New issue of VERSE

Volume 27, #s 2-3

Portfolios by:

Paige Ackerson-Kiely

Kathryn Farris

Noah Eli Gordon

Wolfgang Herrndorf (trans. by Susan Bernofsky)

Sarah Riggs

Adam Wiedemann (trans. by Marit MacArthur et al)


If you want a copy of this 166-page issue, send $6 to Verse, English Dept, Univ of Richmond, Richmond VA 23173.

NEW! Poem by Chris Pusateri

Chris Pusateri


from When Jazz was the Capital of Alaska


This contested reality,
always under new management.

The forest, the trees,
clouds momentarily resembling
the odd head of cauliflower

Metonymy, time out of mind . . .

We can either do nothing or we can worry.
That’s the extent of our agency.

I cannot put things together, & I cannot take them apart

NEW! Review of Peter Gizzi

Threshold Songs by Peter Gizzi. Wesleyan University Press, $22.95.



Reviewed by Thomas Fink

In the aptly titled Threshold Songs, Peter Gizzi´s fifth book of poetry, just about every poem examines various forms of threshold and displays its status as a “song,” lyric utterance. At the beginning of the stanza-less, unpunctuated, three-page opening poem, “The Growing Edge,” Gizzi speaks of “a spike / in the air / a distant thrum / you call singing,” and he uses apostrophe to ask whether this pattern of communication can function for the addressee as well as the speaker:

and how many nights
this giganto, torn
tuned, I wonder if
you hear me
I mean I talk
to myself through you
hectoring air
you’re out there
tonight and so am I
for as long as
I remember
I talk to the air.

Can he achieve a rapprochement between the “torn” and his effort to “tune” song? If the fiction of apostrophe is a cover for self-talk, Gizzi would like to associate the “thrum” with a sign of the presence of those who have departed: “felt presences / behind the hole / in the day. . .” But, no matter how sincerely and intensely the poet works at “hectoring air,” he knows that each attempt to realize such an encounter has its own specific uncertainties unlike any previous ones: “I’ve not been here / before, my voice is / looking for a door / this offing light / reaching into maw.” Even in the imagination, the threshold of contact with the cherished dead (for example, his brother Michael and his mother, noted in the book’s dedication) depends on quality of voice or mental/optical “light” or kinesthetic/spatial factors. “Home,” which is supposed to be ultimately familiar, is caught in agitated recollections of fragments of disparate experiences that are exceedingly difficult to hold together: “I meet the whole / vortex of home / buckling inside / a deep sea while / flash lightning / birth storms / weather of pale / blinding life.” Vigorous, even violent processes of becoming and disappearance have a “blinding” effect for one who seeks perception of a whole essence and a deafening effect on the striving to hear a pure, unified presence. As lines from “On Prayer Rugs and a Small History of Portraiture” suggest, the experiencing of recollection creates a disjunction in the present: “I am alive today, alive not being alive // being with the lost ones and living lost within the lost hours / lost faces lost. . .”

Elegiac poetry addresses the problem of losing others, but anticipation of a different threshold, one’s own departure, requires other strategies. In “Analemma”—the title from astronomy implying a simultaneous multiplying of perspectives—Gizzi ponders how elements of family continuity may be a preparation for death, as well as something of emotional compensation:

That I came back to live
in the region both
my parents died into
that I will die into
if I have nothing else
I have this and
it’s not morbid
to think this way
to see things in time
to understand I’ll be gone
that the future is already
some where
I’m in that somewhere
and what of it.

Formally similar to “The Growing Edge” but with slightly longer lines, “Analemma” plainly counsels temporal understanding and cultivation of the ability to face and accept mortality as reality. A shift in verb tenses underlines the connection of time pattern and this reality: “I can be [“these things”] / have been them / will be there, soon.” This poem presents awareness of the thresholds shared by self and family.

As opposed to those pieces primarily concerned with death, some of the poems in Threshold Songs respond to Emerson’s call in “Nature” and other essays for an immanent communion of individual perceiver and the natural world. “Hypostasis & New Year” at once probes fears that keep the speaker from attempting such an immersion and provides figures that bespeak this engagement: “For why am I afraid to sing / the fundamental shape of awe / . . . would this blade and this day free me to speak intransitive lack— // the vowels themselves free.” By assembling such acute descriptions as “the silvered back of the winter willow spear,” the poet sings “awe” in what might be judged a “fundamental shape,” but he worries, it seems, that the already tenuous ego will be further fragmented or even obliterated by nature’s sublime (terrifying) power: “these stars scattered as far as the I.” It is just as likely, though, that liberation from ego and absorption in nature will afford fulfillment.

For one situated at the threshold of immanence, the poet exhorts: “Hey, / you wanted throttle, / you wanted full bore. / Stay open to adventure. / Being awake is finally / a comprehensive joy.” The adjective “comprehensive” suggests both deepened perceptual understanding and expansive embrace of the natural and built environment: each “nimbus,” “every part-colored aura / on cars,” “every / tinge and flange,” and even “a bright patch over the roof on the jobsite singing itself.” Acknowledging that everyone has a “little” (not a grand) “force” and thus must “turtle” into threshold-crossing, Gizzi’s speaker exclaims: “And now that you’re here be brave. / Be everyway alive.”

Threshold Songs features two poems that are considerably longer than the others. The title of “Pinocchio’s Gnosis” humorously emphasizes what cannot be trusted about the character: his access to spiritual truth is thwarted by the growth of his nose when he lies. The text contains 22 justified prose-paragraphs, separated by stars, with varying numbers of sentences. In the first paragraph, physical manifestations signify the “wooden” Pinocchio’s crisis in attempting to sing a spiritual “song”: “The season falls into itself, cuts a notch in me. I become thinner. My heart splinters and a wooden sound invades the song, interrupts my ire.” Two paragraphs later, he seems to destroy Jiminy Cricket, emblem of his own conscience: “In my father’s house I killed a cricket with an old sole.” Death by stomping, however, is undermined by the pun on “old soul,” and this double meaning leads to the articulation of a poetics of mischief: “Funny how being dead troubles the word. I am trying to untie this sentence, to untidy the rooms where we live.” The trickster poet disrupts the “dead word” of politicians and mass media with “untidy” phrasing and narrative disjunctions, and so this reconstructed Pinocchio’s burgeoning proboscis may be comparable to Picasso’s notion of art as the lie that permits truth to emerge. In its own ways, this lie combats the duping and imaginative depletion of the world indicated in the seventh paragraph’s jostling of high Shakespearean sentence: “All the world’s a stooge. The secret and silent world worn from abuse and those surfaces abrading imagination.”

