falsetto.” This prose poem contains an epic writ on the speaker’s childhood bedroom wall—great stuff that formed this formidable poet.

Another full disclosure: I am a sucker for film, Hollywood, all that jazz. In “Man Is the Intelligence of His Soil” in the final Awoken in a Field of Light section, Koven makes a wry reference to it:

Eye threads coiling,
loosened yarn balls,
firedrake fingers, breathing
sweetness, laughing at dirt,
my slow tongue circles, to dowse
in summer wash.
Cinematic.
Hollywood’s gray, after all.

For the Wallace Stevens fans among you, Koven acknowledges that this poem is titled after his poem “The Comedian as the Letter C.”

Sometimes, reviews just write themselves, and that certainly was the case with this review. I just took a backseat to Koven’s supple writing and enjoyed letting him drive me to his Mystic Orchards. This is the most cohesive and lush collection of poetry I have read in a long time. I would happily climb the tallest tree and proclaim to the world: “Get a copy of Mystic Orchards!” Have I sold you yet? I’ll answer my own question: Happy Reading!

Sean Hanrahan is a Philadelphian poet originally hailing from Dale City, Virginia. He is the author of the full-length collection Safer Behind Popcorn (2019 Cajun Mutt Press) and the chapbooks Hardened Eyes on the Scan (2018 Moonstone Press) and Gay Cake (2020 Toho). His work has also been included in several anthologies, including Moonstone Featured Poets, Queer Around the World, and Stonewall’s Legacy, and several journals, including Impossible Archetype, Mobius, Peculiar, Poetica Review, and Voicemail Poems. He has taught classes titled A Chapbook in 49 Days and Ekphrastic Poetry and hosted poetry events throughout Philadelphia.

Local Lyrics - Featuring Deborah Bayer

February 26, 2024 Brooke Palma

In the Temple of Healing
by Deborah Bayer

When I leave the sea-filled chamber,
the guide gives me a gift, a clean

white handkerchief with two stonestied in the corner. I untie the knot,

take one of the prisms in my hand. It fits
my left hand true when my fingers close

over the polished surface. I feel a deep
hum. The other rock takes getting used to.

It’s the one I keep with me. I bring it
to the clinic in the pocket of my backpack,

nowhere near my cell phone. I fear sharp
edges will mar the screen, or the phone

signal will interfere with the energy|.
The surface of the quartz is scratched

and sticky, as if it once bore a price tag.
Soap and water won’t smooth it; neither

will alcohol. It doesn’t come clean, but
it holds my warmth as it transmits the light,

broken into seven colors. I have two
crystals, an unblemished one at my bedside

and a rough one in my pocket. Do I love both the same? No, I love one more.

Let the pristine one stay home, protected.|The scarred and clouded one is me.

What draws you to poetry as an artistic medium over other art forms?
I first became serious about writing poems when I worked long, unpredictable hours as a full-time physician. The writing was a way of processing complicated emotions. I didn’t copy William Carlos Williams’ capturing thoughts on a prescription pad, but I appreciated the short form of poetry because of time constraints. As I improved my craft through workshops and classes, I continued writing. Poems work the way my brain works, through compression of language and associative leaps that trust the reader to follow.

Your debut chapbook, Rope Made of Bandages, entered the world last year through Finishing Line Press. Tell us about it!
This book includes poems that I wrote over ten years. The collection braids the themes of being a physician, being a patient, and bringing myself to retire from seeing patients, many of whom I had known for over twenty years. I wouldn’t have been able to get this book into the world without the help of my poetry critique group, the Leap Street poets, and the book is dedicated to them. They will be joining me in a reading to celebrate the one-year anniversary of my chapbook on March 27, 2024. https://noyesmuseum.org/all-noyes-events/2021/9/15/world-above-poetry-open-mic-9fmpd-39hcw-hle5n-wmfjk-kymsp-46n7c-wszl9-29k2y-5n8sc-nmykn-8p7e3-3cr7g-xtwe6-gdzdp-exwtm-835ml-ec7yw-wap5n-et44f-2lkt3-4r2c5-hc8np-9lchx

How do you get from an all-possible blank page to a near finished work? How would you describe your process?
When I have unlimited time, my poems often begin as prose freewrites that I shape into poems. When I’m under time pressure to compose a poem, I prefer writing in poetic forms. I like having a container for the poem. And the form distracts my thinking brain. If there’s any genius in any of my poems, I attribute it all to my unconscious mind. I once wrote a sonnet about the rigors of being a physician that collided with a memory of a childhood ballet class.

You retired from the practice of Infectious Disease and Palliative Care. Do you find there are crossovers between the practice of medicine and the practice of poetry?
Yes, the crossovers between medicine and poetry are many. They both hinge on communication and relationships. I’m most struck by these crossovers when I’m at a poetry reading. There is a kind of open receptivity needed to listen to poems, just as there is a need to be receptive when listening to a patient. And when I’m reading, I am open to how listeners respond. Poetry and medicine are both two-way communications: doctor-patient and writer-reader/listener. I witnessed the crossover most sharply when I ran hospice weekly meetings. I began each meeting by reading a poem, a way of showing that our work there was not merely clinical.

You facilitate writing groups via Zoom utilizing the Amherst Writers & Artists (AWA) methodology and the Narrative Medicine workshop format. Can you tell us a little bit about these methodologies and formats as well as the writing groups themselves?
I draw on my experiences as both a writer and physician when I facilitate writing groups. The AWA method is designed to create a safe and supportive environment. Participants generate writing to a prompt and then read it aloud to the group. The two methods dovetail nicely. Narrative Medicine puts more emphasis on group discussion of a piece of art before a short write, while the AWA method puts more emphasis on the writing. I find that combining the methods helps writers surprise themselves when they put words down on a page. Because the meetings are held on Zoom, writers from across the country and overseas meet in the same virtual room.

Where can readers read more of your work/buy your book?
I post weekly on my Substack, Healers Write, Writers Heal: https://deborahbayer.substack.com

Rope Made of Bandages is available on the publisher’s website: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/rope-made-of-bandages-by-deborah-bayer/

Or, signed copies are available on my website: https://www.harmonycommllc.com/shop/

Deborah Bayer is mostly retired after nearly thirty years of caring for HIV patients in the Atlantic City area. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Bellevue Literary Review, U.S. 1 Worksheets, Peregrine (AWA Press), Trampoline, Schuylkill Valley Journal, and elsewhere. She is working on a memoir about finding her way through a sometimes toxic medical culture. She spent her early years in Brazil and now lives in Galloway Township with her husband.

Ways to find me: https://bit.ly/m/DebPoet

Mad Poet of the Year - Tonita Austin (aka Toni Love)

February 12, 2024 Brooke Palma

The Mad Poet of the Year blog posts share the poetry of a long-time Mad Poet. This year-long appointment provides readers with a deep dive of the writer’s work and thoughts on poetry. We are thrilled to have Tonita Austin (aka Toni Love) serve as the Mad Poet of the Year for 2023.

Complete

by Tonita Austin aka Toni Love (8/19/16 , Sandridge VA Beach)

I don’t need you to complete me
I, my beloved am complete

I just need for you to seek me out
When you’re ready to be the King to my Queen
Come from the ocean the farms or the hood
From the boardroom the courts or the mechanic’s floor
Doesn’t matter how you come to me
I just need you to come forth

King you are the perfect man for me
I just need you to get the healing you need
So that the I can become we
I, my beloved, am complete

Years of therapy tears and poetry
Wrap up around me
I’m walking stronger and taller now
I can see much further now
Beyond the red flags I no longer seek
I, my beloved, am complete

I just need you to seek me
See me
As your partner

I offer a soft shoulder to lean on, a wipe for your brow
Pillow for your weary seat
Rub your back and fix your lunch
More deep conversations about the injustice we will together defeat

I just need a man though
Not a boy still crawling at his momma’s feet
Stand up and take my hand
I need you to look in my eyes my King and understand

I my beloved I don’t need you to make me complete
I just need you to be present and be my peace
I don’t need you to complete me
I just need for you to seek me when you become whole

I
My beloved
Am
Complete

I chose this poem for the month of February because I feel it shows the love that I have for my culture, Black men and myself.

