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

November 6, 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.

Welcome Home (We are here)

(written in Bridgehampton, NY 6.27.15)
by Tonita Austin aka Toni Love

Gray birds whisper through the trees

Ancestors swaying the leaves

Calling my name in threes

Tonita

Toni

Niiii-taaa

e are HERE

WE are here

We ARE here

and so should you be

here

present

listening

walking

breathing

feeling

touching

writing

connecting with us

We have wisdom to speak into you

Those chirps are a call to action

The leaves of soft swaying trees beckon you to come near

Those are drums in the distance

We are the Lenape, the Massai and Blackfoot

The soil moist beneath your feet is comfort for your journey

We are you

You are we

We are here

When you are here the sun beams and the clouds part because of your presence

This feels like home because you are home

Yemaya we call you

Oshun misses you

There is peace here

Come

Sit

Hear

Embrace

Inhale

Exhale

It is safe here

This is no coincidence

We have called you and you listened

Never forget us

Stay open

We need you to tell our stories

If you take the time to listen

We will always welcome you home

Although you may leave

We do not

We are here

I chose this poem because this is the month we recognize First Nation people, the original owners of this land, and also when many Indigenous people honor and celebrate their ancestors. I wrote this poem in about five minutes. I felt drawn to the outdoors,particularly to a large oak tree in the back of a home in Bridgehampton, NY. Just moments before, I was thinking about quitting poetry, as I was tired of trying to fit into the local spoken word scene. At the time I did not realize that we were close to a reservation, but I now believe that my African and Native American ancestors called me out of the house because they had something to tell me. I walked out into the grass with pen and paper in hand, sat next to the big tree and this poem came to me instantly.

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/.

Fiction for Poets

October 18, 2023 Brooke Palma

Fiction for Poets

in which one poet writes to other poets about writing fiction

Prose Writer Approaches the Open Mic, aka Dead Man Walking

All right friends, it’s time we chat about one of the most sacred – and safely guarded – experiences in the poetry world: the public reading.

Imagine if you will the opening sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey (or Barbie – choose your frame of reference, either will do). Instead of a monolith or a giant Barbie doll, an enormous mic stand suddenly appears. The prehistoric creatures marvel; they approach with curiosity and trepidation; and upon realizing its power to amplify their voices and force others to pay attention, they quickly battle over who will take control. After millions of years of evolution, they find a way to order this chaos: they create sign up sheets, impose time limits, and enlist MCs. They design the open mic poetry reading, and all hums along with relative ease.

Sure, there’s that guy who always reads for 10 minutes when he’s given five. You know the one, he turns to the MC and asks, “I have time for just one more, right?” But he’s not really asking, and “one more” is really three. Then there’s the woman who doesn’t want to go over her time but also can’t sacrifice a single piece, so she races through seven poems in three minutes. By the end she’s panting because she didn’t let herself breathe between the words, and no one has the heart to tell her they didn’t understand anything she said. There’s the whisperer, who speaks so softly even the microphone can’t help, and the impatient audience member who then screams from the back, “We can’t hear you!” (which only intimidates the whisperer even more). We have yellers, who bring their mouths too close to the mic and then unleash their angriest poems with booming voices that nearly burst our eardrums. We have over-explainers, who spend four minutes introducing a four-line poem. We have entertainers, who can’t decide if they’re poets or stand-up comics. We have legends (in their own minds), who believe they’re doing us all a favor just by showing up. And, finally, the passive-aggressives, who criticize everyone who’s gone before them, casually mentioning all the things they won’t do with their three minutes. (“I’m only going to read this one piece, and I’m not going to talk too much about it. I know there’s a long list. I’m sorry I’m not very funny. Can you hear me? Thanks. I don’t want you to have to strain.”).

For the better part of 17 years, I hosted poetry readings, literary events, and open mics, and when I wasn’t hosting, I was sitting in the audience waiting to read my own work. I know this scene – it’s egos and eccentricities. And lest you think I hold myself apart, I will freely admit: I have been every one of those characters above at some time or another. Recently, I’ve even had the chance to be the most loathed open mic-er of them all: the prose writer.

Have you ever felt an entire audience cringe, as they inwardly wish for your immediate spontaneous combustion? Step to a mic and say, “I’m going to read an excerpt from my story….” The disdain is palpable.

Unfair as it feels, it’s not an unfounded revulsion. Too many prose writers have no idea how to read their own work. To be clear, many poets aren’t very good at it either, but at least they’re familiar with the rules of the game. So much of poetry is based on sound and musicality that most poets (at least most of the poets I know) read their work aloud as they write, so they are well practiced when it comes to speaking the words in front of an audience. Prose writers, not so much. Stories and essays can be beautifully written, poetic, and musical, and the best ones are. But they’re also full of mechanical maneuvers, necessary to develop characters or propel plot, and some of that stuff just isn’t pretty. Important, yes. Beautiful when read aloud. Um… no.

And I believe this is why prose writers are often flummoxed by the time constraints of an open mic or public reading. It’s hard to figure out how much story fits into three minutes. They want to introduce characters. They want to set up suspense. They want to pique our interest. But they fail to understand that if they take up too much time and test an audience’s patience, none of those things will matter.

So, here’s what I’ve learned about giving public readings: If you’re going to read fiction, read it like a poet. Many of the best prose readings I’ve heard were given by writers who began as poets, and here’s what they do. They pick the beautiful passages: the meditative descriptions, inner monologues, reflections. They pick the pieces that show – scene, character, situation. They don’t worry so much about “what happens,” as how it sounds. They read sections of their work that flow naturally, elegantly, sections that seem to rise out of the chest, float through the mouth, and pass easily across the lips, as unpracticed as an exhale.

Of course, if you’re going to read prose, you must practice. You need to hear the words out loud, find the stumbling blocks, and awkward bits. You also need to time yourself. In fact, time yourself a few times reading a few different sections – and variations of sections (starting here or there, ending there or here). Give yourself options so you can change things up based on the mood in the room, just as you would if you were reading poems. Don’t take for granted that you know how to do this. But also, trust that you do. This is one of those places where being a poet is a great advantage in the prose world.

It’s also an opportunity to turn an entire room on its head. When you trust your poetic instincts and let them guide the way you read anything aloud, most times I suspect those cringed faces and tight shoulders will soften, and that skeptical (if not downright hostile) audience will grow mesmerized. If you’re really good, they may even forget you sullied their sacred poetry reading with your dreaded story.

Please drop your thoughts in the comments. Or email me: autumn@autumnkonopka.com.

Autumn Konopka is a writer and teaching artist who enjoys coffee, running, and reggaeton. She's currently working on her first novel, which she expects to publish in early 2023. Find her online: autumnkonopka.com.

Review of Ghost Signs by Sean Hanrahan

October 11, 2023 Brooke Palma

Ghost Signs
by Sean Hanrahan

Alien Buddha Press

$11.25

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Katch Campbell

Transcendence and Symbols: A Review of Sean Hanrahan’s Ghost Signs

In Tibetan, the word for awakening is changchub: chang (“self-purifying”) and chub (“self-expanding”). It is said that the awakened state is the natural path our mind seeks to move obstacles and misunderstandings behind us so we can continue outward.

As we age, our awakened state provides a new view of life. In youth, we see our body as a noun, an entity with fixed functions and properties and as we age our bodies change so that if we continue to look at them from a fixed lens, we become frustrated inside a stunted state of being. However, if we are growing outward, toward wisdom or enlightenment we begin to see our body as a verb with functions and properties that are in constant motion, changing through time and perspective. The body as verb includes an array of elements without boundary, in constant change that includes the process of aging. Aging is a gathering of symbols then letting them go on our way toward transcendence.

Sean Hanrahan’s new full length collection, Ghost Signs, reflects on one life’s symbols, the obstacles of body as noun, and the freedom of awakening to body as verb. It is a narrative of a life full of joy, confusion, passion, pain, suffering, hope, and eventually letting go.

While the collection of nearly 50 poems does not strictly follow a linear timeline, there is a sense of young to old. Innocence and wisdom are introduced early on.

In the first stanza of the first poem, “Lemon Hill,” Hanrahan recounts

I sit here among the purple
Weeds of Lemon Hill, glancing
Down towards Boathouse Row,
Reflecting on the future probabilities
Of my former selves. Certain mistakes
I have made led me to you, my love,

And the second stanza provides a nod to the collection’s arc:

Which of my important days led me
To this moment on Lemon Hill,
And which ordinary days were perfect
In that they had no subsequent impact,
In that they were self-contained,
Satisfied with themselves and a meandering,
Inconsequential unspooling.