These disruptions through “untying” and “untidying” may disclose the material ground(ing) of language—“teasing lone from the lonely, bending the guy into guidebook”—but one version of this attitude, “If I decide to laugh all the time I’ll surely rid myself of tears,” can result in staleness, “yesterday’s plaything,” or the annoyance of “ceaseless chatter.” Another version presented in a few paragraphs involves nihilistic violence: a “fisherman” who “wanted a bride” instead got “a seal and. . . stamp” (two puns) before being “hit. . . with a sickle” and thrown “off a bridge.” This echoes punishment inflicted on Pinocchio for his transgressions: “It was a simple mallet. It spoke simply, whammo, blam, I understood perfectly. Its oscillations filled the darks in waves of blue, some green and felt like no other mallet in my life.” Ironically, “blue” and “green” recur with more positive connotations toward the end of the prose-poem.

Perhaps the darkest point of this emotionally varied text is the speaker’s appreciation of human existence’s pathetic vulnerability, of physical and temporal limitations: “What is a man but a paper miscellany, a bio furnace blowing coal, a waste treatment plant manufacturing bluster. . . .” Two paragraphs after this grim update of Hamlet’s “quintessence of dust” speech, a pronoun shift “tags” a human being with the promise of destruction and states how, in a reversal of Pinocchio’s process of humanization, a person becomes a thing: “This body only lasts for so many days. It’s got a shelf life. It’s got time-lapse, time-based carbon life. There’s you and it and now you are it. That’s the paradigm.”

In paragraph 19, the “summery” encounter of singer and audience is posited as an implicit compensation for violence, cynicism, and melancholy contemplation of the fruitlessness of human endeavor in the face of mortality. But this escape remains subject to irony: “And so the singer cast a shadow. It was like every other shadow and so we were comforted. The song was summer itself. Green and a special blue went into all of us.” Does “the song” represent “summer,” or does the presence of summer render the song’s emotional effect redundant? Given the previous references to the two colors and possibly sinister phrase “went into,” we wonder what is “special” (as well as good or bad) about this infusion. Indeed, the audience turns out to be sweating, the “shadow” not quite providing shade from summer heat. Eventually, in the next paragraph, the singing’s allegedly positive effect—perhaps characterized by how listening to the Blues helps one work through suffering, how blue water can cleanse one, and how green signifies natural vitality and growth—wears off: “But enough of the singer and the special song of summer. We were tired of you, grew tired of these greens and blues, tired of the ray’s long sad decline. It bent way down and didn’t feel special anymore.”

Wallace Stevens, whose long poems like “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” pursue large abstract questions, declared that the supreme (poetic or aesthetic) fiction “must give pleasure,” but in order to keep doing so, it must change (and be abstract). Even if Gizzi might not call such a fiction supreme, he emphasizes change in the song—no less than candidate Obama in 2008—as his text draws to a close. Sounding Emersonian, the speaker encourages his audience to “take the long walk past shadows, alleys, and culverts. . . . Take the promise and transform the man. Look hard into the air.” Both singer and audience should engage in active interpretation and direct experience as they account for continual change. If two paragraphs earlier, the singer projected a representation of an experiential process (“shadow”), in this coda, the means of representation enables the singer to enter the field of the listeners’ reception:

The shadow cast a singer. It was like every other shadow and so we were comforted. But who would stay the same even if the ray’s report is the same. I am changing and you know about this too. The fuzz haloed with heat lines in a cartoon. I am summer the shadow the song and the solstice. Green and a special blue went into all of us.

Renewal is a reiterative process; it is best for “the ray’s report” to keep pace with change in the singer, audience, and environment. The final sentence, though a precise repetition of the one that appeared in the twentieth paragraph, now includes the significance that the colors’ special quality acquires value in its difference from prior “special” color infusions—that is, in its adaptation to the changing circumstances of those involved.

Thus, for Gizzi, who does not suppose that problems of existence and non-existence can be transcended, the verbal effort to locate each threshold is designed to “negotiate the present intensities / in the world and its apostrophes,” as he puts it in “History Is Made at Night,” the book’s other incisive long poem. “The world” in which Gizzi is immersed “is rising and crashing, / a crescendo all the time.”

NEW! Poem by Evelyn Reilly

Evelyn Reilly


CHILDE ROLANDA, or THE WHATEVER EPIC

Here endeth, then,
Progress this way

--Robert Browning,
Childe Harold to the Dark Tower Came

1.

Names in my ears

all the lost

the Spring My Heart Made

sudden river trickle

and charged rain

epistolary pistils

along a Path Darkening



2.

Rain ampules

liquid word phials

came to arrest my thoughts

Questions that CrackDevastate

the extreme corner of the page

no scale order or end

to this series



3.

Wheel which gets the wormiest

sticker panels Nightingale

Panels Small Still Voice

and total inversion splash ruin

in the strictest sense

of the personal desire party

but saddle ached

saddle ached and ached



4.

This was the place Crayola

the Loretto Laredo

where even those

Who Could Find in Their List

trembling outcomes

old man of which

engine trouble

and the interface touch

a little bit dated



5.

Although the View the Same

migrating into the deepest pocket

of Next Phase Phrases

a switch of the Thin New

once upper

now "in it" low

and Subject to the Same Error



6.

In Middle Ground

Tall Scalped Mountain

and lame figure in the cleft

sunset where Noise was Named Ears

re-spoken in the muffle

of horror ardor and blond worry

The Arm That Will Reach Out

when dry blades prick the mud



7.

For flowers fill cruel rents

with Environmental Trial Run

natural regrowth material

mostly alien mostly waste

but coherent with alarms

that Bruise the Creature Program

alert the disappearing progress memo

laid down millennia and millennia



8.

And She Whose She-Horn is also

a camera also a navigational device

photographs as a Breathing Rock

what was picked up as a speaking sea

of avant jewelry: rock paper scissor

and Uber Fern Leaking Through

so many pre-set talking points

disambiguated among the creeping forces

of multiple password panic



9.

in which dauntless Childe Rolanda

whistle blower forest format

maven trolling the underside

of the Universal Mistake Blanket

presses to lipless lips

the endzone slugfest

run out of fuel last lines

(locust marrow sepal

sorrow) of the Whatever Epic

Review of Barbara Claire Freeman, Endi Bogue Hartigan & Jennifer Martenson

Incivilities by Barbara Claire Freeman. Counterpath Press, $14.95.

One Sun Storm by Endi Bogue Hartigan. The Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University, $16.95.

Unsound by Jennifer Martenson. Burning Deck, $14.

Reviewed by Andy Frazee


Each of the poems of Barbara Claire Freeman’s first book might be called an incivility, as if the term referred to a new poetic subgenre alongside the elegy and pastoral. Even as the title may connote civics, civil society, and the Civil War—all of which play roles here, directly or indirectly—it is the way that Freeman’s poems act discourteously, uncivilly, that make her poetry exhilarating. “Imagine not having to apologize for the United States,” she writes in “When the Moon Comes Up.” “Let history decide which matters most, the weeds or the earth.”


