New Books In Poetry

In Literature, Exile, Alterity: The New York Group of Ukrainian Poets (Academic Studies Press, 2014), Maria G. Rewakowicz explores a unique collaboration of the poets residing in the United States and writing poetry in the Ukrainian language. This research offers a systematized and chronologically organized vision of the group, which, in spite of the geographical limitations implied by its name, appeared to invite artists from a variety of geographical loci and aesthetic backgrounds. Literature, Exile, Alterity focuses on seven founding members of the New York Group: Bohdan Boychuk, Yuriy Tarnawsky, Bohdan Rubchak, Zhenia Vasylkivska, Patricia Kylyna, Emma Andijevska, and Vira Vovk. Acquiring its shape during the 1950s and 1960s and actively participating in the cultural, social, and political dialogues during the subsequent decades, the New York Group expanded and eventually went rather far beyond its original core. Over the decades, the group also dispersed geographically; however, as Rewakowicz argues, it

How do we mourn those we’ve lost? What are the rituals and rites that allow us to understand our loss? To feel the measure of it? To heal, if we need healing? To reach closure, if we need closure? For any of us who have had a loved one die, these questions are personal ones. Suddenly were faced with an emptiness we cant fill and, at the same time, an often overwhelming abundance of memory and emotion. And yet the questions are not only personal, because, when we become mourners, we fall back on the cultural practices of mourning that our society offers us. Here in America, visiting hours, funerals, eulogies, obituaries, and wakes are a few of the ways we reckon with our dead. Unsurprisingly, other cultures have other practices. In Madagascar, for example, the Malagasy people have a ritual called famadihana, where once every five or seven years families celebrate their ancestral crypts by exhuming the corpses and spraying them with wine or perfume. Its a celebration of their past, full of music and danci

I had the pleasure of interviewing poet, Terence Degnan while he sat on a bench in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. For those unfamiliar, we refer to Sunset not as a park, but as a still slowly-morphing section of the borough. It is not difficult to find an entry point into Degnan’s writing, just as interactions with him can feel effortless.He understands the nuances of communication on and off the page and manipulates them into something familiar and comfortable. He is also a poet of such dedication that he went back in time to acquire a Gary Snyder quote for an epigraph, such perseverance that he drafted 300 poems to get down to the 30 or so that grace this collection, and such conviction that he lives his life as he lives his art. With the ambient noise of cars and people and the wind threatening rain, we spoke about the beauty of his collection Still Something Rattles (Sock Monkey Press, 2016), about trees, about lineage and language; we allowed the stimuli of what was happening around us to enter our convers

What is the best way to be a feminist? What is the best way to be a poet, a musician, or a painter? As a woman, what is the best way to be a friend to other women? The very idea that these water marks of success exist, goes against the nature of being biased and beautifully flawed humans who have been formed and informed by our lived experiences. Humans do not fit into neatly framed boxes. We are messy, shape-shifters–we resist social constructs and sometimes we resist our very definitions of ourselves. Bashaar employs a colloquial cadence to bring the reader into a conversation about defining oneself outside of these relationships/schools of thought and then in terms of them. This isn’t some sisterhood bullshit, some wannabe salvation for Eve, some half-assed claim that before god grew a cock there was no war, because I know there is violence in all of us–don’t try to tell me I wouldn’t slice a thing open to watch it die I would be remiss if I didn’t call attention to one

The “coming of age narrative” will never lose its allure because we are constantly drawn back to the moments that shaped us into the adults we are today. Nostalgia, many argue, is the most powerful human emotion. It not only memorializes eras but intermingles fact with memory and emotion we even remember the feelings memory elicits and the realities we longed for. In My Bedside Radio (Deadly Chaps Press, 2016), coming of age is informed by music that in turn, informed an entire decade. The musicality of the lines mimics the musicality of a 1970s adolescence. The speaker learns about love, relationships, and our national culture by juxtaposing what was taking place in his home with how music was responding to current events. There was no internet and no way to broadcast knee-jerk responses. Musicians and other artists had to take time to process and understand. Their “art as response” actually depicted a thought out and measured response. Coming of age stories will continue to take on m