There are poems that speak to body as noun: “Skinny Tattooed Legs,” “Autumn Leaves,” “Boots and Bonnets” as well as body as verb: “History Lesson,” “Accordion Line,” “Wedding Gift,” and “Turbulence”. Each skillfully combines past with present and offers up lessons that lead to transcendence.

Part of the collection’s strength is Hanrahan’s use of object as symbol. I am reminded of Simic’s use of objects as a commentary to everyday life and to the existential. Hanrahan uses well placed object poems throughout the collection to slow the pace of the collection, draw out the importance of the objects within other pieces, and to reflect. Specific poems to look for include “Couch,” “Avo,” and “Emma”.

The heart of Buddhist practice is to cease placing limits on the vast expanse of the awakened state. To let go of thinking that seeks to make the awakened state serve our anxious purposes, to let awareness, observation, attentiveness dissolve into the vast awakening as streams flow to the sea.

Dogen Zenji said: “When the world ends, and the fires blaze unobstructedly through everything, and all falls to ruin, we just follow circumstance.”

Hanrahan’s Ghost Signs takes the reader on a journey toward transcendence, through body, mind, object, and narrative. As he writes in the last lines of the final poem: “But write about me, write about us, write about yourself and pretend it’s me. What’s the difference? We are what people choose to commemorate.”

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

October 10, 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.

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.

Lisa DeVuono

This Time Roots, Next Time Wings

Cento: Refugees
from Tiny Journalist by Naomi Shihab Nye

The moon sees us.

We are outdated shrines,
many orphans
from the pavement of neglect.

Forgotten perimeter
Around the edge of winter
in its camouflage of grief

Our voices pour out
through a hole in the floor.
Where is the door to our story?

How will we sing our names?

From the solitude of bruises
to the tight throat of alert.
Where is our lucky number?

A word is brave --
we never know how far
a voice can travel.

Life has loveliness to sell,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,

Who will be left to enter the calligraphy of joy?

Upside-Down World (After Rumi)
by Lisa DeVuono

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 star

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

This summer 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 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
by Lisa DeVuono

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/.

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.

Local Lyrics - Featuring Dave Worrell

October 9, 2023 Brooke Palma

Snapshots
by Dave Worrell

At seventeen months,
on the dining room floor,
I sit bent over my alphabet book,
my chubby fingers reach
to turn the page.

In the back yard,
at four years old,
in a Lone Ranger cowboy hat—|
twin six-shooters dangle from my waist.

First day of kindergarten, short
pants and polo shirt,
me and two neighborhood buddies
drape our arms over each others’ shoulders.

With little Jimmy, at Christmastime—
together we watch Howdy Doody
on our tiny new Magnavox.
I sit behind my Hot Shot drum set.

The following Christmas,
still toting six-shooters,
I’m gazing at the Nativity scene
that Mother had put
on the dining room hutch.
Little Jimmie, three years old,
is pointing at the barnyard animals.

My first grade teacher wrote:
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.

Why is poetry your artistic medium? How did you get started with poetry?
I learned in about the second grade that my drawing skills would never develop beyond the stick–person level. I played trumpet for three years during my teens, but never got beyond the point where my lip hurt. A high school female friend and I shared a love of reading—Sallinger, Huxley, Orwell and, notably, classical haiku and T.S. Eliot. I was a lit major in college and studied all the greats and since clearly I could never hope to create at that level, I was inhibited from even trying until I reached the age of 56 at which point I figured what the hell and began trying to write poems. Why poetry and not fiction or playwrighting? Probably practical reasons, since I was working full-time until age 63, and part-time for another 10 years. It seemed more feasible to create works of between 10 to 30 lines, and perfect them as best I could, than to compose 300 pages of fiction.

What is your creative process like? How do you get from all possible blank page to a finished work?My poems spring from a variety of muses/stimuli–interactions with friends and loved ones, baseball, solitary experiences, random images, jazz; speculation on life, love and death. Also, see below the Answer, below concerning how I transform memory into poetry.

You have been a longtime open mic host. What draws you to the open mic poetry scene? What makes for a successful open mic?
I try to listen carefully and seize upon something in the poems that resonates with me so I can make comments that communicate appreciation and connection. We all started out at some point, unsure whether our work was worthy. Novice poets need encouragement and thrive on it.

Your debut poetry collection, Runnemede Boy, is out now. Tell us a little about it.
It is a kind of memoir in verse form—a story of a boy growing up In the 1950s and 60s in a small blue-collar town in Camden County, New Jersey. While not everyone experienced the full benefit of post-World War II prosperity—let’s face it: it was a time of significant remaining racial injustice—it was a fortunate, wonderful time of nearly-full employment, strong unions, and decent, living wages for our family and those like us. My book tries to capture that era through the eyes of a child/adolescent.

What is your strategy for transforming memory into poetry?
My best answer is: from the moment my brain conceives the kernel of a poem, I write it down as quickly as possible, try not to edit or refine it at all in that first rough draft. Then, revise, revise, revise, get advice from peers, critique groups, etc. and then revise and revise some more. Repeat that cycle a few times until I’m satisfied that I can’t make the poem any better. That process can take anywhere from a few months to a few years.

Do you have any upcoming events? Where can readers read more of your work /buy your book?
October 11, 6 PM, Northeast Philly Library 2228 Cottman Ave.

October 20, 7 PM, Inkwood Books, 106 Kings Highway East

November 1, 7 PM, Wallingford Community Arts Center, 414 Plush Mill Road, Wallingford

The book also is available on Amazon.

Dave Worrell’s verse memoir, Runnemede Boy, was published by Parnilis Media in 2023. His chapbook, We Who Were Bound, was published in August 2012 by Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press. His limited-edition ekphrastic collection, Close to Home, appeared in 2015, featuring paintings by Catherine Kuzma. Dave’s poems have appeared in Slant, Canary, Shot Glass Journal, Painted Bride Quarterly, Schuylkill Valley Journal, U.S. 1 Worksheets, Exit 13 and elsewhere. He has performed his music-backed poems at Chris’ Jazz Café in Philadelphia and The Cornelia Street Café in New York.

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 - Tonita Austin (aka Toni Love)

October 2, 2023 Brooke Palma

I Remember You (For Mommy)
by Tonita Austin aka Toni Love

With every embrace
I remember you
In every poem I write
I honor you
Each boo-boo I kiss
Every time I drop everything to respond to a call from the school
I invoke glimpses of your face
I remember you
Prayers tucked into wrinkles of your hands
Wisdom in the tight grey coils that framed a crown of compassion on your forehead
Baby oil in the bathtub and Vaseline on your feet
Callouses from walking your journey with no shoes
Allowing the earth as a cushion beneath
Fourteen years, 5,110 days, 112640 hours and 7,358,400 minutes
The time lapse does not stop tears and memories from flooding my heart
I remember you
Homemade cigarettes in the basement
We watched not knowing you found comfort exhaling
You inhaled concoctions of joy, sadness, loss and grief
The exhale both liberating and toxic
I speak of you to your grandchildren
Chance meetings as souls passed in transition
They remember you though never met you here on earth
I hear you in the deep vibrato of Nina Simone and Lou Rawls
I smell you in the cinnamon nutmeg infused sweet potato pie I can’t quite get to taste the same way
I see you in the eyes of my son you ushered onto this plane
The time he came through me was your birth date
My children speak of past lives with you
I cry for you
I laugh with you
I speak to you
I still need you
I wait
To hear you
I call and you still answer
I remember you
And thank you
For remembering me too

I chose this poem because I wrote this in remembrance of my Mother Ethel. October 1st is her birthday and although we lost her so very early in her life, at the age of 58, once I moved past the grief I could see how present she was in my life still in so many ways.

Review of Alphabet of Mo(u)rning by Kari Ann Ebert

September 27, 2023 Brooke Palma

Alphabet of Mo(u)rning

Lily Press

$40.00

You can purchase a copy here. (MPS blog readers: Use discount code MADPOETS15 to enjoy 15% off your total purchase.)

Reviewed by Abbey J. Porter

Kari Ann Ebert’s recent chapbook, Alphabet of Mo(u)rning, is a nuanced contemplation of opposing forces: desire and death, presence and absence, the physical and the ethereal.