Review of Yours, Creature by Jessica Cuello

February 7, 2024 Brooke Palma

Yours, Creature

Jackleg Press

$11.65

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Jennifer Schneider

Dear Readers,
For those of you who decide to spend time with Jessica Cuello’s Yours, Creature, you will not be disappointed. The collection is a remarkable demonstration of the power of the epistolary form as well as an equally remarkable tribute to the life and work of Mary Shelley.

The collection’s 97 pages present 48 poems in six sections, each in letter form, and span a lifetime. While many pieces share salutations (“Dear Mother” and “Dear Creature” regular openings), each poem is utterly unique and uniquely Cuello.

The collection masterfully demonstrates the timeless poetic power of letter writing as both a tool for documentation and for a deeper understanding of the complex and layered worlds in which the letter writer experienced life.

Yours, Creature – It’s surprising. It’s educational. It’s haunting.

Together, the pieces present Mary Shelley’s deeply layered complexity.

From “Dear Mother, [I wanted to crawl]”:

A line from the red radius of your womb
went dark. That night the whole of London
raised its eyes to watch the comet pass –

except for us.’

(a letter from Mary Shelley speaking to the night of her birth)

to “Dear Mother, [You wrote that]”

A person has a right to tell
And I could tell a tale by bight.

I wrote beside the tossed grey water
and where the dark red rags were soaked

I told by yeast and flour,
made a man, made a monster,
put it on the Chamonix

The work not only describes a life, it pulses with life.

It’s poignant. It’s impassioned. It’s charged.

It also charges readers to desire more - more storytelling, more poetry, and more expertly researched history.

Cuello’s attention to detail is unmatched. Relying on primary historical sources (including Charlotte Gordon’s dual biography, Romantic Outlaws, and letters written by Mary Shelley, as detailed in the collection’s Notes), the poems paint a life as complex as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Tonally, the work is as haunting as it is educational. With each reading comes a deeper appreciation for Cuello’s exquisite writing and a deeper understanding of a life full of hardship, heartbreak, and horror. Mary Shelley would, undoubtedly, approve.

Not only is the work tonally reminiscent of Shelley’s Frankenstein, it also fully embraces the gothic genre in poetic form, with villains and heroines, darkness and death, horror and harrowing losses. Written in the voice and persona of Mary Shelley, the work speaks to the mother Shelley lost ten days after childbirth (due to an infection that developed during Shelley’s birth).

From birth – In “Dear Mother, [Father noted each event]”:

Your afterbirth would not come out
the doctor pulled it away in pieces –

,,,

and to expel the placenta
puppies suckled the milk
your body meant for me —

To girlhood – In “Dear Scottish time”:

Father sent me away – or was it stepmother/?
To be sent is different from being left.

To be left is to remain in the walls
that repel you. Memory rooms

have no equilibrium. They never match
and Mine so full of him. His turn, his back.

To love affairs – “Dear Mother, [I did not write]”:

The backward-looking need no enemies
and every world is provincial once you’re in it.

Your pregnant daughter,
Mary Shelley

To births – In “Dear Rejection 1815”:

In threes they came: the mother, the father,
the holy lover. One by one they cut me loose:
the first went underground without me.

amidst cycles of life, the work explores ongoing loss all while Shelley’s work on Frankenstein was born. For example, in ‘Dear Mother, [His wife was Harriet]’:

There is nothing in my arms
another nothing
added to the nothing first
the nothing second

How do you think of punishment?
Girls make their own

Did you guess your name
would get me love
and blame?

Themes revolve around love, loss, pregnancy, childbirth, and again, loss. It’s a harrowing collection that is as gripping as it is educational and as moving as it is memorable. The collection masterfully blends history and gorgeous text in a way that is both accessible and memorable. Its fabulous in ways that extend far beyond form, genre, and any single poem.

Through its haunting exploration of desire, loss, exile, and rejection, and the monstrous creations that can follow, the work simultaneously celebrates the marvelous power of the desire to create and the creative process.

Dear Readers, I hope you enjoy the collection as much as I did.

Yours in poetry, a Fan and Reader (of both Mary Shelley and Jessica Cuello)

Ekphrasis: Poems and Art

February 6, 2024 Brooke Palma

Ekphrasis: Poems and Art

Welcome to a new Mad Poets blog, to be offered quarterly.

It’s a pleasure to write about the relationship between poetry and other art forms, to examine ways that a various creative arts relate to each other.

The term ekphrasis can be defined narrowly as writing that describes a work of art in another medium-- paintings, music, photography sculpture and the like. It can also refer more broadly to the alchemy that happens when one medium tries to define and relate to another. This could refer to poems inspired by the visual arts or music -- and also the reverse! To my mind, ekphrasis can also encompass hybrid works, like artists’ books, author/illustrator collaborations and graphic poems.

Many scholars have written about ekphrasis and there are great resources online. Though not scholar of the topic, I have had a practice of writing poetry and painting for many years. Both are essential to my creative life. These art forms interact, challenge each other and open up many questions and tensions.

My aim in this blog is to feature the work of various poets and artists, to let you know of interesting viewing opportunities and to provide some angles that might prompt your own writing.

Ekphrastic Adventures

This month I share my own adventures with ekphrasis. The time seems opportune since I’ll be teaching two courses in February that link visual art with poetry writing (details below). But first, some background on my obsession…

While attending PAFA (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts) as an adult in the 1990s and enthralled with visual art, a long-dormant love of poetry returned. It happened in animal drawing class. A friend and I were sketching, observing a lion and tiger sunning themselves on rocks in separate enclosures. They raised their heads and eyed each other for long, tense moments. Gulping, I dropped my charcoal, grabbed a pencil, and started scribbling words in a notebook. Fragments of this experience emerged in a later poem.

PORTRAIT

Sketching at the zoo,
we’d rough in the forms of giant turtles
like tilting boulders.

Beside the lion cage
we’d glide sticks of charcoal
to imitate their prowl.

Once the pride male leapt to a ledge
across from the tiger on his ledge.
Neither flinched.
What passed between them?

Or between us
that last day teaching
before you got so sick?

Our students sat rapt
while you demonstrated
how to sketch portraits
with a loose grip.

You wavered, nearly fell
but gestured away
my help
and eyed me, as if
from a long distance.

From Etching the Ghost (Atmosphere Press)

I began to write poetry in earnest, something I had done in earlier years. Now imagery expressed in poetry and in painting seemed to intermingle, leading to experiments with one-of-a-kind artists’ books. Initially I kept text and paintings discrete, as in the first two examples, which are pages from different books. However, the third example shows mark- making superimposed over text in a practice known as “asemic” writing. Asemic art is quite intriguing and I recommend the work of Karla Van Vliet as one practitioner of this approach. (eg, Fluency, Shanti Arts Publishing, 2021). It often has a calligraphic quality and seems related to pictograph languages, like Chinese, Arabic and Hebrew.

Light and Shadow

Our eyes turn toward light,
but shadows are vital in painting.
Their muted tones reflect
more outgoing, brassy colors
of candlesticks and copper pots.

Shadows conduct a subtle life
below surface, as dreams do.
They hold things together,
underpinning what shouts
and seeks attention

like glints on glass
or highlights on a rose.
I’m so easily distracted
by bright objects, headlines,
sharp words, the rush of daily life.

Let me notice what’s nuanced,
like your sustaining love.
Let me sense where to place
a shadow, a soft brushstroke, silence,
a kind word.

https://ritualwell.org/ritual/light-and-shadow/

Murmuration

Have you ever witnessed starlings
swirl above landscape,

scattering souls over
pale, winter grasses

in cramped, suburban yards
like mine? The shock

might wobble your heart.
I stare as a thousand tiny birds

slant toward sunlight,
mimic roofs and branches,

bloom into clouds
and blessings.

