Featured Review: Voodoo Hypothesis by Canisia Lubrin (reviewed by Julie Mannell)

Today Is a Good Day to Dream: Canisia Lubrin’s VOODOO HYPOTHESIS 

(Hamilton, ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 2017, $18.00, 96 pages)

Review by Julie Mannell

Canisia Lubrin’s seminal book of poetry Voodoo Hypothesis is one of the most artful and influential works to emerge in Canada in 2017. It raises the bar for what can be expected of debut collections. Voodoo Hypothesis reconstructs history as visceral, bodily, and endured as perpetual, intergenerational psychic injury. The poems are a map of historical displacement depicted by Lubrin as mental and physical manifestations that are both purposeful and lyrical.

In the interest of full disclosure, I will acknowledge that I have been good friends with Canisia Lubrin for a year and a half. However, this friendship formed from my involvement in the Canadian writing community: a particularly small community where it is difficult to not have personal encounters with other authors.

Voodoo Hypothesis is referentially thick. It recollects modernism through frequent allusion both to history, canonical texts, and authors/public figures (Dionne Brand, Jesse Williams, Priscila Uppal to name a few). One could venture to call this book an academic’s wet dream because of the depth of research a single poem requires of its reader in order to fully realize the multiplicity of layers and how these layers poetically conspire to render a single multifaceted and rich collage. For the speaker, the body is not ever a blank slate but is born of and into history. “I am a simple child, then, a tilled site of history.” Before their first breath, a person is already a palimpsest of linguistic signifiers that only becomes further compounded by the experiential. Writing (or becoming) oneself is always a process of writing over what has already been written, experience in conglomeration with that which has already been experienced.

Consider Lubrin’s poem “The Mongrel,” which heavily leans against allusions to Haiti: the Creole language and the Nèg maron (creole for maroon or “wild negro” in the pejorative and can also refer to a statue commemorating the Haitian slave revolt against France in 1804), as well as the Shakespearean island “monster” Caliban (The Tempest was set on an unnamed Mediterranean island but has been often set in Haiti in modern adaptations), to name a few. The word “mongrel” itself is a charged word that refers to a dog with no definable breed and has been unfortunately adopted as a slur for someone of mixed descent. The poem interestingly opens with a quote from Nobel Prize winning poet and diplomat Saint-John Perse, who was heavily influenced by Robinson Crusoe (an author who notoriously treated Caribbean characters with a British Colonial agenda), and was the son of plantation owners in Guadeloupe—fleeing to France on the occasion of the election of the first Guadeloupian President. Yet the quote Lubrin has chosen is one of longing and displacement: “There was no name for us in our mother’s oratory.” What follows renders the quote ironic, if one meditates on its context. However, it is not strictly accusatory. It takes the sentiment of displacement and namelessness and reconstructs it as experienced by “the Mongrel”—those whom Shakespeare, Crusoe, and Perse simultaneously benefit from and blame. Here I point to Lubrin’s striking line, “What else reveals us, a species of amnesiacs, cut off from the trembling that tore—our continents apart? And with so much unknowing.” The longing is as enchanting as it is elevated—it is enchanting because the strength of imagery evoked by “a species of amnesiacs” and elevated by its originality. Yet, the speaker is direct in their inquiry and treatment of historical tropes and colonial agendas that have been adopted and taught: “our knowledge of the Mongrel is only fragmentary.” Throughout the poem, not only are the thoughts and the ideas that accompany the Mongrel elevated, but the “Mongrel” itself as a posited identity is elevated through repeated capitalization:

brutality loves us this side of the name, while
only misted, our ears stretch to still the Mongreled
air landing, broken, invented again as history
in the rusted coils of coffee shops, inked
Mongrel skins, whose only escape is one cosmic
blue carbuncle.

While the breadth of information is intimidating, the universality of the many small observational phrases ground the poems in relatable sentiments that render the work immediately accessible. A dangerously thin line that Lubrin navigates well is that of the wise voice and the casual observer. Lubrin draws upon a wide array of research that for many might point towards someone who has aged into stark seriousness—but she is young, and her material is interlaced with quotable, twitter-esque observations. From her poem “Frankenstein Universe” is a favourite of these lines: “today is a good day to dream, it doesn’t matter if it rains.” Another, this one from “Up in the Lighthouse” goes: “You must know, black isn’t always the void” And here is one last one from “Epistle to the Ghost Gathering”: “Today I insist on the tenderness I may soon forget and remind you.” She successfully marries both the prudent voice of a judicious academic with the passive vulnerability of late-girlhood and the final product is pretty cool:

Nowadays I like to say cool
cool cool thrashing my tongue like an iguana

Tonally, poems often shift from reflective to angry and take you on an emotional odyssey in a fashion akin to an album of music: this is partially due to Lubrin’s expert lyricism and perhaps also due to the careful consideration allotted to the ordering of the poems—no doubt influenced by the editorial team at Wolsak and Wynn’s Buckrider Books. This shift is exemplified in the final line of “Fire of Roseau,” which seamlessly moves from indignant to elegiac: “I rebel, I like any nigger with a demand: tell me my thoughts are jagged but never why they bruise.” Little attention is often paid this kind of tonal movement, both between poems, within a poem, and as Lubrin does frequently, within a line. Something that can be witnessed in too many collections of late, is the focus on a central premise—and there is much to be said for how the Canadian grant system encourages this approach—which often ends up treating poetry collections as if they are an essay. The final product of such endeavours is often a grouping of poems of a singular tone around a central metaphor. It is obvious, for example, that an essay could be written on the Caribbean-Canadian experience in Lubrin’s work, the role of allusion in this collection, integrating pop culture within explorations of colonialism, the aesthetic of the emotive in the reflective speaker. Yet none of these is the central concern of the book as a whole, nor do all of the poems employ the same tools or muses. When a poet permits themselves this sort of freedom, the final product has some variance within it and allots the reader room to breathe. This is an integral element in the enterprise of world creation, even if that world is largely internal and confined to thought. No world is any one specific thing (trauma, ecstasy, disappointment, or accomplishment) all of the time, always, forever.