Ebert is as precise as she is subtle, giving attention to each word, each space, and arranging her poems thoughtfully on the page.

Desire hums at a low frequency throughout this 30-page collection. In “Rumination #9,” there is “only the thing-pile backlit by desire in the cold still space behind the wall.” In “Waking Up,” one of the more electrifying poems in the bo

we longed to quicken the dead

To sink into that lightning strike like butter into a hot iron pan to melt to burn
To stave off this ache for a few seconds more. Oh to become the I in revive

In the same poem, Ebert writes of the potential in both the seen and unseen. She describes the invisible, flammable power that runs just beneath the surface:

The heat of a single thought can bloom into flame
Enough to warm a family of four.

The potential for fever claws beneath the skin cool to the touch

She depicts a tension between presence and absence in “Major Tom,” in which she says, “How can you tell if you’re empty or filled density & void/ could pass as twins.” Intellect is not enough of an anchor in this world, as “to be grounded in reason is to vanish like breath.” The solution, it seems, comes in the physical. Ebert writes, “press your mouth to my wrist again/ make me fathom your name.” Here is connection; here is understanding.

Ebert seems to ask, How do we know each other? “I used to drink/ each night while I wished to see your heart ,” she says in “Maadulampazham (in which Her Daughter Hears the Diagnisis).” And in “Writing Love Poems in Pencil,” she says,

I am not a mathematical
equation to be proved
or disproved

I will not
be documented
mechanically

One might ask, What loss does Ebert mourn here? Perhaps the answer is that she mourns what might have been, what cannot be.

Absence is a persistent presence in “Here I am with Wings Tucked Inside my Body.” “Here I am/ sniffing the remnant of your shirt I use to practice my stitching,” our narrator says. “At night I crawl/ under covers that smell of muscle rub & lavender oil.” Inevitably, I wonder, Who has left these traces? She also mentions “clouds/ thick as the wave of your hair,” summoning a “you” who remains unnamed, unseen, unknown.

In keeping with its title, death is a recurring theme in this work. Ebert writes how “Aglossa Cuprina the grease moth attracted to light/ & sugar feeds on the grease of decomposing bodies.” And in “Waking Up,” she refers to “The incandescence of death a light that curls its finger the C in beckon.”

This is densely packed poetry that deserves—even demands—more than a once-over. The more time I’ve spent with it, the more it has revealed. So put your feet up and settle in with this thought-provoking volume. The effort will be richly rewarded.

Abbey J. Porter writes poetry and memoir about people and relationships, life and loss—sometimes even with a bit of humor. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Queens University of Charlotte, an MA in liberal studies from Villanova University, and a BA in English from Gettysburg College. Abbey is a professional freelance writer and editor who lives in Cheltenham, Pa., with her two beloved dogs. You can visit her online at abbeyjportercomms.com.

Source: http://madpoetssociety.com/blog

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

September 25, 2023 Brooke Palma

The Colored Leaves (from 1974)
by Tonita Austin aka Toni Love

The colored leaves so bright and pretty
falling on the ground, oh what a pity
leaves of beauty like a colored carpet
an orange bonfire or a golden trumpet

But when Jack Frost comes and paints like an artist
The colored leaves are buried all tight

Like a frosted winter blanket at night

I always think of this poem when September rolls around; it makes me think of those first days of school and also signals the proximity of the fall season. I decided to choose it as my poem for September because it was the very first poem that I ever wrote, and I recently found the typewritten original in my basement. I was in third grade and it was the first time I learned about poetry. I decided to write about the change of the season and for some reason my teacher thought it was exceptional and I ended up reading it at some poetry contest at school. I don't recall if I won but it has stuck with me since third grade and I can still recite it from memory today, decades later!

Review of Every Living Day by Adam Gianforcaro

September 20, 2023 Anthony Palma

Every Living Day

Thirty West Publishing House

$16.99

You can purchase your copy here.

Reviewed by Sean Hanrahan

Some poetry collections distill the everyday into a potent elixir or essence, and Adam Gianforcaro with his astounding full-length collection, Every Living Day, does exactly that. Whether he describes mowing the lawn, sitting poolside with contemporary fiction, or receiving a deep tissue massage, Gianforcaro writes with such crystalline precision, all the reader can do is gasp at the power of his diction and a moment of self-realization. His weighty themes include the environment, and the huge metaphysical obsession, time.

In the title poem, Gianforcaro hauntingly writes about the terrified (and terrifying) apathy we can often experience while pondering climate change:

When I can no longer kneel, I will wade myself
towards repentance—beg forgiveness
for folding banana peels in tin foil
for drinking coffee from a Keurig.
Every living day I fuck the earth with negligence.

Power in poetry often comes from a narrator’s complicity as Gianforcaro is well aware. He mentions other examples of how he “fucks the earth” by mowing over a mouse with his lawnmower, and “fall[ing] victim to fast fashion and Amazon Prime.” This poem ends with a rare perfect couplet: “And to give up that convenience, to do no harm/I’ll pretend to not know the answer when I ask, but how”?

In “Human History as Deep Tissue Massage,” Gianforcaro obliquely references the climate by way of an extended poem-length metaphor comparing human history, or perception of time itself, to a deep tissue massage. This brief, psychologically loaded poem explores the exquisite “relief between bursts of pointed pain./And before you know it time runs out…The smell of lavender fields and burning.” As a reader, I have had read few lines that drive home the real, menacing, slow-but-fast, existential dread of climate change. In his own way, Gianforcaro is an eco-warrior, looking at the danger our planet is facing without flinching.

Carrying on with the political themes that course through his poems, Gianforcaro examines modern queerness in “Queer Love Story.” As a queer poet myself, I always cheer when I come across an explicitly queer poem in a collection. In this complex poem, both religion and pop culture are brought into the mix. Across several couplets, the reader is led from “discrete everymen with harps” to “prophets picnicking with gasoline” to “dogma dangles us from the balcony/like the King of Pop.” The metaphors in Every Living Day are rich, surprising, and varied. “Queer Love Story” is both satirical and polemic in all the best ways. It ends with the strident lines:

Queer kids
spell trauma for every camera
they see. Anchors ask, What is it like
to kiss with the forked tongue of a sinner?
Like heaven, we say. Like a burning.

Some of my favorite poets are prophets: Whitman, Ginsburg, Dickinson. I have a new name to add to that list: Gianforcaro. Since the event had been saturated with a climatically anomalous rain (and media coverage), the poem “Not Everyone Thinks of the Festival When Hearing About Burning Man” leapt out at me. It also contains one of my favorite sequences in the collection:

Homos, heretics: human
bodies as woodpile,
as Sunday matinee.
Twigs piled and pressed
like lovers in heat
But I am afraid of fire
so I dress it in drag.

Those lines pull in so much of queer experience that I am dizzied and dazzled. Few things mean more to me as a poetry reader than an illumination into the queer past and future. I think this poem captures the apocalyptic vibes that occur throughout the book. As a reader, the poem “Poolside with a Paperback” called to me. But to be honest, so many of these poems called to me. In this poem, the narrator is tackling DeLillo:

Soon a chemical cloud
will enter the novel. I think, Yes of course. And I consider
the sun, count the willful ways it harms and heals.
Like a kind of lover, and entire government.

Gianforcaro weaves in some of DeLillo’s own prophetic words. I think one of the best things a writer can do is call out the inspiration of other writers. I have my own collegiate beef with DeLillo, but in light of this poem, I will give him another chance. Thank you, Adam, for this gift.

Talking about gifts, I think Every Living Day is one. It is deep, metaphysical, yet accessible and compulsively readable. Best of all, to me at least, it’s unabashedly queer. Of all the reviews I have written, this one was one of the easiest and hardest to write. Easiest since I found so much to love; hardest because there were too many poems to chose for in a review. I commend Adam Gianforcaro on a masterpiece. I think the least any reader of this review can do is drink from his enchanted well.

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.

Review of The Orphan Hydrangeas and Other Stories

September 19, 2023 Brooke Palma

The Orphan Hydrangeas and Other Stories

Parnilis Media

$15.00

You can purchase a copy here.