They spread like open fingers
spelling out questions

then contract
into a line, a siphon into

breath. Pause.
I pray they’ll soon reappear

above another landscape.
Although I’m not a scribe,

I stay up all night to paint
what I recall – traces.

https://ritualwell.org/ritual/murmuration/

In Murmuration, language (Hebrew in various fonts ) is integral to the composition of the watercolor and lately I’ve been creating works that reference Psalms and other ritual texts.

Upcoming Course Opportunities

This leads me to sharing about two upcoming course I’ll be teaching that offer ekphrasis experiments as inspiration for writing poems. The first, Jump Into Poetry, will meet weekly in person in February through Main Line School Night at the Creutzberg Center in Radnor, PA.

Information on how to register should be up online soon. No prior experience even lifting a painting brush is needed!!!

https://mainlineschoolnight.org/ or email me at cpoems@gmail.com

My second course on Ekphrasis in February is Mussar as a Generative Practice for Art and Poetry. It will be conducted online through Ritualwell.org. Poets and artists from any and background are most welcome. Mussar is a study of ethics that originated with European Hasidic practitioners in the 19th century. It emphasizes daily practices that can help people connect with kindness and compassion, to transform our behaviors and strengthen our relationships. In this poetry course, we will use visual art and poetry experiments to consider issues like: seeking order in the overwhelm of our experiences, boundaries and connection, and values that guide us.

https://ritualwell.org/event/mussar-as-a-generative-practice-for-art-and-poetry/2024-02-14/

For more information about my own creative work, including exhibitions and books:

www.cathleencohenart.com

https://ceruleanarts.com/pages/cathleen-cohen

https://cathleencohenart.com/poetry/new--sparks-and-disperses

https://cathleencohenart.com/poetry/etching-the-ghost

Cathleen Cohen was the 2019 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, PA. A painter and teacher, she founded the We the Poets program at ArtWell, an arts education non-profit in Philadelphia (www.theartwell.org). Her poems appear in journals such as Apiary, Baltimore Review, Cagibi, East Coast Ink, 6ix, North of Oxford, One Art, Passager, Philadelphia Stories, Rockvale Review and Rogue Agent. Camera Obscura (chapbook, Moonstone Press), appeared in 2017 and Etching the Ghost (Atmosphere Press), was published in 2021. She received the Interfaith Relations Award from the Montgomery County PA Human Rights Commission and the Public Service Award from National Association of Poetry Therapy. Her paintings are on view at Cerulean Arts Gallery. To learn more about her work, visit www.cathleencohenart.com.

Review of Four Crescents by Norm Mattox

January 24, 2024 Anthony Palma

Four Crescents

Collapse Press

$20.00

You can purchase your copy here.

Reviewed by Sean Hanrahan

Since the 1960s (thank you Wikipedia), the phrase “the personal is political” has been oft-quoted in national discourse. Poets have certainly, and before the 1960s, incorporated that ethos into their work. Few poets today intertwine the two as economically, skillfully, and powerfully as Norm Mattox in his debut full-length collection, Four Crescents, from Collapse Press. Collapse Press, according to their website, “is a small literary publisher specializing in poetry and prose…whose work addresses the current social atmosphere of a society in turmoil and on the verge of transformation.”

It can be argued that the dawning of the current era, admittedly from an American perspective, began with 9/11. In Mattox’s taut poem “A Personal Dilemma,” he writes of a sadly all-too-common experience of being “one of most/‘randomly selected’ passengers/in the whole airport” for extra screening since according to a “sista from another mista” he “looked like an angry Black man/of dubious cultural background.” He tries desperately to comply with the new security state expectations:

i made a conscious effort
to avoid provocative
cultural artifacts,
like necklaces, pendants
hanging earrings,
kufi hats, no berets.

In this listing of effectively banned accessories, Mattox employs metonymy to a staggering and heartbreaking effect.

The poem continues exploring how extra airport security is just a continuation of racism in American society:

xenophobia continues to be
a tightly wound pitch
that americans
fear any nonwhite member
of the community
not being ‘true’ American
determined by some
double blind,
double biased,
double standard
survey.

The short lines in this poem help to convey the anger and the tension of continuously being a suspect while going about your daily life. They exemplify the struggle to

Resist
burning a bridge
at both ends
while the bridge
is my back.

Mattox shows his strength as a poet and human being for suggesting ways of combatting the pernicious evil of racism in “A War on Racism”. In this poem, he deploys a provocative series of questions that sound as a clarion call:

would a leader dare
to declare a war on racism?
where are the volunteers?|
will there need to be a draft?

He enlists the Constitution into his argument as well.

who will be the patriots
in the war against racism?
are we the ones
they’ve been hoarding
their ‘right to bear’ arms for?

Continuing the journey into the post-911 landscape, he utilizes politically charged words including “insurgents,” “refugees,” “rebels,” and “terrorists.” He concludes not with a question, but rather an elegant statement:

it will come down
to a war on racism
not between,|
Black or white,
but between
the human race and
an inhuman race.

As a gay writer, I know how easy it is to point out the cruelties and the injustices of America and modern life. It is more difficult to suggest a way to resist or exist in such a time and place. Fortunately for the reader, Maddox also comes up with answers to probing questions in “Ancestral Diatribe.” He acknowledges

no one said it was simple
to put your hand on the doorknob
scroll through the masks you wear
so you can return home alive

His astute observation continues in what is my favorite stanza of the collection:

revolution is not          a spin through
your life cycle              a stationary bike
going the speed of breathing
                                    last breaths

The answer to surviving, resisting, building a true and permanent revolution is, perhaps simple, but nevertheless true and the only answer, love.

love is a journey          we take to find
                                    our authentic selves
a reflection                  an echo
                        of a love that resounds
                                    at humanity’s core

As I write this review on Martin Luther King Day, Norm Mattox’s Four Crescents has done for me what all great art does—causes me to reflect, to transform in some way. Love to others, kindness to others, standing up to those in power who seek to destroy are ways we can build a better America. This book will break your heart, but then repair it. Mattox’s words and wisdom are a must to keep on your bookshelves. In other words, I won’t be loaning this book out, so please get your own copy. Supporting poets is a worthwhile act, and in 2024, it is more important than ever to support words that are honest and profound. I can think of no better poetry collection to purchase this year than Four Crescents.

Local Lyrics - Featuring Alexa Gutter

January 15, 2024 Brooke Palma

When we were 4 and 8
by Alexa Gutter

You took our hands and told us about loss,
your sister in her crib gone still one night.
In black and white a photo showed us how
the small coffin was placed in frozen ground.
You were not there. No, you were only two.
Who kept you then? Who sat you in a chair
in some warm kitchen with a slice of bread?
One summer we took pansies to her grave
and Mummi walked ahead, she knew the way.
Years after that you told me of your dream
that Eija had grown up with yellow hair.
She reached for you; you held her in your arms.
I guess we never balanced what you’d lost,
the girls you made, your sister made of dust.

Tell us a little about your writing process. How do you get from all possible blank page to finished work?
Often the poem lives inside of me for a while before it lands on the page. Sometimes, if I have the seed of the poem but it feels too nebulous, I'll turn to poetic form as a method of containment. In my chapbook, for example, I have a blank verse sonnet about a particularly weighty topic. I have a range of interactions with my initial drafts--sometimes a poem feels mostly done right away, and I'll do some minor tinkering over time. Some drafts are awful but worth saving, and those I'll rework quite a bit. It helps to have feedback from a workshop or trusted advisor, of course.

Your work dives into themes of motherhood, grief, and family history just to name a few. What draws your to certain subject matter? What are your muses?
I was extremely close to my mother, so losing her at age 23 was a transformative experience for me. In the decade after her death, arranging the emotional chaos of loss into lines and stanzas was cathartic and also a way of remembering her, telling our story. I also write about my Jewish ancestry and my grandparents' escape from Warsaw to Shanghai during WWII. I am drawn to the past because of how it shows up in the present.