The more literary term for a “turn” in a poem is a “volta,” and these are classically featured in sonnets which often have a dramatic curve in tone. Lubrin has multiple per poem and they never tire, they are strategic so as to keep the reader alert and engaged, evoking suspense:

If proof is what you seek: these doors, clear with fright
and conscience burst at the hinges and turn out all ill this life deposits,

however cosmic the unease, into the black sweater
of nighttime. I can’t tell you what marks the hills that wait

like hexagrams of frost. But behold the sweet, holy reprieve
of a hoodie pulled over the eyes in wanton praise

of the pre-bang dark when the world is too much.
Instead the sun comes up announcing it has touched the parts of us that hurt

In this passage, the speaker employs metaphysical conceit to move from grand existential observations to the specific of a black sweater. The voice switches from philosophically instructional to pragmatic and personal. Then what follows is a transition into something simultaneously reflective and collective, implicating the speaker as part of a larger experience: one who perceives the sunlight as illuminating the historical and individual pains of the past synchronously. All the while maintaining its musicality through creative word choice and graceful imagery.

There is far too much quality material for a single review to adequately cover Voodoo Hypothesis.  I will, however, state that I think this collection is absolutely perfect and wholly anticipate its presence on the awards shortlists in the coming months.

 

Julie Mannell is an author of poetry, prose, and essays. She is currently completing her MFA in Creative Writing at University of Guelph. Mannell is the recipient of the Constance Rooke/HarperCollins Scholarship, the Mona Adilman Poetry Prize, and the Lionel Shapiro Award for Excellency in Creative Writing. She splits her time between Montreal and Toronto.

 

To view other poems published in this issue, 15:1, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

 

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Featured Review: “Cheer Up, Jay Ritchie” by Jay Ritchie (reviewed by Bill Neumire)

Jay Ritchie’s CHEER UP, JAY RITCHIE

(Toronto, ON: Coach House Books, 2017, $19.95, 88 pages)

Review by Bill Neumire

 

The title of Jay Ritchie’s debut poetry collection is teasingly straightforward, and it begs the question, to begin, why does Jay Ritchie need to be cheered? The book is full of disappointment, especially the disappointment and depression created by deep intellectual engagement and study—this is not the bliss of ignorance, but rather the dissatisfaction of “O I make so much sense all the time.” The war between feeling/play and thought/education is apparent in “Vanishing from Yourself,” where the speaker wants “[j]ust to not / know for a minute.” He remarks, “I drank red wine and coped like an adult” and “I made pasta because / I wanted to avoid the actual / conditions of my life.” As the title suggests, there’s a real effort, though difficult, toward a practiced optimism, a sort of fake-it-till-you-make-it striving to see the positive, which culminates in “Cheer Up, Jay Ritchie,” where he tells himself:

how giving is easy,
how gratitude is free,
how I believe in everything,
how there are omens if I want them

Ritchie’s voice is concise, funny, epiphanic, self-deprecating and simultaneously self-aggrandizing, splintered, and erudite. It’s full of allusions to writers like Richard Brautigan, Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Carson, Rainer Marie Rilke, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. It’s a mind whirring like one of those simulated cyclone booths that we can momentarily step inside. His erudition often leaves us intruding on small glimpses of others’ stories, and then, through non sequitur and associative leaping, we’re ricocheted off into a new scene, forced to use the journey of juxtapositions to form our own tale. His voice is sarcastic but it’s also appreciative and affectionate—indeed, the word “love” comes up in many of these poems. The tone is flat as he pokes fun at capitalism, education, and lit crit. His speaker notes, “‘Here I am’ // using non sequiturs and air quotes” and later, “I try to look impressed, but / it comes off stoic and sarcastic.” As he mentions, he also makes skilled use of quoted material, dialogue, and a staccato, post-modern meta-take, curating little ironies like “[p]eaceful streets / named after violent men” and “The easiest way out is to look for an entrance.”
In This Is Water, David Foster Wallace presents a fish who doesn’t know what water is because it lives in water; similarly, the speaker in Ritchie’s collection is so immersed in a stream of commercial plastic capitalism that he fractures himself trying to escape, to define his condition and to find value outside the stream, as the speaker in “Town of Mount Royal” asserts, “Going outside is the only way // to have anything interesting to say / about interior design.” The speaker—and increasingly books of contemporary poetry are their speaker—is vanishing and reappearing, even “mistaken for fireflies.” He often expresses the self as otherness, as here in “Water Tower”:

When I listened to my voicemail,
I conceived of my body
and moved to St. Henri
as a tower of water

His identity is intimately tied to economy, to money, as he observes, “The stores had changed / and so had I. / We were difference together.” Some reference to money overtly appears in most of these poems, a motif that quickly becomes existential and troubling in passages like this one from “Multi-level Marketing”:

There Is No Such Thing
As Ethical Consumption
Under Capitalism.