Special review by guest blogger, Robert Zaller

The multilingual Iranian- American poet and novelist Fereshteh Sholevar, long resident in the Philadelphia area and the recipient of numerous local and statewide awards, offers a moving and wide-ranging story collection in The Orphan Hydrangeas (Parnilis Media). Sholevar’s wide-ranging stories are set in various times and locales—Iran, Algeria, the United States—and deal eloquently with perennial themes—solitude, betrayal, persecution, love, and death. It is a world in which, as Sholevar notes in the brief tale, “The Cat Comes Back,” “All the lights of the universe have gone out.” Yet there is nothing in the stories that is lugubrious. Sholevar tells of tragedy with a light touch, with frequent sparks of humor and a Surrealist wit that make of her twists of plot and often unpredictable endings a banquet that keeps one coming back for more. Life, she suggests, isn’t set up to make sense, and death presides over it in the end.

Most frequently, Sholevar’s stories involve the relationship between individuals in which a stranger enters the protagonist’s life, transforms it, and mysteriously disappears. The confusion of who individuals are and what they represent is, for her, the central enigma of experience, from which all else follows. The “stranger,” however, often turns out to be the self, because division begins in the individual, and disappearance to be the wakening from a dream. Sholevar suggests that what we call ‘society’ is in its essential respects a projection of the personal dilemma into the hardened dogma of habit, rules, and institutions. It is here that cruelty and exploitation solidify themselves, creating the traps that ensnare the many, as in “The Guard,” where an orphanage, the pride of its town, serves as cover for a brutal pederast. But the reader is also cautioned against identifying too easily with the supposed victims of Sholevar’s stories, as in “The Watermelon,” in which a woman testifies to the physical and mental abuse she has endured at the hands of a cheating husband, only to confess casually at the end that she has killed him with blows from his favorite fruit.

Withal, Sholevar concludes—if there is a conclusion to be had—that, in the words of the possibly imaginary protagonist of “Sisyphus, I, and All That,” “It’s good to be alive. Suffering and beauty are what it’s all about.” Is the suffering worth the beauty, then? And are the two distinguishable?

Fereshteh Sholevar leaves us to figure that out for ourselves.

Robert Zaller, poet, critic, and historian, is a Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at Drexel University.

Local Lyrics - Featuring Roberto Carlos Garcia

September 18, 2023 Brooke Palma

This Moment / Right Now
for Monica Hand
by Roberto Carlos Garcia

there’s a whispered prayer blowing the crumbs of a season’s harvest
off a girl’s plate

& a roar breaks from her insides, the roar a lioness
a beast that knows

& a man kneels somewhere cupping his tears
for the loneliness he feels

though he’s surrounded by the world, & a finch in a tree singing
for a lover as the buds on its branch

pop into leaves that will flourish & welcome the green grasses,
Right now a boy is wondering

if people can really dodge bullets
& is he one of them & somewhere nobody bothers
to ask, they simply wait

Wind spins across the landscape they say God is twirling his fingers—
The heartbroken hook new bodies, night after night, drink after drink

& I dance—my feet mashing grapes for wine & I sing mockingly—
what is life / what is life

What are you interested in as a writer? What are your muses?
The human condition in the moment. Also, the ways in which history informs our daily lives. I think it is vital to be connected to that. Not just the history but to know who wrote that history and why, and what the counternarratives are and why. History has a lot to teach us.

Many of your poems bring light to the experiences of underrepresented communities. How can poetry be a tool for social justice?
Poetry or anything for that matter, can only be a tool for social justice if we speak our truth through the making of it, and the only way to do that is to truly investigate ourselves and our lives. This is hard work, and it is immensely terrifying. Not everyone is ready or willing to do that, for obvious reasons. It is lonely, it challenges our systems of reality, our choices and our habits, our fantasies, and so on. Any work that hasn’t attempted to do this soul / spirt / heart work can only be propaganda. And unfortunately, there’s more than enough propaganda to go around.

What inspires you in others' work? How do others' voices influence your own?
I like to be surprised. I love a great narrative, a great story. I want to feel when I read. I also like to see skill and play at work. That inspires me step my game up, it gets my creative juices flowing.

In addition to being a poet, you are the founder of Get Fresh Books Publishing. Can you tell us a little about this cooperative press?
The press was started to provide publishing opportunities for underrepresented voices. We wanted to offer a fee free alternative and we’ve been very successful thus far. If you’re reading this, please visit our online store and pick up a book or donate. We could really use your support.

And your new book?
My latest book, What Can I Tell You? Selected Poems is published by Flowersong Press out of McAllen Texas. It contains poems from my first three books. I believe readers will appreciate my poetic progression. It was challenging to decide which poems would be included. Ultimately, I feel like we did a great job putting it together.

What are your rhythmic strategies? How do you establish rhythm in your poems?
I try to capture the natural way people speak. I also like a lean line so that can sometimes push me to examine the syllabics and what that’s doing.

Where can readers find more of your work/buy your books?
I provide links to all my books and published work on my website. My books can be found wherever books are sold.

Poet, storyteller, and essayist Roberto Carlos Garcia is a self-described “sancocho […] of provisions from the Harlem Renaissance, the Spanish Poets of 1929, the Black Arts Movement, the Nuyorican School, and the Modernists.” Garcia is rigorously interrogative of himself and the world around him, conveying “nakedness of emotion, intent, and experience,” and he writes extensively about the Afro-Latinx and Afro-diasporic experience. Roberto's third collection, [Elegies], is published by Flower Song Press and his second poetry collection, black / Maybe: An Afro Lyric, is available from Willow Books. Roberto’s first collection, Melancolía, is available from Červená Barva Press.

His poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY Magazine, The BreakBeat Poets Vol 4: LatiNEXT, Bettering American Poetry Vol. 3, The Root, Those People, Rigorous, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Gawker, Barrelhouse, The Acentos Review, Lunch Ticket, and many others.

He is founder of the cooperative press Get Fresh Books Publishing, A NonProfit Corp.

A native New Yorker, Roberto holds an MFA in Poetry and Poetry in Translation from Drew University, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Review of Dear Selection Committee by Melissa Studdard

September 6, 2023 Brooke Palma

Dear Selection Committee

Jackleg Press

$13.04

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Jennifer Schneider

Melissa Studdard’s Dear Selection Committee
Memo to File: a must-read candidate

Thank you for your application. We’ll be in touch soon….

While waiting, pick up a copy of Melissa Studdard’s Dear Selection Committee for never has the dreaded, formulaic, and regularly unoriginal job application and wholly ambiguous and often soul-crushing interview and hiring process been so much fun. Structured as a job search, Dear Selection Committee packages and presents the sterile and generic process in an entirely unconventional and deeply authentic forty-four poem volume.

The collection takes the shape of an unnamed job seeker’s application process and doesn’t skip an email, follow-up request, or beat (yet continues to beat and reshape the way the process itself is both presented and contemplated). Studdard is both fearless and a fierce truth seeker who is unafraid of challenging conventionality. The text is a bold, “take me as I am” and “not as you wish me to be” statement that works to dismantle while also pushing for new ways of thinking, being, and doing.

The work opens with a prose poem and cover letter (titled “Dear Selection Committee”) which serves as both an anchor and a guide for the collection, with the remainder of the volume broken down into two parts (Interview and Application), with nine subsections (each mirroring a step, stage, or component of what we’ve been groomed to believe is a typical process) in each. The poems within each subsection speak to the associated step and the larger application process in ways that are deeply funny, brilliantly bold, and conversationally revealing.

Dear Selection Committee is a wildly fantastic take on how to magnify voices and experiences rarely offered a proper seat at the recruitment or reality table. Through its satire on the job application, the collection takes on serious themes including taboo topics often imposed upon the woman’s body (for example, “The Heart is a Muscular Organ,” ”, “Did I Do, O God, Did I As I Said I’d Do? Good! I Did.”, “Planted My Shame in the Backyard,” and “When My Lover Says Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.”

See,

“Did I Do, O God, Did I As I Said I’d Do? Good I Did!”

between my thighs
where my love is always required
where the dark bell forgot how to sleep”

and

from “When My Lover Says Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia”

I say, it’s not fear that matters, but where
you bury it. So he buries his
tongue inside me, and I tell him that sometimes I’m more afraid
of hearing what I know
than knowing it.”

With a sharp edge (and sharper pen) in combination with tremendous wit, Studdard gives everything and holds back nothing while calling out deeply problematic systems, norms, and realities, especially those faced by women. The pieces play internally as much as they do with their place in the larger collection. The poems are richly textured with strong, often surprising imagery that expands far beyond the life cycle of the typical job application.