This incivility, while not confined to it, finds its stride in tackling the current financial collapse, “the decade’s debacle.” “My purpose / here is to decline into the realities of the economy,” she writes in one of the book’s title poems. “Greed’s gone viral in someone’s sentence but a stock / that clings to its fifty-two week high begs to be sold.” More generally throughout the book, Freeman investigates the ways that underlying truths are mystified through encoding, whether it be the whitewashing of history by ideology, the occult initiation rites of religion, or the pseudo-mystical language of the stock market. “Better to live like an options trader awake before the market / begins its metronymic stream and the first scattered symbols undo / the possibility of hope,” she writes in another of the title poems. And here we find the tension at the heart of Freeman’s poetry, between poetry’s truth-telling function and its own type of encoding: poetic, especially lyrical, language itself. This tension is of special consequence for political poetry, torn between the need to witness and critique and the need to do so in a way that doesn’t push the poem into the realm of propaganda.

Freeman’s solution to this dilemma is to reconceptualize the lyric as public speech, in a way not out of line with the intentions of British poets of the 1930s—particularly the early Auden, whose modernist experiments in lyric and oratory are too often eclipsed by the reputation of his later works. Freeman engages a form of what the college-age Auden, piecing together texts lifted from myriad sources into anxious narratives, called “the Waste Land game”—as can be seen in Incivilities’s first poem “The Second Inaugural,” which melds textual appropriation (from George Washington’s inaugural speeches), dramatic monologue, and political speech:

Dear Necessity, the magnitude
          and difficulty of the trust to which the voice
                    of my country has called arises from the recent
tempest, adopted by the Spanish to name
          the storms they encountered in New Times
                    Roman.

Here the inability to tell which words are Washington’s, which Freeman’s, makes for a shifting, hybrid speaker that partakes of the past and the present, of public eminence and personal effacement, of borrowed and newly-written language. A kind of melting pot, one might say, though one that serves, in the ostensible moment of national unity, to turn its eye on disunion: “In the night there is a coming / and going of people, but where are the former / ties?” These former ties lie at the heart of Freeman’s vision here, and the poems return to the image of an unraveling social fabric: “a territory made up // of objects connected unhappily,” “parcels tied together by chance bonds, folded structures, fracture / systems.”

In her emphasis on rhetoric, politics, and public language, Freeman does seem to be an acolyte of Auden, by way of the fractured, appropriative poetics of postmodernity. Incivilities shares similarities with Juliana Spahr’s This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, which explores ideology and social ties through a speaker seemingly infected with the culture of global capital, even as she rails against it. Like Spahr’s book, Freeman conveys a world caught in the general economy of capital, which frames each relationship, each connection, even as ideology conceals this framing. Equal parts experiment and jeremiad, Incivilities is an intense examination of the nation’s soul whose lyricism strives to overcome the lament at its center. Like Spahr’s book, Incivilities reminds us that jeremiad demands experiment, if only to free ourselves from complicity in what we would defy. “If you fax, attach, / or photograph this text / without permission from / the unbegotten one who hides / in silence,” Freeman writes in “Apocryphon,” “you will be / its replica.”

*

While Freeman’s poems take on current events directly, the poems of Endi Bogue Hartigan’s Colorado Prize-winning One Sun Storm portray these events as humming just beneath the surface, a kind of background radiation ready to intrude into the poet’s meditations. Juliana Spahr has called for a nature poetry that does not fail to image the bulldozer as well as the bird whose habitat the bulldozer threatens. Hartigan’s is a nature poetry, but one that takes the bulldozer (or in this case “the war”) into account, and in a way that is perhaps more startling for the naturalness with which the threat appears, as if it is an essential aspect of the scene:

You are instances of lichen falling, instances of white fingered lichen
     sprinkling from the bridge          You are two sisters talking there,

it is reported that the sun has fallen on your hair

or that your hair reflects the war above the bridge, or that your hair
reflects the water that is bridged,          or that the water is not there

The cofounder of Spectaculum, a journal devoted to long poems and series, Hartigan alternates more expansive sequences with shorter lyrics; many of the pieces, like “Icestorm,” marry long lines with the intricate repetition of minimalist music. “[A]nd in the fusion of ice drifts we were two of / three, then three of three, then one,” the poet writes. “[A]nd were repeated, as a dance / to which the lost are drawn / in the midst of disperson—.” Others, like the opener “Owl,” compress the poet’s perceptions into lines of lyrical precision: “Here the animals / we've plucked / from books or fields, placed // into our hearts / like lanterns / imagining keener sense.”

One Sun Storm anoints Hartigan an heir to Gary Snyder’s consideration of nature through the lens of Buddhism, even as other influences—Jorie Graham, Brigit Pegeen Kelly—make more direct formal claims on the work. Though the poet does not speak of it in Buddhist terms, the Buddhist conception of multiplicity-in-oneness (or oneness-in-multiplicity) is at center stage here. Importantly, this oneness is experienced as a kind of ecology the poems’ speakers are within and a part of, rather than acting as poles of a subject-object dichotomy:

     The people in the horizon, one people and no horizon, one horizon, one person
and
three billion horizons, two people, three billion people in no horizon
          To not equate horizons with horizons


Here is the center, no, here is the center from which one field is drawn
          Here is my statement, no, here is the field in which statement is drawn

                    Let us be clear.

It is this weaving and unweaving of details perceived in nature that grants Hartigan’s poetry a visionary status, in that the poems’ acute observations, like the nitty-gritty of quantum physics, reveal a complex and wondrous reality, even its ostensibly mundane manifestations:

There is a French men’s store on the corner in which the tourists try on hats.

There is design, and envy of design,
          and cars designed for envy, and actual chartreuse birds.

This visionary cast finds its revelation—as nature poetry often does—within the already-revealed. Or, more precisely—and this is what makes One Sun Storm more than just nature poetry—it finds revelation at the moment of becoming, which occurs and then, just as suddenly, is gone, replaced by another becoming. Hartigan’s poems, particularly the sequences, are recombinant organisms, becoming and becoming again, like double helixes evolving into eyes and ears and skin. “The day the puma licked her face,” goes the Lorcaesque “The day the puma,” “the pace of the past / raced unwed, she said, no fear, no fear, no fear.” “The said world slid, tumbled, rained,” it continues, “the world began again, again.”

Like Snyder’s poetry, Hartigan’s political critique arises from an awareness of events that are ignorant of or threaten this ongoing revelation of unity in multiplicity. Hartigan goes so far as to take Whitman to task:

The third thing is the grass,
                         not the multitude of grasses.
A completion that was singular in nature as a nation is singular
          and torn for it.