I read that on Tumblr
while working at the self-storage,
dizzy with love and disappointment
like my past self in Paris

Desire, advertisement, and debt all play crucial roles in this book, perhaps most trenchantly when the speaker confesses, “I buy plastic to feel / normal.” As a result, one of the strongest subtextual motifs is that of value—if the plastic junk of ads is a false, superficial value, then what is real? How can one possibly not become depressed, inadequate, broken? Indeed, this is ironically highlighted in the Camus-esque “Multi-level Marketing”:

In a Society That Profits from Your Self-Doubt,
Liking Yourself Is a
Rebellious Act.

I read that on Tumblr

The quest for real value begins itself in the negative, specifically, in the absence of money, as the speaker quotes the truism, “A Truly Rich Man Is One Whose Children / Run into His Arms Even When His / Hands Are Empty.” The world of money and salesmanship is absorbed into the building of the self, and the speaker takes this to an extreme as he writes, “Every Brand Has a Story— / Here’s Mine.” This construction is front and center as here, where Ritchie again employs dialogue, a strategy he often comes back to:

The rehabbed
juvenile delinquent said,
Building a house
is just a
series of small
tasks that amount
to something big

This struggle to become whole, to become oneself, is often articulate in lament, as in “I only wish I were myself.” In Mark Strand’s famous “Keeping Things Whole,” the speaker pictures himself as an absence, and Ritchie here also envisions himself in the negative:

Inserted
into a narrative I do not recognize—
I am not that, I am
only what can be articulated
in negatives, a lost item
that is definitely not there

The process of reflection is at its most optimistic in this moment from “Upcycle”: “BE / YOU // TIFUL,” a playful moment that makes, from the fracturing of a word, a larger meaning only possible in language. Language’s effect on identity is truly under the microscope, evident in this moment from “Vanishing from Yourself”:

You’ve made an arrangement
with existence to be
mostly language, and here
are the results: an impossible
demand for expressivity,
cognitive dissonance

It’s a collection that, despite its seemingly inward self-absorption—as amusingly intimated in the book’s title—is so full of brilliant voice that it makes me want to speak with it; a collection whose speaker reminds us that “Oil and Coca-Cola linger / on the poisoned lip of the twenty-first century,” and in this reverberating proclamation makes clear that this is not the depression of a singular speaker, but rather a crisis more universal, a conversation more inclusive and necessary.

 

Bill Neumire‘s first book, Estrus, was a semi-finalist for the 412 Miles Press Award, and recent poems have appeared in The Harvard Review Online and Beloit Poetry Journal. He reviews contemporary poetry for Scout, Vallum, and Verdad, where he serves as a poetry editor.

 

To view other poems published in this issue, 15:1, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

Featured Review: Gillian Sze’s “Panicle.” Review by Adèle Barclay.

 

Gillian Sze’s PANICLE
(Toronto, ON: ECW Press, 2017, $18.95, 90 pages)
Review by Adèle Barclay

 

“Panicle” is a term from plant morphology—it refers to a branched cluster of flowers. With this in mind, Gillian Sze’s fifth full-length poetry collection Panicle announces the poet’s ever-developing relationship with form. With dynamic curiosity, the poet exhibits a studied yet sly engagement with lyric, prose poetry, ekphrasis, sonnets, and long poems.

Sze is deliberate but not constrained when it comes to her poetry—there’s savvy consideration in her voice. She knows formal rules and literary history well, but she also knows the poetic container is human-made and fallible, and that’s what is more interesting. “Calligraphy,” the inaugural poem of the collection, elucidates this self-awareness: “To write heart in our language takes only four strokes, but so much depends on the first mark. […] In calligraphy, if a stroke falters, you must begin the word all over again.” Rather than crumple under this pressure, Sze allows the poem to embody the drive towards perfection while still opening up:

At least here at my desk I can start again and write:
This is how the beginning sounds. This is my heart. Look.
At least there is that.

Initially this proclamation of “at least” seems like a resigned gesture, but through repetition, it becomes clearly generative. The speaker unblinkingly instructs us to look at the initial stroke of a character and at her heart, and the poem tasked with opening a collection flourishes while carrying the weight of its potential undoing.

Panicle is a conversational collection. Sze often constructs the poems out of quotations and ideas from modernist poetry and letters, art history, contemporary art exhibits, filmmakers. The collection is an active museum. Sze’s voice emerges distinct despite the cacophony of references because the poet deftly balances multiple currents of dialogue. Like any good interlocutor, Sze knows when to hold threads of discussion taut and when to let them loose.

For example, “Sound No 2” deploys an epigraph from German film director Werner Schroeter: “Cinema could be as intelligent and could transport as much message and image and idea as it can with sound.” Sze juxtaposes this meditation on the potency of sound in cinema with poetry’s own powerful ability to zoom in. The quotation provides a jumping off point that Sze adapts for her own project. She writes: “These are things I want to show you, like the empty pause that encircles desire. Or how Klimt knew that a woman bends her neck that far for a kiss only if she really wants it. I want to show you how quiet it gets when you’re in the company of someone who no longer loves you.” This poetic conjuring of heartbreaking silence resounds. The poem enacts an encircling desire—the wish to speak to an addressee about the broiling intense meanings embedded in familiar images and sounds:

But more than anything, I want to show you something smaller: how the smell of winter at night has the same crisp scent as the sound of the word biscuit, the touch of velum in your mouth

The desire to communicate is so strong it engenders synesthesia. Intimate meaning transcends distinct sensory categories. Perhaps this is what the speaker wants to show us—the beyondness of sense in poetry.

