The Secret Powers of Naming by Sara Littlecrow-Russell

The University of Arizona Press, 2006
Review by Kimberly L. Becker

I Write, You Listen

Sara Littlecrow-Russell is Anishinaabe (Ojibway) and Han-Naxi Métis, a single mother of two, a lawyer, an anti-racist organizer, and a professional mediator. Her first book, (italics)The Secret Powers of Naming(/italics), won the Independent Publisher Book Award (Bronze in Poetry) and the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award (from the Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights), and was a finalist for both the PEN/Beyond Margins Award and ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award. The secret is out: Littlecrow-Russell can (italics)write(/italics).

With mordant humor, she not only “reinvents the enemy’s language,” but also incorporates her native language into her work, further resisting cultural genocide. In her author’s statement, Littlecrow-Russell explains that in Ojibway “survival” (“zhaabwii”) is a verb that means “the act of passing through intact” and that “this book is the search for the spiritual and political power of ‘zhaabwii.’”

These poems witness to survival–as a verb. In “Russian Roulette, Indian Style” “the spinning cylinder / of a 500 year old gun” is loaded with five colonial bullets: “Alcohol / Disease / Poverty / Violence / Assimilation / Survival is finding the name / Of the empty chamber.” Since “the sacred act of naming brings power over [what is named]” these poems serve as ceremonial acts.

Dance is central to many poems, highlighting cultural incongruities:

Skin-tight bellbottoms
strain against the muscles
of your Iroquois Smoke Dancer’s legs—
10,000-year-old rhythm collides
with hardcore hip-hop thunder.
You dance hard in a world
that does not welcome you as Indian,
but loves a delectable 12-year-old girl.

In one of the most moving poems, a widow dances to honor her slain husband, victim of a hate crime: “You danced, we cried. / The tourists snapped their cameras / And reached out to run their hands / Over the beadwork on your dress.”

Real Indians are often rendered invisible by stereotypes. In “Invisible Indians” those who are “nameless, invisible” under florescent lights of a 7-11 regain identity when “an owl shattered / Brittle moonlight of urban winter / With the power of naming, / ‘Ko-ko-ko!’ / We lifted our arms in greeting, / Spoke our names, / And were visible again.” Indian women, in particular, are subject to invisibility except as sexual commodity: “Half-naked maidens with feathers in their hair.” (Look closely at the cover art by Diane Way, Lakota/Cheyenne.) Littlecrow-Russell claims solidarity with women of all races, from “12-year-old Chinese girls / Imported for the 1900s sex trade / Forced to their knees…” to “Cheyenne grandmothers kneeling on the ground / Gathering wet fragments of their grandchildren’s skulls…‘We all have wounded knees.’”

The massacre at Wounded Knee was precipitated by the perceived threat of the Ghost Dance religion. Although “…History books say the threat is gone…/ Each time it rains, / I go out to the sidewalk, / Where the tree roots / Have broken the concrete / Listening to the water’s whispering: / ‘It is coming soon.’”

With poetry as powerful as this, Littlecrow-Russell’s second book cannot come soon enough.

Small Murders by Carrie McGath

New Issues Press, 2006
Review by Metta Sáma

Because of DNA

DNA everywhere. Hair follicles, eyelashes, hidden hot pink toenails, scraped knees, bruised fingers. Carrie McGath’s debut collection, Small Murders, looks for evidence with a trained, meticulous, inexhaustible eye. From indentations in beds to material inside a glove box, from the bent back of an assiduous artist to the wooden closet of a boudoir, McGath seeks out the tiny parts, the small murders, of the mind, the heart, the psyche, in order to detect the who, why, and wherewithal of love.

Small Murders opens with a tour through a small antique shop, where the perspicacious narrator frets over a series of fragmented doll parts. These “exact dismemberments” hang above the narrator, on display: “brown hair, red hair, dishwater blonde hair,/feet, arms, legs, and heads with eyes,/eyes with eyelids that shuttered when touched.” Despite the baleful atmosphere of this macabre backroom of the antique shop, the narrator sticks around, surveying, making notes of “the gunshot doll”, the “armless teddy bear”, and “two jaundiced plastic arms”, and returns a week later to purchase the small box that contains more parts: “two baby doll teeth,/a small nursing bottle,/a tiny dustpan in 1950s blue” (7). McGath specializes in broken, discarded left behinds, attending to these objects as nurse, scientist, surgeon, and lover.

She recalls the dashboard Virgin in Henry’s taxi, the woeful eyes of Hans Bellmar’s dolls, and a pomegranate rotting in an abandoned refrigerator with tenacious clarity. Later, she returns to the slaughter, more clearly, with “So Nice to See You”, “Rape Dreams”, “Nights Marred Like Crickets in Metal Fan Blades”, and “Murder Girl”. In poems like “You Are a Rifle in My Closet”, “Daylight Savings”, and “My Libido”, the violence is less bloody, yet the narrators suffocate under an intense need to love intensely. In “A Good Nympho Can Get a Lot of Guys Killed”, she writes: “And didn’t I call you a jackass/for not taking the love I gave you seriously?/And then I walked away wanting to cry but seeing the cool/absurdity of crying, so I didn’t” (9).

By the end of the book, I’m convinced this narrator (these narrators?) is “the loneliest girl in the time zone” (1, is “an ordinary object. A compact” (14), is the tremble, the “eerie paths”, the “scouring pads”, the “round and red as plums” nipples, and more and more and more. By the end of the book, I’m just as convinced the fertility of McGath’s imagination becomes overpowering, overdone, and indeterminate. Where restraint is needed, the hand is heavy.

And yet, this is a mesmerist’s narrative hope: to create a lyric fecundate, to unrestrain. Carrie McGath has accomplished this feat. Read it and watch your mind follow the beautiful tangle of dots.

Rising, Falling, Hovering: A Poetry of Ethics and Responsibility by C.D. Wright

Review by Shannon K. Winston

For many reasons, C.D. Wright’s newest collection of poetry, Rising, Falling, Hovering, is breathtaking. Stylistically, Wright’s poems are delicate, deceptively simple, and replete with striking imagery. For example, she opens “Like Having a Light at the Back You Can’t See but You Can Still Feel (1)” with the following lines: “As if it were streaming into your ear./ The edges of the room long vanished” (4). One of the greatest strengths of this collection is its refreshing variation. Wright is vigorous and attentive to all of her lines and each poem begins differently than the one that preceded it. The lines are double space which adds an airy quality to the poems that allows readers to slow down and contemplate each line without rushing. In the same poem, the speaker writes of two people: “they were not covering the air/with false words” (Ibid), which is true of Wright herself. Rising, Falling, Hovering is a very raw collection that abandons ornate language in favor of a vigorous questioning of what it means to be a poet in today’s world.

Related to the last point, one of the most important and compelling themes that reoccurs in Rising, Falling, Hovering is the question of responsibility towards others when the world is ravaged by war and injustice. Wright opens her collection with the following citation from Maurice Merleau-Ponty that sets the tone for the entire collection: “The momentum of existence towards others, towards the future, towards the world can be restored as a river unfreezes.” The reader can interpret each line in this collection, therefore, as Wright’s deeply personal and politically attempt to communicate and do right to others. Each line is a gesture towards a better, more equal future. While certainly utopic, Rising, Falling, Hovering also ponders whether a poet can foment significant change. Wright writes: “But we can’t leave it to the forces to rub out the color of the world/ What is said has been said before (space)/ This is no time for poetry” (15). But, if anything, Wright’s collection seems to confirm that poets have an ethical responsibility to write, to question their world and their place in it. In this hauntingly beautiful collection, Wright presents some of the most salient questions—what it means to be human, to live with others, and to experience both beauty and violence—in an artfully crafted and delicate verse. For all of these reasons, Rising, Falling, Hovering is not only a stunning read but an important one as well.

A White Girl Lynching by Elizabeth P. Glixman

Pudding House Publications, 2008
Review by Kimberly L. Becker

Color Theory

Elizabeth P. Glixman is a poet and writer, as well as interview editor at Eclectica. Her work appears in many journals and anthologies, including Frigg, The Pedestal, Wicked Alice, and Women of the Web: A Poetry Anthology. An animal lover, she also has a blog devoted to shelter animals. In addition, she is a visual artist (B.F.A. in Studio Arts and M.Ed. from Clark University) and the poems in her chapbook, A White Girl Lynching, reflect this artistic sensibility.

A carefully selected frame both highlights and protects the artwork within. Glixman frames her book with an author’s statement: “These poems are…about respect for all individuals and races…many of the poems [are] about what happens to people when they are ‘lynched.’ I interpret lynched as meaning to have an important element of individual dignity taken away from an individual or group.” Glixman takes a risk in dissociating lynching from its historical context and connotation. With her statement, she wisely protects her title’s integrity of intent. Without it, the title itself would run the risk of seeming to disrespect African American victims of literal lynching. By highlighting her definition of “lynching” that occurs across color lines, Glixman frees the reader to appreciate more fully the artistry of her poems.

Accompanying each Pudding House chapbook is a Position Statement on the Value of Poetry Arts that reads in part: “You selected language art that took as long to create as paintings or other fine art.” This statement is especially fitting for Glixman, whose own artwork graces the cover and whose poems are informed by her training as a visual artist. “Painted Stories from the Dutch,” an ekphrastic poem in eight parts, draws inspiration from Rembrandt, Vermeer and other masters from the Golden Age of Dutch painting, according to her blog,(italics)In the Moment(/italics), in which she also notes that quality of light and details of texture characterize this period. (Given the title and theme of the book, the fruit and hanging, bloodied rabbits depicted in this poetic still-life cannot help but recall more sinister “Strange Fruit.”)

The white girl of the title, who suffers a vicious beating, “covered her black blue / fruity bruises with pancake makeup.” The heavy application of cosmetics recalls the artistic technique of impasto, which Glixman also alludes to in the stunning line: “Dance with me in darkness and light / In the thick impasto of secret lust.” Glixman applies the principle of chiaroscuro to the light and dark side of racial relations. Her poems emphasize the danger of being “pulled into one point perspective” when it comes to viewing others. Despite the violence of “The Modern Annihilation” Glixman seeks connection: an executed son of a friend is “still in the arch of all things.” Further, “the path of all things is a miniature painting / Luminescent and telling.”

Glixman mixes colorful characters (a hallelujah-shouting Momma, a cat named Rabbi Simon, a Manoschevitz-toting Eve) to test her theory that it is not race or even species that divides us, but lack of compassion: “Who knows who is who in this world of sorrow?” Glixman paints an answer at once anguished and hopeful: “We cry and wonder, for the confusion of lost things / and arrive in a space of astonishment.”

Scholarship Girl by Lesley Wheeler

Finishing Line Press, 2007
Review by Rachel Dacus

Can memories be passed down through generations? This is the question at the heart of Lesley Wheeler’s fascinating new chapbook of linked poems on the theme of her mother’s World War II era Liverpool. The book begins with a poem whose title challenges ideas of thought and memory, and where memory resides. “Remembering My Mother’s Childhood” dares conventional ideas of memoir by giving it a twist: the concept of a parent’s experience transmitted through living language, full-blown and layered as if experienced by the child. That initial poem begins with definitions critical to the question:

When she says stove she means fireplace,
a great soot-blackened maw. When I say
Liverpool I mean an unreal city, purified
of reeking detail like a fairy tale

But this is no fairytale world that Wheeler’s poetry evokes in rich detail. With a startling authentic voice and “remembered” imagery, the poet layers the present day daughter and her questions about origins with cultural inheritance, even questioning the possibility of such questions being answered. She declares the ambiguity of memory in the poem’s last lines: “I invent this blitzed, hungry, smoke-thin world/ because it invented me, and lies/ are my birthright.”

The layers in Wheeler’s poetry are most deeply revealed in the book’s adroit crown of unrhymed sonnets, “The Calderstones.” The initial sonnet sets out its scope of history, making it as solid and yet mysterious as its subject, a ring of ancient stones. The poem ends by showing the destructiveness of time on culture and memory and even on megaliths: “Liverpool shrugs and shrines/ topple.” The callousness of history becomes part of history and culture.

Wheeler’s deeply rooted – if borrowed – sense of place pervades this collection. At times the poems reminded me of English poet Alice Oswald’s marvelous Dart, a book-length poem that traces the course of the river Dart from its source to the ocean, folding in all its people and occupations along the way. At other times, the idiomatic voices and terse commentary made me think of Eliot. Using a rich blend of artifact, dialect and rhythm, Wheeler points to the mysterious accretion of cultural patterning while simultaneously shrugging them off with the observer’s detached stance.

“No elegies here,” declares the last line of the last poem. Yet I felt in these poems a river of plaintive tribute to the power of language to transmit a deep sense of place. The final poem begins with lines that might be anti-ode, an elegy for memories that cannot completely cohere, but still resonate in the time capsule of verse:

There is no way to prove to you how
my mother’s Liverpool sounded,
the slosh, the rattle of it, the catarrhal
school girl recitations of “Daffodils”

there is no grooved disk, no file
to click, no black-and-white child
to stand on the chair for a song

me auntie Mary had a canary
up the leg of her drawers

In refusing to pen elegies, Lesley Wheeler has instead poignantly recreated another world and another time.

Voice of Ice by Alta Ifland

Les Figues Press, 2007
Review by GA. A. Banks-Martin

True Birth

Voice of Ice, a collection of prose poems, by Alta Ifland, an ambitious group of poems in which the speaker seeks to discover her true self. The poems are highly descriptive and many times highly surrealistic often leaving us with the sense that we have just been somewhere familiar but unfamiliar. For example, the first lines of Birth:

I was born in a lapse of time, my hand clinging to a
dandelion, my feet gripping a vine leaf, my nose on my
back, and eye on my ankle.
Of course, no one remembers being born but it is safe to say that this description is far from the truth. However, as the poem develops, so does an explanation:
My mother wasn’t present at my birth or maybe she was
there and her pain of being torn apart still throbs in my veins.
The idea that the infant was born with what seems to be several malformations is really a way of introducing the book’s primary theme: deconstruction of self. The narrator
must return to the point at which she is purest, the point at which all knowledge is innate, to be reborn and reopened to basic learning.

That learning includes discovering there is something worst than being unhappy: having been abandoned by your own unhappiness. As is the case of My neighbors, a couple who have tried to find contentment via plastic surgery and antidepressants only to find that those solutions lead to more plastic surgery and antidepressants. Surgery has left the wife’s face so distorted that it sounds as if her surgeon was really a cubist painter, the husband shows no physical signs malady but has the odd ability to discuss prescribing information and general concerns encountered while taking any antidepressant. They are so unhappy they no longer know they are unhappy; unhappiness has become a lifestyle.

The last lesson of the book is simple, we have been educated to understand everything, is recycled, thus, Even death is no longer final. While the poem Death illustrates this well, the basic thought was quietly developing along side all of the other ideas, as the poet has translated each poem into French, her native language, symbolically, the lost, and regaining of national identity.

Therefore, when we reach the end of Alta Ifland’s Voice of Ice, we have witnessed the fascinating rebirth of a human being, a being free of ego, preconceived notions of identity, national or otherwise, and formal learning. What we encounter about life and ourselves is funny, uncomfortable, familiar and difficult but refreshing and well worth struggle.

The poet, Alta Ifland, was born in Eastern Europe, studied literature, and philosophy in France, and lives in California.

Asylum in the Grasslands by Diane Glancy

The Arizona University Press, 2007
Review by Kimberly L. Becker

The Greening

If, as Diane Glancy observes, “Writing is a conversation,” then we are fortunate to listen in on her latest collection of poems, Asylum in the Grasslands. Author of more than thirty books, Glancy is also novelist, essayist, and playwright. Her many literary prizes include an American Book Award, the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, the Native American Prose Award and a Sundance Screenwriting Fellowship. In Asylum in the Grasslands she devotes her formidable talent to illuminating the history of the Cherokee.

There is movement in these poems: both forced removal and migrations to “the grasslands of the next world.” Spirits of ancestors come and go, since “Distance is no measure.” Women have traditionally been esteemed as leaders within the Cherokee community, so it is no surprise when the spirit of Great-grandmother stops by for a visit. Yet when she speaks in Cherokee, “I shrug in frustration. How do I tell her even the / words of her Cherokee language do not survive?” Glancy acknowledges that spiritual connection sustains even when native language wanes: “I watch the buffalo cross her / cheek. Under the buckskin there are grapevines for her ribcage. / In her pocket a map of pit stops on the large arc of her restless / migration.”

Glancy transforms the ordinary into the luminous. A snakeskin found on the lawn is first “A crackly robe. / Delicate. / Royal. / Something the children / would have played with” then “a robe Clytemnestra wore / after her daughter Iphigenia / was sacrificed.” The speaker rolls the snakeskin in her hand and thinks of “the sacrifice of women.”

Government boarding schools forced Indian children to sacrifice their own culture in the name of assimilation. “Boarding School for Indian Women” addresses the resultant sense of dislocation: “Now our world is taken, and we are / left with this shadow of our making. / The next world is far away.” Glancy’s poems access the past, yet one “beyond memory / into heritage / or ancestral levels of thought.” Her writing evidences what Gerald Vizenor termed survivance. She witnesses to loss, but also to “a power that transcends horror.”

These poems affirm a transcendent power. In the title poem she envisions the Savior as someone you meet “in the prairie grass / his face so full of light he’s milk-eyed / you let his ideas roll over you / you even forget the bitterness you learned / all your life.” In “Buffalo Medicine” the buffalo are at one with the Great Spirit: “…we would run through the prairie / with the wind in our ears. Our large heads pure with mind. The / Great Spirit great as he spoke. Yo. Were his. We grunted / his praises. Snorted and roamed in his will.”

Like wind through the prairie grass, Glancy’s poetry whispers insistently: listen. “Language is still enough,” she asserts in one poem. In this moving book, it surely is.

Femme au Chapeau: Poems by Rachel Dacus

David Robert Books, 2005
Review by LouAnn Muhm

If I were to define an overarching theme of Rachel Dacus’ 2005 poetry collection, Femme au Chapeau, (David Robert Books), I would use the title of a poem describing her reaction to seeing an x-ray of her broken fibula , Elegance of the Hidden. So many of the poems in this collection reveal just that, whether it is in the daily maternal and domestic tasks in “Apple Pie Order” with its focus on the mother’s hands “above [whose]industry I feel the tears,” or the ways in which a husband and wife reveal their differences in their grooming rituals, where “one augments, the other minimizes” in separate mirrors, “one…wiped of distracting fog/ The other [making] a cheek moon-size/for probing a follicle or pock.”

Over and over again, these poems bring us into tight focus on the things we walk past every day but don’t see: the hummingbird pausing on a branch, the single perfect apple in a litter of windfalls, or the daily tasks that women perform unnoticed as they “Scrub the crud from crevices/…Neaten the chaos of the night/and bake a loaf of innocence.”

Not all of the hidden elegance examined here is pleasant. There are poems exploring the losses inherent in involuntary childlessness, in family rupture, and in death. These poems avoid sentimentality, however, employing clear-eyed reportage that lets us as readers come to our own conclusions and judgments of the father whose self-portrait “points to the harrowing/ his future wives will take,” or whose “mouth becomes ocean/[and] turns his family into rocks with eyes.”

Throughout this excellent collection, Dacus brings a sharp and humane eye to the world around her and within her, and allows her readers “To stand together/ in the light that streams/ from a hidden source in this world.”

Elegy by Mary Jo Bang

Graywolf Press, 2007
Review by G.A. Banks-Martin

How To Mourn A Son

On March 6, 2008, Elegy, Mary Jo Bang’s fifth book of poetry, won The National Book Critics Circle award for 2007. The book, an extended lament for the poet’s deceased son, reminds us that death, while final for the dead, must be contended with by the living daily; nightly. For after the lost is announced, and the body reduced to ash, the narrator states my mothering lips are stitched/ Shut by sorrow.

The early poems, pages 3- 36, are concerned with beginning the mourning process. Here three critical points arise: mourning goes on night and day, no one really understands, and there is no relief. These stanzas from The Cruel Wheel Turns Twice best illustrate the first idea:
A bus slithers by
A din. The aluminum morning takes on more tension
And becomes a metal rod
Straight from a tunnel, dropped in a gate groove.

Disappointment. And again. The End gate
Opens and it’s, Please
Come back. Please Be. Then nothing. Only end-

Less night taking off from the smooth tarmac slate.
The potpie clock, its stock of twelve numbers,
A stew for the weak and the weary.

The poem ends And daylight a gift tied with some tinsel, however, the gift, is simply a break from night. Likewise, Landscape With The Fall of Icarus is a description of the guilt that consumes the day. The poem explores the last moment mother and son spends together. The mother struggles to remember which train she watched her son ride away on and declares:
That car should be forever sealed in amber.
That dolorous day should be forever

Embedded in amber.
In garnet. In amber. In opal. In order

To keep going on. And how can it be
That this means nothing to anyone but me now.
This poem’s last line is one of the many lessons offered; mourning is personal and worked out in isolation. In addition, we begin to hear whispered, if you do not understand; if you think I can just get over it, you are either very young, or inexperienced. We will hear this whisper throughout the rest of the collection. We will hear it even, after we reach the final turning point, the last line of Now, The body as ash/ is inadequate. We will hear it whispered in every line including the very last Goodnight. The ordeal comes/ To its periodic end/ Which simply means/The ahead is again. Many will say that it is a cliqued message but it is a necessary message because we cannot speak of such lost with the level of purity, honesty, and simplicity, as Mary Jo Bang does in Elegy without experience.

Hagiography by Jen Currin

Coach House Books, 2008
Review by Elizabeth J. Colen

Years of Words Blown to Bits

Jen Currin’s Hagiography works backwards. From Death to Birth, with Childhood and two Intermissions between, we are treated to a lyrical voice that makes strange connections and allows the reader sometimes only scant assistance between great leaps of imagery and idea. The beautiful language in the first section includes the lines “Once in a forest I cut myself / and claimed I was the knife.” In this we see the confidence and control Currin displays throughout. The poems maintain an almost wholly consistent tone from start to finish that lets us know that knife is sharp.

Often the poems feel like lists, corralling supposedly disparate items—such as (in prose poem “I Drink to Our Ruined House”) “Wings in our teeth. Breast to breast. We will marry in burnt swaddling clothes. Let it be known in the city of our distraction. In debt like the moon. The phone’s celestial ringing. The piano hushed”—into one poem. While sometimes I failed to find the common thread, my interest in the fresh images she shares never waned. The genius of her titles (“The Bridge Melting Behind Us”, “The Stove Refuses to Cool”, “The Hand Is Equal Parts Healer and Fool”) and the worlds she exposes allow a reader to let go of making perfect sense and give permission to live within the sense of sound. To me this inventorying found its culmination in “The Town in Her” where the list of parts creates a whole that allowed me to go back and reclaim meaning in poems that had previously mystified. As soon as one stops searching for a link and instead uses images as puzzle pieces with which to shape one larger image or idea, a magic to these poems begins to emerge. In “The Town in Her” we are given strange bits of an unsure love—“An eyelash on the toilet seat”, “Shallow kisses weigh down the quilt”—affirmed in the last stanza: “I love her and do not need to.”

Also central to a reading of Hagiography is paying attention to the subtle, intelligent shifts in point of view. Most of the poems are written in second person. The insistence/presence of “you” wanes and waxes, burning particularly bright in the Intermissions, which operate as love songs. The second person shift at the close of the first Intermission forces the romantic “you” to merge with the reader “you”—“You will read this with both of your hands.” After this the book begins feeling more intimate when we (“you”) become party to the next intimate scene when the following poem begins “I tell the teeth of your mouth: / I waited for you and the devil never came” and ends with “Your shoes get too tight…” And in the next poem when the narrator says “The sun flexed its muscles across your back” we can almost begin feeling the heat.

Taken as a whole, the book seems to want to move backwards in an effort to reclaim what we lose in the course of living: “For a spirit to enter a bottle, / there must be this— / years of words / blown to bits.” One may also take note of all the spirits populating the final (Birth) section as proof that the entire book has taken place after death, the long remembering of things that came before. While there are no saints overtly referred to within the course of Hagiography, one may also begin to believe that “you” and “I” and the other entities within are the saints never mentioned by name.

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