For example, in “Hurricane, 3rd Day”, grouped in the “List Obstacles and Challenges You’ve Faced, and if Applicable, How You Overcame Them” subsection –

We hid in the belly of porcelain. The world
sang sirens overlapping, the sound of wind

taking gates from the hinge. That whistling, yes,
Whistling and whipping, the world the cry

of a cow caught in the spin of a twister and lifted,
Water creeping to the back door like a thief

and in “When I Say What for the Tenth Time in an Hour, You Ask if I Know What Happened to Beethoven’s Hearing”, grouped in the “Will You Need Any Special Accommodations or Supplies?” subsection –

and I say maybe it was a little Violet-backed Starling
flew into his ear and got trapped and all he could hear
after that was birdsong

Studdard crafts pieces that are brutally honest and poetically surprising. The collection is built, poem by poem, on truth and vulnerability. Each piece confides with readers in ways the job application never can nor will.

Studdard expertly turns the sterile application process into a fertile ground for poetic ruminations. Dear poetry readers everywhere -- this special collection by a special poet is not to be missed. Dear Selection Committee is highly recommended as the perfect candidate for your TBR list. You won’t regret the decision.

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.

Review of All the Rage in the Afterlife This Season

August 9, 2023 Brooke Palma

All the Rage in the Afterlife This Season

Finishing Line Press

$19.99

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Katch Campbell

Understanding the Unfathomable:
A Review of Marcus S Cafagña’s “All the Rage in the Afterlife This Season

In 1995, after being chosen for the National Poetry Series, for, The Broken World, Yusef Komunyakaa told Marcus Cafagña he was writing about trauma. True then (his wife Dianne committed suicide in 1993,) and true now, Cafagña is a poet who observes the smallest details and brings forth the emotions they elicit. Often his work is a processing of trauma, but Cafagña also weaves humor and playfulness into the space. During our conversations about his life and work Marcus shared that poems are not always about emotion, but “for me it is about 90% emotion.” “One summer at Community of Writers in Squaw Valley, I was able to have a dinner with Sharon Olds and she shared her thoughts on the eight levels of emotion. I left that dinner wanting to touch all eight levels. That conversation changed my process. I am looking to touch something on an involuntary level.” “I do seem to write about trauma, but I need humor too.”

Hence the title of this most recent collection, published by Finishing Line Press in 2023, All the Rage in the Afterlife This Season, holds this duality of meaning in reverence to ongoing traumas and with a subtle wink of the eye to his always fashion forward, former wife. All the Rage…This Season, the central metaphor of this collection, is indicative of what you will find inside.

The collection is broken into three sections which gave this reader an opportunity to walk away, regroup, and return to the work after processing. Each poem presents moments and memories of people. And Cafagña brings his promised 90% emotion. Often when reading a collection, I will hop around and read a poem here or there and then front to back straight through but, for me, the impact of this collection is at its fullest effect when read in its ordained order. As a reviewer I want to tell you to read this poem or another to pique interest, but I want you to read them all. I want to say, buy all of Marcus’ books, and you should, but this is the one that is dog eared with a perfect pantoum that I return to when sitting on the back porch late at night, in the still air, with the sound of crickets. It has become the only other book with a permanent home on my nightstand.

All the Rage in the Afterlife This Season is the product of a mature soul, a master of mechanics, one who understands that the rhythm of language is the magic, who has lived through the unimaginable and brings it to bear witness.

https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/all-the-rage-in-the-afterlife-this-season-by-marcus-cafagna/

https://www.communityofwriters.com

https://paintedbride.org/

Philadelphia note: 1996/97 Cafagña was living in Philadelphia and ran the Painted Bride Art Poetry Series as a favor to Major Jackson.

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

August 7, 2023 Brooke Palma

I Want to Be Your Addiction
by Tonita Austin aka Toni Love

I want to be your addiction
I want you to dream of me
Wake up thinking of me
Can’t wait to touch skin with me
Put your hands on me and let me take you to ecstasy
Hold me and desire me
Inhale me absorb me or savor every drop of me
Fold me into your physique like my dress folds into my inner thigh
I want to be your addiction
I want to possess your mind
Flow through every curvature of your body
Make you want to get up out of your warm bed at night just to have me
Full body sweat and fever when you desire the dope of me to be within you
I want to be your addiction
I want you to need me
To breathe me
To spend your last dime just to fill your atmosphere with me
I want to take you higher
Make your heart sing
Change the neurons in your mind
Make you lose track of time
I want to be your addiction
I want you to be a fiend for me
To concede that I am all that you need
I want/ to/ be/ your/ addiction

This is one of my favorite poems to perform because I love to see who really gets it in the end. This particular piece was inspired by a song "Stop the World" by one of my favorite artists, the late Teena Marie.

We've probably all been in those relationships where our emotions are being pulled in every direction and even though you may love the person or be extremely attracted to them, you know that it's not healthy for you and that you should end it.

Sometimes it takes you a while to get off (pun intended), but you eventually do!

Review of This Time Roots, Next Time Wings

August 2, 2023 Brooke Palma

This Time Roots, Next Time Wings

Independently published

$20.00

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Abbey J. Porter

Lisa DeVuono’s new book, This Time Roots, Next tTime Wings, is a multimedia tour de force that features not only poetry but also short memoirs, family photographs, and images of DeVuono’s paintings. Through this collection, DeVuono engages us in a thoughtful exploration of landscapes both external and internal.

The first thing I noticed about Roots was its physical presence. Square in shape, the volume has a substantial heft at 162 pages. The color printing and satin finish of the pages contribute to the impression of a book produced with great care.

The collection is divided into five thematic sections. The early poems describe the people in the young narrator’s family and the places and customs—both Italian and American—of her youth. Sprinkled among the poems and prose are black and white photos of several of the family members mentioned. Family seems to anchor DeVuono’s narrator; referring to her grandmother coming from Italy for a visit, she says, “Finally I had proof that I came from somewhere.”

But our narrator is caught between worlds, both rooted and rootless. This phenomenon is captured beautifully in the essay “Torrone,” in which DeVuono writes about eating candy sent to the U.S. by relatives in Italy: “The part I felt most hungry for was the tiny sliver of wafer on the edges of the marble-hard torrone. It felt like a veil between two worlds.” The “veil” she speaks of seems to connect—or separate—her Italian ancestry and her American life.

“Hometown Psalm” burgeons with detail about the narrator’s Northeast Philadelphia neighborhood:

Praise to Ray’s penny candy, Charlie’s delicatessen
Melrose Pharmacy and Louie’s Chinese Laundry
to Frank the mailman, our crossing guard Mrs. Ritaldo.

Much as she seems intimately ingrained with her surroundings, she remains someone who is “looking for home.”

We get the sense in several poems of a young woman in peril. “Lifesavers” describes how poets and songwriters save her—from sadness, from fury. The poem concludes:

I have kept an old binder with onion skin paper
where my childhood hand copied their words…

a hand scribbling not softly at all
but raging every day after one injustice or another,

Big Red Chief notebook and fountain pen
where I wrote a first line to save my young life.

The poem is one of several pieces that touch on the role of poetry in the narrator’s life. In the memoir “Fourth Grade Muse,” in which DeVuono describes abuse by the nuns teaching at the narrator’s school, she also finds solace in poetry and pens the line, “Roses are red, violets are blue, the grass is green, how can I hide so I’ll never be seen?”

We accompany the narrator as she grows older. Aging, change, and loss all emerge as themes. So too do physical and mental illness, appearing as opponents the narrator must contend with. In “Severed,” a sort of essay/chant, she reflects,

As she lies here curled up in a fetal position, the neurologist prepares his 12 inch needle poised to extract her cerebrospinal fluid. It occurs to her that she wants to beg him to slip, accidentally move too far to the right or to the left and finish what has already started. Sever the spinal cord, separate her head from her heart, make it official. Then when she faces her own numbing day by day, month by month, she will have no excuse for her lack of pleasure or passion. She can blame him and not this invisible disease that no one really sees.

Perhaps our narrator’s greatest ongoing challenge is the search for self, the attempt to carve out self-identity as she experiences herself in different settings and situations.

In “Bones,” in which she works in the garden, she says, “I weep to find my own bones, a fragile skeleton of all my old selves/Joyous from a slumber I didn’t expect to wake from.” The lines convey a sense of self-discovery, and perhaps redemption.

