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storySouth 28 : Fall 2009



SPECIAL FEATURE: Anhinga Press



Fiction


Poetry


Nonfiction:


Contributors A MAP OF MY BODY
by Rick Campbell

The upper regions mapped, the X,

Sharpie on masking tape, in the center

of my throat. The machine

traverses a line, coordinates tied to this mark,

to other known points, clavicle

jaw bone, maybe an ear lobe.

How far, centimeters, is the X

from where my cancer

began, the scar on my neck. How far,

just for nostalgia, from the nose,

thirty years ago smashed by a brick,

a tangible violence. Ive measured

too often, the girth of my waist,

my weight, this last May my wifes

heartbeat, her breathing, as she lay

hooked to tubes and meters, whirling

and beeping. I measured her breath

by breath, diastole, systole, diastole,

systole. And even that highest of science

or art, that tick by tick connection

to the numbers of her blood, the difficulty

of breath, told me what matters

is immeasurable. Today

my mask fit tighter on my forehead,

my nose, and I feared something

had shifted. But my bodymapped now

like the plat that defines our home,

a point in concrete north of the drive way,

an iron pipe in the confluence of two creeks,

the angle between themflat on this table

could be a job I worked years ago, painting

survey targets on the suburban streets

of Boca Raton. The laser burns my body,

maps what it is I am now, the chance

of my being someone else by summer,

the science of reclamation.

DOG IN THE DITCH, LILIAN SPRINGS ROAD
by Rick Campbell

This morning it was alive

when it walked out of shadow—

brown mutt, brown trees, brown

grass in the swale. Walked

in front of the car like a shopper

decides beans would be good for dinner

and turns toward the shelf. Truck

in the narrow lane, sun in its windshield,

beside me. I dont swerve as much as hope

for the center line. I dont want to spatter

my daughter and I on the grill of a three-quarter ton Chevy.

I hold a short breath until the dog

thumps my bumper and still I hope

that we or the dog are blessed, lucky, that death

today might be like baseball, a game

of inches. In the ditch it lay still,

big ugly head, pit bull and chow maybe, scarred

legs, mange, no collar. I let my breath out.

This dog, dead, looked homeless. No one

could mourn it, no one had called its name.

I left it there, winter falling on us,

and drove past the alfalfa field,

twenty rolls of hay, tractor

rusting near the broken barn.

THE CRYING BABY FLIGHT
by Rick Campbell

We are landing in the night

and the lights make our town a city

the way one light in the dark

seems like home, seems safe.

The babies were brown & cried

loud in the native tongue of babies,

not the Sinhalese, or Bengali I imagined

their father used when he said

what no doubt meant be quiet little one

or shut the fuck up (and who among us

would know, though many of us were

thinking it). I prefer the former.

Then baby said to all of us

I have to pee pee. I have to pee pee,

and we wanted to say Jesus, fuck man,

let the damn kid pee, but we were landing

and none of us could move and I

imagined a river of pee moving under

my seat, soaking my computer bag,

gliding toward the pilot’s locked door.

Threat code yellow, threat code warm.

I raised my feet and then the baby was quiet

and his father too.

HOW TO SAVE A LIFE
by Rick Campbell

I don’t remember much of it.

My father must have been at work.

Early afternoon, by the light, and across the street, Ivan,

our neighbor, was home. He worked

three to eleven. I say my little brother went

to get him and I stayed with her. Ivan

or Celie or someone said keep her walking. Don’t

let her sleep. How did they know?

Who tried to overdose on pills in their world?

Maybe they saw it on TV. 1965. Drama. I

walked her round and round the living room

until my father and the police came.

I remember feeling that everyone was watching, that

my father was not surprised, but Sammy, sad.

Keep her walking, that’s all I really know.

When they take her away, don’t forget her. Love

her anyway. Don’t think about why.

TIME OF DEATH
by Rick Campbell

Looking through the glass

as her hand fell, as doctors

turned and walked away

you knew there was no reason

to go on. This is the way the world

ends. What good is love

if it cannot keep you both alive?

The last minutes fall away

like flakes of ash. Her children leave.

Then she too is gone. Whats left?

A sky of grief, the long green Gulf sailing

away to the edge of the world? You, watching

it every day, all night, waking again here?

THE FILM
by Chad Sweeney

In the year 1210, in that town

which is now Barcelona,

a woman named Amalia

directed the first film,

in real time, like an Andy Warhol,

of a pile of golden apples in the market


and of the light that knew to bring out

the spots of green or blush or the violet tips

of straw which formed a bed beneath the apples,

and of the hands and their shadows

the film was mostly about the hands and their shadows

which arrived all day to touch the apples,


hands missing a thumb or with a hoof print

in the palm, shadows which traced

and rearranged the fruit

and in a way rearranged the light

and the dust motes that hung

like primitive sequins in that light,


rough fingers which crossed the screen

in chiaroscuro,

in the carriage of dancers or pall bearers,

hands which appeared to think

while touching the bruises and stems,

and would sometimes place an apple in a bag.


And though the machinery of cinema

would not be invented for centuries,

and though this film was something

dreamed of rather than manifest,

the apples and the hands it memorized

were real.

IN THE ORCHARD
by Chad Sweeney

I count the apples on my abacus.

One.


My abacus with one bead.


The fallen law and the ripening law.

The law of multiplication.


I count the seasons in each orchard,

the orchards in each apple.


One.

The law of what continues.


A pickup slaps the wet of the bridge.

It’s Sunday, rendered in black and white.


The migrant workers are napping, their children

play hide-and-seek, passing in and out


of time.

Someone


is making a film about them,

with the sound of their laughter


turned low.

THE DOME
by Chad Sweeney

When we were the poorest,

mom paid my weekly allowance

in birds. That one is yours, she whispered


so as not to disturb it.

If you clean the oven

I’ll give you that red one.


In a few months

I owned all the birds on the street,

blue jays, finches, a lame owl


cowled in the clock tower.

We had to walk farther each Saturday

to find a new fountain or thicket


so mother could pay me what she owed.

We stood on a bridge.

Our soldiers were marching away,


singing

and trying to sound brave.

Their numbers were staggering.


I invented a mathematics

to understand them.

I subtracted them from summer


and it was winter. Most of our houses

were gone, and the birds too.

The university had been bombed


with my father inside, attending a reading

by some Polish poets.

The poems were so sturdy, he said,


they held up the dome of the ceiling.

EMPIRE OF WONDER
by Chad Sweeney

Then I knew it was dawn


through which we passed




as through a series of revolving doors


backwards into night




where the tender


red of the pomegranite




lit the lamps in the womb,


the last morning




or the first,


the always-not-yet




morning


where mounted on the horizon




the irons we used


to brand the animals with their names




sank back into the alphabet,


and the prows of ancient islands,




heroic, lapidary torsos


swayed untroubled on the harbor,




answering yes to whatever asked,


to carpenters’ gloves




hanging in clusters from their trellis,


to parapets and mines,




to the furious mineral silence


of the chairs.

MICHIGAN SESTINA
by Chad Sweeney

Believe me, I’ve tried to understand winter.

It grows out from no root and no

seed, yet sways like a meadow toward the mind,

shifts and sways on its white stem and is

a figure of uncertainty over hills of sleep,

where aging factories gesture to a train


and mills are shuttered over river ice. The train

crosses a bridge from Michigan into winter,

its silos and tobacco fields framed by sleep,

inscrutable and nine hells down. No

horses center the pastures, and the sky is

its own pasture, a drift of snow over the mind.


Three crows motionless on a fence, in the mind

are moving, crossing the windows of the train

like Japanese characters whose sense is

effortless, a calligraphy of winter

whose shifting figures evoke a No

theater, three masks in a theater of sleep.


But the land draws its own lessons from sleep,

the heaping of frozen images in the mind,

Polish teachers in a birch grove and no

one to bury them, shoved from the train,

the faces of the dead occupy the whole winter,

one borderless nation of snow. Memory is


unable to bury themwhat was and what is,

and what never was, heaped together in sleep.

History erects a statue to winter,

a wolf leaves its tracks across the mind,

the train and the memory of the train

arrive on one line, though no


station is there to greet them and no

one is getting on or off. Is

it a manner of irony pulls this train

west toward Chicago with its cargo of sleep?

My forehead against the window doesn’t mind

closing its one eye against winter,


the train moves deeper into memory, no

train and no winter, but one crow is

changed in sleep to the Japanese character for mind.

ALL I COULD SEE I NAMED DARKNESS
by Rhett Iseman Trull

Until

              you, lit, tapped me

on the shoulder the night

of Kari’s partyKari, lost

among her entourage, and me

on the periphery, thinking

I might slip the scene without

notice, as always. But then,

as the man whose parents

let him rename himself Flash

gunned his motorcycle to wheel

the fair Kari away and leave me

friendless, you introduced

yourself, as if all evening you’d been waiting

for the moment the beautiful crowd might

part and there I’d be.

                                          I’d thought

myself invisible, self-exiled

to the edges. All summer, come midnight,

I’d been sulking the streets,

apartments illumined where something was

happening: a couple kissing, curtains

undrawn; or a phone announcing

its callsurely, from someone’s new

crush; someone, it seemed,

for everyone but me, spinster

already, wick never

fired. I figured this was the

life for me, like it or not: voyeur

of the neighborhood, popcorn

dinner for one, one

wine glass wearing a ring of red

in the sink. At least I could do

as I thought I pleased: stay out

until the bars flicked

off the music, on the lights;

let the tattoo artist

christen me with his needle

on my shoulder, a wolf

howling with such longing I thought

its moon absent

until

              you stepped under

the patio lights and all the shadows

of the city

              shifted.

THE FISH CRY OUT FROM THE FLAMES
by Rhett Iseman Trull

But it’s Cynthia I love. She turns the spit and fire

reaches again for the bream. Only two

were large enough to keep, riding home from the river

in my bucket, alive, Cynthia’s the knife

that stripped them. Litter of scales like sparks

among the moss. I heard no prayer

she offered. I held the tray and skewers.

She lit the match, set the coals

to dancing. Cynthia in the dark now. Smoke

that curls around her, be my hands. I, too,


am snapping in the fire,


but no one’s listening. Certainly not

Cynthia, unconcerned

about the wind threatening

the blaze, the plate too big for what I’ve caught, hunger

that grows by the hourwell, her own maybe,

yes, to her appetite she attends, but

not mine. Nor my shadow the night

is absorbing. Nor my fishing

pole against the tree, line threaded

still with its hook.

HUMAN RESOURCES
by Rhett Iseman Trull

At the end of the day he’s someone to come home to, a voice

in the hallway, stopping the clocks. My mixed-up morning

doesn’t matter anymore: smog, time cards, deadlines, ink,

Eloise crying again in her cubicle. I leave it all

behind: angry whir of the fax machine, requests for ergonomic chairs,

and the afternoon’s robotic conversations: eligible for benefits

in thirty days; sign here, Ms. Montgomery; sign here, Mr. Grey.


Home at last, I empty the blues from my pockets.

I tell him I love him and think I mean it. And that’s close enough

to happiness, his keys retired on the hook next to mine, scent

of cologne in my den. He pours the wine and I’ve got a reason

to wear that new red dress. The bed will be warm

on both sides tonight. The stars, like wolves,

will herd their lights into packs that look less lonely.

JAGUAR
by Robert Dana

                                                                                                                            Early evening.
                                 The trees turning black and blacker.