In Pull Yourself Together: The Gena Rowlands Poems (Dancing Girl Press, 2106), Amanda Deutch reminds us of the current and historic importance of the muse. Something draws writers the page, painters to the canvas, and musicians to their instruments. Sometimes it is subtle, sometimes urgent. A self-proclaimed cinefile, Deutch stayed up into the early morning hours watching 70s films and drafting her pieces. She unlocked the smallest details to show how they can be pulled and opened into something much larger. These details draw us, perhaps because of memory or an analogy that only our subconscious could decipher. But once we are entranced, we are forever connected with the piece of art or media that pulled us outside of ourselves. It is always the way the cigarette/ hangs from your lips in each movie that makes you look a little bit tough/ and compels me to keep watching you move. You hold it just so, smoking/ with no hands. You search your pockets and purse for something./ Always searching. Keats saw the deli

Greetings, Pushkin! Stalinist Cultural Politics and the Russian National Bard (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) by Jonathan Brooks Platt explores the national celebrations around the centennial anniversary of Pushkin’s death in 1937. Platt structures his book around the dichotomy of what he sees as two different approaches to temporalities and modernity: monumentalism and eschatology, which celebrate, respectively, the formative moments of cultural narratives as opposed to their ruptures and changes. This theoretical framework engages deeply with the work of such scholars as Mikhail Bakhtin, Susan Buck-Morss, Katerina Clark, and Boris Groys. Through the discussion of the planning and the execution of the jubilee celebration, Platt analyzes the pedagogical practices and the role of teaching of Pushkin at the time; the attitudes of Soviet intellectuals to the phenomenon of the national poet; and the way the life and death of Pushkin were re-imagined in contemporary visual arts, literature, and drama.

Where personal history and shared history intersect, we are left with the figures of memory and myth. These poems seek to reclaim the portions of personal history where we were mere spectators of our lives and the parts of cultural history that define us, even now, without our consent. But what about the figures of myth that once walked the earth? What right do we have to ownership, what bond can be formed through reclamation and fictionalizing of their lives? Westhale claims the right to make art of, from, about our legends–whether they be people or the stories passed down from nation to family and to child. This “cavalcade” marches us to the intersection of “ours” and “theirs,” of “real” and “imagined,” but most importantly, this cavalcade is a procession of history that puts us on the sidelines. From here, we see how our individual waking, breathing, and moving interacts with every history we were born from and into.Learn more about your ad

I am not going to lie to you, dear reader, this collection will require you to be fully present. With each layer of the speaker that is revealed, you will shed a layer of yourself. This revealing will bring you knee to knee, eye to eye–two bodies recognizing one another as cosmic dust. What do we allow to confuse this empyrean understanding of one another and of ourselves? we’re what they call a two body problem, it’s like double planets but I was out there at the far end and what you didn’t know but I did: that the stars are far apart that far and with my hearing stretched as far as I could there wasn’t a whisper, not a murmur, not even static that I might’ve called something more or even evidence of something more. Illness compounds time and time is the gatekeeper of our relationships. Noah Stetzer’s poems chronicle the constriction and dilation of understanding. They elevate in lieu of masking. They witness in lieu of reshaping reality into comfort. And these piece

Now in its fifth printing of a very short life, Ashaki Jackson’s Surveillance examines the relationship between acts of violence, the witnessing of violence, the witnessing of the witnessing of violence, and the internalization of all three. Media offers no escape from trauma, instead it creates a cyclical nature where the traumatized are re-traumatized and forced to live out fear after dread after terror. Written over the course of 3 months, Surveillance stretches the far-reaching arms of community to tap into a universal empathy. The collection nearly demands that this empathy exists, almost calls it into being through faith and continued presence. After reading this collection, I thought of the Nikki Giovanni poem Allowables which ends with: I don’t think I’m allowed To kill something Because I am Frightened Our own fear can pull us away from this universal empathy and understanding. The hyper-anxiety mode we are placed in by media rendering of violence, social media proliferation of thos