Part III features the author’s textured, moody, evocative paintings, each one paired with a piece of writing of the same title. The narrator’s mother, a recurring figure throughout the book, appears here in one of my favorite poems, “Ghost.” In this poem, it seems, the narrator is trying to negotiate her mother’s dementia, which has caused her mother to forget who her daughter is. The narrator seeks to create

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

In the haunting conclusion of the poem, the narrator decides,

I must forget who we’ve been
get small again
like a child in the dark
shining a flashlight to my face

“See Momma, I’m the ghost.”

The theme of death—which runs as an undercurrent in the earlier sections of the book—emerges fully in the collection’s fourth section. In “After,” which deals with the aftermath of a death, DeVuono captures the inexpressibility of grief when she refers to “a sentence too long to write.”

The author’s thoughtful, reflective writing invites us to accompany her on the many journeys encompassed in this far-reaching book. DeVuono’s narrator ultimately emerges as quietly heroic from the struggles she faces—struggles that, I suspect, will ring true and familiar to most readers—for the fact that she continues the fight and finds in it moments of grace.

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 The Recovering Catholic Collection by Eileen D'Angelo

July 19, 2023 Anthony Palma

The Recovering Catholic’s Collection

Moonstone Press

$10.00

You can purchase your copy HERE

Reviewed by Sean Hanrahan

Being a fan of Eileen D’Angelo as well as a Catholic school (we’ll call it) survivor myself, I was intrigued by her latest chapbook, The Recovering Catholic’s Collection. As Catholic school graduates know, the preferred Catholic method of instruction often skews close to indoctrination. You do not just learn traditional subjects such as English, history, and math; or parochial ones such as the Old Testament, New Testament, and catechism; you also learn you will go to hell if you commit a moral sin and do not confess it, blind obedience, and that Catholicism is the only true religion. Freedom of thought is not encouraged in Catholic grade-school education. Unfortunately, for the nuns who taught her, D’Angelo is and, as a precocious child, was a free thinker.

In the opening salvo “Miranda Rights for Catholics,” D’Angelo deploys her keen wit and probing legalistic mind to Catholic school morality: “we need lawyers/ for the morally challenged. Experts in Sinner’s Law.” Imaginatively, she constructs a court case with a sinner lawyer who will “find the legal loopholes, hammer out/ plea bargains to avoid length trials/ on judgment day.” Humorously, this hypothetical lawyer would defend their client to the judging priest:

“You need intent to make that sin stick”
“How long will this remain on my client’s record?”…

“My client has suffered enough! She is a mere mortal
and your client is the All-Powerful and Loving God.”

An imperious nun (“penguin”) calls our young Eileen “brazen” after being found “in the church basement/ tempted by the fire of French kissing” in the poem, “Lines to Sister Consolata.” The penguin also mentioned she was “bound for hell.” Our young Eileen’s brazen inner voice “wanted to say: On the Brazen Scale of one to ten,/ I am only a five. I dared not ask: If God made me—/ then why did he make me brazen.” D’Angelo realizes that her former tormentor has “earned [her] eternal/ reward and rightful place at the right hand of God,/ because you were one year older than God/ when I was in the tenth grade.” Our young Eileen has grown up to be brazen slow dancing with electric hips, leaving “no room for the Holy Spirit,” and “making faces” behind Sister Consolota’s back. She ends the poem with the powerful line, “Even the word brazen feels good on my lips—/ this dangerous word marking a lost soul/ on the express train to Hell.”

D’Angelo recalls in the haunting poem, “The Gift,” that after sharing many of the poems contained in this collection an audience member approaches her with a pocket Bible “concerned for my immortal soul. You have a need to save/ a lost lamb.” The audience member also tells her that they will pray for her, and she wants “to believe it matters if you do.” After being told “God always has a plan,” D’Angelo wants to believe in a God that differs from the one she was offered in childhood by Consolata and the rest:

I want to find the compassionate God,
the one I’ve seen in paintings with kind, fatherly eyes.
I want to know if he is the same God who hurls
fires and floods to destroy his wayward children,

his children, who are lost like lambs.

D’Angelo probes all she had been taught to recite by rote: I know the seven levels of angels./ I know Heaven, Hell, Limbo and Purgatory to arrive at a hell of a conclusion: “I want to know what kind of sin/ does God commit when he allows the screaming/ to continue through my row-house thin walls?”

In this book, D’Angelo poignantly explores thanatopsis as evidenced in the poem, “Requiem for My Brother, Joseph.” The narrator performs her own funeral mass for her brother who died far away.

Tonight, I let myself wallow in it. Your photograph, propped up
by a paperweight, my mini-memorial of you. A lit candle
on my desk, a glass of sweet vermouth & a twist—

And it’s just you, me the keyboard—and a long night ahead.

The magic of this poem lies in its catharsis, through its near exorcism of pain. “This poem howls like the pipes in the Irish tunes you loved,/ wails like the banshee…Angels follow your purified soul/ (and I don’t need to see them to know they’re there.)”

Witty, feisty, contemplative, questing, and heartfelt, The Recovering Catholic’s Collection takes the reader on a journey through faith, life, and basic humanity. D’Angelo is a generous poet giving us words to ponder and words to heal, images to provoke laughter and images to generate empathy. Plus, a few tears. A true Irish writer in the best sense, the reader rests in D’Angelo’s palm enthralled by the tale she has to tell.

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.

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

July 10, 2023 Brooke Palma

I Want to Get Off
by Tonita Austin aka Toni Love

I approach you carefully hesitating all the while
Feeling my body being pulled closer because you entice me and I love your style

So sexy the way you dip when you move
Silky smooth colored outer skin and your softness inside makes me want to sink in to you
No doubt why so many others fall in line just to be in your presence
And here I am amongst them unashamed waiting for my turn to experience the same ecstasy

I stand patiently with my heart quickly racing
Thousands of beats per minute fill my heaving chest
As you motion in my direction

My body temperature elevates my palms are moist waiting to feel you inside
Breathing heavily, approaching cautiously til you pull me close and wrap yourself around my waist and outer thigh

I hold you tight and close my eyes
Too afraid to just let go and enjoy the ride
I trust the way you ease into it gently and take it slow
The excitement builds and my heart sinks down to my feet and I forget how really fast we are going

And just when my climax begins, you drop me

and leave me

helpless

No air to breathe, no support under my feet and I don't feel the passion anymore

I'm scared and I don't know what's coming next

I can't trust that you are secure enough to protect me

Even holding me as tight as you can, I still scream from fear
because I'm afraid that when I trust you the most that you'll drop me

So I beg you to stop playing with my heart
To unwrap yourself from my torso and release me
Let me walk away with my dignity, without feeling ashamed about what I let you do to me.

I foolishly trusted you from the start and now that you've shaken both my confidence

and my heart

You will never convince me again to ride a roller coaster, I'll stick to the kiddie go-karts!

Sometimes it takes you a while to get off (pun intended), but you eventually do!

Review of Sex Depression Animals by Mag Gabbert

July 5, 2023 Brooke Palma

Sex Depression Animals

The Ohio State University Press

$16.95

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Jennifer Schneider

Mag Gabbert’s Sex Depression Animals opens with a quotation from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a Latin narrative poem that chronicles history while directly engaging with the complexity of the same across an expansive range of universal themes. The epigraph: “My mind now turns to speaking of bodies that turn into new bodies” is an especially well-suited choice for the collection, as Sex Depression Animals not only explores metamorphosis (and its many forms) through a narrative of lived examples ranging from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, the collection exemplifies the concept through its playfully experimental use of form and language.

Gabbert actively defies preconceived notions of self, identity, and form in a five-part collection that embraces change and brilliantly illustrates the process of deconstruction and rebuilding of self. Altered states of matter, of being, and of thinking present a common thread, theme, and, ultimately, outcome of the collection.

In ”The Breakup,” for example, Gabbert highlights change at, through, and of its sometimes hidden-in-plain-sight levels –

remembering the sensation of his hands, my spine shivers
he spin s
me in a hive

In “Goat’s” closing lines, Gabbert writes:

Because hell is an animal with other animals inside it.
Because every choice I’ve made involved sacrifice.”
Because I’m always the one that got away.

The collection is simultaneously personally contemplative and an active source of prompted contemplation. The compact pieces (the majority span no more than one or two pages), with similarly succinct titles, form a collective body of work that transforms initial conceptions of the nouns and adjectives that title the pieces.