Unity is implicit in reality, Hartigan seems to say; to claim it as a function of the state is to reduce oneness to ideology, to claim (unilaterally, one could say) that the centerless has a center. Lovely without losing its edge, critical without losing its heart, One Sun Storm achieves that rarest of poetic feats: it makes wisdom new.

*

Like Hartigan’s work, the poems of Jennifer Martenson’s Unsound are texts to move around in; like Freeman’s, they pack a sharp political edge. Most of all, they remind us that words are things too. This is not concrete poetry, though the words do interact with weight, and their texture matters as much as the more traditional syntax of the sentence. Taking her cues from the spatial, appropriative poetics of Susan Howe and Jena Osman, Martenson performs an autopsy on the page only to prove the language is still alive, its heart beating all the faster.

In poems like “A Priori,” it is the way that words touch that is paramount over what order they come in. And in this Martenson reminds us that poetry is an art of alternatives—particularly of alternative syntaxes, whether they be between two words, two pages, or two lines:

The trouble seems to have stemmed not from the synapses but from the word “sexuality,” about which much was said but little known. Her perception (taken over and assigned a different value) of her impulses was forced into alignment with THAT IS, THROUGH a lexicon gleaned from those old standard fantasies (retained in spelling due to conservatism) which had by default passed into public domain to disguise themselves as private longings while THE MEANINGFUL AND OBJECTIVE misogyny and homophobia REACTIONS OF THE OTHER raked in the residuals.

Martenson experiments with the way language touches in order to examine how this shifting linguistic surface may enact the perceivable world—but only to lay claim to an unseen world of meaning that resists scientific discourse’s appeal to an authoritative truth. Yet this is less an appeal for the soul than a recognition of what is elusive, and how the very difficulty of defining the elusive lends too easily to conceptual distortions. Martenson frames this most clearly in the series “Xq281,” which at once takes a cue from Jenny Boully’s “The Body” and which differentiates itself though its playful rhizome of reference. Comprised of 12 footnotes (the main part of the page is blank), the poem behaves like the bio-linguistic mutations of the first footnote, which seem to lead to nothing less than the “ideological mutation” of human selfhood:

While numerous experiments have demonstrated the ability to bind tightly with strands of DNA,9 thereby producing ideological mutations, the exact mechanisms by which these paradigms exert their effects on the economic ramifications of sexual preferences are, at present, unclear.

We’re then lead to the ninth footnote, and from the ninth, the tenth:

9 (While the spines are relatively durable, the information stored within can be banned10 at any time.)

10 This process is known as indoctrination: traditions normally stored in the form of two vines wrapped around the status quo separate in order to guarantee the reproduction and survival of laboriously alienating complacency.

To say that Martenson’s writing “slips” easily from the linguistic to the material, the conceptual to the physical, or the biological to the political is to mislabel the work, for the slip is no mistake and the poet calls our attention to it: this is what language does, and what poetry in particular makes evident. “Is there something / buried in the hybrid / testimonies of medium, / skin, and prediction?” Martenson asks in “Centerpiece.”

Appropriately, the more traditionally-versified poems of the last section take on their own sequential state, their own duration as an object of inquiry, using line and stanza breaks to make visible the in-betweenness, the aporias that lurk within one’s seemingly coherent worldview:

Let flute equal raw sensation
and let medium et al
stand in for language
with its veils and chisels.
I thought to find a block of marble
where instead I found an echo
splashing back and forth
between resemblances.

This “echo / splashing back and forth” is for Martenson the kind of fact that science fails to measure, and because of this, holds the possibility of escaping its confining, defining discourse. In her emphasis on the physicality of the page and in the way her language constantly breaks its conceptual frame, the poet suggests that this echo, this fact, is poetry itself, uniquely equipped to handle the interface of the physical and the ideological, the biological and the cultural. “I get stuck where the tree provides merely // shade, not philosophical positions,” she writes in “Preface,” “I had either to seek out a different gender or to climb across the blind-spot and resume my identity // on the other side.” Unsound is finally a book both defiantly experimental and, in a way, defiantly traditional: it seeks to approach the unspeakable, and speak it.

NEW! Poem by Micah Bateman

Micah Bateman


ONE


One starves, one
Activates a cigarette.
Outside the bush
Of limbs billowing: a
Mime’s glove.
One leaves, one
Selects a glossy
From a selection
Of glossies, hand
Deliberate, printless.
One’s eye dissects
The room like
Cut fruit, one
Swells like a pear
In the serpent’s
Unhinged entry, one
Streaks a blind flash,
One cringes, one’s
Mouth ejects
A deluge of grain,
Cascading brown
Gestalt of particles
Only discernible
By the lightning’s
Quick crack, rescission
Of verbs bonded
To nouns, plucked right
Out of the loop, one
Blowing a bubble, entering
It, only to wave
Goodbye, only to
Meet the wall’s
Ballistic exactitude.
A crop circle is stitched
Radian by radian
Into the mown rows
Of pasture, cows
Given over to the
Chore of sleep
And dream, of what?,
One wonders, flicking
Her toe too relentlessly
To answer one.

NEW! Poem by Stephanie Ann Whited

Stephanie Ann Whited


IT STARTS IN THE BELLY

I am losing prayers to these eardrums. In a whale
stomach that needs a scrubbing. A good detox. No
more shellfish for this fiend who just opens his mouth
taking in any old thing that comes along. I
dream the ark teeters on the precipice

of embargo. How about
some Palmolive to shiny

the hull? I hear
the figs have eyes

to rest on laurels
made of patent pig
skin and red #
40.

I spy something black and white and radioactive

All over.

NEW! 3 poems by Douglas Piccinnini

Douglas Piccinnini


WILDLIFE

my green is my green”
and trending
and huge

woodlings porch
the ordinary forces

and caked w fur
and seasoned

the water beads
around my leathery beak.

Let’s not think about
breaking let’s not break
anymore of my things.



SERVING THE HEAD

Only smooth channeling.
Only soothing annuals
to ear the way.
Which that I see

tingling fury
so possessive following
doubling becoming.

All the states
throat up.

All the coin towers
tooth down.



PLAY

Por love of noon
cracks the grape
feeds the sky
pours its plain young
explaining on everything.

In the thistle I hear
wind coming too

maudlin wind
so full and filling.

NEW! Poem by Kyle Booten

Kyle Booten


POOLSCAPE



You've heard about the order of the waves,



established many years ago by boys



and girls disguised as boys.  Wholly artless,



they plied the crests barehanded.



You've heard about their hands, but have not touched



or been touched, else you too would be clean



and constant, governed by the distant sun



or its viceroy umbrellas.  In their shade



you saw many people alive with sugar.



Every person is made of water; so



every person is, or could be, a radio,



a rudimentary song harvester



with no search-dial, bleating random tunes



or static.  I trust you've heard of static,



that place where songs surge and overlap.



Half-graveyard, half-battleground,



it grows more crowded every summer.



Songs have to go somewhere, after all.