 

Panicle is deeply engaged with visual art—classic and contemporary. What’s refreshing about Sze’s ekphrasis is that her awe isn’t weighed down by self-effacement. Her ekphrastic poems are full of inquisition and astonishment—“This is the hand that reaches for God. / This is where you look up”—but they don’t bemoan language’s inadequacy in the face of visual representation. The poet does not surrender power to the visual realm; instead, she creates poetry playfully and defiantly in tandem with the art world. For example, “Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, 01/06/11” begins:

In the nineteenth century, the romantics ran out of words. They began titling their paintings by the same name. On one wall of the museum hangs La mort de Cléopâtre. Beside it: La mort de Cléopâtre—and beside that: La mort de Cléopâtre.

Words didn’t fail the romantics—the romantics failed with words, but the poet arrives to pick up the slack: “Along the wall, Cleopatra dies, again and again, in French and Flemish.” So much of the collection is concerned with the mechanics of looking—art, film, photography. But it’s poetry that allows Sze to invert the traditional gaze. In “Proof,” the speaker articulates a desire past the camera’s own fields of vision: “There is a way I would like you always to see me when you put your camera down.” Here the speaker sees the seeing and seizes the authority between the two onlookers: “I carry a pair of suns in my head. Take a look: I want you to go blind. I want something in me to do irreparable, irreversible in you.” The poet craves the looking as well as the connection that underpins the two observers.

Sze’s explorations of perception in Panicle are also investigations into how observing connects us to stories and each other. The collection wanders through the halls of high art, not as a way to designate itself as erudite, but as a method of interrogating what visions have come before and enabling poetry to find new ways to see.

Adèle Barlcay‘s writing has appeared in The Fiddlehead, The Puritan, PRISM, The Pinch, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2016 Lit POP Award for Poetry and the 2016 The Walrus‘ Readers’ Choice Poetry Prize. Her debut poetry collection If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You (Nightwood, 2016) wont the 2017 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. She is the Interviews Editor at The Rusty Toque, the Critic-in-Residence for Canadian Women In Literary Arts, and an editor at Rahlia’s Ghost Press.

This review was published in issue 15:1 Memory & Loss. To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes

 

Featured Review: Erin Robinsong’s Rag Cosmology. Review by Alan Reed.

“a poem of objects that live by magic”: Erin Robinsong’s Rag Cosmology (Toronto, ON: BookThug, 2017, $18.00, 104 pages). Review by Alan Reed. 

Rag Cosmology is a meditation on the ecological in personal terms, or the personal in ecological terms. Or it is the work of blurring the distinction between those two statements, presenting the two as mutually imbricated perspectives opening onto a world where the distinction simply does not matter.

The collection opens with leaves falling from a tree, “when the green leaves / have gone back”: the decay of the leaves becomes a reflection on death, their falling and mulching a funerary process, the changing of their colour the words for an unnamed anxiety, which becomes a metaphor that grounds the affective state in an understanding of a broader ecological process.

I would say that this movement between the personal and the ecological, from one to the other and then back again, is emblematic of the work Robinsong is doing with these poems. And with each shift from the one domain to the other she brings something across the distinction between them, knitting the two together in a way where each can offer insight into the working of the other.

Alongside this, or perhaps running beneath it, there are occasional poems in what I would describe as an almost pastoral mode. These are poems about Cortes Island, where Robinsong is from, and her early life experience there. They are about oysters and rocks from a creek, bottled to preserve their lustre, “the knowledge that is around / wrapped in mountains emitting clarity.” They are memories, of a childhood and of growing up with the wild around her. In my reading, these poems are the heart of the collection.

That the scenes they convey are remembered is important. They are past, they are absent, and there is something painful about that absence—“2007 marked the end / I left my home, and could not return / (oh for my bright black sky).” In their absence, however, a trace of them persists. It is a seed unfolding slowly, subtly through these poems: it is the possibility of the ecological perspective the poems work from, and also how personal the ecological is in them. It is, in a sense, the magic animating them:

“What shall I do with my information I’m an animal in an animal in an animal I’m a poem of objects that live by magic I’m every idea I ever had, I’ll just stay here as a person. I have a photographic mouth.”

If Robinsong was a girl who grew up with the wild around her, then in this reading she has become a woman with the wild inside her. And not just inside of her but spilling out of her. She writes: “I was 20, I was a polyrhythmic / rug rat noticing there is nothing that isn’t / moving.” In this I would say there is a sensibility learned in her childhood that has persisted alongside her memory of Cortes Island.

In these poems this sensibility is brought face to face with the contemporary world. From this perspective, Robinsong is able to articulate a subjective space for herself—“Chemist programmer waste management prodigy / structural analyst shamanic kinetic engineer / I’m not. My open palms disorganized dreams / wild chemicals.”

What it is possible to do in this space makes up the greater part of the collection, too much to address here. I want to touch on how she returns to the theme of death. Late in the collection is an elegy to a lost friend. It is bracketed by a pair of meditations on dying. The first is brief – “I read somewhere that we think of death as a taking away of life / but that actually – you die into life”; the second, the poem entitled “Mon. Aft,” unfolds more convolutely and at greater length. It reads, in part: “you accompany / yourself / to what / vast appoint. / without your / face all about / a bond with / the universe / going to / cosmic smith- / ereens.”

Similar to how she treats leaves going to mulch in the beginning of the collection, Robinsong is here concerned with how an understanding of ecological processes can deepen the meaning of personal experience. The ecological perspectives Rag Cosmology grounds itself in offers a way to understand the personal within the context of the broader life processes we cannot but be part of. Reading it offers a way to more richly imagine the natural world and better understand our place within it.