  With a genre-bending hybridity that Czerwiec is well-known for, Sweet/Crude: A Bakken Boom Cycle (Gazing Grain Press, 2016) takes the structure of a heroic crown of sonnets and retrofits it for the prose poem and lyric essay. The repetition throughout entrances the reader into the dream state of industrial dystopia that one might find Orwellian but Czerwiec knew as home. The question and answer format is more of a call and response where the speaker ushers you through the duality of truth: what I see is different from what you see, but what lies beneath us is the same. What and who do we level in the wake of our greed? Start reading it for the pleasure of the form, but keep reading it because this is a piece of our history as a nation and society that needs to be held in the tight home of lyric.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After the enormity of our loss had been calculated, Guzman started writing. Drawn to the page to process his grief and to understand in the best way poets know how, through their art. This chapbook does more than encapsulate the memory of a community, it links that community to a single life and to a larger struggle. /I am afraid of attending places that celebrate our bodies because that’s also where our bodies have been cancelled/ when you’re brown and gay you’re always dying twice/ We are kicking off our chapbook celebration with a call to remembrance to preserve the memory of the 49 people killed and the 53 injured at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, FL. This is also a call to celebrate art in the face of loss, in spite of loss, and the enduring need of the human spirit to express fear as hope. If this wasn’t enough of a reason to click on the link and order the collection, 10% of all proceeds will be donated to Pridelines. The rest of the funds will be used in the continued production o

We commonly think of Walt Whitman as the great American poet, the gray-bearded bard who captures the democratic music of our country with, as he called it, his “barbaric yawp.” And, sure enough, Whitman thought of himself this way. “I hear America singing” he famously wrote in the fourth edition of Leaves of Grass. What’s less commonly know is that Whitman had a very clear idea as to how a poet should create this song. In his preface to the very first edition of Leaves of Grass, that book he would add to and enhance throughout his life, he describes his vision of the poetic process: “The sailor and traveler . . . . the anatomist chemist astronomer geologist phrenologist spiritualist mathematician historian and lexicographer are not poets, but they are the lawgivers of poets and their construction underlies the structure of every perfect poem.” For Whitman, it’s the craftsmen and scientists who lay down the laws, and the poets must follow them. Now, if your ear

Emily Dickinson is no ordinary poet. Her intelligent and profound work inspires a fierce attachment in those who love it. I know this first-hand. My wife began reading Dickinson soon after we first met and took to the poems so deeply that, a little over a decade later, she published a book about Dickinson’s spiritual life. What that meant for me–in addition to admiring her writing–was that for over a decade Dickinson was more or less a member of our household, readily quoted by my wife on almost any occasion. “If your Nerve, deny you,” she might advise me as I tried to parallel park, “Go above your Nerve.” Or, on a winter morning, she might suddenly reflect on the “polar privacy of a soul admitted to itself.” A number of times I had to remind her that not all of us speak Dickinson. And yet, even if I don’t speak Dickinson, I, too, admire the poet’s work, as well as the spiritual struggles she undertook. So I was delighted to come across Kristen

My grandmother, who’s now ninety-eight, lived most of her life in a little town in Southwestern Ohio called Waynesville. The town has reinvented itself in the last few years as a destination for antiquers wiling to pay top-dollar for what she might call junk, but when she was there the town was the small center of a lot of small family farms, including her own. In her years there, she helped run the farm, started a dry-cleaning business, drove the school bus, served as an EMT and worked in the sheriff’s office. She was one of the folks everyone knew. On Sundays, she cooked biscuits for the prisoners in the local penitentiary. For me, growing up, she was just grandma. I didn’t realize the richness of her character until years later, with age and distance, maybe even a little wisdom. In her latest poetry collection, Amy Wright takes this kind of realization and transforms it into powerful, moving, and often times hilarious art. She was raised in the Appalachian region of Southwest Virginia, an