In “Bathtub,” Gabbert writes:

I did not have to worry
about finding orange lipstick
on my teeth or whether I was clean
shaven I did not need
to argue over the semantics
of ‘date’ and ‘please’

In “Rhinoceros,” Gabbert writes:

I once mistook
the word blubbery
for blueberry

while exploring the kingdom of Basma
now called Sumatra

Each piece reveals new ways of being and of consuming poetry. The work alters thinking and explores altered states of language, in a variety of ways and on multiple levels.

In “Steam,” the collection’s opening piece, Gabbert writes:

last week I read
about a Chinese scientist
with the surname ‘He’
who had altered a set
of babies’ genes
I kept thinking He
was a deified pronoun
as in He who created
you out of ashes

Throughout the collection, form takes on former pains with a force that lingers in language. At the line level, each piece is a masterclass in poetic devices. Substantively, each piece offers further teachings in transformation, growth, resilience, and incessant curiosity.

The collection’s 42 poems, rich in both imagery and inquiry, transcend simple descriptors.

Questions like

I’m also wondering why lately
people always touch me
on the elevator and at parties
and bars why men always graze
my arm with their fingers
asking what each
of my tattoos ‘means’ (“Bathtub”)

and

I used to wonder
whether Jesus ate meat
how his words became flesh
and why he always broke bread
saying this is my body” (“Egg”)

permeate the collection. Readers are prompted, pushed, and pulled in directions both surprising and distinct while Gabbert masterfully navigates complex waters.

“Ship” offers one, of many, examples:

maybe we find ships
Romantic because that word is
both a noun and a verb

It’s a spunky, lively collection that invites readers to engage, and reengage, with life’s most enduring and complicated topics. The collection is of roots and rooted in experiences both relatable and deeply personal. Gabbert shares generously, and graciously. End-of-text notes provide context, both personal and historical, for many of the pieces.

Imagine even the root of your name – the name you
were given – meaning to scrape, gnaw, or eat away” (“Rat”)

and

once during recess my girlfriends asked
the boys to judge a flying beauty contest
and when they got to me one said mouse-like
mammal we think you’re cute but not pretty

the word’s root often translates to striking
or disgraceful thing as seen in flagellum (“Bat”)

The collection lingers at the intersection of disparate and disappearing realities. Themes of invisibility, alteration, and multiple states of being thread the collection while sustaining the duality often associated with truths, experiences, and perspectives.

Gabbert’s love of language is contagious, as is the pull of her poetic prowess. The collection shines with a surprising boldness that flexes in malleable and surprising ways. The collection is as playful as it is poignant; it’s also celebratory.

Sex Depression Animals is a brilliant depiction of the messiness of a life well-lived and lessons well-earned. “Recipe for Quiet Ferocity,” the work’s closing piece, provides an apt metaphor for the collection as a whole. Each piece is strong, quirky, and full of curiosity. From objectification to objective evaluation, Gabbert does not hold back. Instead, she shares generously and with a depth of awareness that humanizes the speaker and lingers long after each reading. The collection is a gift from a gifted poet - a “recipe for quiet ferocity” that will be enjoyed and again.

Local Lyrics - Featuring Dimitri Reyes

June 26, 2023 Brooke Palma

Papi Pichón As Rhetorical Device
by Dimitri Reyes

Papi Pichón flies out of my library
book and no one hears him because
he chirps at spanish-to-english
dictionary speed. Don’t dismiss Papi’s
beautiful wings a sabre a grindstone
attached to gold plated breasts,

a picture of many beers emptied across
a flag on the wingspan of a flying rat.
Sin vergüenza, he fluffs his feathers and
juts his pecker at an unknown roost slurring,
mira! mira! I got your stereotypical Boricua
right here! pointing to its pigeon butt.

If he had a crack it’d be the faultline where
carpetbaggers meet the campo. The winning
lotto ticket my grandfather never scratched
flutters out of the same book and Papi Pichón
gobbles it up. It’s been a long time since we’ve
seen real gold and not the deceiving foil

of a Publisher’s Clearing House sold dream.
It’s been longer since our Puerto Rico was
Borikén. Since coplas, décimas, y bombas
fetishized Borinquén reinas and creole babies.
Show me royalty, Father Pigeon
before you go up in flames.

Before you are burnt ash buried underneath more
history where the musicians and poets sit on your
pile of dust because you can still sing louder.
Fly me to the antiquity that collected the dusts
of gold for your angels in Ponce harvesting coca
to make our heartbeats beat faster than our feet

stepping to the conga in Newark. Papi Pichón
wants me to follow him past Oscar López Rivera
during the Puerto Rican Day Parade. Before
Commonwealth and the Bronx burnings when we
squawked like coquís. Before colorless. Before oro.
Before our sea of tierra learned to speak Spanish.

What is your poetic aesthetic? What are you interested in as a poet?
I'm a poet that didn't know they were a poet until they became a poet-- if that makes ANY sense.

Though I was good at it, I avoided writing for years in the pursuit of "a money making career." I was the first person in my family to go to college and I didn't want to squander the opportunity on ramen noodles, instant coffee, and stacks and stacks of drafts. Then I found out that there was a way to make a living while writing by diversifying my skill sets. I worked in education for 6 years and participated in grassroots social justice movements through the arts before transitioning into arts administration and publishing. I always found moments to create and be inspired.

This is all to say that I'm interested in writing, performing, and teaching in ways that model passion, epiphany, observation, and joy. I'm heavily influenced by the music and tonality of Nuyorican and Black Arts plays, prose, and poetry, as well as what is contemporarily being produced in the aftershocks of the BreakBeat school like the concrete poems & presentations of Douglas Kearney and LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, and the performative energy of writers like Patricia Smith, Denise Frohman, Elisabet Velasquez, and local NJ gems like Sean Battle, Porta Rock, Rob Hylton, Ras Heru, and Rashad Wright.

You have a full-length poetry collection coming out. Tell us a little about Papi Pichón.
As you can gather from my first answer, I'm really investing in the connections and togetherness that poetry can create. It can be the educator in me that wants to encourage everyone to step into my work. Papi Pichón is a bird-myth that's spirit, demigod, and thought all at the same time where the story finds our titular character bouncing from body to body throughout the course of history and speculative futures-- inhabiting (or reimagining) what it means to be "of the culture." Broken into 3 main sections, the audience gets the experience of a 20-something Puerto Rican who has never made the journey to the island, a paternal figure who is the 20-something's connection to tradition, and a séance that evokes other mythological beings-- both human and immaterial-- that call out to an already written and inevitable future.

On the surface, it's for mi gente (my people) that are Puerto Rican, but as an extension, it's for my people that experience the dilemma of dual identities-- being from two (or more) places at once. I want these groups to be seen and find home in my words but I also want to leave the door open for others outside these spaces to walk in, sit at the table, break bread with Papi Pichón, and learn something. Though it isn't a highly sophisticated notes or glossary section, I did include both after the conclusion of the book to encourage further research and discussion. Basically, whether you are well read or picking up a poetry book for the first time, I want to be sure you put the book down and walk away being more culturally literate, whether you grew up with some of these same experiences, or you're willing to expand your mind and take a walk in another's shoes.

How do you move from an all-possible blank page to the act of writing poetry?
I used to set writing times for myself where I'd collect all of the notes, overheard conversations, and scribbles I'd recorded in my phone and spend that writing session tooling with poetry ideas or expanding fragments of poems until I realized, "ok, I'm sitting on A LOT of work, here!" I learned early on that it's important to me to go with the ebbs and flows of creation. If I'm in a generative mood, I write, if I need some help, I revise or read. Maybe I'm in a stage where I don't feel like writing, then maybe it's time to enjoy life until I'm bound to become inspired again.

These days, I'm in my "untitled projects" era so I'm crafting less from scratch. I still write when I get hit with inspiration but I've mostly transitioned over to thinking about my writing in terms of grouping them thematically. That's how I put together Papi Pichón and now that this book is out in the world, I've turned my attention to two other "in the works" manuscripts. They're both sharing a few similarities and now the fun is seeing how the poems speak together in different iterations and discovering how they converse as collections with each other. I'm also intrigued about how they're also in dialogue with Papi Pichón and my chapbook, Every First & Fifteenth.

You have an active social media presence where you not only promote poetry but offer tips and tricks to make it more accessible to others. Why do you feel called to do this work?
Thanks for this question. Many authors I speak to are still trying to "crack the code" to social media and I'm a big advocate for doing what feels good in order to create. Creating social media content is akin to penning a poem or writing a story. Why do you do it and what story do you want to tell? There will be an audience that'll be there to receive what you have to say and once you know who you want to impact. Once you find your "why," you can begin creating content that is authentic to who you are.