They can't seek asylum in the future.



You've heard about the future, or even



leaned against it once, unawares,



mistaking it for a chain-link fence.

NEW! 2 poems by Sara Femenella

Sara Femenella


MARY SHELLEY

The second moon inflated like a lung,
naïve, organic, a quickstep’s heathered
horizon, peals of astral-ardor sung
above the noir, numinous she weathered

that storm, thank you. So arresting and how
it hurt when it hurt. The gathering gale
of father, redshift Tuesday on the prowl.
An off-key, minor diatonic scale,

a daughter’s parlor trick, she lay muttered
bone-cold in a watery tableau, bloom
affliction mulled and wooly, kill shuttered
away in two blue chambers, fears flood and flume

the ruins. The gamine’s keen and boozy urge
limns motherless aesthete, autumnal dirge.




THE STORY OF THE EGG


Born an arctic circle of cautious
physics, it’s a closed system of calcified
brides and orphans, chitinous and whistling
northern lights. It is Oedipal, sanctified,
a black wing slick with membrane.
If a palacial city, handsomely baroque,
dressed in snow, twinkling with carriages
and holiday parties, then it is the waltz,
the stroke of midnight, the glittering
champagne. Love doesn’t have
to be real. It’s the actual abstraction
of call and response, the soloist’s standing ovation,
the flowers at the door. If every biography’s
unsung accolade and greatest mythology
glows amber in a coal dark,
wreathed in ideology, then it is the proverb,
a disciple to Petrarch’s descent, the Laura,
kneeling in a curved prayer.
What gratitude that every confession,
every hunger, every mistake
from this one small thing, and that you can hold it,
organic, opaque, cool and weighty in the palm
of your hand.

NEW! another David Bartone

David Bartone

The Prince’s Downfall Involved Li Po in a Second Exile



The trouble with being good at courting patrons.

The prince’s downfall involved Li Po in a second exile, though they spoke of it an excursion.

…

The fall has now entered fog fall as a way to help Li Po understand himself, which he accepts.

He’ll be back by Indian summer.

…

Exile: drink, write nothing until Indian summer.

The energy of his thighs enough to carry him.

…

Attention wolf fans:

Indian summer has already garnered tons of praise and will arrive just in time for Halloween.

…

It has been thus far a four-colored fall.

Kitchen window light. Stove light. Sink light. Lamp.

…

Spry sprung into a full force of passion, lovers obey this time of year approaching with their ears to the leaf crinkle.

Old lovers leave-taking in old friends.

…

To see through the thick now, sense of a band playing down low over the hill.

This, the prince’s downfall: always sensing down low over the hill.

NEW! 2 poems by Jesse Nissim

Jesse Nissim

Your city with love on the benches

Where the harbor shrinks back
from its edge

Thousands of dead fish
take a nap
in the library.

Smell the harbor’s ordinary
objects, trusting us, with
all that stuff in here.


If you string them
together, will these fragments form
a recognizable mirror?

If you trust in
the frictionless
narrative.

We’re all the same
down to the lawn ornaments
Christmas & Hanukkah
black and white and even
down to the lesbians.

We coordinate mailboxes in taupe
our names curled in gold.
All the same font.

Yellow stakes flag the yard’s perimeter
indicating our pests

Yes, every neighborhood has pests
even here

Where we can benefit from
the foul smell
that deadens the wonderful.



Someday

The light presses down
imitating summer
and need presses down
imitating a fire-escape
and want falls empty
unloved and alone
and bushes flop like
need imitating belief and
the church is a true
empty head alone imitating
an oven dying.

They need never escape.
Some of them like stones
sleeping under firelight.

The spying dawn
alone is light
pressing in
upon the fire escape.

I was alone and unloved light.
I was as hot as a church.
I was the dying swan. For a long time
I could not escape the fire of that swan
and little girls’ who believed in it’s existence.
The girls pressed down instead of falling
while I was imitating a stone.
When I escaped from falling. I escaped from my heart.
In my head, I was need, belief, and truth.
My head was a peculiar bush.
It flopped in an empty oven.



This poem is constructed almost entirely of lines- randomly taken and freely scrambled- from The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, Ed. Donald Allen.

i want someday / to have a fire-escape (471)
this would mean, i think, that summer need never come (471)
and snow falls down upon / the streets of our peculiar hearts
the Seine believed it to be true / that i was unloved and alone (473)
the light presses down / in an empty head the trees / and bushes flop like / a little girl imitating / The Dying Swan the stone / is hot the church is a / Russian oven... (475)

NEW! David Bartone

David Bartone

Beekeeping and Hearth-cooking


Consider what Thoreau proposes:

“There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance, is a very slight interference. It is like directing the sunbeams. All nations, from the remotest antiquity, have thus fingered nature. There are Hymettus and Hybla, and how many bee-renowned spots beside! There is nothing gross in the idea of these little herds—their hum like the faintest low of kine in the meads. A pleasant reviewer has lately reminded us that in some places they are led out to pasture where the flowers are most abundant. ‘Columella tells us,’ says he, ‘that the inhabitants of Arabia sent their hives into Attica to benefit by the later-blowing flowers.’ Annually are the hives, in immense pyramids, carried up the Nile in boats, and suffered to float slowly down the stream by night, resting by day, as the flowers put forth along the banks; and they determine the richness of any locality, and so the profitableness of delay, by the sinking of the boat in the water. We are told, by the same reviewer, of a man in Germany, whose bees yielded more honey than those of his neighbors, with no apparent advantage; but at length he informed them, that he had turned his hives one degree more to the east, and so his bees, having two hours the start in the morning, got the first sip of honey. True, there is treachery and selfishness behind all this, but these things suggest to the poetic mind what might be done.”

…

Consider a recipe from The American Frugal Housewife.

A task to divest oneself then from worldly gods.

On election day, eat election bread.

…

During the Q&A portion with experts on Lydia Maria Child, an audience member tries to sell one of the speakers a $125 library licensed video on Lydia Maria Child, and as though I could be a community college professor for the rest of my life, long long past retirement age, a minor tangle begins up in me, that I must understand as a certain dying of youthful ambition—the sentiment I could write anything, not gone but going.

…

The Child’s didn’t have any children, were abolitionists.

They were poor, sugar beet farmers for a time.

He took up the last dollars on a ship ticket to France to learn how to raise sugar beets in central Massachusetts. She remained to raise the sugar beets in central Massachusetts.

The abolitionist movement had come this far: beets not cane then in the North.

…

Later in a barroom the kingship is abandoned.

…

Today now all this time passes.

…

Today now as ever.

…

The sum of exiles, greater than Christ and the meek—the mind making Emily Dickinson of the Old Testament.

…

Not wanting to leave myself behind on any worried walk inward, I decide to step outside of myself for a few days.