Alan Reed is the author of a collection of poems, For Love of the City (BuschekBooks, 2006), and a novel, Isobel & Emile (Coach House Books, 2010). His short work has appeared in dANDelion, The Coming Envelope, Lemon Hound, and Papirmass. He lives in Montreal.

This review was published in issue 14:2 “Lies and Duplicity.” To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes

Featured Review: Aisha Sasha John’s I Have to Live. Review by Domenica Martinello.

Aisha Sasha John’s I Have to Live (Toronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2017, $16.95, 160 pages). Review by Domenica Martinello.

In a culture that takes pride in leisure and unrelenting productivity with an equally obsessive rigor, multidisciplinary artist Aisha Sasha John’s third collection of poetry I have to live stakes its claim outright. “I have to live” is a declaration made not so much from the heart or mind but from the stomach: full of blood, hunger, and life force. As the refrain modulates from universal, to idiosyncratic, to even withholding, I have to live churns butter from the pleasures of a fully unapologetic personhood. It turns the common fact of living into its own artist’s statement.

Here’s a sampling of John’s ‘formal’ artist’s statement from her website: “I love activity very much, I love to do things. Thus, it is very important that what I spend my time doing is good for me. My artistic vision is to be relaxed and all the activities I do are in this service.” I have to live abides by this vision right down to the watercolor wash of purple and pink on its cover page. John operates with a relaxed confidence, the way loose brushstrokes require an artist’s faith. In other words, I delight in how John’s chill artist’s statement spits in the face an economy that celebrates—as a recent headline for The New Yorker puts it—working yourself to death.

With the boundaries of work and leisure more blurred than ever before, even living is a commodity. Think of lifestyle gurus, YouTube stars, and other “creative influencers” who hang a decorative tapestry over late capitalism and post it on Instagram. John recognizes the specificity of the consumerist moment she both inhabits and rejects:

When I am dead this time
Will be an object
And I
Will be an object
Too

That’s okay.
Right now I am alive
And
I like it.

There’s also a clear divide between work and everything that isn’t work. I have to live acknowledges labour but certainly doesn’t glorify it. Take all three lines of “I can’t believe I agreed to go to work today”: “That was so dumb of me. / I hate money. / And I hate sitting down.” Another poem outlines the way work gets in the way of the body being a body:

The first time I came here I was late, I was scolded
I was bleeding.
I barely even cared
Fuck, look:
When I start to bleed
I have to eat.

The speaker relishes in the subversive act of being “lazy,” of “hardly [knowing] what’s going on,” and of continuing to attend to her “heart” and “pussy.” The speaker must live in accordance with the rhythm of her desires lest she feel the remorse of having “left prime sweetness / Between the tight teeth / Of some hurried days.”

The prime sweetness of John’s micro-poems is often a morsel of evocative, idiosyncratic thought. Evocative of what I’m not always sure, but as John puts it later in the collection, they seem to enact a “performance called DON’T YOU WANNA KNOW WHAT I’M DOING EVERY DAY!” In short, yes. I am somehow riveted as John ruminates “if it’s even sanitary / To leave the ketchup outside all the time. / At night, even. / And also the hot sauce.” In “I like it when we give the world it itself,” one of my favourite poems in the collection, I don’t necessarily need to know about the origins of the mysterious photograph to love the lines “Hi, God. // I said in the photo’s caption. / It’s Aisha. // I volunteer.”

The collection does move into a place that is intentionally withholding, however. An unusually descriptive poem set in Zagora, Morocco ends with the speaker toying with the audience’s access, concluding: “I get / What I come for. // Do I tell you?” Reading like a letter, “For you and all your siblings and friends and husbands or boyfriends” signs off “Daddy // Page 2 of 2.” Readers don’t get first page of the epistle, though its existence haunts the poem. These instances of intentional obfuscation are a risk because they cast other moments in a different light. Poems that seem guilelessly idiosyncratic and without context are suddenly a little more—what is it—glib?

Yes, we’re being teased. If you’re a reader who is willing to yield your sense of authority, you’ll love it. If you go into books thinking their authors owe you anything, you might not. If you need to exert your intellectual control, though, John is more than willing to cede the steering wheel with a wink, as in “I defer to you”: “It’s great. / I’m tired of always knowing everything.”

Ultimately I have to live is a collection rife with life lessons ranging from how to be funny (the answer is to “never joke”), how to have “the most pleasure,” how to prioritize food over all else, how to relax and “draw something ugly by accident.” You know, the basics. It’s also a reminder to stop taking ourselves so seriously. Take a moment to forget the hustle, forget the grind, forget networking, forget working all together and take a cue from John in “Today I could aspire but I want to nap.”

Some people are interested in exploring the ways
Something is negotiated
In light of something else.
God bless them.
I have to fucking live.

Domenica Martinello, from Montréal, was a finalist for the 2017 Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. She is completing an MFA in poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and her debut collection of poetry, All Day I Dream About Sirens, is forthcoming.

This review was published in issue 14:2 “Lies and Duplicity.” To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

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Featured Review: Catriona Wright’s Table Manners. Review by Julie Mannell.

