Apparition Wren by Maureen Aslop

Review by Metta Sáma

Main Street Rag, 2007

We’re often trained to think of titles as the entryway to the poem; after all, it’s the first thing the eyes (are supposed to) land on when first encountering a poem. Some of us (renegades that we are) choose to save the poem for last or to meet it somewhere in the middle of our reading, a sly glance upwards that says “hmmmmm. . . now what is this poem doing?” Sometimes the title is a place-holder, sometime it’s a key to the workings of the poet’s mind. In Maureen Alsop’s debut book, Apparition Wren, the title of the collection works as the latter.

Alsop’s poems are wicked, irreverent, often tender with a sly edge; yes, sometimes they’re abundant in their play, and she goes after this decadent language with intense vigor. They very often perform as the title of the collection performs, as a little mystery with logic built in: what is an apparition wren? Is it similar to an apparition of wrens? Is it the apparition of a wren? Is it the voice of someone startled who accidentally left “of” out of the equation? Is it a child speaker? A dialect? I’m still not sure, but I certainly enjoy the topsy-turvy smashed up world the title (and the poems themselves) toss me into.

In “Autobiography of Fresh Oil” Alsop takes on the voice and attitude of oil that has seemingly lain itself on a road and is interrupted by a farmer, who drives his tractor over the oil. Of course, this angers the oil, after all, it’d lain itself out to be sunned!

Where the oiled road tapered into a bend
past shaded oak, I flat
lay myself on it. I burn
under the gravel sun. Until

a tractor come: he, farmer
of cornfield, say Fuck; yes (1-6)

The poem takes many a surreal turn and the voice of oil becomes muddled, less slick, abbreviated, and damaged: “I want/to enter him into me in repulsive way”, “But//blank my speak”, “A breeze//punish me”, “Later, I squeal//to the good doctor” (17-18, 21-22, 25-26, 31-32). Eventually, the oil “come[s] to know/nothing/of [it] self” (43-45). This is Alsop’s Apparition Wren at its core: ever-turning, ever-searching, ever-leaping.

In the oft-quoted poem “Daguerreotype Portrait of Woman and Bird” (itself a mine-field of style and tone, attitude and experiment (beginning with a six-line stanza on one page, moving to a 3-stanza 11-line poem on the next page, a 4-stanza 16-line poem on the next page, and followed by two pages of stanzas that alternate from solid structures to shifty foundations)), Alsop throws in 8 lines (3 stanzas) of backward slash marks to indicate “thinned ink” that had been “cramped” on paper:

// //////// //// //
//// // /// ////// /////

///////// /// //// / ///// ///// /////// ////////
//// /// //////// / /// ///// //////

/// /////////,
//////////////////////////
/////////////////////////
//////////////////////// (42-49).

I had the great pleasure of meeting Maureen Alsop recently. We took a walk together and laughed at the funny names of plants and agreed that poetry, often, is the intense desire to laugh with and play with language, to interrogate it, to twist it and sharpen our tongues on it. Apparition Wren, with its multiple voices, its attention to detail, and its hybridity of contemporary languages and archaic diction certainly masters the art of poetry that makes one want to work hard to get to the heart of every word.

Notes from The Red Zone by Christina Pacosz

Review by Leslie Hayertz

Number 1: The Seven Kitchens
Press ReBound Series, 2009

I first reviewed Notes from The Red Zone, Christina Pacosz’s gem of a chapbook from Seal Press, in the Fall 1983 issue of Calyx. Now, almost twenty-seven years later, I revisit these eight poems, pleased that they have found new life on fresh pages as the first chapbook in The Seven Kitchens Press ReBound Series.

In Notes from The Red Zone, Pacosz observes life near the Hanford Site, a 586-square-mile nuclear reservation adjacent to Richland, Washington. The fact that Hanford’s nine reactors have since been decommissioned does not, unfortunately, date the book. Fifty-three million gallons of high-level radioactive waste make Hanford the most contaminated site in the United States. A commercial nuclear power plant and several research centers continue to operate there.

Poet David Chorlton, in his forward to the new edition, speaks to the chapbook’s continuing political and ecological relevance. He also praises Pacosz’s work for the “breadth of her view” and her “universal compassion.” It is precisely these qualities that have kept the poems in my heart and the original book on my shelf all these years.

Notes from The Red Zone is more than a mere collection of poems. Its recurring images and themes, and its controlled, forward movement make for a journey.