I read six poems in the New York Times, six poems to mark the end of day-light savings.

What the Pulitzer Prize winners have to say.

The couch in the basement.

NEW! Poem by Stephanie E. Schlaifer

Stephanie E. Schlaifer


The simulation is an understatement--



the tract  not wide enough
too brief. Still, those cautioned
and those cautioning cannot believe
that it is not an unlikely cinema,
indemnity against
grievances and grief.

NEW! 2 poems by Stephanie Burns

Stephanie Burns

TWO POEMS

Spring in the Winter Garden

I’ve known you to be cross-eyed for a while now.
Like the flared fat pigeon on its crumbling
headstone, you mix your lefts
and rights until the whole world is less
stable than before. In the shops,
in the malls, they are folding
clothes into shapes that can never
be emulated in real life.
I guess we are all facing south when we die.

There is, ever so slightly, something
to be heard on this balcony.
I’ve watched others writing it down
in complicated twirls and all too ordinary
snapshots. I know that the backs
of their heads want to breathe.
Then again, I am all that strives to be,
but is not, more than too-tight pants
and curled hair.
We are taking notes on each other.

Dear Good Sir—
I am not dangerous. Kindly stop thinking it.
Sincerely yours, etc. etc.

This year we will not smoke in the hallways
or clack in high heels. I am meeting
only people too bored for me.
You have been one of them.

You are letting it be too obvious.
You are staring too much.
You cannot let it be known
that things have gone radio electric
in front of you. Keep a distance
and healthy swagger.

Otherwise, you will glint into the scene
and everything you’ve collected
in a dusty shoebox under a bed
will slip away into trash.
We are only the poses we can commit to being.

Secret doors and miniskirts meet
under your eyes. They rile against
your skin. Toys turn to roses
and sad hands are held.

I know you are hasty and that
you can’t stop actively being pretty.
This is how it all portraits—protests
and steamy hot mornings.

If I become cold or undernourished,
I will know it is because we have built
ourselves this winter garden,
but shattered its glass with our first breaths.



Poem on Talking to You

Out of a cut
in my arm I pull a dove,
a tightrope, a bright red sunset.
My arms are useless in this way.
Their gestures are worthless and awkward—
awkwardness the tragedy hovering over me,
resilient as fruit flies.
I’ve killed the impulse for natural reactions.

Pronunciation slips in and out—
I hardly know what I am saying.
Now in the back of the scene,
I don’t talk. I paint
my face to mean, “Stardust,
appleseed, march hare, revolution.”

The paint chips away
and blankets the area, nearly
as inconsequential as it could have been
in my head.

NEW! Laura Larson & Brian Teare

Haze, 2003



There is neither God nor nature in photography. Like faith
a discrete series of disappearances; like God the abrading of
arrested motion—landscape is active absence, part of the
design. That’s why photography’s trees can never be the trees
of painting or of nature : we expect them to correspond to
themselves and then they slip, asymbolic, outside of religion,
outside of ritual until the upper limit of our nostalgia seems a
high green canopy and its lower a mat of rust-colored needles
so thick and acidic it permits no undergrowth, a perspective
intended for reverie. Nature is essential to photography’s
invention, but it’s the picturesque—a way of picturing nature—
that aids photography’s development. It becomes more difficult
to position the frame : does photography simply wipe out one
space in order to invent another? Good-bye, perhaps. The first
art in which God never existed, its trees arranged by men.

Discursive Glance





A Picture That Includes by Means of Its Structure the Excluded Space



I’ve held this
smallest forest


sticky with sap
haptic branches swaying


in nonce wind—
a syntax


outside the frame
of the visible—


and longed to be struck
as I should
to say I’ve loved


It’s no small thing


Let each eye
be believed


the way cicadas leave
clinging skins


split to drone
umbra’s grass


Let matter rest
in belief


it has lent itself
to all our purposes


liminal and image
the way veronica is


a flower
a girl watching
a matador


wave his cape
over charging eyes—


each only once
given one


of matter’s many
possible nouns


Let each pass by


picture
difference
or surprise


In that still space
we won’t stop


finding and losing
what we love


all day
we’ll keep on



thinking
because it once existed


it still exists


very arbor very body
very smoke

NEW! 3 poems by Stephanie Burns

Stephanie Burns

THREE POEMS


The Park

This is the day for a newfound gorgeous melody.
I guess I don’t mean that.
I guess I mean it’s a day that should be captured—
This park, its strollers and one-handed bikers.
Everything is just fractionally above disaster
and that is, of course, why it works.
Babies are creaking into their shoulders
and dogs squat in painful contemplation.
It’s the traffic that blesses this spot—
the red-bottomed sailboats and two-
tiered zephyrs. Airplanes and helicopters
and truant little islands straining to sea.
Here, the hair before its first cut,
she’s allowed cappuccino.
There, two boys with sweaters tied
around their necks.

Some buildings will slide off each other,
but some will cling and pull us all down.
We are all thinking about each other—
caught in wonder—and the horizon
conceals all the more obvious paint jobs.



Route 66 in Decent Light

Sweet-toothed drumbeat in the desert―billboard
of dinosaurs and the cut-glass sky.

The mesas in their ignorance upend
the road out of town. Soldiers and nuns―

our scented headache. We are unscathed
in the hungry nunnery of the soul. The food

is good. Tumbleweeds loop themselves into repeat
behind the only two cacti available.

My snaps pop and drop―no revelation
in this swimming pool of sand. The chalk

of possible endings unfolds without glamor.
The charge is only so high. Earlier flights

and histories are available upon request,
as well as bathrobed blue skulls.

They are subject to change.
No touching, no pictures, no faces.

The salt-soaked sky taps
these questions, and is sullen.

Desks, insults, movie sets--the things stripped
and shouldered forth. We are the fish.

The ink and paste we’ve produced mix
into my coffee with subtle soft curls.

At the gas stations,
we sew ourselves into each eye.


Several

This is not unlike what I wanted you to know.

I am saucy (drunk), fatigued,
Talkative in the times we grasp for silence--
the clumsy piano player
in the red-lit bar at the back of your mind--
all you never knew you
always wanted.

I know all the neat lines
in your gardens--the way you order
memories (playground--hot dog--pretzel).
I negotiate these sandboxes
but these are not the secrets
as I want them.

You flinch at me. I buy you presents
but they dissolve at your harsh touch--
so much burning paper. I keep
to the middle of your thoughts,
listening for the right instructions.
is there something you want known?

You shrug at us, the world, yourself.
You come to the part where you must
walk a tightrope above yourself
and I just want you to know
I wasn’t going anywhere with that question.

NEW! 3 poems by Robert Fernandez

Robert Fernandez

THREE POEMS

Flowerheads


I

Red today, and like a wave-field fanned along the length of Overtown, a hummingbird-red universe or saturnalia, St. Keith. Avail us of your administrations. Certain dead president mythotypes perched on the topmost peak of Watts. Delayed. Abetted resolutions. I enter the studio and of these sour, convalescent faces: a logopoeia of flayed reds.