These days, I miss teaching in classroom settings and am so grateful when I have the opportunity to speak to a group of high school or college students. I'm a teacher first and a writer second, and that's why I think so much of what I do on social media and in my writing leans into the exchange of knowledge. I'm able to offer advice from my own experience which is ever-changing, therefore, the content will always be ever-changing as I continue to publish and participate in the community. When I first started writing, I didn't know what I was doing and when I searched for help online to better prepare myself, it yielded very little results. I created a space where I share insider experiences in a manner that's accessible to those not able to afford an MFA. In terms of equitability, I want others to know everything that I know. And I'm happy to see that since I started creating content in 2016, I've found other YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok creators doing the same.

What are some easy ways poets can market themselves? Why is this important?
This answer will depend on one's style and (literally!) where they're writing. When marketing oneself, the main focus should be building some sort of a readership. If you are in an area where there is an arts scene or adjacent literary community, get involved! Volunteer at festivals. Go to an open mic and make friends if you're an extrovert; if you are an introvert, still think about attending the open mic anyway and let your words speak for themselves. In my experience, places with thriving artistic spaces have supportive communities and if you don't feel supported, feel free to find another group. Attend readings at bookstores, libraries, and other similar brick and mortars as they usually have more programming to participate in. With enough engagement, that's how you become a "local" and those local poets always have the hometown advantage :-)

If you are in what I call a "poetry desert" or a place where there isn't much in the way of a poetry community, that's when I'd suggest taking to the internet. There are forums for poetry, Facebook groups. and hashtags to follow in order to find others with similar interests. There are also many organizations that still have virtual workshops and readings to participate in. I love the Murphy Writing community out of Stockton University as well as Arts By The People up in Madison, NJ. These organizations have been good to me and they have great in-person and online programming.

As someone who dabbles in both the traditional in-person and virtual sides of "marketing" I’d suggest doing both, but of course, it's up to the writer. The most important thing is to market oneself in a way that's comfortable.

Where can readers connect with you? Buy Papi Pichón?
Readers can find me offering poetry tip videos, poetry vlogs, book unboxings/reviews and other cool literary videos on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. I always love growing the community and meeting people. Follow me and let me know that you found me through the Mad Poets Society!

I also teach monthly virtual workshops and we have a very small but close-knit group of amazing writers, some local, and others as far as the UK. You can find out more on the SHOP section of my website.

Papi Pichón is available from the NJ-based publisher, Get Fresh Books. I'm so happy to be publishing with them as I've been a fan of their work since their inception and I hope you get to check out the great work my pressmates are doing as well.

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/dimitrireyespoet

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dimitri__reyes/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@dimitrireyesthepoet

Papi Pichón: https://gfbpublishing.org/shop/ols/products/xn--pre-order-papi-pichn-by-dimitri-reyes-zxd

Dimitri Reyes is a Boricua multidisciplinary artist, content creator, and educator from Newark, New Jersey. Dimitri's most recent book, Papi Pichón (Get Fresh Books, 2023) was a finalist for the Omnidawn chapbook contest and the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. His other books include Every First and Fifteenth, the winner of the Digging Press 2020 Chapbook Award, and the poetry journal Shadow Work for Poets, now available on Amazon. Dimitri's work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and you can find more of his writing in Poem-a-Day, Vinyl, Kweli, & Acentos. In 2023, he was a part of the inaugural poetry cohort for the Poets & Writers Get The Word Out publicity incubator. Dimitri is also the Marketing & Communications Director at CavanKerry Press.

Review of Not Yet a Jedi by Partridge Boswell

June 14, 2023 Brooke Palma

Not Yet a Jedi

Kallisto Gaia Press

$17.50

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Katch Campbell

Pulling the Rug Out: A Review of Partidge Boswell’s Not Yet a Jedi

The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly - you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you. -Eckhart Tolle

Sometimes I want to be a kid again, and sometimes a rockstar. As a society we are inundated with stimulus from the world around us. Over time we create opinions, and then test these opinions. Those that filter as “true” become beliefs, those that filter as “not true” are discarded as invalid. This process is repeated across our life span and leads to automated thoughts and subsequent actions, or what philosophers call identity.

At a time when society seems rife with inflexibility, Partridge Boswell’s collection, Not Yet A Jedi, asks its reader to suspend belief and live a poem.

Boswell a Vermont native, started the Bookstock Festival of Words in Woodstock, VT. This years festival runs from June 23-25, 2023.

From the front cover’s image, a nod to “Pop A Wheelie,” the reader vaults into the possibility of being ten and free. The language of said poem creates the lift.

From oil-dank bowels of a nightmare garage you ride
beknighted, Saturday morning’s acolyte, sleep-dazed
But aright, straight for the ramp you built last night

In the driveway in homage to the great adrenaline-hazed
Evel Knievel-achetype for every dangerboy and bone-
Headed troglodyte bent on a bright schematic vying to break

more bones than the Guinness World Record flying prone
over cars buses lions fountains sharks canyons rattlesnakes—
before the neighborhood wakes. Topping the slope you rev

Your banana bike and pedal hard on the approach past
A hushed gang of squirrels and robins holding their breath
Half-hoping this levitation will and won’t be your last….

Boswell doesn’t leave us at adolescence but offers a wide-ranging mix of moments. A son, a father, a teacher, an astronaut, a beggar, all packed with imagery and the musicality of someone who knows how to compose a line of sounds. Sounds that move the reader outside of ego and into possibility.

Ode to an Afterthought

…the how and what about.
For a handout                                    asterisk to the everyday miracle of driving around town
                Windows rolled down in mild disbelief                    a suicide therapist
crawling inside a client’s empty                cocoon to find a small yellow butterfly
                flitting in the abyss of a September afternoon embalmed in what
                                must surely be the last eighty degree day before

the who and why and what the fuck

everything heads south bleeding mercury             retreating rebel soldiers thirsting
                for a front porch tune marching daily from errand to appointment
diffused in the patina of a million inconsequential dying into another endless
                gestation             another frost’s first refusal
                                naked stubble of field corn reborn

                the two seconds it took to assess her situation.
                                the last-ditch universe and no one else.
On hunters’ faces beginning to unveil                      their prehistoric camouflage……

Boswell, a primary vocalist for Los Lorcas (where you can hear several of these poems sung), admits a lifelong appreciation for the symbiosis of music and poetry. He has been writing and lecturing on the fluctuation of this connection in different cultures, for some time. A believer that poetry is an oral art, his poems bring to life moments where joy and pain live simultaneously. This is evident in the ending of “Strike”:

Loop of canned Muzak…But which Orpheus? The one before
or after he finds the minor key? Or after he’s torn apart?
I strike another match and light a candle. They’re hungry

so we tuck in around the table, drawn by the surging urge
Icarus felt as he soared toward the light that conjured us,

our capes and masks draped over the back of our chairs.

Here we are, this is us. He tender peppery leaves of rocket,
croutons crispy yet soft. I know but don’t say what power
I wouldn’t want: to see into their futures. Our hands are open

and empty; our plan—a scrap of light we keep in our pocket.
Which superpower? Here’s a hint: there’s only one.

After our conversation about the collection, Partridge sent me this note,

“A poet doesn’t simply want a reader to read—to enter and engage with or experience a poem; a poet wants a reader or listener to live their poem. You’re right, it runs deeper than nostalgia…not quite duende or saudade exactly either, but a feeling of “you had to be there” that’s so profound, a poet will risk everything to vanish vicarious boundaries including words themselves, to take you there so you can be there together, not merely as witness but as shared essence. There’s a word for it in some language, I’ll let you know if I find it.”

Partridge Boswell risks everything for us to live a moment together through his recent collection, “Not Yet A Jedi.”

Fiction for Poets

in which one poet writes to other poets about writing fiction

Prose Writer Approaches the Open Mic, aka Dead Man Walking

Transcendence and Symbols: A Review of Sean Hanrahan’s Ghost Signs

Ekphrasis: Poems and Art

Lisa DeVuono

This Time Roots, Next Time Wings

Understanding the Unfathomable: A Review of Marcus S Cafagña’s “All the Rage in the Afterlife This Season

Pulling the Rug Out: A Review of Partidge Boswell’s Not Yet a Jedi

Understanding the Unfathomable:
A Review of Marcus S Cafagña’s “All the Rage in the Afterlife This Season