The setting takes us far from Washington’s iconic rain forests and mountain peaks to a flat, semi-arid landscape dominated by the Columbia River.

In Poem 1 and 2, in few words and with strong images, Pacosz takes us firmly by the hand into that desert place. She gives us the terrain, sets the tone: “…Skunks forage beneath locust trees / buzzing and clattering / in a deadly wind,” as well as introduces the issue of contamination: “…plutonium / uranium isotopes / lapping at my feet…”

In Poem 3: “…where the mesas strain / to come together / and make the hard land whole again.” Pacosz expresses a longing for health and wholeness and the inevitable veering away from the heart’s desire. Then, moving away from the river, to job and town, she lets us see deeply into the lives of the people caught there. Poems 3 and 4 are about the fear you don’t speak of. The men have separated themselves from the land, poisoned and exploited it. The women are trapped. Poem 4:

These women walk, sit, gaze

over caged hearts.

But the women are also complicit, trying to make a life by denying the danger, by not speaking the truth. Poem 4: “…A mute chorus they lament / the nuclear horse on their doorstep…”

Poems 5 and 6 speak of a culture gone astray and its men adrift. Turning their backs on wholeness has created fragmentation and emptiness:

They toss beer bottles at the stars

of some other.

Pacosz captures a place and people eerily well. She is as adept writing about human frailty as about the fragility of nature, and does both with pity and grace. In Poem 6, the poet describes a mallard duck mounting a female: “…She spreads her orange feet in the mud. / her breast, with its swift, small heart / rests on the earth…”

And then Poem 7 brings a whisper of hope, and 8 leads us away from the geographic

“Red Zone” in Eastern Washington and into ourselves with a cautionary and cautious meditation on the heart and the “other”: “…Given time, the heart / could contemplate the enormity, / purify the blood, the word…”

In the years to come, when I pick up Notes from the Red Zone, I’m sure it will speak with the same clarity as it has over the last 27 years.

Does Your Mama Know? : An Anthology of Black Lesbian Coming Out Stories

Review by Georgia Ann Banks-Martin

2nd Edition edited by Lisa C. Moore
RedBone Press, 2009

The True Self Discovered and The World Confronted

In 1996 Lisa C. Moore, the founder of Red Bone Press, published a collection of stories called Does Your Mama Know? : An Anthology of Black Lesbian Coming Out Stories. The stories that were told on those pages were remarkable not only for what was said, but because they gave shape and form to what many in the African-American community knew, however, wanted to keep hidden. No one wanted to admit to outsiders that black families were just as likely to produce gay children as white families.

As America expanded her awareness and acceptance of homosexuality it seemed that the African-American community grew more perplexed, more jaded. The years of denial had left many blacks with much more to learn about gay people than their white counterparts. Many African-American women didn’t know it was possible to be married to a man who was gay. Most thought that if a man was married, had children, and a successful career there was no possibility of him being homosexual. The same logic gave rise to the idea that a mother could not also be a lesbian. Therefore, Moore’s anthology was an important move forward for all people of African-American or black descent.

Unfortunately, thirteen years after the original publication of Does Your Mama Know? there are still young people, especially women, emerging from African-American homes without a sense of what it means to be a lesbian. As Moore points out in her introduction to the 2nd edition, “Black women have a rich oral history of lesbianism: Everybody knows of the bulldagger of the block that their mamas used to talk about.” However, most of these stories are intended to shame the lesbians rather than to empower them or the younger women of the community. The stories, poems and interviews that comprise Moore’s collection not only offer insight into the mindset of the African-American community, they make the issues faced by Lesbians of color feel much more personal than is possible in the rumors and folklore found on the streets.

For example, without going too far into the book we encounter perhaps the most important and primary source of rejection that black lesbians endure, the church. Regardless of ethnic background, most readers know enough about the Christian church to know that until very recently, homosexuality was counted amongst the greatest of sins. In many cases those who were thought or proven to be gay were forbidden from talking part, fully, in the life of the church, if not driven out of the church family completely. For many blacks this isolation means that there is little socially or spiritually that can be undertaken, because the church is so well integrated into the community. As Hope Massiah says in her story, “1985: Memories of My Coming Out Year”: “When I left the Church, I left my community behind me”. Thus Massiah, like the other woman represented in this collection, tells a story of falling in love, a story of seeking a new sense of community through attending women’s retreats, and becoming involved with the women’s movement.