II

What moves along the course of a line must learn the single line, single statuary’s flanked revision of scan, and learn reluctance. Is hateful. Pools wrath in porcelain. A mandrill clutching the throat in the billiard hall of Pele. Hasten to work? Wither goest, Ruth in strange corn: the concise fft of levitation. The backs of the knees sloped like rock elm. The tonal steps of the eyes pushed vaguely on.

III

Boom. Gainsay death metal is a window, ram’s-horn ripple. RZA shaved the track, niggaz caught razor bumps. Ascyltus: “To sell ‘em piece by piece, brick by brick, a catch!” Encolpius: “Twice the street value…” Homage gainsays a death-work of preterit lexicons. Tramlines etched adept, colossal rounded patterns.

IV

Printed “adagio, et in Arcadia ego.” The caryatids of Miami, our golden bough. Because we endeavor to end in a fuck-all of resolution: blooms of the crotch and raining credit. THE WORLD IS YOURS. Laundered ax of draconian abilities. A fast, red-eyed vireo hollows the duodenum.

V

Of all your lauds, thinking like a course in statistics but not yet raw of wheat uninhibitedly pounded not yet sun, wild in your ears. Then, anxious for news of Mike Tyson. Then I seemed (Thanatos) to Wifredo Lam (sought) a concise logic revealed, of my situation: forearms like reddened glass lovely, able to move freely.



Victuals

Then violence and practice and make it happen. On the map with the delicatessen that falls through your mind, that shudders in its hide of brick and awning. This is not how we would have wanted it. Village and music box with a little pentacle on its back, and not what we would have wanted for anyone involved. I escape arrhythmias into the heart’s normal operation. The valves run smoothly. The hide’s parched and pleated but runs smoothly: a bucket of ice and a rhinoceros, a Syrian flag and a recliner. Falling through the rug in the grip of a stomach that sees, we slip past the odds; we feel fortunate. From the bedroom, from closed booths, we plot our victuals. What illuminates the morning better than the souls of the dead?



Coast

Lethal as ever. We link up. We stay exact. We are the clean cut through the middle quadrant—with box cutters, through pin-stripe, though cardboard—we have not yet decided. We are the letters spilling out onto the bare table today. These rash communications. A virus, like carousels of glass; like flame poured on the table, cut cleanly—into quadrants—whether in lattice-work or arabesques we cannot decide. Whether a young man walking up from the asphalt or through shadow, we have not yet determined. Look at the waves, they are like blood packets rising, falling. Look at the gulls. Look at the clean shore and the bodies, the parables (I glide a muzzle over the sun’s oscillating bands of purple and white).

Review of Sawako Nakayasu

Texture Notes by Sawako Nakayasu. Letter Machine Editions, $14.

Reviewed by Amani Morrison

Sawako Nakayasu’s collection of prose poems, Texture Notes, is “too buoyant to lay low” (“9.12.2003”), as her narrator optimistically traverses through and pontificates about a dismal existence filled with endless lists of objects (especially eyeballs) and concepts, where one suffers from “a breath of fresh air that arrives too late” (“5.26.2003”) or can “end up on the ground as a result of someone else’s good or bad intentions” (“8.12.2003”). Throughout the work, the narrator explains her experiences through references to thickness, layers, and texture, ranging from the “texture of a field of fried umbrellas” to the “thickness of the anti-tropism,” from “[l]ayers of loss” to “danger as a texture.” Drenching reality with waves of whimsy, Nakayasu constructs a world with scientific precision, in which it seems only natural for the narrator “[t]o provide a physical, chemical, psychoanalytical, or textural analysis of it. To assign it values of beauty” (“8.22.2003”).


A portion of Chris Martin’s abstract Glitter Painting appears on the front cover of Texture Notes, serving as a gatekeeper that provides as much information about the internal content as the title does. The reader cannot fully appreciate the unlikely masterpiece of “acrylic medium, spray paint, and glitter on wood” and “assign it values of beauty” before reading Nakayasu’s first entry, entitled “6.2.2003”:

Bicycle texture.

Take five radically different groups of people. The groups may radically differ in the usual categories (such as size, shape, color) or others (such as surface area, scent, hair texture, politics, emotional predicament). Lead them by the hand, and then let go and give them a choice: field of flowers, field of gold, field of dreams, field of vision, field of applicants, field of corn, field of bicycles, field of bicycles.

Martin’s painting along with the “five radically different groups of people” provide a precursor to the conglomerate pieces in the collection: they “may radically differ in the usual categories. . . or others. . . .”

Using numerically-formatted dates as titles, Nakayasu draws attention exclusively to her poetic conflagrations, persuasively inviting the reader to “relax and get fuzzy” in a seamless existence of “Needing Yellow,” “girls, women, all ages and sizes, who have. . . diarrhea like a motherfucker,” and “a four-year-old tree attaining twice its current height thanks to the tears of a widow.” Despite the informal tone and disturbing hilarity of the content, Nakayasu organizes her notes in a fashion resembling a formal paper—the first isolated line of each poem serves as a thesis statement, and the lines/paragraphs following justify the initial claim with examples and further explication, convoluted though they might be.

The self-conscious narrator (there seems to be only one) exists in a state of oxymoronic harmony—she is amused and horrified, judgmental and meek, sober and fantastical. Consider the speaker’s recount of a “nightmare about hamburgers” in this excerpt of “9.2.2003”:

I think I see a light in the distance.

Though it might very easily be a lump of fat.

But worse yet, clearer yet, I begin to smell smoke, a gas-fired barbecue. I call out, distressed and damselled to the hilt:

“Hamburger!”
“Hamburger!”
“Hamburger!”

For lack of a better way to describe the situation—and I am quoting some long-lost love poem, and so I am.

Immediately following this poem is the equally revealing “6.3.2003”:

What do you miss about America?

A woman, a very very fat woman, I trace her and to what extent she gives, and what of her takes as I dive into her rolls, loll around and find a press, a fold, fresh laundry out of the dryer and keep tracing her, linger on the inside of her elbow, insider of her armpit, fall into her heated neck I keep tracing her with my finger her tracing her and she bites me and I go back.

As the narrator explores the textures of the world around her, she resorts to science, math, and inference to make meaning of what she finds. At times, the speaker is child-like, reverting to elementary practices and thought practices (although not necessarily language) to deduce her findings—such is the case in “6.3.2003” as the inquisitive narrator relates, “. . .I keep tracing her with my finger her tracing her and she bites me and I go back.” She guiltily confesses her unconventional behavior later in the collection, stating, “Whenever I meet new people I want to touch them first and find out their texture” (“9.19.2004”). At other instances, however, the speaker grapples with seemingly more complex subject matters, for which she employs equally complex, even impossible theories and equations, as in “10.6.2003”:

Combined sum of the texture of one word at each moment everywhere, thicker than it is true. The true number, when taking into account the combined sum, which amounts to how many false answers.