The snow turning blue.                                                                Winter clamped and hard.

                                                                              *

Only the fire consoles me.
                                                               Fire.
                                                                                 And the eyes and mouth and hands of fire.

                                                                              *

Twin birds in each ear.
                                                 A fox on each cheekbone.
                                                                                           The candle flaming along its flat nose.

               Exploding on its skull, a blue cosmos.

The dream-tiger’s head
                                                 snarls silently on the white wall.

                                                                              *

Ten thousand tiny beads of many colors
                                                                              pinned into beeswax over carven wood.

                                                                              *

                                                                              Jaguar.
                                                                                                            Vision animal.
Power decayed into Beauty.
                                                                Mercado junk food for the soul.

               In its blank, fierce eyes,

                                                                      some shamans storm of wild music still frozen there. CHAD SWEENEY’S ‘ARRANGING THE BLAZE’
by Stefanie Silva

Arranging the Blaze
by Chad Sweeney
Anhinga Press, 106 pages, $15.00

In “The River,” the introductory poem to Chad Sweeney’s book, Arranging the Blaze, he writes,

     I went to the river and found a desert

     rising gradually toward the Pleiades,


     lions panted beside a boat

     half-buried in red sand.


Rivers, deserts, the Pleiades, lions: all these trigger words invoke a grand tradition powerful enough to cleanse and rearrange a landscape, either physically or psychologically. Indeed, there is a prophetic tone to many of Sweeney’s poems, as he rediscovers the geography of his own history and time, which inevitably tangles with nature and tradition. All this exploration is done with inventive imagery and precise diction that succeeds in tightening the line until it is taut with energy and urgency.

The book is divided into four parts: “Genealogy,” “Of Memory and Innovation,” “Basho’s Robes,” and “Arc of Intention.” In “Genealogy,” Sweeney traces the shared ancestry of people through elements of folklore. The poem “Genealogy” is Sweeney’s attempt to encapsulate the living world surrounding him, a world that affects and forms all of us. His refrain, “It is in me,” refers not only to both man-made and natural objects, but also to his own personal history (“Mother before she was my mother”) and how that history projects into a larger, shared history that “arrives” within us “by memory or dream.” One of his most successful poems in the book is found in this section: “The Welders” begins with the speaker watching a group of welders making a carousel, but Sweeney takes the welders’ jobs further, giving them a mythic quality:

     Under the masks

     they are magicians

     seaming sky


     to a mountain

     with a red stitch,

     a green stitch.


     I’ve seen their work before,

     wherever theory

     or bone


     needed binding...


The welders become god-like, the makers of civilization as we know it. They not only weld objects, but natural and philosophical inquiries. And, when they are done (reminding the reader of God’s seventh day of rest), they drink a beer, and we return to the initial image of the carousel that now begins to turn. The cyclical movement of this poem (highlighted by the circular nature of a carousel) contributes to its success: the generous leaps and turns sends the reader on a carousel ride of creation, and the sparse but incredibly detailed and inventive description is admirable and hits all the right marks.

The next section, “Of Memory and Innovation,” begins by exploring human interaction with nature. Sweeney is at his best in this section when he employs the use of the short line to highlight a beautiful lyricism. The poem, “Cul-de-Sac” effortlessly examines the disintegration of man-made objects:

     Here the swing set

     over-vined

     with jasmine,


     a tricycle

     rusting,

     all manner of desire.


The poem then takes a turn, introducing a character who, in the midst of all this dilapidation, rearranges the world around him or her for a closer examination:

     And a dark-haired child,

     a new thing among the worlds,

     broods over a baby snake,

     its emerald head


     turning

     under the jelly jar,

     its living eyes.


It is the simplicity of this poem that holds the most impact: there is a gentleness found in almost all of Sweeney’s poems that turns the poet into a dark-haired child who picks up each detail and arranges them into his own little jelly jars of poems.

“Basho’s Robes” furthers the idea of innovation and reinvents tradition, especially in “33 Translations of One Basho,” a series of poems that attempts to do justice to the master Japanese haiku poet. This section is unlike all the other sections because it contains no personal experience, which shows Sweeney’s range and ability to remove himself from his poems. However, it still contains Sweeney’s themes of exploring the origins of something (in this case, 15th century Japanese poetry), as well as the themes of tradition, reinvention, and rearrangement. Sweeney’s goal in journeying to the past, then moving forward and rearranging the past to better understand it, is apparent even when he removes himself from the equation.

Sweeney begins his last section, “The Arc of Intention,” with three poems of personal history, creating his own folklorian tradition. These are some of the strongest poems in the section, asking the question, how does the past shape who we are? In “Inheritance,” Sweeney writes his own creation story:

     And when she could walk no farther

     she fell between the tracks to give birth.

     Not a boy but a tree


     rooted to the spot and began to grow

     so that by dawn it might be strong enough

     to stop the train.


At the end of the poem, Sweeney touches on the theme of time, giving himself his own arc of intention:

     Mother was facing the wrong way


     so I sprouted backwards

     into time

     where no train could harm us.


Sweeney’s creation of a mythic birth only furthers the scope of history and how that influences the present and future. He uses his poems like time machines: going back in time to interrogate the past, then moving forward to rewrite the past in the way he sees it effecting the present. For, as he says in the poem “Moving,” “Words are everything / we own.” The line break is especially strong here because, to Sweeney, words are everything. They are his tools to understand and recreate the past. His mastery of words sends readers on a journey through time, a time that is relatable and familiar to our knowledge of tradition and history. RICK CAMPBELL’S ‘DIXMONT’
by Amanda Rutstein

Dixmont

by Rick Campbell

Autumn House Press, 88 pp., $14.95


How do you reckon yesterday with today? This is the daunting question that Rick Campbell attempts to answer in his 2008 volume of poetry Dixmont. Named for a mental institution in South Pittsburgh, this volume practically pulses with the desire to not only understand but to manipulate time. Each poem manages to capture the swampish heat of Campbells Floridian home, as well as the tender affection he seems to have for every life experience.


Dixmont is broken up into four unnamed sections of varying length that each grapple with the passing of a life in a subtle yet distinct way. The first section unearths the beauty implicit in simplicity and teaches us that everyday moments contain gems worthy of a poem. Campbell is skilled at combining humor and pathos to create images that linger in your memory. In his poem Road House he describes a bartender after hours dancing with his dog while his wife sleeps at the bar:


     The Fat man I imagined sad, long eyes

     of a Basque sheepherder, would look at his wife

     sleeping on the bar, head in her arms,

     and then whisper to his dogwho waited for this moment


     wanna dance. Between bar and empty tables

     hed wrap his big arms around the mutt and sway

     in the yellow light. They danced in a slow circle,

     no matter what the music said.


This is a scene that is at once undeniably funny and also quite sad. One does not know whether to feel badly for the wife left sleeping, or the bartender, who so oddly delights at dancing with his pet. Balance such as this permeates the first section where Campbell staggers his heartbreaking poems, such as the title poem which explores a childhood visit to his mother at a mental hospital, with poems that uplift. In A Poem for Della, he learns how valuable patience is to his young daughter as they sort through her collection of seashells.


The second section hearkens back to Sylvia Plath and her poem The Arrival of the Bee Box, where she questions whether she or the bees are in charge and says, Tomorrow I will be a sweet God, I will set them free. Throughout this section there is an attempt on the part of Campbell to assert himself as an authority in his world and also to question whether that is the truth. Section two is riddled with questions about creation and fate. A somewhat darker portion of the book, it is also in this section that he begins to experiment with formal poetry illustrated by his inclusion of a sonnet about the Vietnam War. However, this is not to imply that all of the poems here are burdensome or philosophically inclined, for it is in this section that we can find what is, I believe, his most successful poem in the book: Naming Things. This poem is deeply original and questions the origin of titles and language. It is at once playful and haunting. Here is an excerpt from the end of the poem:


     ...We will have forgotten

     know; the card for rain will be wet,


     but that we will have forgotten too.

     The card for wind will have a picture

     of trees bent and swaying, but the card

     for trees will have been lost. Bent

     and swaying will be motions we

     never understood.


Here again is a perfect example of how Campbell is able to combine simple images to create deeply tender emotions. There is even a hint of redemption from all of the questioning at the end of this section when a shopping mall Santa Claus gives a child CPR.


Throughout the book thus far, we have been gracefully jerked back and forth in Campbells timeline, but section three serves as a reprieve from this time travel as it seems to skid to a halt. The third section is devoted to remembrance. Most of the poems here are highly narrative pieces concerning a specific memory, both in the past of the poet and the culture. There are no moments of sentimentality and very few that show any true regret, and it is Campbells undoubting honesty that makes this the perfect group of poems to follow the first two groupings. Here again, he plays with form to deal with the heavier cultural topics with a villanelle titled, Elegy for Matthew Shepard to commemorate and comment on the Matthew Shepard tragedy. This, of course, is balanced by other, softer poems like Alligator, where he contemplates the risk of taking his young daughter and dog to swim in a lake inhabited by alligators and how they narrowly miss an encounter with one. Campbells frequent use of repetition becomes a kind of mantra that makes it hard to forget that for every situation someone has authority and that, more often than not, we dont really know who that authority figure is.


Part four is both literally and figuratively the culmination of the entire book. The poems in this section are marked by a more relaxed tone of acceptance. Whereas the previous sections asked an array of unanswerable questions, this section puts aside all query and we begin to see Campbell look ahead towards an unknowable future. In the second section we learn about Campbells battle with throat cancer, which is progressively expanded upon throughout the third section, and by the fourth there is a definite theme of healing. Contrary to its title, the poem, Time Running out on the Millennium goes beyond the ends of things and focuses largely on the times yet to come:


     Now, I measure the past by how much

     I remember. Measure the distance

     by my drive from town. Measure the sun

     by its height in my windshield.

     measure joy by each time the gate

     swings open and my daughter

     runs up, flanked by dogs.


Here, the pattern of sentences greatly reflects the poets expanding sense of optimism. As the stanza begins with three short anaphoric sentences and digresses into a longer sentence that spans three lines, the poem ends with the inarguable message of finding happiness in simplicity. Perhaps the most telling shift towards hopefulness and continuation occurs in the final poem of the book titled, Prayer for Daily Neglects. Written in couplets and with no end punctuation, this short poem is quite simply a list of miscellanya to-do list that would mirror that of any average American. By ending the volume with a focus on his lawn, Campbell has both satisfied our need for resolution and created a very linear narrative that mirrors the narrative arc of the book. As the speaker of this poem adds the grass to his list, echoes himself, then fades away, the book too draws to a close and seems to linger (or echo if you will) into the infinite possibilities of the future. There is no doubt, however, that it is the pedestrian that makes this poem a tremendous comfort and a stellar way to end the book:


     The hoses that need coiled

     the firewood that needs stacked


     The dogs that need brushed

     The birds that need names


     My life, my life

     The grass, the grass

RHETT ISEMAN TRULL’S ‘THE REAL WARNINGS’
by David Blair

Rhett Iseman Trull’s first book The Real Warnings has a lot of really beautiful poems in it and several unsparingly precise ones. The poems that I love best in this book are poems of voice, but not actually of persona. Here is an example of what I mean from a poem called “The Last Good Dream,” a poem that describes the world of a coastal town in summer, and which gathers strangeness and sadness about it, so that the third person treatment of a little girl riding her bike makes us confront the sadness of divorce in a way free from the manipulative claims of the autobiographical expository details:

     It is the moment when doves

     light on dormant phone lines and boys

     find love in fish nets and crab cages,


     in the salty chorus of the wharf. We

     can almost hear them, six blocks east,

     the lobstermen bringing in the catch


     and their daughters in braids telling secrets,

     a cloister of curls and intentions, waiting

     for fathers whose bones smell of fish


     to carry them home. By habit

     our arms touch as we listen to the cadence

     of the first evening rain tapping to the west


     near the cemetery and the eight-stool pub.