This loss of community often means a strained or broken relationship with one’s mother. Terri Jewell’s mother says,

“As if wearing those thick glasses and cutting your hair down to the nub isn’t asking for

Tribulation, girl. Now you’re getting fatter and fatter. Don’t you care about how you

look? Don’t you have any pride in yourself?

Later she says to Terry, “I am so ashamed of you, I can’t mention your name to the women at work who are always talking about their daughters.”

Some gay women are raised by supportive families such as “Miss Ruth” who is ninety plus years old when she is interviewed by Terri Jewell. “Miss Ruth” was able to work, overcame racism and found enough freedom in Detroit to live openly with a woman she calls “Babe”. However, for most there are issues that seem almost insurmountable.

The stories in Does Your Mama Know? : An Anthology of Black Lesbian Coming Out Stories, are so well written that when we walk away from them it is impossible not to understand how remarkable it is to be born black, female, and lesbian. For being born black is still to be born into a world that is not fully ready to accept your arrival, and to arrive also being gay means you are truly an alien in your own land. This collection of coming out stories is important not only because it draws attention to the issues faced by lesbians of color, but because it highlights their struggle to be accepted as fully embodied human begins.

Light and Trials of Light by Cynthia Reeser

Finishing Line Press, 2010
Reviewed by Georgia Ann Banks-Martin

Cynthia Reeser is a poet, visual artist, musician, and the Founding Editor of Prick of the Spindle. Her new collection of poems, Light and Trials of Light is a chapbook published by Finishing Line Press earlier this year. The collection is comprised of twenty poems which capture the world in such a way as to remind the reader that nothing we experience should be treated as minor or unimportant. For example, “The Amputees” is a poem that at first seems to be a simple recall of a forgotten memory. A mother is speaking to her child who was just a toddler when:

the men in orange suits
came, for our tiny
stand of trees,
the one (you won’t remember)
bordering our house/

Here the mother sounds as if she is telling a story to a group of small children, but this is not a fairy tale. Instead it more closely related to a horror film. In the stanzas that follow, the men in orange suits are not coming to harvest the trees, but rather to mangle and disfigure them:

On the edge of the field.
They came hacking,
sawing, scraping: reaping
limbs, but only just

on the side threatening
the power lines.
When they left,
limbs lay dripping
useless sap all over
this new battlefield.

The victims of this war are rarely mentioned, their wounds never spoken of, because for most people it is more important that their lights, appliances, and games work when they come home.

On every page Life and Trials of Light challenges the reader to reconsider our behavior, to look around us for clues on how to react to such things as death and change. The poem “Petals” feels like a lament for a lost loved one, and our expectation may be that this poem will end sadly; however, Reeser instead reminds us that there is hope and beauty in death:

Recalling boughs, your fragile limbs
reaching for light and air,
for sails blooming hushed in the strain
of multifoliate descent, plummeting
past memories that now rebound
in silence and in the staid river,
dolmens rebounding off nothing
Except last season’s foliage, now ground
into shade and mulch and dust,
into minerals now sent up through roses.

“The Year” ends with:

The lilac brush does not hide the
heaviness of rain. Keens itself,

for want of bygone seedlings dropped,
for loss of dove-pecked buds.

The poems that await the reader in Light and Trials of Light are beautiful, sometimes witty, and always filled with truth. Cynthia Reeser does not try to hide the ugliness of life, she admits that our world and our lives change, while encouraging us to find a way to move forward. The trees that lose half their bodies go on living, because the life cycle includes death: a rose is provided the minerals it needs to live, and the lilac brush recognizes that sometimes we are robbed of the things we hold dear, yet it does not give-up.

Light and Trials of Light is a short collection of poems, but it should not be overlooked.

Historical Imperatives in Arisa White’s Disposition for Shininess and Sara Veglahn’s Closed Histories

Closed Histories
Noemi Press, 2008

Disposition for Shininess (not pictured)
Factory Hollow Press, 2008

Review by Metta Sáma

Arisa White’s Disposition for Shininess and Sara Veglahn’s Closed Histories are two incredibly different chapbooks from two seemingly (on the page) different writers. While White’s poetics veer towards the lyric narrative, Veglahn’s work is determinedly lyric, with narratives always harkening in the shadows. Each of these books establishes a central focus: for White, the lyric “disposition” is the core of the poems, while Veglahn constructs a concept for, as her title suggests, closed histories. Despite these fundamental differences in the end product (the poem itself), White and Veglahn’s chapbooks are moody trajectories of the intersections between the personal, the public, the private, the memory and rememory, and the responsibilities of the individual to these not so discrete spaces.

White’s poems are sprawling or tight, playful and compassionate, stark and brutally honed to capture the core of the metaphor that she extends and warps and snaps and releases to a newness. This is innovation at its core: an ability to make new the old, to make unrecognizable the familiar, to comfort and destroy, to build the concept while also building the narrative (and lyric). This innovation is most noticeable in the titular poem, “Disposition for Shininess”, a six-part, eight-page poem (the second poem in the book) that expands the lyric presented in the first poem, “This is How it Went in Luke”. Where “This is How it Went in Luke” builds on an anaphora, “The daughter of,” and stages the book as religious/spiritual beginnings, “Disposition for Shininess” puts the narrative pieces in place. We learn about the births of various members of the family, and White, a master craftician, plays with physical birth, emotional birth, spiritual birth, the birth of geography, and the physical mappings between the siblings, the mother, and the mother’s lover. In White’s hands, every image is compressed and conflated to hold as much emotional resonance as possible: “Like over and over again we a post-it/to some stone she had to swallow,/some pain that can’t be exfoliated down” (1: 20-22); “She pulls her hair and there’s a widow./Slicked, she stands at the peak of her thoughts./Our mother polishes her requiem until it’s an opal./Watch it long it glistens like a leach” (2: 12-15); “We fold the smaller one into the bigger one/until we are one child our mother cannot hold.//. . .We know this exquisite corpse between us” (4: 2,3, 14). This poem, similar to others in the book, drops clues and picks them up, working deeply on nuance.

Sara Veglahn, too, is an exquisite innovator. Closed Histories, a series of untitled prose poems, build on a basic premise and re-create as it queries. Veglahn’s innovation happens within the lines, saturated as they are with quietness and mystery, with a surprise that startles the senses, but that, oddly, feel right, earned. She writes: “Where there’s a magic number for each/thought. I walk sideways down the road. I walk/careful and slow. The soldiers are in the fields./The soldiers are coming down from the hills” (2-5). I follow these poems because the voice is steady, confident, curious, and tenacious. Selah Saterstrom says that “Between the images an almost divinatory logic erupts,” and Veglahn captures that deep intuition in the middle poems, which begin in the simple and move quickly, stealthily, to the profound: “From the window, light. From the light, a/pattern. From patterns, the shape of the world./A thought in a shape. . . ./As if in a mirror, the way that you are not/yourself in your reflection” (1-5). Veglahn’s work feels like a mash-up of Muriel Rukeyser and Mei-Mei Bersennbrugge: deeply philosophical, utterly conceptual, fresh, political, and painfully compassionate.

Box of Surprises by Teresa Peipins

Finishing Line Press, 2009
Review by Jamie Elizabeth Marko

The question of identity is a constant struggle for most Americans. We boldly declare our heritage, if we are lucky enough to know it, assuming that our ancestral homes innately impart some deeper meaning to our sense of self. What does it mean to be Irish? And how does that change when one is also German or Finnish or Russian? And can any of that be relevant when one is born American?

Teresa Peipins confronts identity in her collection of poems entitles “Box of Surprises.” Having lived outside of the States for twenty years, Peipins takes us through the journey of connecting with the ancestral land while living as a foreigner. While visiting Latvia, her parental home, she grapples with Europe’s dark history that forced mass diaspora throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. She questions the lives of her family, what was known and unknown, what was spoken and unspoken. Conversely, she details the curiosities of living, loving, and surviving abroad through her experiential Barcelona-based pieces. She takes the reader along the sun-soaked countryside without neglecting the dusty suffocation of cities.

Stylistically, Peipins provides clean, tight description. “Recognition: On Visiting Latvia” (p 5-6) paints a simple picture of arrival and discovery that captures the curiosity and pain of discovery. “Box of Surprises” (p 9) is cohesive prose in which she brings the stifling scents of the past that paradoxically open up her sense of history in her life abroad. It is deftly crafted without a word misplaced.

Peipins does, however, write from a very feminine perspective; she employs many references to water with images of pounding waves, submerged worlds, and swimming through oceans. She also refers to childbirth several times. Although this is not a criticism in and of itself, breaking away from typically feminine verse would likely provide Peipins with a wider readership.
That being said, Peipins aptly and beautifully questions who she is. In doing so, she helps the readers question themselves. What does it mean to be an American? What does it mean to live abroad? What does it mean to be a woman outside of her home? For anyone who has wondered, take comfort in Peipins exploration of self.

Jamie Elizabeth Marko is a PhD student at the University of Buffalo, specializing in cultural identity and power relationships in language.

Saints and Cannibals by Christine Hamm

Plainview Press, 2010

Reviewed by Georgia Ann Banks-Martin

She Did What?

Many books have been written and praised for their complex depictions of women. However, few writers are able to present readers with characters who seem as realistic and multifaceted as Christine Hamm does in her new book of poems, Saints and Cannibals.

In the first poem, Up from the Root Cellar, we are introduced to Ruby, whose mother, ravaged by intense labor pains, yells to her from the furrow in which she has fallen. While many daughters would run to their mother’s aid without hesitation, Ruby does not, her resentment at being forced to care for her mother’s other children palpable. For a moment, Ruby watches “the younger children shriek like crows, stuff dirty fingers in their mouths, clatter into the house.” The youngest child, Rachel, stays behind trying to get her mother to come into the house. This powerful poem comes to a close when Ruby “… remembers the elephant she touched once at a carnival, big as the sky, wrinkled as a map, dark eye fixed ahead.” In the end, Ruby does go to her mother, but only out of a sense of duty or expectation rather than genuine concern for her mother’s condition.

After Ruby we shift our attention to Enid, whom Hamm introduces in a poem titled Caldwell, Idaho, 1941. Enid, the daughter of a farmer, “hates it when the cats give birth in the hay; the afterbirth molders the straw, the cows won’t eat it/too many cats anyway.” We might be able to dismiss this statement as a throw-away statement made out of anger had we not learned in the first stanza that Enid’s shoes are held by strings. In the next poem, Enid Has a Visitor, we are again reminded of Ruby as Enid lies in a corn field bleeding and suffering from harsh cramps. We next meet Enid in a poem titled Fertility Rites For a Daughter. Enid’s desire to have a little girl is so strong that she tries sleeping with bottle caps and barrettes beneath her mattress. Her story continues:

She has opened the cupboard door and taken out the salt
Strewn it into stars on the floor
So a daughter will sit and stay, fascinated
By the constellations stuck to her soles

While this poem is humorous, it underscores the notion that there are “too many cats anyway.” Considered together, these few poems present us with a fresh look at the unique problems affecting women that resonate throughout the first half of collection, including the fight for control over the female body. Through these depictions we learn that this issue is not limited to concerns surrounding rape and male domination. Ruby wants her mother to stop having so many children, and Enid is raised by a family so poor they can’t buy shoes; yet, when Enid can’t have children, instead of relief that the same fate will not be suffered by her child, she is driven to desperate actions to increase her chances of giving birth.

There are moments when the women of Saints and Cannibals are independent and courageous, but the choice to be so is costly. In The Weight of the World, we meet Claire, whose mother would do anything to keep Claire thin. She is happy with the doctor’s declaration that Claire is underweight, because this means that “the chocolate laxative,/the prune juice,/bananas, the enema bulb like a clown’s nose,/the suppositories/that glisten like worms, have worked.” Claire fights back, getting up before her mother each morning to eat cereal and milk, some of which she saves for later snacking. In Memoir of an Unrepentant Thief, the narrator is the daughter of a woman who spends her time reading romance novels instead of caring for her child. The poems opens as follows:

“If you were to shake my tiny sticky hand
You’d see a thin girl
With a rainbow-striped dress she’s outgrown
yellowish hair matted to one side of her head”

The narrator goes on to describe how she confronts the matter by breaking into the neighbor’s house, eating what she finds in the kitchen, and watching “…Sesame Street / until someone comes home.…”

Near the end, Hansel and Gretel appear in How the Witch Got Started. Once again, the setting is one in which there is too little food and too many children. The mother begins to kill the children and eat them; “afterwards she knew/ her daughter was safe.” By the poem’s end, only two children have survived, and they run away. Over the next few pages, we watch Gretel grow too tired and too thin to keep going, but she survives; in fact, Hansel, Gretel, and their mother live, and the mother even gets so fat by the time we reach the poem The Next Season that “she has splintered a chair/ just by sitting.” She spends her time giving food to the poor, never speaking of what she has done to her children.

In the end, Saints and Cannibals resonates with its readers because of Hamm’s skillful depiction of feminine characters capable of both good and evil. The poems in this book are memorable because, even if inspired by fairy tales, the women and their situations exist in the world. In reality, there are no fairy godmothers or evil step mothers, just human women.

Radha Says by Reetika Vazirani

ed. by Leslie McGrath and Ravi Shankar
Drunken Boat Press, 2010

Review by Hannah Eason

Wanting to read this poetry collection within a fair context – other than the context of my unfamiliarity with Hindu American poetry, that is – I often read over notes provided by the editors who collaborated to bring these last poems of Reetika Vazirani to light.

Within the freedom of poetry, any deductions drawn are fragile. It is an artform in which it never hurts to get acquainted with the poet’s body of work, known history, known political inclinations, and so on. This can help the reader begin with a working hypothesis, already somewhat wizened by past experiments. An explanatory note I found very helpful came from the elegant foreword written by Kazim Ali: “Breath moves through a poetic line beginning to end, but in Reetika Vazirani’s three volumes of poetry we see a different treatment of breath – breath that interrupts itself, sometimes in mid-exhale, breath that swirls around and returns, as it does at the top of an inhale or bottom of an exhale in the yogic practice of pranayama.”

In examples such as the following from “Preference of Vishnu” (pg. 9), breathing is highly detectable.

“now to switch a cloak a ring
who am I Arjuna’s charioteer?
discus lotus mace or conch?
do I drive whose wheels?”

The pace of her writing from one poem to the next becomes connotative of how easily or with what labor her breath comes as she broaches a certain topic. Her breath can be excitable, or it can be lengthy, monotonous, desperate for a break.

Radha Says is a collection in which the devices of poetry are so well integrated that they themselves further mimic breath – devices merging with message for the sake of a solid creation, just as yoga practitioners integrate mind and body with their practiced consciousness.

I found myself needing to read many of the poems a third then fourth time before feeling confident I had read what Vazirani wrote. This exemplified the analysis of her poetry provided by Kazim Ali, who stated that each line can answer the line before it, stand on its own, or open the door for the line that follows. This multipurpose aspect of her work seems to point to her perspective, to the purposeful integration of parts. The structure of her poetry seems to continually offer her readers the ghosts of past, present and future as help-mates. By brevity and depth, the structure then asks the reader to determine her own preferred mind-set among the three. Will the final impression taken away from a poem be reflective, forward-leaning, or clarifying of the present moment?

In the spirit of most subtly handled, skillful poetry, I believe Vazirani’s words can act to the reader as a mirror. In getting close enough to the mirror to make out finer details, one tends to see the fog of her own breath.

In Paran by Larissa Shmailo

BlazeVox, 2009

Review by Georgia Banks-Martin

I live in Paran

Larissa’s Shmailo’s collection of poems, In Paran is a mix of vibrant and audacious selections narrated by people that we might say are just a little odd due to their unabashed frankness. Yet, there is something about the people we meet in In Paran that leaves us unable to dismiss them.

In the first poem from the collection, Personal, the speaker seems to simply appear before us, forcefully declaring:

I want to know
what makes you
tick.

I want to know
what makes you
fickle; I want to know
what makes you stick.

However, it is not the speaker that makes us feel uncomfortable: It is the fact that the reader is being made to search for that which is almost unanswerable. Most people never seriously consider why they stay in one place or with one person, and if asked they normally offer the questioner a stock answer such as “I like it here”, or “I love him.” These answers will not work for this narrator, because the questions that he poses are fundamental to who we are:

which ion propels you
which soothsayer spells you
which folksinger trills you
which hardwood distills you
which downward dog twists you
which protest resists you
which neural net fires you
which siren desires you

These are the questions for which we fear we have no answers. The poem ends with:

what
makes
me

forget the right answers
consult necromancers
allow the forbidden
ignore the guilt ridden
unlearn all the learning
embrace this new burning

to know
what
makes you
tick.

And we realize that our failure to answer these questions, our failure to know ourselves completely, means that the narrator is losing the chance to learn something about himself as well. In this way the poem establishes a theme that reoccurs in the collection, the idea that we are always involved in a relationship with someone else, and that we all share in the pain that is encountered in our lives together.

At the top of My Lungs is a poem about a mother who feels unloved by her children:

At the top of my lungs I scream at you all,
Babies, I am your mother!
Love me! Let me in!
Excited by my love, I shriek and bang at your door:
I love you, let me in!

What?
You don’t want to?
Then I will slash my wrists,
And from my wrists will come ants and tired shopkeepers,
All the things you ever imagined or dreamed,
Bits of glass and fear
Will pour from these important veins:
You’ll see how much I love you then.

What is most striking in these lines is the admission that without love life isn’t worth living. This thought is further developed in stanza three, where the narrator notes more things she would do for children:

Like a scorpion I would carry you on my back,
My stinger poised, ready to kill;
Oh, how my babies would love me then!

Babies, I would bite off my hands for you,
Like an albatross or a whale, I would swallow you whole
And keep you safe in my stromach;
I love you that much;
Surely that’s worth something.

This is the real problem; the speaker doesn’t feel that all the work, and the protection, the declarations that she loves her children are worth anything to her family. Again, it is pointed out that our lives are shared and that we owe a debt to one another. This concept isn’t new, yet it feels new when we read In Paran because rarely are we confronted with honest demands for payment. If given the chance, In Paran is a book that that will inspire positive changes in the way the reader conducts relationships and lives life.

Weapons Grade by Terese Svoboda

The University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville, 2009
Review by Georgia Ann Banks-Martin

Weapons! Everywhere!

In her latest book of poems Weapons Grade, Terese Svoboda takes on issues of war, politics, and everyday life. These are themes common to poetry, but Svoboda’s work asks the reader to consider events both as wholes and within context, and as events that we thought no longer were possible within our current moral context.

The first section of Weapons Grade comprises poems speaking to the impacts of war. The first selection, “Picnic Portents,” captures our attention by placing us in a park for a picnic. A young mother ties balloons, unaware the area is infested with spiders; she wears herself out hollering directions for those who are helping her decorate the park, unaware that her husband:

While parachuting down,
he pinned on stripes and medals—a corporal’s—
so they would treat him better.

These moments are rarely offered in a context such as this, yet they occur in every moment of our lives. This poem also reminds us of our constant risk to misdirection, and the threat of pre-packaged, incomplete, half-truths relentlessly distributed by twenty-four hour news engines. Throughout Weapons Grade, Svoboda repeatedly challenges that notion. In one instance by way of a young mother, who finds a way to care for her child in the absence of his father away at war. In Svoboda’s version, her experience will be left out of the final story.

In “Code Name: 731,” Svoboda speaks to the live human dissections performed by the Japanese Imperial Army’s Unit 731 during World War II, their aim being to see how chemical weapons affected the tissue of potential targets: live humans.

To be sure, this isn’t the first time the world has heard such stories, as we are all familiar with German persecution of homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Jews held in camps such as Sachsenhuusen, Dachau, Natzweiler, Buchenwald, and Neuengamme. Here similar experiments were carried out to see how potassium cyanide and arsenic affect the body. Some were exposed to deadly diseases like typhus and tuberculosis; many died or were disabled. But we find ways to absorb such stories and lull ourselves into believing that now that the details are known, we will never hear of them occurring again.

Svoboda’s work shows us that such hopeful thinking is misguided. In the 90s, this type of medical experimentation occurred again. This time civilians in Japan were infused with AIDS-tainted blood. The poems in this first section are dark. They make us nervous, but not without good reason.

Section II concerns marriage. These poems focus more upon intimacy and the search for balance. In “Susurrus of Sheets Goodbye,” the husband finds his wife’s body attractive, though she does not look like a model:

he leans across his arm, peeks
at her nose-crotch bed-height
her breasts doubling over.

In “Bicoastal,” a wife left at home with her young child struggles to understand and make sense of her husband’s absence from their lives while he works away from home. To the narrator, the time he will be away equals:

a month of cold phones, only food
children eat, not a marriage.

Section III recalls some of the themes from section I, but this time the fear and hate happens within our own homes. One woman is beaten by her spouse, yet cannot move beyond her love for him. The narrator justifies her abuse by conflating her wounded body with the vegetables that, as a “good wife,” she would have chopped and made into a proper dinner served in a white Pyrex bowl.

Section VI brings the book to its end, where we find the central point of the book in the closing lines of “Cycles”:

But Death says
we must, both of us,

and the road
we followed, the road
the car left,

will disappear.

This is powerful imagery, reminding us that no matter what we survive–be it war or personal struggles–all paths converge on a road where death will eventually overcome us. Weapons Grade is a challenging read, but well worth the extra time and thought.

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