After-Dinner Poetry: Catriona Wright’s Table Manners (Montreal, QC: Véhicule Press, 2017, $17.95, 88 pages). Review by Julie Mannell

Molecular Gastronomy is a concentration of food preparation focused on the creative physical and chemical transformation of ingredients at a microscopic level. This concept is alluded to in “Gastronaut,” the title of the first poem in Catriona Wright’s debut poetry book Table Manners. The poem reinvents the term, instead suggesting the opposite, a scientific exploration of consumption as it relates to the external. A photo of “barbecued tarantulas in Cambodia” causes the speaker “jealousy and rage” for which they must confront by way of their “edible moss” that is only adequate insofar as it might “calm myself enough to sleep.” Here the language of rare and high cuisine stands as a place marker for other suggestions of class—travel, freedom, rare and often inaccessible experiences that may lead to expensive varieties of wisdom. The speaker in the poem is aware of their own shortcomings but (literally) breathes back into those it perceives as judgmental, “My breath smelled as though I’d been fellating a corpse. I coughed on everyone.”

This sets up the central concern of Table Manners: how the self reacts when constrained by the obligatory digestion of cultural signifiers and the sometimes unpalatable imperative to perform socially. The poems do not provide an answer but interrogate social experience purely through reaction and reflection, compacted by the constraint of culinary terms that often reveal themselves as distinctively unappetizing. In “Dumpster” the voice flirts with eating garbage:

I would not let a single

rainbow Chips Ahoy! or briny dill pickle

or cocktail shrimp ring breach my lips

unless it had first passed through the purifying

fires of the dumpster—five star chef, wizard

capable of transforming the too, too processed

into the unsullied flesh.

The contents of the dumpster are allotted the same linguistic treatment as fresh produce at a grocery store and explored with the same capitalistic impulse, “The only thing rotten is everything sold here.” While Wright’s andoxographic practice should have the impact of mocking the dumpster, it instead, cleverly, has the opposite effect. It elevates waste while diminishing the appeal of clean and fresh material thereby embarrassing the lexical signals society uses to sell and profit off ideals and anxieties surrounding health and nutrition. In the poetry of Wright, everything is both soiled and appetizing.

This is again reiterated in “Parties: A Selection”—a collection of haikus that concisely portray different social gatherings:

pulled pork    muddled mint

pansexual Prince      all primped

pumping up the crowd

this first poem in the series conveys what one might imagine to be a lavish nightclub with techno music and bottle service.  Yet, by the end of the series we are at another event entirely:

barbecued tofu

please don’t call me a lady

left early         for once

Here food has the power to signal not just what people will be eating but what they will wear when they eat, where they will eat it, and, ultimately, it sets the tone for the kind of social engagement the speaker will have.

It might be a stretch to call Wright’s poetry anti-Whitman because it seems both poets are driven by the urge to connect the body with the external world to show the ways in which the external and internal of undivided. However, while Whitman celebrates the body as intermediary between external and internal, Wright problematizes this connection. In Table Manners the body is one with the world but the world makes the body sick. These are not celebratory poems, they are irritable bowel poems wherein the body is capable, adherent to natural law, but reluctantly adherent and always in pain. This is at its most elevated point in the collection in the poem “Origin Story” where mandatory ingestion predicates an obligatory renunciation of the self: “women resigned themselves, just waited for it to end, floating above their bodies.” The point is reinforced in “Instinct” where bodies fight the desire to eat other bodies (“just a few clean snips to guarantee I won’t be tempted to devour my young”). Both these poems are devastating and masterful, they are the two best of the collection.

One criticism for Table Manners is that what works for it, sometimes works against it. While the constraint is noble—the language of the culinarian in the world beyond the kitchen—limiting a project to reliance on a single metaphor that repeats itself can sometimes feel to the reader as if they are being hit over the head with the theme. The book, paradoxically, is at its best in the poems that abandon the metaphor the most.

Julie Mannell is an author of poetry, prose, and essays. She is currently completing her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph. Mannell is the recipient of the Constance Rooke/HarperCollins Scholarship, the Mona Adilman Poetry Prize, and the Lionel Shapiro Award for Creative Writing. She splits her time between Montreal and Toronto.

This review was published in issue 14:2 “Lies and Duplicity.” To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes

Featured Review: Alex Manley’s We Are All Just Animals & Plants. Review by Klara du Plessis.

Alex Manley‘s We Are All Just Animals & Plants (Montreal, QC: Metatron, 2016, $12, 61 pages). Review by Klara du Plessis.

“Instead of writing a poem about this mess I made, / what if I wrote a poem about the natural sciences?” Alex Manley asks in his debut collection of poetry, We Are All Just Animals & Plants. Here he projects imagery from the natural world onto a series of reflections on the contemporary climate of dating and relationships. In contrast to the emotional distance and cynicism that is often associated with millennial love, the inherent growth narrative of the organic images employed throughout—namely, animals and plants—allows Manley to capture a sense of vibrancy, even in the face of rejection; if not outright optimistic, the poetic speaker is willing to keep putting himself out there. Accepting present-day dating at face value, and not comparing it with past or alternative modes of romantic love, he is able to highlight the charm of contemporary times; when lovers check their phones in-between bouts of passion, they are not separated by technology, but rather insulated from the landscape of “Instagram flakes” snowing outside, together in a moment of quiet tenderness.

While the title We Are All Just Animals & Plants insinuates a devolutionary agenda—humanity being governed by their baser, animalistic instincts, the proverbial birds and bees—one of the collection’s major concerns, on the contrary, is the poetic speaker’s persistent urge towards personal evolution or reinvigoration of self: “All I want is for it to be springtime … so I can be a new me.” Absorbing the vitality of verdure in order to discard the old, unwanted self, the poetic speaker imagines himself to be “sprouting / leaves, vines, tendrils” burgeoning from his limbs as “a new person grow[s] over top of you, like / ivy.” The implicit caveat within this duality, and coexistence, of old and new is that, while a linear narrative of maturation may lead to a stronger, more rounded sense of self, dependency on change can also become a cyclical avoidance of difficulty in favour of the constant thrill of renewal.