     A girl coasts her bike down the street,

     bells on her handlebars ringing. It is the hour


     before women wash dishes

     and men go out, before the gulls flock

     towards Captain Calabash, the shore’s single light


     for miles. And we give

     with unthinned hearts, little knowing

     how, even if banked by the best words


     and buoyed by honest, love can fail.

     Or maybe we do know

     and unharbor ourselves anyway.


How wonderful that we are ‘unharbored’ at the end of this poem, cast into the danger of knowing love, of actual risk, and also fallen from the world that can merely recite the attractive, descriptive facts. This is a wise poem. It’s a personal poem, sure, but it also has the impersonal force of a rock, perhaps because it gives itself so entirely to movement.

The best poems in The Real Warnings have this quality both of movement, and of personal impersonality. Trull is a generous poet, given to neither self-pity nor rancor, able to delight in others and the world. “The Real Warnings Are Always Too Late,” the first poem in the book, is her proud apology to her parents for being such a lunatic as a teenager:

     I’ll dent the garage door with my head, siphon Crown Royal

                   from your liquor cabinet, jump from a gondola in Venice. I’ll smash

                   my ankle with a hammer, drive through stop signs

                   with my eyes closed, cost you thousands

                   in medical bills. Forget about sleeping.


Her elegy “Signs” has this quality, too: “Tonight: no moon, no stars. I never realized before/ how noisy the planets are. I praise their choice/ to be absent...” Because a good poem is a slung stone, she doesn’t have to tell us too many details about her friend Sarah, who has died in “Talking All Day to the Dead.” She can end the poem with an image: “The dog’s water would tremble if his bowl wasn’t empty.”

Trull’s poems have their largest and most generous reach when she resolves a poem in the concreteness of images, rather than with a concern for herself or others as characters whose fates or psychologies must be resolved, as in “Study of Motion”:

     Hanna, drawing chalk poinsettias on the sidewalk,

                   once said, Pursue Joy Now and sounded solid,

                                 like the TV emergency signal.

                   You get the feeling she fears nothing,

     which can’t be true, but it’s nice to believe,

                                               especially now that you’re alone

                   on the side of the road, engine still, no white towel

                                               tied to the mirror.


At this point, we might ask, “Who is Hanna?” The only thing we find out is that she was twelve years the poet’s senior and moved to California. The poem ends with what we all see on the highways that pulse with American ambition dead-ending:

                                 It’s the sound of sirens that prompts you

                   to get off the side of the road

     back into traffic,

                   to smooth the creases of the map and join

     the flatbed trucks, the horses’ tails

                   swishing through the slits of trailers,

     the station wagons hauling their families

                                               before a banner of exhaust.


Reading these lines, I have to feel that this is the country where most of us live.

When other people and her own feelings are treated as externalized as these things seen on the road, Trull’s warmth and generosity are rhapsodic, as in “Lovers on a Walk” and in her mordantly funny and catty poem about sexual jealousy “Lotion Cigarettes Candles Wine.” When she sets out to write about herself in relation to her mother or brother, things get less energetic:

     his mother who wanted

     divorce, who grabbed his hand weeping the mall

     last week, praying aloud right there

     in the middle of the crowds; and his sister

     they call clinically depressed, suicidal, though he tries

     to explain that’s not possible,

     they don’t know her, weren’t there

     when she was young and told him all

     her secrets, all her dreams, leaping from the bed

     in her Wonder Woman underwear.


Though there is much to admire here and in other poems about her family, particularly in those about her brother, in terms of warmth, precision and compassion, I feel that the material might lead Trull into putting story over language, and the poems occasionally wobble. A poem built around the conceit of giving advice, “Naming the Baby for Mark and Terra’ initially feels like more of a triumph than it actually is when compared to other poems in the book that are of a higher level of intensity. Sometimes it seems as if almost all books of what gets called narrative poems feature a few poems that could be called high concept, lighter in tone and built around a structural gimmick. On the other hand, “The House of Pain” is a parable in which a character called Doctor Lonelinessdisturbing as the character of the host in George Herbert’s final poem called “Love”teaches the poet “to loathe and love/ the yes that saves you.” What else can I say about this poem? Frank Bidart should watch out.

The Real Warnings makes us confront an issue central to writing both fiction and poetry. Does one write memoir and focus on the things that have happened to one’s self, which can be assimilated into shaped narratives or does one dwell in experience and write in honor of obsession and nerve about the people one meets, the things one sees, thoughts, all the stuff that gets us away from our mirrors, and which is essentially a lonesome habit of mind? The Real Warnings suggests that Rhett Iseman Trull can be both sorts of poet. A central sequence to the book is “Rescuing Princess Zelda,” a series of poems about Trull’s experience in a mental institution as a teenager, and one of the best things about this sequence is that it is about the other people that she knew there as much as about herselfJosh, who fell for a Duke undergraduate from an abnormal psych class and later committed suicide, and the charismatic beauty named May, whom Trull feels lucky with a deep and precious sense of transgression to hear weep wildly at night after loving her braggadocio and tough talk in the recreation room during the day. Throughout The Real Warnings, the spirits of obsession, generosity and scrutiny are intense, and if we’re lucky, we’ll get many more poems like this in years to come. KENNETH HART’S ‘UH OH TIME’
by Michael Zinkowski

Uh Oh Time

by Kenneth Hart

Anhinga Press, 98 pp., $15.00


For Kenneth Hart and for the sake of this review lets assume a whole lot is invested in naming things. Whether or not we admit to liking on any conscious level the name of a book or a poem, their names affect us on important emotional and intellectual levels. They shape our expectations and they alter the phenomenology of reading. After reading Harts collection Uh Oh Time, winner of the 2007 Anhinga Prize for Poetry, I felt particularly compelled to think about the type of work such a name as Uh Oh Time performs on my level of enjoyment and on my interpretations of the poems. While this review wont be in any way a case study for the significance of a title I do wish to use this particular title as a skeletal structure for the review in order to exemplify how the title Uh Oh Time represented many of the books most compelling qualities but also some of its insipid and weak ones as well.


Let me first say that I plan to focus on the title because I wasnt immediately grabbed by it and because it didnt initially demand that I pick up the book. Before I read the book the title felt juvenile and bland. Alas I read on and the title began to intrigue me. Each poem felt like another meditation on the title.


Matched with the covers painting Flying on a Big Red Bird by George Pali the phrase “uh oh time” evokes a book chock full of bizarre albeit imaginative childrens stories. I expected something surreal, something a little silly too. Upon several readings the childhood innocence and surreal curiosity initially suggested by the cover remained intact as a strong influence throughout. A fair amount of nostalgia such as in “Nat & Forrest” when the speaker confronts a memory of a summer working for his father but the nostalgia never feels contrived and always productive. In fact, Hart stokes the very foundational fires of each with these qualities, allowing grown-up settings and people to feel the surge of some untarnished curiosity. This allows Hart to explore a wide range of played-out topics from the pastoral and the spiritual to the domestic without sounding stale (at least most of the time).


While this may not seem like a brand new or unique implication in the contemporary world of poetry, Harts execution is genuinely compelling because it constantly forces us to reconsider whether or not the present action of a poem appears to be very active at all. In “Damaged Goods” the speaker is asked by a friend, “Is it okay for a guy to kiss me on the first night?” (47). While the poem informs us of her husbands affair, the messy divorce, and her two children, the poems heart is the act of starting over that manifests itself in the form of this delicate question. The poems presence situates itself not only after “the fights, sleepless nights, and the tears” but also in front of these tragic moments (47). Hart truly thrives by picking and choosing what actions to include and which ones to dangle somewhere else in the readers constructive imagination to manipulate a nuanced background of moments.


Each poem encapsulates an awkward, confusing or otherwise uncomfortable moment in which both speaker and reader navigate the difficult question that is, “now what?” In other words an “uh oh time,” an 89-page collection of “uh oh times.” Navigating the awkward and uncomfortable rather than the tragic, Kenneth Harts Uh Oh Time captures the moments when we settle in with heartbreak, fear, or triumph while we consider what to do next.


In “The Pool” Hart revels in such awkward and uncomfortable joy. The poems plot is fairly obvious a “freckled adolescent / pool attendant” catches a glimpse of a mother scolding her children (46). In doing so the mother reveals “something hell replay later / in the quiet of his room” (46). Because the mothers act of scolding is interpreted differently by the pool attendant as an act of exposure the reader gains a multi-faceted perspective on the scene. Imagistic details such as “Mothers bikini strap-marks across / her unstrapped back” also help to fully realize the dynamic wholeness of this scene (46). We realize that one present action is actually multiple and the moment becomes more exciting and realistic as a complex system of past, present and future moments.


“The Pool” is a wonderful example of Harts selection of action as it relates to changing perspective but it also reveals a weakness that I felt haunted several poems. Had the poem stayed with the mothers embarrassment or ignorance to being noticed the end would be entirely different. With a sudden abundance of alliteration in the last two lines, “stinging-skin along shirt sleeves” and “too-tight trunks,” the ending is certainly aesthetically pleasing (46). However, I felt that like many of the other poems endings it lacks a needed push into more dangerous territory. The end feels too easy and too expected for a white, male American poet to write. At the risk of sounding overly critical to Hart, I admit that the end to this poem feels stagnant because it refuses to step outside of its own safety zone.


Several other poems that deal with female characters have similarly mixed results. “The Russian Women,” for example, attempts to intellectualize strippers in order to spin the assumptions of said dancers. The male protagonist discusses literature with the girls, but he soon compares the names of writers he dishes out to bait “each name / I hang out like a dollar bill” (54). The end, again, leaves a sour taste in my mouth because the male speaker has the last word on the dancers:


     Squeezing her hand on my thigh, she flounced




     to the stage in her thin-strapped, satin slip


     which rode up over her bottom as she bent in two,


     and hooked her fingers around the spikes of her heels (55).


As he describes her dance she becomes familiar as an anonymous collection of glorified objects. Let me explain that my criticism stems not simply from an ideological standpoint either because many other of the poems endings felt familiar without necessarily being offensive in anyway. Representing women as hyper-sexualized albeit smart(er) beings is already an all too familiar incident everywhere we look in popular culture so its saddening to watch it occur in the form of poetry where the likelihood for new thought processes seems so high, seems so very within the grasp of a talented poet such as Hart. As a reader of poetry I am both offended and bored by endings like these.


To borrow from the books title once more, these are what I consider the books other “uh oh times.” I consider these “uh oh times” because they feel mishandled, safe, and familiar. They feel familiar because they dont direct the reader to new ways of thinking or seeing the world, which felt disappointing in the context of otherwise exciting poetry.


These kinds of endings are few and far in between but are glaring amongst personal favorites such as “Tick,” “This Religion,” “Ashes” and “Nat & Forrest.” Love and lust are always taboo subjects to toy with and more often than not Uh Oh Time handles the material with a Thomas Lux-like affection, fascination and genuine care. The confessionary “Glance” is one such example in which the speaker recounts lusting over a student and in the process of writing owns up to “an old self, me” (66). Or in the prose poem, “Tools,” that ends with the image of a womans lime green t-shirt that would look better on an old lover, “the flesh, that other color, seen where you slice it open with a knife, bright translucence, sucking the light out of the room” is a majestic and breathtaking finish (79).