Why is poetry (or in general writing) the artistic medium for you?
I have tried my hand at other things--I loved the stage for years, for example. But poetry has been a constant in my life. W.S. Merwin once said: “Poetry addresses individuals in their most intimate, private, frightened and elated moments … because it comes closer than any other art form to addressing what cannot be said.” Poetry, through sound, through image, has a unique magic. It gives shape to the disorder of human experience.

In addition to being a poet, you are a middle-school teacher. Does your work with students influence or find its way into your work?
I occasionally write about the classroom! For example, in this poem about a 9th grade classroom in April. As an English teacher, I am in the business of words. Watching students interact with new texts or tap out the lines of iambic pentameter on their desks is a great joy. Since I teach middle school, I am also faced with students who are figuring out how to be people. Sometimes my experience as a poet is more helpful with that struggle than any other training I've received.

Tell us a little bit about your forthcoming collection Aiti from Finishing Line Press.
Äiti is a chapbook about motherhood, childhood, loss, and renewal. I wrote these poems in the decade or so after losing my mother, and they take place in the present, in memory, and in the imagined past, in both Finland and Pennsylvania.

Where can we read more of your work, buy your book?
Äiti is available in January 2024, and can be purchased through Finishing Line Press, as well as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other booksellers. For more information about me, please visit alexagutter.com.

Alexa Gutter is a middle school teacher, poet, and mother. She was named poet laureate of Bucks County, Pennsylvania in 2013. The daughter of a Finnish mother and a father born as a Jewish refugee in China, she often explores her heritage and ties to the past in her poetry. She currently lives in West Chester, Pennsylvania with her family. Her website is AlexaGutter.com.

Mad Poet of the Year - Tonita Austin (aka Toni Love)

January 8, 2024 Brooke Palma

The Mad Poet of the Year blog posts share the poetry of a long-time Mad Poet. This year-long appointment provides readers with a deep dive of the writer’s work and thoughts on poetry. We are thrilled to have Tonita Austin (aka Toni Love) serve as the Mad Poet of the Year for 2023.

Kwanzaa

by Tonita Austin aka Toni Love

Black colors
Brown faces
Strong arms to hold and embrace you
Big smiles
Hearty laughter
Habari Gani
Smells of ancestors lurking in each corner of the house
Rising from the love scented crumpled foil
Floating in on recipes passed down through generations
Warm pots and pans carried in the hands of family
Friends who cherish our rituals and faith
Stand by to learn
To share
Umoja
Children laughing, playing
Yearning
to participate
Waiting to put warm Sahara colored food on their plates
Love
Warmth
Family
Ancestors
Kwanzaa

I chose this poem for January because my siblings and I come together on January 1st, the last day of the Kwanzaa celebrations, for a family feast. Aside from the chance to see one another and eat, we spend time sharing about the seven principles of Kwanzaa, what they mean to us as a family and community, listening to stories from our elders and recognizing accomplishments made by our youngest members of the family. It really is the perfect way to start the new year. Ironically, I wrote this poem after one of our Kwanzaa feasts (Karamu) but have yet to read this poem at our Kwanzaa celebrations. I guess I already have a goal for 2025!

Guest Post - Ray Greenblatt on Charles Dickens

December 20, 2023 Brooke Palma

**Just in time for the upcoming Christmas holiday, here is a guest blog from Ray Greenblatt on *A Christmas Carol* by Charles Dickens.**

Exuberant Experimentalist - Charles Dickens

Who would have assumed that Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was such an experimental writer? He began early in his life and at the beginning of the Victorian Age in 1836 with Sketches By Boz. Even a shorter work, A Christmas Carol (1843), holds many examples of daring and emotional writing. His style could be called poetic even though he never published a book of poetry. Dickens would have felt hog-tied if he had had to follow prescribed rhythm and rhyme—prose gave him full freedom to create.

I – STYLE

An insightful way to begin to look at his style would be his plenteous use of series. So many nouns: “Signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner.” Verbs: “The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait.’”(6) Adjectives: “Secret, and self-contained, and solitary.” (6) Adverbs: “Some shyly, some boldly, some gracefully, some awkwardly.” (42) Participles: “A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!” (6)

He even uses series of sentences: “No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty.” (6) And he sometimes iterates the same sentence to build suspense in succeeding paragraphs: “Marley was as dead as a door-nail.” (5) In other places he repeats the same adjective: “His sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend and sole mourner.” (5) Notice that Dickens is scrupulous about the parallelism of his sentence structure.

So many of these techniques would be employed in poetry. For instance we have interjections: “Mind!” (5) “Oh!” (6) “Foggier yet!” (14) “Woe is me!” (23) Alliteration: “Rolled, and roared, and raged.” (69) Onomatopoeia: “Clash, clang, hammer, ding, dong, bell.” (100) Interrogative: “Scrooge knew he was dead?” (5) Interrupter: “Once upon a time—of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve—old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house.” (7)

His exuberance seems to have no end. Simile: “The owner of one scant young nose, gnawed and mumbled by the hungry cold as bones are gnawed by dogs.” (14) Personification: “The ancient tower of a church, whose gruff old bell was always peeping slyly down at Scrooge.” (13) Puns: “More of gravy than of grave.” (21) At times the narrator steps in: “The mention of Marley’s funeral brings me back to the point I started from.” (5) And the entire story is laden with irony and double-meaning. Marley’s ghost reveals to Scrooge that even as a living partner, “I have sat invisible beside you many and many a day.” (25) They were sadly not really friends.

II – SCENES

We could go on and on into minutiae about the poetic devices Dickens employs. However, several scenes best bring his experimental originality to the fore. As he waits for the first ghost, “The air filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went.” (27) It is a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to fiendish life.

The first Ghost of Christmas Past shows Scrooge how as a young man he used to dance and love life. “Advance and retire, hold hands with your partner, bow and curtsey; corkscrew; thread-the-needle, and back again to your place.” (43) The Ghost of Christmas Present introduces the Christmas feast: “Turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch.” (53) We learn so much about the mid-Victorian diet.

Londoners were vigorous and animated at this season: “The people made a rough, but brisk and not unpleasant kind of music, in scraping the snow from the pavement in front of their dwellings, and from the tops of their houses.” (54) But they knew and cursed Scrooge for his miserliness: “Oh God! to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!” (65) The spirit took Scrooge to various places in the world where people were suffering: alms-houses, hospitals, jails, mines. All they saw were ignorance, want, doom. As an example, “They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meager, ragged, scowling, wolfish.” (78)

Finally the last phantom, the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, showed Scrooge the ultimate truth if he did not change his ways. “The ways were foul and narrow; the shops and houses wretched; the people half-naked, drunken, slipshod, ugly.” (84) “Walled in by houses; overrun by grass and weeds, the growth of vegetation’s death, not life; choked up with too much burying; fat with repleted appetite. A worthy place!” (97) The sarcasm takes its toll on Scrooge who, viewing his potential gravesite, finally reforms.

Of the Christmas stories Charles Dickens wrote for magazines, A Christmas Carol caught the imagination of the public the most. He structured it in what he called five staves, to hint at the idea of music. And as you have observed, the musical flow—like poetry-- played a major part in the narration as well as in the style. This tale held humor and much exaggeration but also misery and the reality of death. That is most likely what appeals to readers even today—the panoply of life in all of its stages, told vigorously and honestly.

Ray Greenblatt has been a poet for forty years and an English teacher longer than that. He was an editor of *General Eclectic*, a board member of the Philadelphia Writers Conference, and is presently on the staff of the *Schuylkill Valley Journal*. He has won the Full Moon Poetry Contest, the Mad Poets Annual Contest, and twice won the Anthony Byrne Annual Contest for Irish Poetry sponsored by *The Irish Edition*. His poetry has been translated into Gaelic, Polish, Greek and Japanese.