Case in point, the accretion of vegetal images of revitalization soon leads
to a body superseded parasitically by plant matter: “I just have all these
bonsai trees growing in my torso. // It’s pathetic, I imagine them whispering,
a grown man / who can’t stop accumulating miniatures.” It is one of
Manley’s strengths as a poet that figures of speech consistently maintain
the vividness of metamorphosis. The bonsai trees are more than the poetic
speaker’s psychological state. In contrast to other “people [who] are
photographers / dancers, chemists, lepidopterists,” the poetic speaker is
immobilized, unambitious, unable to manipulate his transformation to his
benefit; he is paralyzed by “the way the roots snake; the way the leaves
fall,” by the way his entire being has morphed into that of a tree. The poetic
speaker never reverts from this transfiguration back into his human
anatomy. Instead the image lingers intact till the next metaphor, the next
metamorphosis, and poetic suspension of disbelief when he suggests:
“I’m the panther.”

Formally, the collection is divided into three sections labeled as Animals,
Paraphernalia, and Plants. The poems in the first two sections of the collection
are exclusively written in couplets—a constraint, which maintains
an orderliness and thematic resolve to break away from solitude, to meet
someone, and to couple with them. The final section opens up to stanzas
of varying lengths, and a concomitant dissolution of the hopes and dreams
expressed before. Stripping the poetic speaker of the drive to find his better
half, Manley revokes the gentle insinuation of domestic animals and
houseplants, embracing the feral instead. We Are All Just Animals & Plants
concludes with an apocalyptic poem “Noahtic,” a reversal of the biblical
tale, not leading to redemption and safety, but destruction and bloodshed;
now the “animals will not / be loud as we kill them off. The / leaves will
not be loud as they detach, slow, languid / bodies, from the evaporating
trees.” As the violence abates, the collection leaves the reader with a pervasive
sense of calm, a dismantling of the metamorphic jungle of dating,
and a clearing, a blank page, for Manley’s next book to germinate.

Klara du Plessis is a poet and critic residing in Montreal. Her chapbook Wax Lyrical (Anstruther Press, 2015) was shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award, and her debut collection Ekke is forthcoming (Palimpsest Press, 2018). She curates the monthly, Montreal-based Resonance Reading Series.

This review was published in issue 14:1 The Wild. To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

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Featured Review: Laurie D. Graham’s Settler Education. Review by Megan Callahan.

Laurie D. Graham’s Settler Education (Toronto, ON: Penguin Random House Canada, 2016, $18.95, 128 pages) Review by Megan Callahan

Laurie D. Graham is a Canadian writer, reviewer, and editor from Sherwood Park, Alberta. Settler Education, published in March 2016 by McClelland & Stewart, is her second book of poetry. Work from this collection was shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize and Arc Poetry Magazine’s Poem of the Year contest, and awarded The Puritan’s Thomas Morton Prize. Graham’s Prairie roots are evident in all her work, and the landscape is particularly meaningful in her newest collection.

In Settler Education, Graham offers us a contemplative and critical look at the painful and violent history of Western Canada—in particular, the Plains Cree uprising at Frog Lake, the imprisonment of Big Bear, the European settlement of the Prairies. The collection is structured around Graham’s journey by train from Ontario to British Columbia; as she travels past the Great Lakes, through villages and fields, she also moves in and out of time, carrying us back to the 19^th century. Many poems are named after the towns she visits—Battleford, The Yellowhead, Fort Pitt, and Frenchman Butte—with maps and photographs to guide and ground the reader. As the title implies, this is a history book, one that rewrites the facts we’ve been taught to include a perspective so often left out, glazed over, or swept under the rug.

Graham’s collection opens with the poem “Number One Canadian”—the name of the train that runs from Toronto to Vancouver, one filled with irony in this context. While Graham’s voice is ultimately critical, her tone remains meditative and tinged with sadness. There is very little anger or aggression in Settler Education; rather, each poem is infused with profound and sincere empathy: two women walking, misshapen. That’s not the word. They walk in pieces. / A grief that makes the body plural. Graham’s point of view shifts throughout the work; at times she writes in first-person, while at others she echoes the voices of the dead. In “Theresa Gowanlock”, Graham embodies the wife of a European settler killed during the Frog Lake massacre, and creates a fictional account of her experience: We cut the woods, thick brush, creeks and logs, / fording a stream. / On we went not knowing / where we were going. She also plays with pronouns and perspectives, directly addressing the ghosts of Cree warriors and European settlers as You or We: Who knows or cares that you were here / perched with your men over the North Saskatchewan River, / hauling up your life by the pail? The overall effect is a sense of broken, unravelled time—but Graham’s strong use of imagery keeps us firmly grounded in space and place.

Overall, the language in Settler Education is beautifully conversational. At times Graham’s writing is sparse and disjointed, like the broken sentences of old telegraphs: Through tree scenes, tableaux in the dome car, / the soldiers, the settlers, the track laid, the way made. Other passages flow in a stream-of-consciousness river, full of subtle assonances and alliterations: the travellers restless rounding the big lakes, they buy the wild blueberries, / they take photos of each other beside dead buildings along the line. Several poems are interspersed with quotes and excerpts from historical texts. These add layers of meaning to the stories being told, and add depth to the work as a whole.

