Poetry International has published my review of Adeeba Shahid Talukder’s Kundiman Prize-winning debut full-length poetry collection Shahr-e-Jaanaan: City of the Beloved (Tupelo Press, 2020), a truly gorgeous unforgettable book available at Tupelo Press and Barnes & Noble and elsewhere (including you-know-who – let’s try other places first).
Check out the review!
Ecstatic doesn’t even describe it. My poetry collection, To Love the River, has been reviewed in Atticus Review, and it is indeed a gratifying review for a book into which I put my whole self. All my appreciation to the reviewer, Nicole Caruso Garcia, for taking the time to consider and appreciate my poetry in such a fine venue. Also a fine poet in her own right, it means so much that she considered it worth her time. My thanks to Atticus Review as well for publishing the review; especially as I have a publicity deficit (common among poets, alas). Being online also means the review is accessible to more people. She states:
She skillfully toggles between micro and macro, zooms in on an insect level, then pulls back to let readers see the constellations.
And
Like the core pieces in a museum’s collection, Karami’s ghazals alone make the experience worth the price of admission.
With its lovely inventive title, “Life Only as Water Current,” this review is a thing of beauty for which I am deeply grateful.
Atticus Review is itself a wonderful venue for poetry, fiction, CNF, and mixed media, as well as reviews and interviews. It’s well worth your time to look through the whole site.
And for those who are interested, now is a good time to consider giving the gift of poetry; the review touches on the high points of my book and gives you a fair assessment of what’s inside. I will sign and send a personally signed copy with free shipping for those who contact me in the next two weeks either via email sihamkarami at gmail dot com or follow me on twitter @sihamkarami and I will follow you back where you can send me a direct message regarding purchase of a signed copy of my book. Of course, there’s always Amazon and Kelsay Books’ site as well, but without signature and paying for shipping. All this is also on the “Books” tab above. One feels somehow not-right to promote one’s own book, but such is the fate of the lesser-known poet. A small blip in the sea. For which such reviews are lifeboats.
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
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!
My Review of Ann Tweedy’s wonderful poetry collection The Body’s Alphabet has been published on Glass-Poetry Journal. A gorgeous site, well worth visiting for the poetry too. So excited to be a part of Glass, one of the most beautiful venues out there. Please check it out.
The book’s author Ann Tweedy is a Pacific Northwest-based Poet, lawyer, scholar, and advocate for Native American rights, environmental protection, as well as polyamory, aka bisexuality, as a married bi woman. A voice that must be heard!
Is this the world’s first poetry book review with comics? OK, maybe not, but it seemed appropriate and even irresistible to try my hand at comics as review for a book that includes poetry comics. Look for Howard Bloom going for the buzzkill button. Jessy Randall’s new book, Suicide Hotline Hold Music, is the inspiring subject of the review, which includes samples of her comics too. Of course. And yes, the review also includes writing.
My review of And the Walls Come Crumbling Down by Tania De Rozario, published by Math Paper Press, is up on Singapore Poetry, the premier poetry website in Singapore. Its founder and editor, Jee Leong Koh, is a fine poet in his own right, and has initiated an exchange of reviews and books between Singapore and the United States (where he now lives in New York). It’s a fascinating idea and a quick look at the site will tell you the high quality of literature coming out of Singapore.
De Rozario’s book is a fictionalized memoir, written in a style that reveals her skill as a poet and quite memorable. I learned much from her about the consequences of Singapore’s social experiment, and also about the struggles of the LGBT community there, one that illuminates the struggle for freedom and love for all humans. Please check it out!
Siham Karami 