Local Lyrics - Featuring Sue Cummings

December 18, 2023 Brooke Palma

can you miss a morning?
by Sue Cummings

can you miss a morning
like a bus or a boat?
find yourself –

standing

flat-footed, shrouded in a cloud
of blue – black smoke, on the hard
edge of a man-made curb

or stranded

without a prayer on a sea’s empty
shore staring absently out at a
distant watery-wake.

can you miss a morning
like a dream?
find yourself –

grieving

for what might have been
had you stopped to rest, or
over-slept without regret

or altogether

quit the race to place your bet
on what now you cannot
imagine

can you miss a morning
like a moment?
find yourself –

writing this poem
while the goose swims
crookedly-by on flat

black water
and the silver-blue heron
stands erect in new light

What draws you to poetry?
It’s the power that draws me – the concision (nothing wasted), and, of course, the payload! I love the thrill of having a dangerous, brave conversation with myself and a reader – searching for the “ insight so refined… it could kill you.”

The Real Trouble with Poetry
by Sue Cummings
After Billy Collins “The Trouble with Poetry”

The real trouble with poetry is not
that it is the mother of guppies,
or as irrelevant as that old man
sitting over there mumbling
who knows what?

No – the real trouble with poetry
is that it is so demanding,
stealing your attention like
a petulant child who won’t
take no for an answer.

Heck, who could ignore these lines,
after burying their mother?

I took the last
dusty piece of China
out of the barrel.
It was your gravy boat,
with a hard, brown
drop of gravy still
on the porcelain lip.
I grieved for you then
as I never had before.*

You see – the real trouble with poetry
is that it could kill you. It’s the turn,
the gesture, the insight so refined,
it stops your breath – leaves you
gasping on the ground, flopping around
like a fish in air.

What are your muses?
My muse is a demanding “ethereal feminine presence.” She cannot be summoned. I believe it is my job as a wanna-be writer to actively live in a way that creates the conditions she requires to make an appearance. And when she arrives I must take care to obey the following rules: 1) I must give her my full, complete attention. 2) My mind must be scrubbed clean of any petty jealousies I have of the writing of other poets 3) I must trust her, and refrain from any willful derailment of her efforts to guide my pen. 4) I must live as a fireman, in perpetual readiness to receive her call. Oh yes – one more thing – she hates ingratitude!

How do you get from blank page to completed work?
I begin with a first thought, a first line and follow my mind. I hear the sounds of the words, and start to feel the mood of the poem. Unless I specifically intend to write to a form, I don’t pay attention to line breaks or stanzas or punctuation. My first order of business is to get the sounds of words onto the page –– let the poem breathe and tell me what it wants to say. The rest is theater.

I know you are involved with the LBI Poets’ Studio and Barnegat Poets’ Society. Can you tell us a little about these organizations?
Both the LBI Poets’ Studio and the Barnegat Poets’ Society are venerable old poetry groups, begun years ago in branches of the Ocean County Library. Since the pandemic both these groups have moved on-line (Zoom). Each group meets monthly, and there is some overlap in the membership. The LBI group meets the first Thursday of the month, 1-3PM; the Barnegat group meets the third Wednesday of the month 6-9PM. It is the purpose of both these groups to encourage and celebrate the writing of original poetry. These two groups meet together regularly for in-person Open Mic and socialization.

In both groups a prompt is offered, and a poet of the month is featured. Participants are invited to bring an original poem (written to the prompt or not). I am the coordinator of both groups, and I collect the poems to be read prior to the meeting, in order to provide an electronic file to all the members before gathering. During the Zoom Meeting poems are Screen-Shared, and each poet is invited to read their poem out-loud, this is followed by a re-reading of the poem by another member, and this is followed by a period of feedback to the poet. During feedback the poet is asked to remain silent. At the end of the feedback period the poet is invited to speak at will with the group about their poem. For more information, contact scummings817@comcast.net.

What are some advantages of engaging with a poetry community?
For pure joy and intellectual stimulation – there’s nothing in the world that beats the comradery of a community of poets. For me it’s heaven!

You’ve used Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) to get your work out into your world. Can you tell us a little about your experience with this platform? https://kdp.amazon.com
KDP is a FREE, on-line self-publishing service, which provides instruction, templates, and live support for authors. It is associated with Amazon.com, though it operates independently. If you use KDP, and publish a book, it will automatically be sold through Amazon.com.

In 2019, under the pressure of deadline, I created and published a book entitled Painted Poetry VI (Amazon.com 2019) in less than three weeks using KDP. It cost me nothing, and I began without any knowledge of publishing, and a few computer skills. In 2022 I published a second book, PLC A Writer’s Memoir (Amazon.com, 2022), and I’m currently creating a third, About Time: A Collection of Poetry and Short Prose. I’m very satisfied with my KDP experience.

I don’t rely on Amazon customers for readers. I know my audience when I write a book, and I obtain author’s copies at half the cost of the Amazon sales price to sell directly. It’s nice that I can direct a stranger to my book on Amazon, where they can look inside and purchase it if they wish. I’ve sold more than 300 books, made a few hundred dollars, and best of all, I’ve had the thrill of enthusiastic readers! That’s priceless!!

You were a biologist in your pre-poetry life. Do you find connections between the two fields?
I wanted to be a scientist as soon as I learned what the word meant. At age 6, I discovered that polliwogs turn into frogs. I’m 78 now, and I still think that is amazing.

I became a Cell and Developmental Biologist at UC Irvine (1982), and I’ve had an incredible career as a research biologist and professor, studying dormancy in Schizoporella unicornis, a marine invertebrate; working on a vaccine against tooth decay; attempting to understand X Chromosome reactivation; figuring out what influences head regeneration and polarity in Hydra, and well, I do believe my child’s mind, its deep desire to understand the natural world, is the engine that drives my life and poetry. I’m coming to the end of my life, and what occupies me are the existential questions like – What’s goin’ on here? Why am I? Who’s in charge of this catastrophe, anyway!? Duh!?

Where can readers see more of your work/buy your books?
I’m currently gathering my poems and short prose into a book entitled, About Time (2024). A list of publications where you can read some of my poetry and/or prose is shown at the end of my Bio.

Sue Cummings is a 78 year old, retired research biologist and professor, who went Fly Fishing on the Youghiogheny River in Western Pennsylvania to fulfill a bucket list dream, and came home inexplicably wanting to write poetry. In 2015, she joined her local LBI Adult Writers’ Group, took a creative writing class for freshmen at Stockton University, and attended her first Writers’ Retreat. She’s been writing ever since.

These days Sue hosts and coordinates the LBI Poets’ Studio, The Barnegat Poets’ Society, and a weekly Writing Down the Bones Writing Practice Group. She has published two books Painted Poetry VI, ( A Collection of Ekphrastic Poems and Original Artwork by Local LBI Artists and Poets, Amazon, 2019), and PLC A Writer’s Memoir, (a sometimes hilarious, sometimes poignant account of her brief but spectacular writer’s life (Amazon 2022). She’s presently working on her third book, entitled About Time, a collection of her short prose and poetry.

Sue regularly contributes prose and poetry to her local LBI Sandpaper, the PLC Women Writers’ Retreat Anthology (2015- 2023), and her poetry may be found in the Weekend Poets of Pyramid (2015-16), Tour of Poetry (2018), the Aurorean (2020), Moonstone Press, (Haiku 2021). Sue is the featured poet in Breakers, Arts and Culture Magazine, (Nov. 2023, Issue 18).

Mad Poet of the Year - Tonita Austin (aka Toni Love)

December 14, 2023 Brooke Palma

The Mad Poet of the Year blog posts share the poetry of a long-time Mad Poet. This year-long appointment provides readers with a deep dive of the writer’s work and thoughts on poetry. We are thrilled to have Tonita Austin (aka Toni Love) serve as the Mad Poet of the Year for 2023.