Uh Oh Time is a remarkable read about facing conflicts as opposed to the conflicts themselves. While several poems fail to push new boundaries for me I hope that you will pick this book up because there is much pleasure to gain from its many successes. I hope when you do sit down to read Kenneth Harts book that you will keep in mind both my praises and my criticisms. Look for your own “uh oh times” and give a second or two to consider what to do next, or how to start over.

CONSERVATORY
by Chris Bachelder

All day long Abbott and his wife have been arguing. By evening there is a frangible truce. The daughter has been put to bed, though her singing and babbling are audible on the staticky monitor. “I forgot to even ask you about the butterflies,” Abbott’s wife says, conciliatory in word if not tone. They are sitting together in the family room, a designation they actually use. They are sitting as far apart as possible on the devastated couch, purchased years ago at a furniture warehouse when Abbott was in graduate school and now draped like a corpse by a mail-order cover. Besides Abbott’s cocktail, the couch is the only adult item in the family room, which this and every evening looks as though robbers have ransacked it in an urgent search for a small and valuable item. Books, toys, coins, buttons, beads, and costume jewelry lie strewn across the stained carpeting. It’s almost impossible not to fight with your life partner in this room. Abbott’s wife has asked, sort of, about Abbott’s trip to the butterfly conservatory, an outing that he took this morning with their daughter but that he did not discuss afterward with his wife because she was too busy reminding him of things about which he did not need to be reminded. Today was Abbott’s first trip to the butterfly conservatory; his wife has been twice before with their daughter. Previously his wife has reported that the conservatory is “neat” and “kind of peaceful,” that it’s an “an interesting place ... [located] in the middle of nowhere.” One potential response to his wife’s current inquiry is that the butterfly conservatory is a hideous travesty, a transparent example of everything that is wrong with everything. The twelve dollar admission, accepted joylessly by a woman talking on the telephone to someone she pretty clearly does not want in her life anymore; the cruel trap of the over-stocked gift shop, selling stuffed butterflies, real butterflies, butterfly magnets and puzzles, butterfly nightlights and kites, along with entire aisles of bright toys that are thematically irrelevant but wildly attractive to children; the imprisonment of thousands of butterflies, not to mention finches, turtles, lizards, and a parrot, all in the name of appreciation and education and preservation; the heat, not unlike a small bathroom after a long hot shower; the horrific musichyperactive, flute-driven renditions of “Edelweiss” and “On Broadway,” engineered to overpower visitors and create in them a stupor that might be mistaken for deep relaxation; the weird smell; the chipper, ecologically ignorant staff members, who are in all seriousness referred to as flight attendants, and who spend their days trying to get children to pet a sleepy lizardAbbott ponders this truce-obliterating response. He knows, however, that this answer would have more to do with his argument with his wife than with his genuine response to the conservatory. He had actually had a pretty good time. There were so many butterflies. Some even landed on people’s hands or shoulders. The large proboscises were really easy to see. Butterflies are astonishing when you really look at them, and when else would you ever really look at them? The flight attendants had helpfully led Abbott and his daughter to a mounted board of cocoons, where they saw butterflies emerging, drying their wings, then flying off into the world. Or at least into the conservatory. Abbott’s daughter had never seemed so animated, so truly stimulated. Her brain no doubt grew and reorganized. The conservatory is, in addition to a hideous travesty, something like a spiritual center, operated by a dedicated team of citizen-workers. Who else cares about butterflies? Who else would attempt to mend their broken wings with a special wing glue? The pop of the ice in Abbott’s glass reminds himand probably his wife, as wellthat he has not, as a courtesy, desisted or at least curtailed his drinking during her pregnancy. This is a courtesy extended by quite a few Pioneer Valley men to their pregnant soulmates. Abbott has still not said a word in response to his wife’s question, which, come to think of it, was not so much a question as a statement about forgetting to ask a question. He’s just staring at a section of sub-toy carpet that is in the shape of what Abbott thinks is called a rhombus. Either a rhombus or a parallelogram. He knows he would just be criticizing the butterfly conservatory to irk his wife and renew the fight. This is what a married person can do, mount a mean-spirited tirade against a nature conservatory in order to injure his beloved. But he does not deride the conservatory or its workers. His decision not to strikes him as exceedingly mature, though he knows that congratulating oneself on one’s own maturity is probably immature. Also, it comes as a tremendous disappointment to Abbott that his wife cannot know his restraint. If she could know, she would be touched. But he can’t very well tell her how mature and restrained he’s acting, for the maturity and restraint would evaporate upon utterance. Abbott and his wife can hear their daughter, through the monitor, singing an Australian folk song about a swagman who drowns himself in the billabong. She’s waiting for an answer, his wife is. She’s been waiting this whole time. Abbott clenches his jaw, stares at the dirty rhombus. When it comes down to it, he just cannot bring himself to say that the butterfly conservatory was amazing, or even that it was pretty neat, even though it would be at least partially true and it would help salvage the evening. This is another small failure of spirit, and he knows it. The knowing of it might make things better, but probably just makes things much, much worse. “It was fine,” he says of his outing with their daughter. And then he repeats it: “It was fine.” This is either an act of aggression or diplomacy, he’s not even sure which at this point. His wife is a separate person, large on the inside, capable of a very broad range of responses. She folds her thin fingers across her belly and gets ready to say something. WEST VIRGINIA
by Jennifer Key

In a bathtub in Hiko, West Virginia,

my figure inverts in the faucet’s gleam,

fabricating the lie that the body is a thing

just as likely to show up here as anywhere.

Consciousness tempers a bit with water,

like my plastic cup of bourbon and ginger

translucent now with melted ice.

A trance of silence from the hotel hall

whirs in the ventilation fan.

I’d like to leave this reflection behind

in the unmade bed as though this happened

a long time ago and I had to look hard

to find the person I was then again.

Instead, I water myself down

with some new trick or other

and see the horizon as the brick heel of a house

where a lawnmower hums out back.

What can any of us know about ourselves

except that we’re good for filling out

the sleeves of our shirts?

Still, today at a pumpkin fair in southern Ohio,

I saw a man lift a meanly glowing beauty

by his teeth.

SUPPOSE A TROT LINE
by Andrew Wells

I thought you, fishing a limit,


walking home in chert-dust dark


catching your boot-toe every rut



or so. That log road deeds the creek


to us. It’s alright. I thought it, running


water or wind in the scrub oak.



If widow moon, then dog years, the way


you walk down, your hat set for traveling,


dreaming backward like paper lace



in the same Summer rain.


Hardly a day goes by. Hardly a far field,


feldspar flecked in sandstone



when sparrows fall out of the creek.


I thought you coming home


for a cold mattress and folly



playing feet in the current, eddying


along the clay path between me


and the rumpled painter’s hat you wore.



Not pinebox. The campfire and the map


you wouldn’t stop drawing.

A MAP OF SHANXI
by Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers

First, draw the world.


But the world

erased of water. Lake-bottom,


now a plateau. Riverbed, arc


of dust. And where ocean should be,

a swaying tapestry of corn.


To make TH, I tell my students,

the tongue must curl

and leave the mouth. Think this


through: northern earth’s


weather. Repeat until tongues

harden, parch like the valley


of Ezekiel. Voices elbow

towards a cadence. Words

hit words, pile like skeletons.


And all day, the air’s gānzào

so dry, I can’t feel what is it you might


call God. As if to say


it’s humid were a synonym


for knowing the hand,

the sweaty familiar hold of it, lines


that are rivers. No, my skin splits


in absence. We ride

on, bikes veiled


in thirsty powder. Gobi wind

takes the leaves, leaves us still,


and wantingwhat

was it? A forgotten word


tastes like

the barrel’s bottom.


Frantic to remember,

all I know is to head towards

the market, in hopes


someone might have it

in their cracking hand,

so I can ask, what is this?


But here, without

the word, I’ve forgotten

also, the shape of it


and what else is there

to recall now, in this place


where every color is living


the life of another? I buy oranges

but they’re green. Greens, they’re


prisms, spun in oil. Egg yolk,

something blue. My hair, plain


auburn, students calling


gold. I told the vendor,


I need,        I was needing,


or was it?           Was it

wanting,


either, the same character


yao. 要  Open your mouth,

let the wind out,


and then, on closing, find it


empty. The dry mouth

that first said bring me


the cup, the mouth

that also said


the sky’s backwashed

in dirty watercolor


is now searching for

the bright word, waiting


in the dust. If Ezekiel wants


the wheel, it’s just

the cigarette-sun, setting on China,


neon on inhale, dark by the time

the lips separate again. Think this


through: northern earth,


speak. An echo is just

a voice, just the bones,


your own. Write a name

in loess, watch it leave


you for the dark

spine of Atlas.


Cup your hands, and wait.

But do not ask for rain.

GHAZAL FOR CHRISTIAN
by Renee Soto

A tri-fold screen creates rooms, divides the air.

You are hidden. I cannot breathe. Your memory provides the air.


Too wet to rake. Leaves clog the drains. Before the rain

stopped, the creeks and rivers surged. Detritus is everywhere.


A house is not, by default, dark, abandoned, or quiet,

but privacy can silence its stories, and the house will hide its flares.


In November, Hercules bends a knee to the western horizon.

In the sky he faces the dragon. Is any fight fair?


Where is the logic of God, naturewhen the boy shoots

a hole in the floor, then the window, then . . . after he neatly sets his shoes by his chair?


In dreams we speak: one of us in a tree, both of us hungry.

One: Come back. One: Fill me. Sleep collides with prayer.


Uprooted, the garden rosemary traveled by pot in a car.

Remember how the backseat smelledthe scent still rides in our hair.


A little house on a hill weeps into the incline,

Renews the world with its heaving, guides us through despair.

DEAR JOHN
by Renee Soto

I am not as available as you thought, nor as interested

in home brewing or minor league baseball.

All of that? Poses

to draw you to me. I went after you

like the Chumash hunter stalked the deer:

from the sweathouse roof,

the climb down the ladder, to a seat above hot stones

and green branches, he sweat out every drop

of scent before the steaming race to the sea.

Lithe, naked, his body draped in deer hide

front legs, a tail, the head and antlers

and with bow and arrow, he entered the woods,

crouched and chomping on sage leaves to mask

any remaining man-smell. The hunter

needs the deer, down to its sinew and hoofs.

For a moment, I mistook you for necessity,

for a minute, you believed. Here I am unmasked,

sparing your life. Don’t miss meyou never met me.

THE DIRTY WORK OF PLANS
by Renee Soto

You mistook attic detritus for dead rodents, birds even,

until a jab with the push broom dissembled each webby pile,

until the flakes of corrugated boxes and cheap garbage bags

agitated against you, even as you flailed. Threads, yarns,

clock cases and parts, the heft of plans unburdened by decomposition

wended through the fibers of your clothes, flecked

your skin with the decades of someone else’s dirt and ambitions,

mudded with your sweat. You stank. The feathers of a bird,

finally, and then the skeleton of the bird stiff in its place

on the shelf with the canning jars. Probably it sent up its high,

thin buzz of panic, its own whirl of capture, whirl of release.

IRIS
by Cate Whetzel

“There is a train inside this iris.” David St. John


Most beautiful of temples, built-in shimmer

to the petals with the long droop of a mouth

play-acting sad. Glorious face of the flora

falling open like a witness to a tragedy, or the smile

of a child at a party on sufferance, who knows it.

Iris of soft wisdom, weeping willow madam,

in your sweep you hold the smoking machines

of my destructionI hear it coming. Nightly

the whistle, the shudder of twin fans

that cover your eyes like the wings that hide

a seraph’s face as he floats over a sea of red coal.

Flower incarnateIris, organ, seat of beauty,

pump of oxygen! Your tick genteel

as the station master’s watch. I see it approaching:

steaming like a racehorse with smoke reversing

in the white wax chimneys, clean as a candy.

It comes like cords of rain in spring, it comes

like lightning. Slow, train, I feel the shearing

sparks inside me; they hurt, they spur my

hand to reach, to speak what you need to know:

My train is here. Take me where you need to go.

FLASHLIGHT TAG
by Kyle Booten

My black shirt

inside out

I trip in

the wet ditch

but keep

going past

the tree

Jenny and

Matt humped

for money

past the

trampoline

where we dared

them

and

I hide

in a bush and

am quiet but

I hear your

breath and

see your

lantern

I cower

in the drainage

pipe beneath

the street

but you know

this place

so I make

for the school

dumpsters

but you

are always

there rotting

I stow

myself be-

low deck on

Charon’s

zombie barge

and you are

the coin

and the

transcendent

dead I

fly back to

my warm

house (which

is really

cheating b/c

houses are off-

limits)

reach into the

refrigerator

and how much

sweeter

milk tastes

when I am

a fugitive but

of course

you are what

makes it sweet

Everybody

has gone

home With

my night

vision I

see only

you I wish

you’d yield

but it’s not

in your nature

now is

it You look

frozen but

are faster

than I am

Moon

of my

Hour

who must

chase me


though never

in your

real form

AGE TWO
by Elizabeth Swann

The feisty robin

greets us at the window,

hammering

his own fine reflection.


You toddle outside

and in the sunlight

find him,

fallen like a stone

onto the rough wood deck,

one ebony eye frozen,

two gnats hovering

at its corner.

The bird’s black feet

clutch air, legs stiff

as winter branches.


I watch death dawn

in your dark eyes.

STORIES WITHOUT NAMES AND IN MEMORY OF AUNT LIZZIE
by Tyler Scott

“We’re learning that we should not be ashamed of our mental illness,” I overheard as I was driving the van to the YMCA. I looked in the rearview mirror at the twenty something male wearing a Yankees capI’ll call him B. It was not a face I would have associated with nervous breakdowns, hospitalizations and two doses of lithium, Ativan, and one of Risperdal each day. Diagnosis: schizoaffective disorder, symptoms of both mood disorder and psychosis. Former life: wife, baby, good job at a Fortune 500 company. Current life: resident of a life skills program which teaches the mentally ill how to live independently.

When I started working at this non-profit a few years ago, I knew little about mental illness. I’d had cases of the blues, relatives and friends who’d battled depression, knew stories of people who’d cracked uplike some of my favorite writers. But if you’d pressed me, I could not have given a clear definition of nervous breakdown or schizophrenia. To define schizophrenia I would have said split personality which is inaccurate, a notion I’d learned from the movie “Sybil” starring Sally Field where she had multiple personalities. Most of my knowledge of mental illness was based on books, movies, and televisionThe Bell Jar, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the poetry of Anne Sexton.

My experience didn’t change much as I grew older. Growing up, there were a few suicides in my hometown, always whispered about, and a couple of girls at my boarding school made weak attempts like the one who OD’d unsuccessfully on No Doze. During my single days, a well meaning friend set me up on a lunch date with a powerful handsome attorney a bit older than I. Shortly before the rendezvous, I found out the reason the rich and powerful attorney was now available was he’d had a nervous breakdown the previous year. I ate a quiet lunch with a dapper man in a blue checked shirt, very tanned with movie star eyes. Obviously very bright. But there was something shaky and unstable about him, I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, and I noticed small scabs on his face and arms. I didn’t go out with him again.

The non-profit I worked for is tucked away on thirty acres in a rural area just starting to develop outside of Richmond, Virginia. Millionaire McMansions are mixed among the farmhouses and small forgotten churches. Most people get lost on their first visit to the campus and the quiet gray buildings seem very peaceful in the distance. The program teaches those with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression how to live independently in the community and they can participate for six months, three years, or the rest of their lives. It’s a campus lifestyle for about 30 residents and 22 staff; twenty more live in the community with assistance. The organization is divided into three parts: the first level, the group home, where people enter at their sickest, usually from a hospital or jail, and they have 24-hour supervision where they are assessed, learn about their illnesses, medication management, and in some cases basic hygiene; the Supported Living Level where they move into their own apartment on campus, usually with a roommate, and take classes in cooking, shopping, budgeting, job interviews, computers, relationships and any other life skills needed to make it out there. The last phase of the program is Community Support where they move off campus into an apartment and either work part time or go back to school, still with the program’s support whether it’s transportation, therapy, or social events. Since the residents usually move into neighborhoods you and I would never visit, it should come as no surprise many were reluctant to move off campus.

Most of the residents were indigent. With private pay facilities costing as much as $9,000 per month, it’s no wonder family members had often exhausted their resources by the time their relative had been accepted. I took many phone calls from concerned relatives, often sounding desperate. There was always an increase of these calls around Christmastime.

Until fall of 2007, I worked as the Director of Development. Our small staff was expected to raise about $350,000 which would offset about half the cost of each resident along with fees from SSI, Disability, HUD and Medicaid.

This was all well and fine until Virginia Tech.

As we now all know, on Monday, April 16th, a young student named Cho Seung-Hui got up, dressed, walked over to the dorm next door, and shot two people to death. He went to the post office and mailed a video of his rants against the world to NBC News, returned to campus and entered a classroom building, locked the doors and walked from room to room gunning down people. Final toll: 33 murders of faculty and students, twenty-five wounded, and Cho killed himself. Within hours everyone wanted to talk about the plight of the mentally ill and the holes in the system.

It has been a cruel wake up call, especially in my home state Virginia where all of us were so closely affected by the tragedy. As a Richmonder, it was even closer to home since so many Tech students come from Central Virginia. Three of my neighbors knew victims well and my daughter’s third grade teacher said she had six families in her class who were closely affected by the killingsthe worst kind of six degrees of separation. On a sad and professional note: For those of us who were fundraising for non-profits helping the mentally ill, the following months were lucrative. Corporations which had not paid attention to us for years were suddenly sending large grants.

A backward glance at the history of mental health treatment is an ugly view indeed. Burning witches at the stake...trepanning...snake pits...lobotomies...shock treatments...hospital patients so doped up they literally couldn’t remember years of their lives...patients who shouldn’t have been committed in the first place.... In 19th century England one could pay a penny to peer into the cells of lunatics and watch for entertainment. (Hey, the sex and fights were great!) Admission was free on Tuesdays and visitors were allowed to bring sticks so they could poke the mad. In 1814 alone one hospital logged 96,000 visitors. Popular as NASCAR.

This early treatment of the insane is beautifully captured in William Hogarth’s print “The Rake’s Progress,” a print of the world’s oldest psychiatric hospital Bethlehem Royal Hospital in London. (And also called Bedlam.) The print is so named because back then, it was thought insanity was linked to moral weakness. “The Rake’s Progress” is hell in grey tones: two women caressing (!); a mad fiddler wearing a down turned book as a hat; a half nude and bleeding man, crying, in chains, and having a fit; a man staring off in the distance; a woman playing with string. Over 200 years later I can still hear the screams and whimpers of these sorry doomed souls. I guess we have often treated the mentally ill the same way Michael Vick and his friends treated their dogs. All this is very hard to accept, especially for a slightly spoiled 52-year-old writer sitting in her peach-colored study, tortoise shell cat sleeping alongside, while two maids clean the upstairs of her house.

Finally, in the 1960s de-institutionalization caught on and state mental hospitals gradually began to close in favor of community based care, the problem being there was no funding. Hence, a new trend - homelessness which evolved into today’s reality of the mentally ill being recycled through the hospitals and jails. Statistics are still bleak. According to the website for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), approximately 57.7 million Americans struggle with a mental disorder each yearone in four adults. The U.S. Surgeon General reports 10% of children and teens in America deal with mental disorders that seriously undermine their daily lives. And finally, 90% of those who commit suicide suffer from a recognizable mental disorder.

When I first started working for the non-profit, many of my colleagues wondered how I was going to raise money for the mentally ill. My first response was always to ask if they or any of their friends or family had been depressed, if they’d known anyone treated for depression, been hospitalized for mental problems, or committed suicide. The answer was always silence.

Most of my donors had a personal connection with our mission to help the mentally ill. They had relatives or friends who grapple with mental illness so they already knew firsthand what it was like to live with this terrible diagnosis. My personal connection was through my husband’s Aunt Lizzie, a spinster great aunt who depending on whom you ask in the family was described as slow, retarded, or depressed. No one mentioned her name much. What’s kind of touching is we have her cookbook; a copy sits downstairs quietly in the den on a shelf next to our other ragtag much loved books.

Aunt Lizzie spent the last decade of her life at Piedmont State Hospital in Burkeville, Virginia. She was the youngest of five and grew up in a rambling Victorian home in Blackstone. As her sisters and brother died off, she went from home to retirement home and finally to the hospital in Burkeville, forgotten by all other than my mother-in-law who used to visit her on a regular basis, usually towing one of her children. The children dreaded the visits and my husband said he has blocked out most of the memories, though he said he remembered Aunt Lizzie vaguely; she was plump, dark haired, wore glasses, and looked like his first grade teacher, Mrs. Montgomery, “but when you’re little, all elderly women look like that.”

The cookbook is a snapshot of small town Virginia life: Blackstone, the 1930s. From the notes I know what Aunt Lizzie liked to cook and which recipes her neighbors shared with her. The title is My Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook and the cover states every recipe has been tested in their “tasting-test kitchen.” It’s a loose-leaf, much worn binder with an outside spine held with grey electrical tape. Many of the recipes are handwritten, typed, or cut out of newspapers and glued to cards. On an inside flap there is Lizzie’s signature and “This book was given to me by Anna” written underneath: a long ago gift from a younger sister. If you don’t hold the book carefully, watch out or recipe cards for Pickled Crab Apples or Mrs. Johnson’s Candy Chocolate Fudge may spill out.

Lizzie died around the same time my father-in-law had a massive stroke so the family was too distracted to focus on her. Six months after her death she was eulogized in a memorial service. In the end about the only legacy Lizzie left was the cookbook since all her possessions were sold off to cover her costs at Piedmont State Hospital.

*

I learned a lot about the residents during the two years I worked with them. They never seemed particularly interested in me and never asked any personal questions, yet each of them loved to talk and talkif they were having a good day. If they’d made some sort of progress, I noticed they loved to be hugged although during flu season, I confess I resorted to carrying books so I wouldn’t have to touch as many people. In the early days it would have made me sad to visit campus and have a long personal conversation with someone, only to return a few weeks later and find the same person ghostlike, incommunicado. Over time I learned not to take this personally.