Readers gather around: Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity (Sundress Publications, 2016) is an anthology for a new era. As Cathy Park Hong states at the end of her New Republic essay, “There’s a New Movement in American Poetry and it is Not Kenneth Goldsmith”: “poetry is becoming progressively fluid, merging protest and performance into its practice. The era of Conceptual Poetry’s ahistorical nihilism is over and we have entered a new era, the poetry of social engagement.” This anthology stands with a significant few who are helping to usher in or marking this renewed time of social engagement through poetry. Up and coming poets are balking at the instruction to stay away from the political, the politicized, and the instigative. We are writing about the body as we have come to understand it, not a version sanitized for comfortable consumption. With two editors–Fox Frazier-Foley and Erin Elizabeth Smith–at the helm who were fully prese

“Poems of Nomadic Dispersal” This latter phrase in the title of Janice A. Lowe‘s new book–LEAVING CLE: Poems of Nomadic Dispersal (Miami University Press, 2016)– has hung around me, following me through my home, around the rural town where I live and have not yet become fully accustomed. The insistence on “landing somewhere” has resonated with me. The notion of understanding that place enough to call it home has altered the way I see myself geographically. The poems themselves have hung around me, in their narrative, in their varied terrain of verse topography. And then I heard the poet read her work, and the lines that had been trailing me rose up to eye and ear level. I understood the many levels on which these poems are operating. my House was small her secrets full of wildflower memory of Hungarian table wines her backyard of mint and rose breath singing through humble cracks a milk chute for bottles no longer delivered her garage a sentry box weary from Black sig

What is explosion? What does language look like when it mimics a gas leak, a bang, or rubble? What does language look like when it orbits other sounds, mediums, and musicality? How can it then react to and converse with itself? Rodrigo Toscano is a poet who trusts his creative impulse, trusts the place in time, space, and his mind where art is born allows this wave to carry the poet where it will. It is this ceding of will that permits a collection like Explosion Rocks Springfield (Fence Books, 2016) to fully realize itself. How can we better understand how a mid-day, multi-structure gas explosion took no lives? But this is isn’t about the explosion that took no lives. This has everything to do with the explosion that took no lives. And everything to do with dialogue, and the cosmos, and ancient civilizations. Interconnectedness is expressed at its most fundamental level. How can we better understand the philosophical impact of each word, each turn of phrase, each image it conjures, and how this languag

Paul Rouzer‘s new book offers a Buddhist reading of a famous collection of poems and the author associated with them, both of which were called Hanshan, or Cold Mountain. On Cold Mountain: A Buddhist Reading of the Hanshan Poems (University of Washington Press, 2015) presents and proposes what it calls a “Buddhist approach to poetry”: rather than focusing on the intentions of the author in reading poetry, it offers a way of thinking about the importance of the way a poem is read. Pt. 1 of the book introduces readers to the history of, and some of the technical issues surrounding, the Hanshan poems: its prefatory material, later debates about its authenticity, arguments in Chinese scholarship about the life and dates of the poet. It also proposes a way that we might think about a “Buddhist poetics.” Pt. 2 of the book looks closely at the overarching themes and rhetoric of the poems themselves, looking at the ways that meaning is made through internal and external juxtapositions, a

From its opening fragment on “Fragments” to its “Possibly dolorous tropical lyrical coda,” Simon Critchley‘s new book is a pleasure to hold in the hand and the mind. ABC of Impossibility (Univocal Publishing, 2015) is a collection of fragments and a catalog of “impossible objects”: poetry, America, emptiness, indirection, money, and more. Thoughts and jokes and quotes and small essays ranging from one line to several pages are arranged in a sequence that plays with unusual juxtapositions and acts as a form of “counterpoint,” riffing on and playing off of the work of Pessoa and Augustine and Rousseau and Blake and Heidegger and others. This is a thoughtful and playful book about time, and the sea, and humor, and loss, and slavery, and the importance of unlearning. Highly recommended!Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices