My review of David Mason’s latest poetry collection Pacific Light is up on the Los Angeles Review of Books website. It’s a book full of beauty and enlightenment you don’t want to miss. Please read the review to get an idea about it and excerpts from his unforgettable poetry. Much thanks to LARB’s fantastic Editor-in-Chief editor Boris Dralyuk, himself a fine poet as well.
Lucille Lang Day has been on my radar for quite some time, but today I actually discovered her. Not just her poetry, her 11 books of poetry (as I counted from her website), her many awards and her anthologies, books of prose and memoirs, like Married at Fourteen, not even the poem I had just read this morning which led me to all this from a link in my inbox, not even her scholarly science papers, her degrees, but more than all this it was the discovery of her, who inspired me to come back and post on this website again, after the death of my husband, and of others too, including my oldest brother, and then the losses not by death but estrangement that in some ways hurt the most. Lucy Day’s life story itself is so vibrant, and so unusual, something she embraces to the benefit of all of us. As if her story is telling me now it’s high time to embrace my own oddities, those histories it seems no one could possibly accept. And not just accept, but flaunt them, no holds barred. It is her delightful courage really that inspires.
So this poem kind of exemplifies what I love in her work, the impetuous storytelling, the sense that life is just bursting from the seams, and that we can’t just hold it all in, that it was meant, and so we can make it destined, to be shared.
Return to Acushnet
To my mother, Evelyn Lang
I finally see your life—
a page ripped from a book,
its meaning, emotions, intent
fragmentary and obscured.
I’ve found the town where you were born,
whose name you never told me,
and met the family you were torn from,
not as a baby
but as a child old enough to know
your mother was dead,
your father was letting you go.
I ran an ad to find descendants
of your father’s sisters.
One lived in a log cabin in Acushnet,
amid red maples, weeds, abandoned cars.
Her crazy brother lived alone next door
in the shingled farmhouse that belonged
to your grandparents when they were young
and raising children, chickens, pigs, and cows.
The fireflies in Massachusetts winked and glowed
in the elms in early summer,
constellations of memories
appearing and disappearing amid the leaves,
your life itself like a leaf
cleaved too soon from the tree.
Out back, a tractor sat rusting in tall grass—
the carcass of an animal,
fossilized, extinct. The barn
had fallen down the year before. The porch
that used to wrap around the house
was gone. A notice in the window said
“Condemned.” The once grand stairs inside
were carpeted with dust. Paint peeled
from the walls; boxes, bags, and garbage
filled the rooms. I went upstairs:
I had to see it all. Pine floorboards
were loose, cobwebs everywhere.
I closed my eyes and saw bright quilts
where long ago your father’s sisters slept.
When I came back down,
Cousin Ken stared straight ahead
in the kitchen, trembling from his drugs.
Mother, eight years dead,
your father, aunts and uncle,
all long gone, are listed on the Internet.
Imagine it! Ernestine, born first,
watched the little ones: Valetta,
Harriet, and Mabel, who quilted, sang,
and put on plays; Rowland and your father,
Ebenezer, who liked to trick the girls.
The night I visited the house
where they were born, Grandpa Eb
appeared in a dream, lithe
and handsome, with his big mustache.
“Go back to California,” he said.
“I’ll come visit you.” I think he wanted
to stand beside me, watching
a Western gull, its pink feet
skimming the crests of the Pacific,
hear Hutton’s vireo call
from the top of a California oak, wrap
his taut arms tight around us both
like a shipwrecked sailor clinging to the mast,
but I knew in the end he’d let go.
It is hard for me to imagine that Susan de Sola (Rodstein) is no longer with us. She was always so vital, the very embodiment of creative energy coupled with a vibrant sense of humor. Although we only met virtually, I consider her a dear friend, who reached out to me because we both have five children, and whose kindness transcended borders and preconceptions. Both poet and critic, her recent book Frozen Charlotte (Able Muse Press, 2019) has met rave reviews, a book so expressive of her unique poetic voice. A winner of the Frost Farm Poetry Prize for her moving poem ”Buddy,” she also wrote a poem in the voice of a rock, indicative of her imaginative style. We had all thought this was the first of many books. A delight as both a poet and a generous, loving human being, I will always remember her, and wish her family well. From her book, these lovely poems:
Eve Sleeps
Each night we form a double C.
Hand rests on hip or curves to breast,
chest to back, his strong legs pressed
to make a chair of flesh for me.
Adjudications of the breath,
Adam’s apple near my head,
we’re stacked for storage in this bed
as sleep suspends us near a death.
Twins in the dark, we knit a seam
from toe to crown, a tensile wire.
Our eyes roll blind, they roll desire.
Locked in body, branched to dream,
we fall into this darker space.
Each cannot see the other’s face.
The Tulips
We bought them at a farmer’s field, so plump
and red—great goblets, plush concavities
which made of content an irrelevancy.
For days we took delight in their post-mortem
magic. What had this red exuberance
to do with death? They anchored down the table,
held center stage, just like an aria,
a swelling note we held against the odds.
But now they start to fall apart, and see,
they deconstruct so cleanly! Diving petals
reveal a pattern on the inner corner,
a three-point wedge of aubergine-black, capped
by arching yellow bands; a stylized print
of itself in little, vector to the ribbed red
flank, which had barely aged. The tiny tulip-
print anticipates its slide to symbol.
The sleekly flattened violet pistils spill
out scarcely any powder. Slim green stalks
with small white crowns stand bare. Abstract.
A Dutch-bobbed slouching flapper of a flower,
so modernist and sleek, a silhouette.
A flower a cartoonist might invent.
I sweep the petals up in great big bunches,
the dustbin blazing; it had never looked better.
But it’s become almost a game. The petals
fall at random—yet they seem to fall
in answer to our conversation, plunging
at key words, thumping downward during our
significant pauses, heard in silences.
Blowsy, lipsticked interlocutors;
drunken smacks, and dried-out goodbye kisses.
One of the complaints common among non-English majors is that poetry today is often inaccessible, sacrificing general audiences for academic ones, or that the qualities of rhyme and meter have been sacrificed on the altar of modernism and free verse. Martin Elster, however, simply writes the kind of poetry he writes, both formal and rhyming, because as a musician this is what he intuitively prefers. His is a unique voice, and his new book Celestial Euphony gives us poetry that is not self-consciously “accessible,” but rather engages the reader with a rare sort of clarity and art, bringing us perspectives on nature, science, and human nature that are wrought with the intent of conveying them in the best way possible. So below is the press release from the publisher for his book, which can be purchased here.
We’re pleased to announce the release of Martin Elster’s new poetry collection, Celestial Euphony. Many of you might know him by his pen name, Miles T. Ranter, under which he participates in our weekly poetry contests. In addition to winning many of our contests and earning an honorable mention in many more, Martin has seen his work published in numerous publications and anthologies, and has won or placed in several poetry competitions. Celestial Euphony is available in paperback and Kindle.
“Martin’s fluid movement among various frames of reference— from astrophysics to musicology to botany to etymology—creates a structure of sheer imaginative play, which frames his utterly humane eye. His poetry explores the lyrical, intellectual, affective forces of language, while staying rooted in sensitive subjectivity. Martin is a joyous craftsman!”
Matthew Kirshman, author of The Magic Flower & Other Sonnets
“Stepping into Martin Elster’s work, I’m taken by its rhythms and musicality. These are poems to read aloud, savor their sounds, and enjoy a meandering walk through the world around us.”
Frank Watson, editor of Poetry Nook and author of The Dollhouse Mirror, Seas to Mulberries, and One Hundred Leaves
Through ballades and ballads, acrostics and ghazals, sonnets and Sapphics—both lighthearted and ruminative—the evocative poems in this collection portray the sights and sounds of our natural and manmade environments, the plants and animals everywhere around us and our relationship with them, sometimes pleasant and beautiful, often harmful and ominous.
There are poems about terrestrial musicians and interstellar musicians, the songs of spring peepers and katydids, the plight of spiders and polar bears, humans in love and at war, songbirds vying with urban cacophony, lonely dogs and ghostly dogs, and very serious musings about the huge and mysterious cosmos that we are all a part of and how we click with it.
About the Author
Martin Elster, who never misses a beat, is a percussionist with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. Aside from playing and composing music, he finds contentment in long walks in the woods or the city and, most of all, writing poetry, often alluding to the creatures and plants he encounters.
His career in music has influenced his fondness for writing metrical verse, which has appeared in 14 by 14, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Better than Starbucks, Cahoodaloodaling, Eye to the Telescope, Lighten Up Online, The Centrifugal Eye, The Chimaera, The Flea, The Speculative Edge, THEMA, and numerous other journals, e-zines, and anthologies.
His honors include Rhymezone’s poetry contest (2016) co-winner, the Thomas Gray Anniversary Poetry Competition (2014) winner, the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s poetry contest (2015) third place, and four Pushcart nominations.
A sample poem is below:
Waiting for Dawn atop Butterfly Mountain
A dilapidated lepidopteran
dying atop The Mountain of Butterflies
holds out her wings to the darkness — wings as thin
as the mist that swirls beneath monsoonal skies —
and pictures the tea farm women, who often glow
like painted sawtooths dotting the plantation;
and, wallowing in the Mahaweli’s flow,
trumpeting in carefree conversation,
elephants plashing, washing away all worry.
Unlike them, she’s alone here on this rock,
a decent rock on which to dream. No hurry
to flee the fleeting memories that flock
like the birds of Sinharaja: the cunning jackal,
the whistling thrush, the fish in every lake
(which lure the hungry to come with boats and tackle
and float on magic molecules that slake
the roots of rice), the din of Devon Falls
reverberating through a green expanse
where a muntjac barks, a magpie calls and calls,
and footsteps crack the chrysalis of her trance —
men climbing toward her haven. Soon the sun
will oust the night. Slowly she beats her wings,
wings like frozen wood as, one by one,
they gain the hilltop, quicker as someone sings
a hymn to dawn, then darts away as a bell
blossoms like an orchid on the height
and, rising with the most resounding knell,
fades like the constellations at first light.
The gorgeous print literary journal Lily Poetry Review has published a beautifully-written review of To Love the River in its Summer issue. Due to family issues, I haven’t been very active posting things of late, but hope to do more now. The review is written by Editor-in-Chief Eileen Cleary, author of the heartbreaking and powerful book Child Ward of the Commonwealth (Main Street Rag, 2019). She writes “To Karami, poetry is music and as such is composed rather than written.” And “to explore luminous spaces in the hands of this capable and imagistic poet is a true pleasure.” How can I thank you, dear reviewer, for such a thrilling review? And the journal itself is a thing of beauty, full of poems that open up worlds to the imagination. Well worth a subscription.
When it comes to form, nobody does it like Terence Hayes: he understands the larger view of form as a Force that can drive a point right into your heart. In this New Yorker article, author Dan Chiasson says that the sonnet, a form Hayes calls “part music box, part meat grinder,” became the poet’s vehicle of choice for his recent book, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin , because for him,
the sonnet offered an alternative unit of measurement, at once ancient, its basic features unchanged for centuries, and urgent, its fourteen lines passing at a brutal clip.
In the book, the American sonnet both contains and assaults his assassins: “I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison, / Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame.” The form itself being the brainchild of “the L.A. poet Wanda Coleman, who died in 2013 and who coined the term ‘American sonnet.‘” Who considered the term as referring to a more “improvised” sonnet that used jazz techniques and musical patterns.
The language is powerful and immediate, exuding worlds and threats. This is what sets Hayes apart: the combination of power, poetic skill (unique use of craft), unrelenting content, and an intensity of heart that drives all this into a tour de force of words closing in on flesh.
All cancers kill me, car crashes, cavemen, chakras,
Crackers, discord, dissonance, doves, Elvis,
Ghosts, the grim reaper herself, a heart attack
While making love, hangmen, Hillbillies exist,
Lilies, Martha Stewarts, Mayflower maniacs,
Money grubbers, Gwen Brooks’ “The Mother,”
(My mother’s bipolar as bacon), pancakes kill me,
Phonies, dead roaches, big roaches & smaller
Roaches, the sheepish, snakes, all seven seas,
Snow avalanches, swansongs, sciatica, Killer
Wasps, yee-haws, you, now & then, disease.
A list that also serves as ammunition, a kind of automatic fire that thrills with its sheer brilliance and expanse of imagination. And also with its truth, how he disgorges the racist and white supremacist attitudes made flesh in the form of Donald Trump and his followers. To which this collection is addressed, among other things.
“This word can be the difference between knowing / And thinking. It’s the name people of color call / Themselves on weekends & the name colorful / People call their enemies & friends.”
Trump is a palpable undercurrent throughout the book, and occasionally Hayes addresses the President directly, calling him “Mr. Trumpet”:
. . . You ain’t allowed to deride
Women when you’ve never wept in front of a woman
That wasn’t your mother. America’s struggle with itself
Has always had people like me at the heart of it. You can’t
Grasp your own hustle, your blackness, you can’t grasp
Your own pussy, your black pussy dies for touch.
These poems all happen in the mind, which has been portioned into zones called “I” and “you.” Both assume countless different roles, but what remains constant is their reliance upon each other and their tendency to flip positions. This makes the work morally ambiguous in ways some readers will resist: I suspect that not everybody will recognize “blackness” as any part, even a rejected part, of Trump, a man whose loathing of black people seems unabashed.
Yes, “Hayes isn’t describing canonical melancholy, the pined-for vision of mortality that poets sometimes indulge in. He fears a more immediate kind of danger, which can’t be aestheticized or glorified in verse. “You are beautiful because of your sadness,” Hayes admits. And yet: “You would be more beautiful without your fear.”
In the form he invented:
The Golden Shovel
after Gwendolyn Brooks
My first full-length poetry collection, To Love the River, is now on sale at the publisher Kelsay Books’ website! This is much sooner than I had imagined, months earlier than its projected publishing date, so this is a huge and happy surprise. The book is the culmination of many years’ work, the subject matter spanning a river’s worth of emotions and experience condensed into the craft of both formal and free verse poetry.
The cover art is by the Swedish artist — a pioneer of abstract art pre-Kandinsky! — and mystic Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) whose séance-inspired (and later simply inspired) paintings are finally getting recognition in her first solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum. Like her work, my poetry also reflects a subtly spiritual perspective on life.
Here is one sample poem from the book, which echoes the “dawn” theme woven through some of these poems, “The Word for Dawn,” first published in Sukoon journal.
The Word for Dawn
Fajr: the j a mere mirage, light on the tongue,
just melting into r, no vowel between,
bluing into nothing but a turning of the lips.
I hear it like a distant motorcycle,
its street lost in a cricket’s heartbeat,
and I find it leaking tiny drumbeats from
my son’s earbuds fallen from his ear,
buzzing in his sleep. Newborn wasps,
tinny, revving j’s straight through the r’s
that rise and thread their little lights
where teeth touch lips and feel the furry f’s
a darkness, void, a space of hairy night.
A single hair-edge turning from the deep.
The Whale Road Review has published my review of Cynthia Neely’s chapbook Passing Through Blue Earth. Please check it out, as well as the fine poetry and reviews in this truly excellent site. Well worth your time. Also here is a link to where you can buy a copy of Neely’s award-winning chapbook, selected by the fantastic and illustrious Kwame Dawes, one of my favorite poets too.
The Rumpus has published my review of Joy Ladin’s transformative poetry collection Fireworks in the Graveyard” today here. Joy Ladin is quite an amazing person herself, and enlightened me, in the process of reading her work and about her struggles, about the deep connection between transexuality and religious faith. The review explores this and so much more. Please check it out!
If you haven’t read or discovered Faisal Mohyuddin, then this may be the moment to wake up to the unforgettable, even transformative experience of his poetry. Also an accomplished and unique visual artist, as well as a recognized innovator in the teaching profession, Mohyuddin’s poetry is not to be missed. His newest collection, The Displaced Children of Displaced Children, won the 2017 Sexton Prize in poetry judged by Kimiko Hahn. A “proud American Muslim” whose voice enlightens a path to multi-cultural coexistence and compassion, one cannot really categorize his work in the usual sense, because its boundaries are made dynamic by their heartfelt human core. Just a sample of his work below. (More on his website.)
Migration Narrative
What wilts becomes
the world for the weary.
They can’t help but
wonder at the lovely
shadow touch of another
war’s rubbled song.
If crossing freely into fire
can churn the blood’s
hollow music, then
surely the orphan can
ask at dusk for water
and get more than spit.
—————————-
The following poem, published in The Missouri Review, is one of the most amazing poetic expressions of faith, fatherhood, love, and defining sacredness, I’ve seen.
The Opening
It is You we worship; it is You we ask for help. Guide us
to the straight path: the path of those You have blessed,
those who incur no anger and who have not gone astray. —The Holy Quran, “Al-Fatiha,” verses 5-7
THE CHILD: Tell me, Father,
what new turbulence took hold
in your blood on the day of my birth,
and did your stomach sink
each time I cried out for the basket
of your arms?
THE FATHER: I held you too close
to feel anything but the wild
gallop of your tiny heart.
THE CHILD: Did you recite
the call to prayer in my ear, slip
your pinky, dipped in honey, in my mouth
to mark with song and sweetness
my entry into the ummah
of the Prophet Muhammad?
THE FATHER: All night, I nursed
a candle’s flame, leaning in and out
of its sphere of light, mumbling verses
of the Qur’an, mispronouncing
the Arabic, not understanding a word
beyond “Al-Fatiha,” but knowing,
nonetheless, I had fulfilled
this first obligation of fatherhood.
THE CHILD: What was it like
to look into my eyes for the first time?
THE FATHER: I felt as if my fingers
had combed the embryonic silt feathering
the deepest bottom of the ocean.
And when I resurfaced, holding the key
to fatherhood, I understood
the true worth of being a living thing.
THE CHILD: What did you say
to Mother when she could not find
the words to tell you about how
the breaking open of a body
propels one toward heaven, that God
promises the greatest share of Paradise
to mothers?
THE FATHER: After a long silence,
I said, “To every unutterable thing
buried in your heart, to every miraculous truth
teetering on the tip of your tongue,
yes, yes, ameen.”
THE CHILD: Did you spill the blood
of two goats, give their meat to the poor,
to bless my arrival, to mark
the transition of my soul
from the library of the eternal
into the living fire of a body too fragile to share?
THE FATHER: For twenty years,
I harvested the silhouette of my father’s voice
from the night sky, let its echo rock me
to sleep whenever I felt so crushed
by heartache that even God’s infinite love,
a rescue vessel sailing through a history
of bloodshed and loss, could not hold me
intact enough to believe in survival—
so if it was my hand or another’s
that guided the blade along two throats
I cannot recall, nor do I want to.
THE CHILD: What else
might you have done
had fatherhood not stolen you
from the life you knew?
THE FATHER: When a surgeon
saves your life by amputating a limb
housing a reservoir of poison,
you do not curse the violence
of his work, nor the pain of the procedure.
You bow down before God.
You thank the man. You learn to write
with the other hand, to walk
on one leg.
THE CHILD: One final question,
Father. What should I say
when my son, when I too become a father,
asks me about the hours
of your life that exist beyond
my knowing?
THE FATHER: Tell him more
about the hours of your life
so his hunger is not as desperate
nor as bottomless
as ours.
Siham Karami 