The narrator’s hyper-awareness of the eccentric and the mundane paired with her curious, exploratory nature push the reader beyond the bounds of the ordinary, stimulating contemplation of “ant-sized objects,” “Tokyo advantages,” and “the pressure of a speeding vehicle or even that of an angry nation.” However, Nakayasu does not present the reader with a narrator who is simply exploring to make mischief. On the contrary, Nakayasu’s narrator arduously seeks “layers of clarity,” to find answers to her questions and offer solutions to problems she encounters in a world where it is possible for something to be “true and false.” Consider the following excerpt from “5.28.2003,” which is also printed on the back cover of the book:

When the compression finally comes forth, allow for the bodies to settle, before measuring the resulting thickness. Measure the authenticity. Measure the artifice. Remove the artifice.

The giant shall not be held responsible for the removal of the artifice.

In Texture Notes, Sawako Nakayasu becomes a master artist as she creates a congruous cacophony of images, perceptions, problems, and word play. Nakayasu deftly ensures that “a distance, a thickness, a slightly twitching texture is created between the first and last layers, a measurable distance that surfaces out of nowhere but an internal and external longing for a presence or good word” (“11.16.2003”).

Review of Franz Wright

Wheeling Motel by Franz Wright. Alfred A. Knopf, $26.95.

Reviewed by Adam Palumbo


To dismiss Franz Wright’s latest collection as melancholic or cheap (as some have done in the past) would be a tremendous disservice to American poetry. In his tenth solo collection, Wheeling Motel, Wright’s visionary aphorisms and short-lined lyrics show a weighty confidence. He has distilled issues of personal anguish, spiritual longing, and regret, which prove to be impressively robust when presented through his sparse style. But Wright does not allow these themes to constitute the heart of his work; beneath the dark wit is an astute and humble voice. He clings to faith in times of trouble and has no misgivings discoursing in a tone both self-deprecating and eerily comforting.

Wright has always been noted as a frank poet, and this characteristic does not cease in Wheeling Motel. His brutally honest appraisal of the condition of the human soul begins in quite a foreseeable place—with the poet himself. In “Out of Delusion,” he starts by considering his oeuvre spanning nearly thirty years, but confesses, “a book one wrote decades ago seems stranger than somebody else’s.” This unfamiliarity extends into the rest of the poem when he leads the reader into a quandary of perspective, admitting, “I speak in the mask of the first person not as myself.” But Wright’s poetry does not isolate itself by focusing on the constant “I”. The poet has crafted this lyric, but he doesn’t have to be the main character. The speaker spies himself walking alone, riding the subway, and, lastly, appearing at the gates of heaven, until Wright ends the poem with the most anticlimactic line of the book: “And that is a beginning.”

Wright’s preoccupation with despair and evil is not a new development for the poet. He has confronted psychological terrors in many of his earlier volumes. He has also been chased by despair for much of his lifetime, a sentiment he categorizes as universal when he bids the reader to “Call no man unhappy until he has passed, / beyond pain, / the boundary of this life.” In “Baudelaire,” the poet decrees, “Evil isn’t hard to comprehend, it is nothing / but unhappiness / in its most successful disguise.” The logic behind these statements is not revolutionary, but Wright can express these universal fears in such a heartfelt and succinct manner, and it is this kind of assertion that makes Wright so authentic and accessible. Wright would not assert that his suffering is unique, but common to all men. His honesty about drug use is striking, too. In “Kyrie” (a transliteration of the Greek Κύριε, an exclamation meaning ‘O Lord’), he begins by popping an oxycodone and ends with a prayer—quite a progression in just six couplets, but typical of the power in this collection.

Wright’s style may seem spartan, but that only serves to make his poetry more powerful. In “Will,” he shows a defiance that becomes commonplace by the end of the collection:

I would be ready,
accompanied
by a rage to prove them wrong,
prove they picked the wrong child to torment

and that I too was worthy of love.

But not all of Wright’s poems dwell on dysfunction. The most outstanding moments in Wheeling Motel come when he oscillates from experiencing deep anguish to basking in the most ordinary occurrence. After bumming a cigarette from a young woman in “Günther Eich Apocrypha,” the poet forces himself into reverie, with interesting results:

Think about it.
I do. And am
for a moment
the happiest man
that I have ever known—

Wright’s language transforms the quotidian into the sublime, blatantly proclaiming the beauty in the most everyday of occurrences. His meager rhetoric is not used out of carelessness, but a desire to make each word more exposed, more influential. His short, aphoristic stanzas may employ nontraditional rhythmic modes, but they burst with experience, wisdom, and unexpected optimism.

Wheeling Motel also exudes a powerful feeling of nostalgia for family connections. In this collection he addresses nearly his whole family. Wright’s childhood was turbulent, particularly after his parents’ divorce. In “Abuse: To My Brother” he describes his childhood in terms both terrifying and magnificent:

(No one is born sad.)

There’s a gladness in everything
When it’s first breathing, a
bright naïveté
and a will to be well—
They’ll kill it and then go have breakfast.

The collection finds Wright struggling with a yearning for connection and a realization of the impossibility of being all things to all people. As longing as his voice may be, Wright does not often suggest solutions for the problems he elucidates. Thus, the absence of major figures in his life draws out of the poet an unapologetic impudence. Wright addresses “The Call” to his mother, acknowledging his failings as a son but without shying away from explaining that the mere sound of her voice irks him. Wright continues, lost in the complicated array of feelings that exist in the void between him and his mother. Ultimately, though, the void remains unexplored because the poet lets “The Call” end unanswered.

The book’s representation of the author’s late father, fellow Pulitzer-Prize winning poet James Wright, is even more complicated. In “Wheeling Motel,” the book’s title poem, the ghost of the elder Wright becomes a corporeal presence. Franz speaks directly to his father, saying, “There’s this line in an unpublished poem of yours. / The river is like that, / a blind familiar.” Wright is no doubt mournful of his father’s absence, but also continually haunted by his legacy. The disenfranchisement of the elder Wright’s poetry is reticent in his son’s, but manifests itself physically in the troubled childhood Franz experienced. Despite their problematic relationship, in the end, the poet seems appreciative of his father’s posthumous presence in the book.

Wright’s genius in Wheeling Motel lies in his ability to turn moments of fear and dread into unexpected optimisms. Throughout the collection, he yearns for happiness amidst the evil all around him. It is this satisfaction with the dichotomies of the human soul that makes Wright’s book so enrapturing. As the poet himself asserted, “We are free, in some strange way, because of our hopelessness.”