Hope
(written on the National Day of Hope, 4/6/22)

by Tonita Austin aka Toni Love

Hope is the last tear that you cry before you get up off your knees and wipe your face.
Hope opens your eyes to the possibilities of joy after sorrow
Hope is that unexpected voice in your ear overpowering the cocktail of despair and pain that beckonedyou to dance toe to toe with the edge of the bridge
Hope is the grain of belief that pulls you back to consciousness.
Hope is the sweet breath filling a newborn’s lungs the moment it is separated from the womb
Hope sustains life
Hope is powerful
Hope is love
Hope is the sweet memory that lifts you up out of the depths of depression
Hope moves your exhausted mind and body out into the day even when you don't know where your next shower where your next meal is coming from.
Hope surrounds families tucked inside bunkers unaware of what will come for them in the next day
Hope keeps fathers /hope keeps mothers /hope keeps children /hope keeps families/ hope keeps communities/
Hope keeps the person in that jail cell wrongly accused, writing letters instead of ending their own livesout of desperation.
Hope is the whisper from God that says there's a reason to go on just one more day.
May we all cultivate it
May we all grasp for it in the midnight hour
May we all maintain the awareness that it is within our reach at any moment
May we be all quiet enough to listen for that whisper of Hope

I chose this poem because the month of December is a time when people are celebrating in various ways and honoring different religious and cultural beliefs but all are connected by hope.

Review of Thrift Store Metamorphosis by Tony Robles

December 13, 2023 Brooke Palma

Thrift Store Metamorphosis

by Tony Robles

Redhawk Publications

$15.00

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Katch Campbell

This is my final review for 2023. It has been an honor and delight to read, interview, and write reviews for the Madd Poet Society of Philadelphia this year. Thank you for taking the time to read my words. I hope they have inspired you to read poetry or write a line of your own.

“the word or sign which man uses is the man himself...my language is the sum total of myself…”

— Charles Sanders Peirce

Charles Sanders Peirce, a thought leader in cognitive semiotics postulates that all reality is based in a thought reaction to an object. Simplified, there are three components to this process. The object, the emotive thought, and the interpretation of the emotive thought triggered by the object. Before reading this collection take a moment to ponder the following questions. If objects are signs that suffuse the universe, what is there left that is not a sign? What is there to say of the observer or interpreter of the sign? And how does the interpretation of said object/sign impact history?

In a world that seems to have no limits on detailing the horrific, Tony Robles’ new collection Thrift Store Metamorphosis displays exceptional restraint even if detailing the tragedies of everyday life. It is rare to find solace inside stories linked to suffering, but Robles wraps them in solace, humor, and transformation. The work Robles has done through interpretation of these objects and created art is healing for self and for reader.

Robles provides a context for the extensive subject matter with a forward about his life, how it led him to the hills of Hendersonville, North Carolina, and how the objects around us may trigger memories. The book contains 42 lined poems. Each poem tells a complex story simply through the utilization of clear imagery, and straightforward language. The sensory is evoked in most poems.

Mopping the Thrift Store

Get a whiff of
what's inside the
thrift store

musty pages of old
almanacs

old shoes carrying
the fragrance of cadences
carried out on city streets,
country trails, shopping malls,
gas and brake pedals and
perhaps other planets

the smell of meals gone by
in crock pots that have landed
on the shelves among a never
ending array of kitchen gadgetry

take a deep breath
and maybe you'll smell the
scent of an old pea coat

There is suffering, humor, and self-reflection. Some offer internal dialogue and others take the reader through the aisles, up to the register, and back out into the world.

It is difficult to choose one poem to discuss with this collection as I enjoyed each one for where it took me and what it taught me about how I see life, how I interpret objects, and where my interpretations leave me.

Assumptions

The man walked into the
thrift store the other day

his countenance I
immediately discounted

To my perception, he was
likely one of those ignorant
folks, the kind that would have
a confederate flag license plate

it was something in his
demeanor that
soured me

he came to the register
where I work as a
cashier

he put down a pair
of socks and a package
of underwear

He reached into
his wallet
hands trembling
and I remembered
working at an insurance
company years ago…

If, as Charles Sanders Peirce postulates the self is manifested in an individual’s interpretation of objects through thoughts generated by bodily feelings or actions, then it is possible we are not as free thinkers as we hope to be, but are instead impacted by the unconstrained forces of society. While Thrift Store Metamorphosis is a book full of humanity and what humans do to themselves and others it is grounded in generosity, compassion, and self-reflection. This is a transformative and necessary read for those of us who are considering the essential questions of our time and who want to embody equity, peace, and inclusion as answers.

May 2024 be a year full of poetry.

Katch Campbell is a connector. With a master’s degree in Science and an MFA in poetry, she creates metaphors for her patients and others about the world around us. Her work is an inquiry on the atrocities we commit consciously and unconsciously against each other and the universe. Katch serves as Vice President and is a permanent faculty member at the River Pretty Writing Retreat, a bi-annual workshop in the Ozarks. She has co-led immersive poetry trips to Slovenia and Italy and used to edit for ZoMag.com.

Ekphrasis: Poems and Art

December 12, 2023 Brooke Palma

Ekphrasis: Poems and Art

Welcome to a new Mad Poets blog, to be offered quarterly.

It’s a pleasure to write about the relationship between poetry and other art forms, to examine ways that a various creative arts relate to each other.

My aim in this blog is to feature the work of various poets and artists, to let you know of interesting viewing opportunities and to provide some angles that might prompt your own writing.

Lisa DeVuono: This Time Roots, Next Time Wings

Upside-Down World
After Rumi

Jasmine flowers jump off the roof
Old basements hide loneliness

Fifteen trucks sleep at the weigh station
The highway is a thin teepee of disappearance

Shoes slip into the ground
Wandering grows under my feet

I walk through deep space
My lap is big enough for joy

More remnants for describing fog
Words spit – fire-crackering the sky

Two by two they descend into the dream
Infinite blue, this cobalt store

Ten more times to write
What died last night can be whole today

Recently, I’ve been thrilled to delve into Lisa DeVuono’s new book, This Time Roots, Next Time Wings, her fine collection of poems and monoprints. Lisa is a local poet, artist, performer, and seasoned workshop facilitator who has worked for many years with a variety of diverse communities.

Ever since meeting her years back at a poetry therapy conference, I have admired Lisa’s dedication to using poetry as a tool to deepen our understanding of ourselves and others. More recently, I was intrigued to learn about her ekphrastic practices of pairing visual images of her prints with her poems.

Creative expression has long been important to Lisa, beginning when she was in elementary school, crafting poems, covering her schoolbooks with collaged words and images and transcribing the words of admired poets. Visual art always surrounded her and her father was a jewelry designer who painted and made wood carvings.

Lisa says that the intention of her creative work is to connect. What drives her is its healing, spiritual, and transformational possibilities. She personally experienced its power and potential in 1999 while healing from Lyme’s disease. This led to her connection with the National Association for Poetry Therapy and a focus on writing’s therapeutic aspects as she began to lead workshops with different populations.

Among her many accomplishments, Lisa cofounded IT AIN’T PRETTY, a collective of women writers and performers. For ten years she coached and trained mentors through the Artist Conference Network, which supports artists in their creative projects. She has facilitated poetry workshops with teenagers in recovery and with cancer patients as well as individuals with ALS and their families. Her poetry curriculum, Poetry as a Tool for Recovery: A Guide in Eight Easy Steps, was published by the Institute for Poetic Medicine.

Visual artists whom Lisa admires are Henri Matisse, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Joseph Cornell, whose sculptural 3D works particularly inspire her. She has been influenced by poets Naomi Shihab Nye, W. S Merwin, Ted Kooser, Li-Young Li, and Rumi. Her husband, Michael London, is a musician and together they have performed the poetry of Rumi that he has adapted into song. Music is particularly important to Lisa, as she says that it bypasses the critic in her brain and allows her to be open to receiving inspiration.

During the pandemic, Lisa took up visual art-making intensely, creating gel prints at home and putting aside her writing for a while. She experimented making hundreds of one-of-a-kind monoprints. The meditative, playful and intuitive process of printmaking captured her imagination. And, indeed, some poems came out of all this. (To learn more about gel prints, which involve using a gel plate and paints to print on paper, there is much information available online.)

Ghost
I am out of tricks today
no new ways to make you remember
who I am to you – you’re the mother, I’m the daughter

cajoling words on a swaying rope bridge
where our collective memory might hold us
in the middle of this uncertain footing
where illumination of love might shine

all over the world, stars are dying out

just because there is a crack in everything
doesn’t always mean the light gets in

You are the very disappearance of light
a person traveling backwards
into a tiny pinhole of knowing
down a long tunnel of narrow

To follow you there
I must forget who we’ve been
get small again
like a child in the dark
shine a flashlight to my face

“See Mama, I’m the ghost.”

It was fascinating to hear Lisa talk about her approach to printmaking, and gave me much to think about vis-à-vis how visual artmaking might relate to writing poems. She loves playing with color and seeing how mark making enhances images. She talks about the resulting images as springing from emotions in the body that might otherwise be hard to access. “Through an external stimulus, a valve or channel in the body gets opened energetically and needs to be expressed,” she shared.

For Lisa’s latest book project, This Time Roots, Next Time Wings, she had initially thought it would be a chapbook. However, with support and advice from an artist friend, Mia Bosna, she decided to include images of her prints alongside several of her poems. She chose a larger format for the book than originally intended in order to pair images and texts. Putting the book together, she matched prints and poems and felt that this process evokes freshness-- which I felt as well seeing her poems and print side-by-side.

I highly recommend This Time Roots, Next Time Wings, Lisa’s wonderful new book, which delves into family history as well as her own journey of self-knowledge and exploration. It offers a multi-textured collection of works based on music, poetry, art, memory and connection.

For more about Lisa, including her upcoming readings -- https://www.lisadevuono.com/

Review of Raining with the Sun Out by Steve Delia

December 6, 2023 Brooke Palma

Raining with the Sun Out

Parnilis Media

$15.00

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Jennifer Schneider

“Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.”

— John Ruskin

Steve Delia’s Raining with the Sun Out is all such things and a perfect reading choice for all kinds of weather. The collection captures emotions across life’s seasons and continuously surprises in ways only a rain shower followed by a spectacular sunset, sunrise, or rainbow can. Raining with the Sun Out is a celebratory work, both tribute and triumph and grounded in life throughout the Philadelphia region (with camaraderie and literary locals such as the Glenside and Fox Chase Libraries, a recurring theme).

Raining with the Sun Out unites a new volume of pieces with previously published, slightly updated favorites. Albeit cliche, the saying that the sum is often greater than its individual parts highlights truth in this context as, being a first-time reader of both collections, I can’t imagine reading one without the other. As Delia explains in the Preface (3), the collection is a “twofer” (like “CDs where you get two albums on one CD”) and, I’d add, a celebration well worth the time spent reading.

The collection honors those who influenced the work and its individual pieces, either directly or indirectly, and serves as a model for rich storytelling. It’s a verifiable and self-described bonus book (a “double feature”) that includes a reproduction of the 2007 chapbook 1622 Church Street and its gorgeous illustrations compliments of artist Lisa Lutwyche, as well as Between the Books (positioned appropriately in the collection’s middle). 1622 Church Street serves as the collection’s final part, with seventeen poems, each of which was born out of an initial list bearing the collection’s name. (Delia continues to inspire in list form in Raining with the Sun Out. See, for example, “Prescription for Happiness” and “Prescription for Misery.”

Whereas 1622 Church Street compiles Delia’s earliest memories, from smells to music to the people that make life worth living (and well lived), Raining with the Sun Out is a present-focused compilation of the author’s more recent lived experiences. While for Delia, a gifted storyteller who shares generously, “the present is always more interesting than the past” (3), I claim new-to-me favorite pieces and shared wisdom and life lessons throughout the entire collection. Delia’s past, as shared in 1622 Church Street , shines with compelling narratives that provide seeds for the present collection.

Delia is generous across theme and style. The author masterfully takes the familiar (see “Familiar Faces”), with many pieces dedicated) and turns otherwise ordinary interactions, foods (scrapple and cheesecake repeated mentions), and moments (baseball another frequent reference) –

for example,

“Abbey Strings”

Abbey takes her seat
at the critique table
long strings swing
from her sweatshirt
sway across pages of her poetry
maybe they have a suggestion, too

into seeds and themes of friendship, fear, love, loss, death, and the power of writing through all of life’s experiences. In “Familiar Strangers” and the collection as a whole, Delia turns strangers into friends and readers into fans.

It’s a journey in both literal (from “The Cellar” to “Illusions, Holmesburg 1966-1986”) and figurative form. It’s a mirror into a life lived richly and an invitation to come along. It’s overly simplistic to say the collection is a pure delight to read, but it is. The pieces span decades and take on a type of dance, with each piece both a movement in a life and a window into a life well-lived. An authentic storyteller, Delia not only invites you into his home - whether 1622 Church Street or otherwise, but makes you want to stay with delicious offerings of whimsy and depth atop otherwise ordinary interactions.

For example, “Sex and the Solar System”

“They are really cool underpants, you said
but there is a hole in Jupiter
then you went off on some scientific tangent
that normally I might find interesting

and “My Date with Cecily”

Living out a fantasy
I was going out on a date
with Cecily Tynan
the gorgeous local news weather forecaster
We have perfect weather
I said to Cecily”

Delia’s love and admiration for those of whom he writes is palpable. The collection inspires reflection on those who influence our lives as well as connection through strung words, memories, and poetic phrasing. Delia opens the door into his own remarkable life, built of ordinary turned extraordinary moments, and, in doing so, opens the door for readers to unite in the joys of poetry and its potential to transform.

Delia teaches as he entertains. Poems not only provoke reflection, but also demonstrate the power of writing to capture moments so that meaning might be made.

In Writing about Writing, Delia shares tips –

“Writing Tips”

Never argue with the muse
you will never win

“White Space”

the galaxy where there is nothing to explore
the nothing that means something
sacrificing itself
for the good of the poem

“Defined by Verse”

My poems trust me
even when I don’t
trust myself
they keep me grounded
when I’m airborne
they will define me
after I am gone

The collection’s style and form vary, with pieces that include, in part, a letter, prose, memoir, and poetic verse. Delia applies repetition throughout the collection to create a familial and familiar feel across character, theme, and experience while simultaneously ensuring each piece is utterly unique.

For example, “They Swore”:

She swore
she would appreciate him more
but she never got close
never learned
how to play horseshoes

He swore
he would never make her cry
now he won’t even throw her
a life jacket

Raining with the Sun Out is the best of all weather patterns and a perfect jacket companion for any type of weather. This lively book aptly captures the nostalgia and anticipation that accompany change and is primed to change the hours you spend with its contents for the better. Get your pencils ready, as well, for the work will both warm and inspire waves of new verse. Most of all, soak up the author’s tremendous poetic prowess and enjoy the work’s expansive embrace.) and figurative form. It’s a mirror into a life lived richly and an invitation to come along. It’s overly simplistic to say the collection is a pure delight to read, but it is. The pieces span decades and take on a type of dance, with each piece both a movement in a life and a window into a life well-lived. An authentic storyteller, Delia not only invites you into his home - whether 1622 Church Street or otherwise, but makes you want to stay with delicious offerings of whimsy and depth atop otherwise ordinary interactions.

Review of Runnemede Boy by Dave Worrell

November 29, 2023 Brooke Palma

Runnemede Boy

Parnilis Media

$14.95

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Abbey J. Porter

In his recently published book Runnemede Boy, poet Dave Worrell takes us on a journey back in time, into his childhood in Runnemede, New Jersey, in the 1950s and ’60s. In a series of verbal sketches, Worrell gives us a glimpse of those formative elements: interactions with family, the rituals of youth, the moments that can shape a life.

Worrell uses archival material to good effect. In the opening poem, aptly named “Snapshots,” he concludes the description of several childhood photos with a quote from his first-grade report card:

David daydreams now and then,
but comes back to us when we really need him.
He could use more practice carefully
coloring inside the lines.

Worrell does not interpret these lines for us but rather leaves his readers to make of them what we will. This technique is typical of the minimalist style he employs throughout the collection, and it resurfaces in “Dare You…I Dare You.” In this poem, he describes being driven to a Cub Scouts meeting and on the way seeing “two kids jumping/real hard on the frozen lake.” What follows is a series of fragments that seem representative of the nature of memory: hearing sirens, running down the lake, one of the kids’ older brothers diving in to try to save them. Ultimately, one child drowns. Worrell ends with:

Mrs. Di Ciano took us back
to the meeting. Then we went
to the woods on a nature hike.

What he doesn’t say is as powerful as what he does.

Worrell’s style is matter-of-fact. One gets the sense of someone making an honest examination of the past and its artifacts, with the goal of discovering something.

He shares details of the memories that snag in a child’s mind—such as in “A Boy’s First Big League Game.” The narrator accompanies his father, grandfather, and two uncles to a baseball game at Connie Mack Stadium in North Philadelphia. After the Dodgers’ Jackie Robinson gets a triple and the Phillies lose, a car full of people passes the narrator’s group, the driver smiling in his Dodgers cap.

Load ’a coal, Pop-Pop snarls.
Uncle Joe laughs. So does Uncle Bruce.
I turn to my father. He isn’t laughing.
He looks me straight in the eye,
shakes his head side-to-side and says No!
The others stop laughing, quiet down.

It’s not the only poem that touches on race. “Runnemede in the ’50s” opens with the statement, “There were no Black families in our town.” The narrator recounts how, when he was 4, his mother took him to Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia to see Santa Claus.

I asked out loud what was the matter
with those people, their skin. My mother
said God makes people in lots of colors.
The nearest Black woman smiled at me
but nobody else said or did anything.

Contemplating the seeming simplicity, yet profundity, of this moment—of this poem—I can’t help but compare it to the fraught state of today’s race relations.

These poems tend toward the straightforward, yet they also explore some of the subtleties of the human psyche. Such is the case with “Getting Right,” in which the narrator fails to protect another, smaller student from harassment by Lydon, “the rich kid in town.” The narrator doesn’t “feel right” until the next week

when I punched Calabrese in the mouth,
knocked out a tooth. Somebody said
he’d been saying stuff about Sharon.

We understand that the rumor about Calabrese is an excuse, that in his violent action, our speaker is attempting to work something out within himself.

Worrell stares at his past with a sort of clear-eyed bravery, writing about behavior (if one assumes the poems to be autobiographical) that he seems to look back on with guilt, shame, and regret. In “Shame,” the narrator steals money from his mother to buy baseball cards, and she finds out. In “I Should Have Turned Out Better,” he wonders, from the distance of age, why he had found it amusing to pick on another student.

The poems also relay the narrator’s first curious, awkward sexual experiences with girls. One of my favorites is “It Never Entered My Mind,” a gently nostalgic piece that recounts a relationship with a girl named Athena: “The ripe, flagrant ones usually snared me/but Athena always was nearby too.” He concludes: “We swapped books: Orwell and Salinger and Eliot/but it never entered my mind to ask her out.” To me, this poem captures the tender regret with which I know I look back on many episodes of my past.

This 46-page collection is an easy, accessible read, and you don’t have to have grown up in a small town in South Jersey to recognize the roads that Worrell travels. Just as the writer may be haunted by some of what he shares in this volume, you may find yourself inhabited by this arresting work.

Abbey J. Porter writes poetry and memoir about people, relationships, and life struggles. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Queens University of Charlotte, an MA in liberal studies from Villanova University, and a BA in English from Gettysburg College. Abbey works in communications and lives in Cheltenham, Pa., with her two dogs. You can visit her online at abbeyjportercomms.com.

Source: http://madpoetssociety.com/blog

Review of Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers by Kelly McQuain

November 15, 2023 Anthony Palma

Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers

Texas A&M University Press

$21.95

You can purchase your copy here.

Reviewed by Sean Hanrahan

The language in Kelly McQuain’s Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers is layered, evocative, rich, and, at times, either velvet-soft or bone-hard. It is no wonder that this outstanding collection was selected as part of the TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series, which “highlights a debut full-length collection by emerging authors from each state in the southern United States.” Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers represents the state of West Virginia. It is a well-deserved accolade for this powerful book that explores themes such as the sui generic construction of a queer identity, family relationships, the power of language itself, love, and memory in four sections.

The first section titled Ex Nihilo (Latin for out of nothing) explores the speaker’s creation of a queer identity in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia. One of the standout poems in this first section is the title poem where the speaker describes himself using some of the fauna found nearby:

You are Joe-Pye weed and yarrow root,
resolute with purpose, pinioned for sky?
Why then is your skin nothing but cockleburs?
Who fiddled with you—rewired deference
into difference? What if you never meet
the person you are meant to be?

The poem’s tonal shift from an uplifting skyward exuberance to a down-to-earth and painful contemplation is the breathtaking work of an immensely skilled poet. In the final stanza, the speaker wonders where he will be able to find his “authentic self.” The answer is eloquently “Not on this hill, not in that house./ Something calls you somewhere else.”

“Uncle,” a tripartite poem in the second section The Grieving Bone, casts a penetrating light on the speaker’s complex relationship with his family, in this case, his brother. “My brother phones to ask a favor/…So I was wondering, if you’d like, maybe,/ donate some sperm—an idea he tosses out/ like bathwater.” This request leads the speaker to consider procreation: “Is it right to create something/ that can be taken away”? and in the second part of the poem, sperm itself:

I looked at my spunk under a microscope once…
I felt as close to that roommate as a brother,
told him what a Catholic schoolgirl once said,
how each time a boy masturbates “he spews death
on countless millions” and we laughed at all the times
we’d pleasured ourselves through mass genocide.

In the final part of “Uncle,” after the speaker has visualized being both father and uncle to a potential child, he is informed by his brother: “False alarm./ He switched to boxers.” Their relationship goes back to what it was “ghosting through each other’s lives.” McQuain ends this powerful meditation with the lines

Sometimes I see children—
older brothers. The way they wrestle,
bodies sweaty, getting knotted,
steeped in tensions and smells
—armpits, peanut butter, sour milk—
until, with a twist, one gets the upper hand:
stronger pins weaker, makes him cry uncle.

“Mechanical Bull” in the third section Bite and Balm is love drunk with the sounds and meanings of language itself. It is a whimsical and humorous poem that successfully sustains an insect metaphor throughout.

Tonight he feels the need for a strange word
in his head: lepidopterist perhaps…
This queer honky-tonk he’s come to
verges on colony collapse disorder
and he is wingless, friendless
whiskeyed thoughts abuzz

While riding a mechanical bull, the speaker’s thoughts and observations on words grow more frenzied in time to the buckling:

Somewhere a lone moth slo-mo struggles
beneath a chloroform cloth, while our rider
puffs his spirit, holds on, clings to strange airs;
he crams his brain with ten-dollar words;
oleaginous (covered in grease),
batrachophagous (eater of frogs).

This poem is a tour de force and evidence of McQuain’s use of line breaks, meter, and diction to create a comic and melancholic effect.

For the final section of the book Tin Hearts, I decided to highlight the gorgeous poem, “Memory Is a Taste that Lingers on the Tongue.” The speaker and a presumed lover visit St. John in the US Virgin Islands, and he recalls

Down to town we drove: the docks
of Cruz Bay beleaguered by tourists; the streets
bottlenecked with cars from the ferry
spilling past whitewashed shops and houses
drowning in late sun and the purples and pinks
of frangipani, bougainvillea, hibiscus.

On the docks, they meet a “bare-chested fisherman” who is gutting a red snapper while another one’s gills were still “fishing against the world’s air.” They both the fish and had a romantic dinner as the poem ends “Even now I can taste that red snapper in my mouth.”

Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers is a magnificent debut full-length collection from Kelly McQuain, who previously has written chapbooks entitled Velvet Rodeo and Antlers. I highly recommend you check the work of this lyrical, insightful, and clever poet out. Buy a copy for yourself, but a copy for a friend. You will not regret the time spent in McQuain’s company.