I admit it took me over a year to stop judging the residents by my standards. Once volunteers from a church painted and decorated one of the campus apartments for a new resident. I was furious when I dropped by for a visit a few months later and discovered the apartment was a pigsty with stacks of pizza boxes, dirty dishes, pillows on the floor, overflowing ashtrays. Then, my frustration crescendoed. R. quit his job at a café after one monththe first job he’d had in years. Then, B. quit school and T. quit his job and moved home. How was I going to fundraise for a program if everyone kept quitting jobs and dropping out of school? Success stories were what led to the donations. My boss eventually explained that in the world of mental illness relapse was as much a part of their daily lives as fundraising was to mine. There was no such reality as going on meds and never having another problem. Something seemed to slip every few months or so. It was expected.

Over time, I learned many of the residents’ backgrounds. I’d say most had the dreams of young people we all know: to finish school, find a job they like, marry, have children. Two residents were homeless; one was married though his wife was in an institution and his children were in foster care. Many had been in jail at least once. We had students who attended UVA, University of Iowa, Rice, Swarthmore. We had a florist, a creative director at an advertising firm, and then there was B. at the corporation. Many of the males had proposed to female staff and sometimes not in the most genteel fashion.

The only links I could find between all these individuals were possible genetic predispositions to mental illness, extremely stressful jobs and family lives, and family members who seemed to have their own mental issues. In one case it was clear the relatives wanted the resident to move home because they needed her benefits.

When you have a serious mental illness, I learned that life moves in slow motion. Two steps forward, one step back, one step forward, two steps back, one step forward. Little victories are important, thus, the hugs. I would call the environment on campus nurturing. Most of the staff had worked at Central State Hospital, the mental institution with a large forensic unit in Petersburg, so they were used to a far tougher population.

When I decided to write an essay about mental illness, I had great intentions. I thought it would be fascinating to interview the residents about their lives, how they think on and off medicine, and the progress they were making with their illnesses. The day I volunteered to drive to the YMCA and had a chance to spend a few hours with a dozen residents, I realized most didn’t really want to talk about their illnesses and what their lives were like before; few wanted to be named or interviewed; few wanted to tell their stories. Conversely, most of them were helpful with interviews for the annual report, reporters, and special events, and information for grants when I applied for scholarships. They felt very strongly about doing whatever they could to help a program which had changed their lives for the better or in some cases probably even saved their lives. So I don’t have any names with the stories. Anyway, I don’t want the residents to always wear their mental illnesses like yellow stars.

Perhaps now you can understand why I could never bring myself to drive over to the retirement home where my 81-year-old mother-in-law lives and ask her about Aunt Lizzie. When you marry into one of the First Families of Virginia and have on the family tree the founder of a famous brokerage firm, a well-known architectural historian, two professors, and an ornithologist with books dedicated to him, it does not go over when the only relative a daughter-in-law expresses interest in is the one who died in a mental institution. (My father used to call this “Shaking a stick at a hornet’s nest,” something he said I did a lot during my teenaged years.)

What I can write about the residents is this: On campus we had five bipolar disorders; one dysthymia (a milder form of a major depressive order which is chronic); four major depressive disorders; one post traumatic stress disorder; two psychotic disorders not otherwise specified (a diagnosis mainly for people with psychotic symptoms yet who do not meet the criteria for a diagnosis of schizophrenia); six schizoaffective disorders (A combination of psychotic features within a mood disorder; with this diagnosis you are likely to experience hallucinations/delusions during the manic and depressive phases of the illness); and 13 schizophrenias (A psychotic disorder which changes how a person thinks and acts, characterized by hearing voices and delusions).

Our clinical director told me the biggest challenge facing the mentally ill is not housing, employment, or social acceptanceit’s the ability to take their medications on a regular basis. Most have a tendency to stop taking their drugs once they start feeling better, a vicious cycle. Small wonder since the side effects can be blurred vision, nausea, dizziness, constipation, and impotency; sometimes they have to give the males drug holidays.

The biggest hope for the future lies in drugs. Research is focused on longer acting medicines with fewer side effects. I expect it will reach the point where someone only has to have one shot a month rather than a fistful of pills which have a complicated sequence and often make him feel sick. For the time being there is no cure. A diagnosis of serious mental illness is permanent. However, we have effective means of therapy and drugs alleviating many of the symptomsnone of which were available to Aunt Lizzie.

After two years working for this program, I was able to draw a few conclusions. We need more long-term affordable housing whether state or privately run, especially dorm situations where residents can live in safety and comfort with support when it comes to decision making, daily life management, and most importantly, medication compliance. During the day, individuals can go to work, school, and appointments. More group homes could be opened and cater to about 25 people, only needing a small staff. (If you will, think of this as foster care for the mentally ill.) One of the biggest problems I see is we are training the mentally ill how to live on their own and yet there is a serious shortage of adequate housing. They can only afford marginal or bad neighborhoods which make them vulnerable to hooligans and isolation; NIMBY casts a pall over their having a chance at living decently. Most of our residents were low income and had to live on benefits and minimum wages from part-time jobs; they had to scrape by on about $650 a month, including $170 for groceries and personal needs. Few could afford to live alone and finding a roommate was a challenge. And this was before the recession.

Towards the end of her life Aunt Lizzie recognized no one. I’d like to think there were family and staff members at Piedmont who showed her kindness, even in the simplest of gestures during her sad and lonely last months. A favorite dessert, a joke, the linger of a reassuring hand on her shoulder, placing a comfortable chair in front of a mountain view beckoning from the window. We’ll never know. JACK RIGGS’S ‘THE FIREMAN’S WIFE’
by Anna Whiteside

The Fireman’s Wife
by Jack Riggs
Ballantine Books, 352 pp., $14.00

Jack Riggs’ sophomore novel, The Fireman’s Wife, tosses its readers among several climates: the chilly coastal waters of South Carolina, the steamy blacktop highways of the low country, the cool mountain air of the Western Carolina Mountain, and the choking fires that burn along the coasts of South Carolina. In the same way, the novel also swings the readers between Peck, the fireman, and Cassie, the fireman’s wife. The relationship between these two isn’t any less bipolar than the relationship between the different climates, which always makes for an interesting story.

The story begins with Cassie headed towards a softball game, her daughter in the backseat and Clay Taylor, another fireman and more specifically, another fireman with whom Cassie has become involved, riding passenger. Cassie’s daughter, a fifteen-year-old who yes, was the catalyst for her parent’s fifteen-year-old marriage, senses something is up, and shoots barbs at her mother. These continue to fly for the remainder of the novel, softening only towards the end. It is this relationship that is perhaps the most real; we can sy sense in Cassie a resentment towards the daughter not only for happening along and interrupting her life, but also for being such a hitch in her plans to leave her husband. This is not only a very true relationship, but Riggs also manages to do this and still keep Cassie sympathetic. He does not judge any of his characters, which, in a tale about moral failings, would be relatively easy to do.

Part of the way that Riggs does this is by giving both Cassie and Peck a voice. The novel is told in alternating spurts of Cassie and Peck’s first person narrations. After Cassie’s section that opens the book, we get Peck’s. When we first meet him, he and his crew have attempted to save a young child who has drowned at the beach. They fail, which, as happens many times in this novel, this calls up thoughts about his own daughter.

For Peck’s struggle is a one of life and death, which contrasts well with the other struggle: between losing Cassie and keeping Cassie. Between not having a family and having one. Between being in company or being alone. Peck’s career gives Riggs ample ability to ramp up the stakes on the relationship between Peck and Cassie, and thus adds intensity to this struggle.

Another thing that the firefighter idea allows Riggs to add to this piece is, of course, metaphor and imagery. As I said before, this is a novel that flips between hot and cold in climates as well as relationships. While some of this is good, I did feel that it occasionally went over the top. Peck talks a lot about the relationship in terms of “Cassie never liking the low country,” because of the heat. While Peck might certainly have had such a line of thinking, there might have been moments where Riggs could have allowed us to see past the characters simply in terms of fire and heat. In all the fire and heat imagery, there was also that crucial idea of the middle ground that could have helped. In a sense, we get so much of the heat and flatness, and so much of the chill and dramatic climb of the mountains that we miss any kind of plateau that might have forced the characters to face themselves and each other.

All of this imagery, however, would not be present in the novel without Riggs’ use of language and careful attention to details. While some of the time these images are a bit too rich and oversaturated, that is not without saying that the details and images were there, and that they were rich, and that they did make this an enjoyable novel to read, as well as an interesting world to inhabit. JOHN GUZLOWSKI’S ‘THIRD WINTER OF WAR’
by Jennifer Whitaker

The Third Winter of War: Buchenwald
by John Guzlowski
Finishing Line Press, 27 pp., $12

John Guzlowski’s latest chapbook, The Third Winter of War: Buchenwald, is a study in liminality: in these spare poems, the central father figure is constantly on the cusp between the dreams that make life endurable and the nightmare reality in which he finds himself. To say that these poems are filled with an awful beauty is cliché, and yet what makes these poems gripping is the calm and often lovely veneer overlaid on the obvious horror of their narrative content. Here we are reminded that what makes real horror so terrifying is that it is not populated with unknowable monsters, but with the things of everyday lifechildren’s songs, soft cheese and plums and cherries, a cow in the field. The strength of these poems comes from the poet’s denial of the easy image or a reliance on the tragedy to make the emotional center of the poem; instead, the fragmentation and frankness of the imagery and language create a way for readers to begin to understand what ultimately avoids understanding.

In the four lines that make up the poem “Prologue,” the poet establishes both the understated violence that reigns in the chapbook as well as an insistence that the reader is interior to, if not complicit in, the action of the poems:

     My father’s hands are cut into pieces,

     each piece small, pebble size.


     If you are hungry at night,

     You’ll put a piece in your mouth.


Guzlowski’s combination here of violence and nourishment, of a father’s experience mediated through a son’s recounting, of the reader’s distance and intimacy, typifies the collection. The 24 poems that make up the body of the book, framed by prologue and epilogue poems, are numbered with Roman numerals. This decision by the poet to focus on a logical order to the poems strives to set order to the chaos of experience. As we make our way through each poem, we feel as if we are watching a day slip away; as soon as we have apprehended an image, another one, equally striking, takes its place. We watch the poems accumulate with each number that followsthe ticking away of a morning, afternoon, eveningwithout knowing what precisely is gained. Juxtaposed with the ordering of the poems is the timelessness of their narratives; the poet’s lyrical use of language foregrounds the what of the poems rather than the when. In this unknowable time, the poet creates for us “a winter that will never end” (“XXIII” line 5), with all of its uncomfortable limitlessness.

With Guzlowski’s control of the timeor timelessnessin these poems, he recreates the at-once distillation and expansion of time that typifies experience in trauma. As is the nature of trauma to level past and future, for the father there is only a present, the now of the experience. Each poem in the collection is written in the present tense, and by grounding us in the present, Guzlowski ensures that each time the poems are read, the father’s experience is replayed, refusing to let us forget that the trauma is a human trauma and is of this time. As a result, the poems here purposely subvert of our desire to assign a lesson to what is learned from such horrordisallowing the perspective of time to reflect and make meaning. Here is a mark of Guzlowski’s genius, as he makes us focus instead on the human tragedy and strength rather than on the reader’s desire to find out the “moral” of the story. The collection reminds us of the perils of looking to horror as a vehicle for a lesson at the expense of understanding the inherent human strength and suffering.

So unwavering is the speaker’s focus that the reader is given no relief from the father’s experience. Fourteen poems in the collection begin with “He,” referring to the father, and in seven of those poems, the reader is told “He dreams.” By never letting the father out of the reader’s sightand by making us watch him both from without and by seeing into his dreams we witness how fundamentally his experience in the camp clouds waking and sleeping life: not even in his dreams can the father escape reality entirely. Already by the third poem do we realize the enormity of his situation, when the reader is told that even in his dreams “Nothing / will save him. He knows this and wakes / waiting to dream of the river’s bottom” (lines 12-14). Even when the father “dreams a comedy” (“XV” line 1), the poem comes quickly to the chilling conclusion that “He laughs until someone kicks him” (line 8). Far from tedium, the strict attention to the father requires the reader to push beyond an easy reaction of pity or horror, and move instead toward recognition of the nuance of the father’s experience.

The weightlessness of all the dreaming, and particularly “waiting to dream of the river’s bottom,” establishes the image of the falling body that pervades the collection. In “VIII,” a dream of falling is the poem’s impetus:

     He dreams he’s one of the boy scouts

     of Katowice, forced by the Nazis

     to jump from the tower in the park

     My father falls screaming.


     His courage will not give him wings.


     His dead mother watches and cries.

     Waking, he remembers her love

     for him and how he cried

     when she died in the winter.


     Her love couldn’t give her wings


This is the only time in the collection where a poem ends without punctuation, and so it leaves us suspendedfallingas we are denied the comfort of closure at the end. From this falling we find ourselves landing in a landscape that is markedly colder than the earlier poems, as if the day is already dimming; the reader is confronted by accumulating images of snow and frozen ground as the father becomes increasingly detached from the world around him and from his body. Early in the collection, “he feels trees are growing in him” (“V” line 1), an image echoed and complicated in “XIV” as he feels stones “pressing / against his skin, trying to burst through” (lines 2-3). Through this shift across the collection, hope that the changes happening to him are somehow generative is gone; burning stones now grow “beneath the skin on his arms” (“XIV” line 1) where trees once grew. With the increasing unnaturalness of imagery, we see the exhaustion that comes with such detachment and trauma, until the self becomes the Other. In poem XIII, we learn that the father:

     [...] hates no one, not God,

     not the dead who come to him,

     not the Germans who caught him,

     not even himself for being alive.


     He is a man held together

     with stitches he has laced himself.


Here Guzlowski presents us with a father who has been pushed beyond hatred of those who hurt him, pushed beyond considering his body as anything but a subject of objectification and alienation. This is a collection, after all, that is framed by the image of cut-off hands; and while these are disembodied hands, neither cupped nor supportive, the hands do provide nourishment (in the prologue) and have the potential, at least, to grow (in “Epilogue”):

                   If he plants his cut-off hands in the ground

                   will they take root, bring him the promise

                   of his mother and father, will a stem

                   grow from his wrist, leaves from his fingers,


     will these be his children, will he know

                   how to water them, will his water be

                   enough to bring them the love they’ll seek

                   as they uncurl like roses before the spring sun,


                   will his tears be the holy, saving water,

     or will they be a blasphemy against

                   his blessed lord, just the bitterness

                   of a cow disappointed with its field?


As this final poem illustrates, these poems defy easy definition as hopeless or hopeful; rather, Guzlowski perfectly positions the reader in a state of suspended hope, reminding us that what we see can as easily become the instrument of a person’s downfall as it can become his salvation. K.A. HAYS’ ‘DEAR APOCALYPSE’
by Lauren J. Moseley

Dear Apocalypse

by K.A. Hays

Carnegie Mellon University Press, 88 pp., $15.95


During the most catastrophic economic crisis since the Great Depression, the publication of an apocalyptic work of literature may come as no surprise. However, while engrossed in K. A. Hays debut collection of poetry, you will find no overt references to the stock market crash, unemployment, or desperate economic stimuli. And thank god, if there is one, for that. These poems do not respond to unusual circumstances; instead, they render the feeling of impending doom, which has haunted humanity throughout history, as utterly remarkable through their balance of delicacy and strength, horror and beauty, and resignation and hope. The speaker of these poems longs for salvation as passionately as she longs for the apocalypse to get it over with already, afterlife or no. This book is a world of falling houses, noisy birds, and crashing seas, but instead of becoming hopeless as you read, you will be thankful for this voice that has articulated the ineffabilities youve always felt at your core.


In the collections first poem, which is also the title poem, the speaker invokes the apocalypse, inviting it to:


     Gust through     good. Give us

     over to the oaks,     sway the old

     sheds, the mansions     shake them down

     to meadows,     unmake us, melt off

     what was wasted     of our waking years

     but know     were no worse

     than former fools.


By using caesura as extreme as that of Cdmons Hymn, Hays reminds us how much faith has changed since the seventh century, when, as the story goes, that unwitting herdsman was blessed with religious song. It is important to note that Cdmon was illiterate. Hays mention of former fools introduces the complexities of ignorance that she grapples with throughout the book. In the title poem, Hays makes it clear that our struggles and our failures are nothing new, all while refusing to blame any sort of god, past or current generations, or even the apocalypse itself.


After the opening poem, the book is divided into four sections: Letters, Labors, Mind, and Fowls and Lilies. In the first section, Letter from the End of the World addresses the apocalypses aftermath:


     We wail like children on the beach


     who had intended the slow spoil of a city

     of sand, but were slighted by the sea

     flinging through too soon


The speaker wishes she could rescind the request she made in Dear Apocalypse now that, in the world of the poem, the end is at hand. She drops the title poems objectivity as she accuses uncanny forces, such as the great arbiter, / in whose image // we fear, squinting, we were not made.


Hays emphasizes this separation from god and everything religious in subsequent sections as well. For example, in Outside the Basilica di San Petronio, a poem in the final section, Hays writes, Dear saints, / keeping always and perfectly away. This poem, like nearly all the poems in Fowls and Lilies, features birds (pigeons, in this case, that the young girl in the poem can never quite reach). But creatures of flight are not caged in this section. Winged insects, grackles, juncos, ducks, thrushes, and nuthatches populate the first three sections, which is a testament to the books unity, as is Hays consistency of form.


Almost all the poems in the book appear in controlled, 1-6 line, double-spaced stanzas, whose lines are usually of medium length. The white space that results from all this double-spacing gives the poems a fragile appearance, even when the diction is most violent (e.g., that monster, the cane begonia, / with jagged leaves like the wings of vultures). Despite Hays free verse, the poems look as delicate and ordered as songbird skeletons, and most often, the form is just right. With poems so meticulously wrought in both form and content, the reader sees, hears, and feels the speakers anxiety.


In addition to making metaphorical use of creatures of the air, Hays also investigates creatures of the earth. In Pastoral, after describing a despondent rural scene, Hays writes,


     Only the worms loop on

     with confidence, poking up from the earth, the blissful


     gods of mud (the maker of man). They bring

     the dung and fouled leaves through their bodies.

     I smell their castings even in the burrows I dig


     at two a.m. and curl in, hoping to wake

     rose-tinged, translucent, devolved.


This desire for a less sophisticated mind reappears in section two (Labors). The Way of All the Earth begins, In various ways well be taken. Fine, except / that we know it. With moves like this one, Hays makes the apocalypse universal and perpetual, because whether theres an Armageddon or not, we will all die. The speaker of this poem concludes that it would be better to live like a turtle and hibernate in the mud for half the year, because then we would be happy as stone and could stay alive by being nearly dead. The speaker curses her perception, her knowledge of the past, and her ability to worry for the future throughout the book, but the painstaking attention she pays to the natural world only shows her love for it and the faculties that enable her to experience it.


It is this tension between love and hate for the world and the creatures in it that makes Dear Apocalypse so compelling. Nothing is ever purely beautiful or terrible, and the speakers doubt and tentative syntax intensify in the third section, Mind, to show this complexity. In Imagine How Easy it Must Be for Weather, Hays writes,


     Surely we all fear the reach of madness.

     But what if it made us as confident as the wind billowing

     a hurricane, far past the flat snare of beaches,

     over the triangle where ships go off radar

     and laws get sucked down?


The preponderance of questions in the middle of the book clarifies that while weather and animals may be confident, we humans are not, thanks to our continuously churning minds. The speaker often yearns to live like a fowl or a lily, without any thought for her condition, but she cant stop observing, observing, observing.


The poems in the final section, Fowls and Lilies, are almost entirely observational. Previous sections are also packed with concrete images from the natural world, but Hays calls for the thing in itselfwhether its the sea, a tundra swan, or a man sitting in a lawn chairmost loudly in the final section. By drawing even closer to the concrete in the final section, the speaker strives to hold the earth more closely, even when what she perceives is ugly. She even asks, in Theology, why should there be a god? The animals, people, and landscapes she observes are just as instructive and mysterious as a god. After gazing at so many birds in the heavens in this section, the speaker paradoxically finds solace on the ground. To hark back to an earlier poem (The Labor of Wakingpossibly the books best gift), the speaker has come to love / this waking life enough to dread its loss, though she would never admit that outright.


As a whole, Dear Apocalypses structure is artful and intelligent. The bangs and crashes of the first section quiet down as the book proceeds, but beware of aftershocks. Fowls and Lilies contains a few redundant poems and is relatedly too long, but even these imperfections cant mar the beauty of this exquisite and important work. Read this book, and you will feel like youve just returned from a spiritual retreat to a pastoral land by the sea. Your head will swirl with questions and images, you will flinch from moments of ferocious diction, but in the end, you will feel the relief of catharsis.

NINA RIGGS’S ‘LUCKY, LUCKY’
by Tom Christopher

Lucky, Lucky

by Nina Riggs

Finishing Line Press, 26 pp., $12.00


Nina Riggs’s debut collection from Finishing Line Press, Lucky, Lucky, explores the friction and tectonics of contradictory desires. In these poems, Riggs continually braces the safety of the routine against the risk of the unknown, grinds the daily against the extraordinary, bangs the family against the unfamiliar, and the resulting shower of heat and sparks lightens the night. These poems live in the shadow and the flash.


Beginning with a child’s thrill of a train ride, “the start of something,” this collection frequently presents us with a desire to reach beyond the everyday (“Sonnet of the Night Train”). Whether a teenager breaking from her mother’s guardianship or the workers of France striking, these poems reflect a spirit unwilling to be easily constrained:


     ...Some mornings I wake up longing

     to mimic all of this: to feel the graze of the exceptional...


     (from “Manifestation”)


Throughout, there is an awareness of life’s restrictions, the boundaries slowly setting like mortar, and there is a need to break free from the hardening routine. The future is envisioned in “terms of choices”, and we are keenly aware that choices have been made (“Desire”). We are also aware that the choices made may not be fully satisfying. Often something is missing, and we are left with a feeling, an absence, that cannot be fully expressed. In several poems, Riggs uses an epistolary form in which to consider the nature of the speaker’s life. In “Dear Quark at the Universe’s Edge”, for instance, the speaker is “jealous” of the quark’s “probability.” Our skies, on the other hand, are “safely ceilinged” and “We expand to where we have been before.”


But this collection eschews easy convictions: there is a “violence” in the departure from the norm. Contrasting the need for the new is a need for protecting. The collection doesn’t hide the shock of loss, and with a lurid intelligence, the vultures of Bisbee describe the living as momentarily “lucky” (“Lucky”). There is some safety in “the everyday,” in boundaries, a need to “pull...back from the edges” (“One-Minute Amaryllis”). The conflict between these two rolesthe adventurer and the worriercreates a powerful dialogue in the collection. For instance, in the poems “Desire” and “Rooster,” parallel wives endure sleepless nights, one in breathless witness to a drama of freedom and desire, the other listening carefully to her sleeping child’s breathing, a new mother grappling with the unknown. At one point, the collection concedes at the possibility that even a lifeless limbo can be “lovely” providing that it bestows “a gravity you lacked in life” (“Last Swim”).


While the speakers may be concerned with ordinariness, these poems are not mundane. Riggs’s microscopic awareness imbues the world with meaning; her vision is exceptional. Often her precise observations function as a point of meditation for the emotional core of the poem. In the poem “Dear Thread-Waisted Sphecid Wasp,” Riggs uses a wasp gripping a caterpillar’s corpse as a reflection of a marriage:


     The two of you make a remarkable creature, your glossy body

     and violently blue belt, that corpse a flush berth beneath.


While the speaker has been left alone on her third wedding anniversary, admirably, Riggs never allows the speaker to mire in anger or self-pity. Rather, Riggs unfurls the speaker’s feelings while keeping the poem tightly focused on the natural world:


     ...this morning I allowed a fly to crawl the length

     of my leg because I wanted to be touched, and a perfect

     stillness sometimes feels like something’s coming.


By the end of the poem, the speaker fully associates herself with the wasp: “we are not simple vessels” (emphasis mine). The poem ends with the speaker’s and wasp’s need to “be cracked” and “expanded.” Riggs’s ability to express the incorporeal through metaphoric manifestations consistently gives her poems a power and freshness that avoids sentimentality.


Simply put, there are no “common” observations in these poemsevery detail resonates with potential. In the poem “Dear Emerson” the coals illuminate an aging man’s struggle with a dimming world. In “Mother and Daughter Tour Italy,” a stumble over uneven path carries familial support. Under Riggs’s eye, the everyday is exceptional.


While this is a first collection, Riggs writes with the control of a seasoned poet. She breaks lines to amplify their meaning. She selects words with a careful precision. Like the child in “Taken,” Riggs knows “what sounds language can make.” From the lulling “soft tromboning of bloom” (“One-Minute Amarylis”) to the sharp “last ice age chafe below in precipitous flanks” (“Dear Stranger“), the sounds provide a musical accompaniment to the poems. A few poems defiantly throw open the doors. Particularly in “Midsummer Hymn,” the sounds whirl gleeful and muscular as a summer barn dance:


     desperate UFOs searching

     for an idea as good as corn

     while corn heaps in cribs

     and silos of corn ride from crops

     like massive corn rockets and

     a corn scarecrow warns...


From beginning to end, Riggs shows us desires and restraint, excitement and worryin other words, muddy hands and fingernails of life:


     How awfully from Earth

     we are, and made of it

     no transcendence, only dumb

     as a fat squash in some small garden.


     (from “After the Argument”)


She leaves us with the instructions to “agree without saying/...clump up,/ the way strawberries do,/ and bees listening” (“After the Argument”). There is wisdom in these poems. This new voice is worth listening to.

CONTRIBUTORS

CHRIS BACHELDER is the author of the novels Bear v. Shark (Scribner) and U.S.! (Bloomsbury). He teaches fiction at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where he lives with his wife and two daughters. His short story ‘Conservatory’ is included in this issue.

DAVID BLAIR was born in 1970. He grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and has degrees from Fordham University and the creative writing program at UNC Greensboro. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Fence, The Greensboro Review, The Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Verse, and been featured in the anthologies Zoland Poetry and The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. He is an associate professor at The New England Institute of Art in Brookline, Massachusetts. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, with his wife Sabrina and daughter Astrid. His review of Rhett Iseman Trull’s The Real Warnings is included in this issue.

KYLE BOOTEN’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Tin House, Guernica, and Ghoti. He won a Hopwood Award from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he is in the MFA program. He is from Nashville. His poem ‘Flashlight Tag’ is included in this issue.

RICK CAMPBELL’s newest book of poems is Dixmont, from Autumn House Press. His other books are The Traveler’s Companion (Black Bay Books, 2004); and Setting The World In Order (Texas Tech 2001) which won the Walt McDonald Prize and A Day’s Work (State Street Press 2000). He’s won a Pushcart Prize, an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and two poetry fellowships from the Florida Arts Council. He’s published poems and essays in many journals including The Georgia Review, The Florida Review, Prairie Schooner and many others. He is the director of Anhinga Press and the Anhinga Prize for Poetry, and he teaches English at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, Florida. He was born on the Ohio River 20 miles downriver from Pittsburgh and lives with his wife and daughter in Gadsden County, Florida. His poems ‘A Map of My Body’, ‘Dog in the Ditch, Lilian Springs Road’, ‘The Crying Baby Flight’, ‘How to Save a Life’, and ‘Time of Death’ are included in this issue.

TOM CHRISTOPHER teaches at the American Hebrew Academy and has recently completed a residency as the Emerging Writer at Randolph College. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals, most recently or forthcoming in the Alaska Quarterly, BATEAU, Caketrain, Court Green, Harpur Palate, Mid-American Review and Spinning Jenny, as well as the anthologies Best American Poetry 2006 and Cadence of Hooves. His review of Nina Riggs’s ‘Lucky, Lucky’ appears in this issue.

ROBERT DANA’s most recent books of poetry are The Other (Anhinga Press, 2008) and The Morning Of The Red Admirals (Anhinga Press, 2004). A book of memoirs and literary essays Paris On The Flats, Versions Of A Literary Life will be published in April 2010 by The University of Tampa Press. It will be published in tandem with his New & Selected Poems, 1955-2010 published by Anhinga Press. He served as Poet Laureate of Iowa from 2004 through 2008. His poem ‘Jaguar’ appears in this issue.

JENNIFER KEY teaches at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Her work has recently appeared in Callaloo, The Southwest Review, and The Carolina Quarterly. Her poem ‘West Virginia’ is included in this issue.

LAUREN J. MOSELEY received her MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she also served as Poetry Editor of The Greensboro Review. Her poems have appeared in The Southeast Review and Cimarron Review, and one of her poems was recently selected by Kim Addonizio for Best New Poets 2009. She currently teaches introductory English classes at two colleges in Greensboro. Her review of K.A. Hays’ ‘Dear Apocalypse’ appears in this issue.

ELIZABETH LINDSEY ROGERS was born and raised in Greensboro, NC, and graduated from Oberlin College in 2007 with degrees in writing and dance. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Chautauqua Literary Review, The Country Dog Review, and on Poetry Daily. She was the recipient of an Oberlin College Shansi Fellowship and lived and taught in the rural Shanxi province of China from 2007-2009. She will begin an MFA in creative writing at Cornell University this fall. Her poem ‘A Map of Shanxi’ is included in this issue.

AMANDA RUTSTEIN is currently pursuing her MFA in poetry at UNC Greensboro. She is a poetry editor for The Greensboro Review. Her review of Rick Campbell’s ‘Dixmont’ appears in this issue.

TYLER SCOTT has been writing articles and essays for almost thirty years and has recently finished her first novel. Her essay “Welcome to Richmond, Miss Welty” appeared in storySouth in 2007. She lives with her family in Richmond, Virginia, and works as a fundraiser. Her essay ‘Stories Without Names and In Memory of Aunt Lizzie’ is included in this issue.

Originally from Santa Clara, California, STEFANIE SILVA is currently pursuing her MFA in poetry at UNC Greensboro. She is a poetry editor for The Greensboro Review. Her review of Chad Sweeney’s Arranging the Blaze is included in this issue.

RENEE SOTO lives in Bristol, Rhode Island, where she teaches in the BFA program at Roger Williams University and is the editor of roger, an art & literary magazine. Her poems and reviews have appeared in journals including Crab Orchard Review, The Greensboro Review, Indiana Review, and Post Road. Her poems ‘Ghazal for Christian’, ‘Dear John’, and ‘The Dirty Work of Plans’ are included in this issue.

ELIZABETH SWANN is an MFA candidate at Queens University of Charlotte in NC. Her recent work has appeared in Kakalak, Wild Goose Poetry Review, and the anthology Journey Without. A finalist in the Guy Owen Prize 2009, she has work forthcoming in Southern Poetry Review. Her poem ‘Age Two’ is included in this issue.

CHAD SWEENEY is the author of three books of poetry, Parable of Hide and Seek (Alice James, 2010), Arranging the Blaze (Anhinga, 2009), and An Architecture (BlazeVOX, 2007) and editor of Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds: The Teachers of WritersCorps in Poetry and Prose (City Lights, 2009). Sweeney’s work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Crazyhorse, New American Writing, Colorado Review, Black Warrior, and elsewhere. He is coeditor of Parthenon West Review and is working toward a Ph.D. in literature at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, where he teaches poetry and serves as assistant editor of New Issues Press. His poems ‘The Film’, ‘In the Orchard’, ‘The Dome’, ‘Empire of Wonder’, and ‘Michigan Sestina’ are included in this issue; his book of poems, Arranging the Blaze, is also reviewed.

RHETT ISEMAN TRULL’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Best New Poets 2008, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and other publications. Her awards include prizes from the Academy of American Poets and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation. She received her B.A. from Duke University and her M.F.A from UNC Greensboro, where she was a Randall Jarrell fellow. She and her husband publish Cave Wall in Greensboro, North Carolina. Her manuscript The Real Warnings was selected by contest judge Sheryl St. Germain as winner of the 2008 Anhinga Prize for Poetry. Her poems ‘All I Could See I Named Darkness’, ‘The Fish Cry Out from the Flames’, and ‘Human Resources’ are included in this issue; her book of poems, The Real Warnings, is also reviewed.

ANDREW WELLS is from Piedmont, AL. He currently lives in Iowa City, IA, where he is a student at the Writers’ Workshop. A couple of his poems have been published in Forklift, Ohio. His poem ‘Suppose a Trot Line’ is included in this issue.

CATE WHETZEL lives on the north side of Chicago with her fiance, poet Ben Debus, and a growing collection of bric-a-brac. During the academic year, she teaches poetry in the city's public schools through The Poetry Center of Chicago’s Hands on Stanzas program. Her book reviews have appeared in Indiana Review and The Other Journal, and poetry in Breakwater Review; new poetry is forthcoming from The National Poetry Review. Her poem ‘Iris’ is included in this issue.

JENNIFER WHITAKER is a lecturer in English and assistant director of the University Writing Center at UNC Greensboro. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Mid-American Review, New England Review, The Greensboro Review, New Orleans Review, Drunken Boat, and Pebble Lake Review. She has won an Academy of American Poets prize and two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg prizes. Her review of John Guzlowski’s The Third Winter of War: Buchenwald is included in this issue.

ANNA WHITESIDE has a B.A. from the University of Georgia, and she recently received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is currently a lecturer at UNC Greensboro. Her review of Jack Riggs’s The Fireman’s Wife is included in this issue. Originally from Massachussetts, MICHAEL ZINKOWSKI is currently pursuing his MFA in poetry at UNC Greensboro. He is author of the poetry collection Gentle Push. His review of Kenneth Hart’s Uh Oh Time is included in this issue. JFIFC   %# , #&')*)-0-(0%()(C   (((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((" }!1AQa"q2#BR$3br %&'()*456789:CDEFGHIJSTUVWXYZcdefghijstuvwxyz w!1AQaq"2B #3Rbr $4%&'()*56789:CDEFGHIJSTUVWXYZcdefghijstuvwxyz ?((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((()1&uVc?uw? 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