The last dozen pages of Graham’s collection are filled with notes and historical references. These added bits of information give the reader context and help ground Graham’s work in reality. Poetry is an inherently abstract and metaphorical form of writing, one that falls somewhere between fact and fiction. But Graham’s ultimate purpose is to educate, and this is why her appended notes are intrinsically linked to the work itself. Without them, readers could easily forget that Settler Education is above all a history book—reworked and reworded to expose the aboriginal experience we so rarely learn about in school. This is the beating heart of Graham’s work, the pulse we feel throughout the long journey. She wants us to know that these things happened. In “The Train Back”, the final poem of Settler Education, Graham says it herself, as clearly as she can and in the simplest terms: it existed. It existed. And it exists.

Megan Callahan is a fiction writer and translator from Montreal, Quebec. Her work has appeared in PRISM International and Matrix Magazine. She holds a BA in Linguistics and Creative Writing from Concordia University and is currently pursuing an MA in Translation Studies.

This review was published in issue 13:2 The Wild. To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes

Featured Review: Elana Wolff’s Everything Reminds You Of Something Else. Review by Kian Vaziri-Tehrani.

(Guernica Editions, Spring 2017, $20, 72 pages)

Balance, Opposition, & Interconnection: A Review of Elana Wolff’s Everything Reminds You of Something Else by Kian Vaziri-Tehrani

Though Elana Wolff has been a contributor to Vallum in past issues and a highly decorated poet in her own right, I myself am a relative newcomer to her work. Guernica Editions’ Everything Reminds You of Something Else is the first of her collections I’ve been fortunate enough to read.

As per the title of her collection, Wolff’s poems sew clever webs of interconnection between the mundane and the mystical, joining together seemingly incongruous notions while also pairing more universally acknowledged associations. Spread across subjects ranging from faith to nature, “Altarpieces” to “Air”,  Wolff’s poems explore the oppositions found within differing states of existence. Though this characterization is admittedly abstract, one line encapsulates the essence of her collection, and it comes from the poem “Theory of Dreaming”:

“Here I sit awaiting a car, there awaiting the war.”

The speaker posits herself in two liminal states, in anticipation of two very different situations. Though the words themselves differ only by a single letter, their meanings and connotations could not be any farther apart. The almost contrarian use of articles is noteworthy. Why the speaker would await “a” car and not “the” car  while awaiting “the” war and not “a” war raises interesting questions. Does the speaker truly know what they await?  What is the relationship between the “here” and the “there”, the “car” and the “war”? One expects more so a sort of familiarity with their ride than with a mass conflict that has yet to pass; a war does not become “the war” until after its historization. This article reversal suggests commonality in difference; it places side by side two differently charged yet orthographically similar words while complicating the expectations that are typically attributed to them. In this sense, Wolff’s poem, and her collection as a whole, speaks to opposition and balance.

Likewise, in the first stanza of the same poem, Wolff’s speaker indicates her love for “the garden,” calling it “[her] solace” but complicating the notion as she writes “especially in winter”. Her preference for a cold and snow-covered garden over one with sunshine and blooming flowers elucidates a divergence from poetic tropes while suggesting a love for the unappreciated, more inaccessible state of garden. Much like her article reversal, Wolff’s love of the garden in winter is unexpected. It comes as a welcomed surprise because it does away with the anticipated perception of this “other” state as less favorable; the garden is just as captivating covered in snow as when it blooms in abundance.

In one of the earlier poems called “The Bestiary”, an allusion to the medieval book of beasts that goes by the same name, Wolff associates predominantly human characteristics to a series of animals. Three of them were especially noteworthy and appear consecutively in the middle of the poem:

“The dog embodied the sad devout,

the mouse—the dutiful doubtful.

Conjugal life produced the spider-and-fly.”

Each association possesses tension within it.  While a dog’s loyalty is expected , its sadness is perplexing due to the characteristically happy and excited nature of the animal. Likewise, mice are known to tread hesitantly under kitchen tables and into crevices, but is it their duty to do so? Notice how the words describing the mouse look and sound similar, a common trend within her collection. But most strikingly, with the third line, Wolff marries predator with prey, subverting  both the expectations of marriage and the spider fly relationship thereby creating balance and harmony between opposing forces.

In “Grenade” Wolff’s fascination with the impact and importance of individual words is on full display. Once more, she places side by side two nearly identical looking and sounding terms, writing “Rudiments of colour/ split & spilt.” In the preceding lines, the speaker searches for a certain word, writing:

“A word escaped me yesterday. Its image came up vaguely in the

painting I was painting and I aimed to put it graphically in black.”

This desire, both beautiful and impossible, strikes me deeply. For, while certain words conjure universally common images, such as fire or cow, others are enigmatic, changing, or unrepresentable.

While Everything Reminds You of Something Else is a complex and enchanting collection, some of the poems, at times, lost me. This is most apparent in “The Innocent Spin of Dreaming Real”. The poem begins with the lines:

“I fell asleep on my elbow once and woke up

on a donkey that I rode into a monkey

sitting jauntily on its back. See me as a rabbit,

it said, believing it could speak”

I appreciate the dreamy qualities of the poem and understand that it applies a distorted dream logic. Though purposefully disorientating, the images feel inaccessible and the significance of the three animals and their actions eludes me.

The collection picks up momentum once more with the title poem “Everything Reminds You of Something Else.” Its lines are jumbled, and I use that term positively, with associations and interconnections, some of which are magical, imagistic:

“…Numeral ix

at the foot of the page springs into a walking stick, lifts its

insect wings and flits away.”

Other associations seem to have more sequential series of action , but possess the same otherworldliness:

“…Moses shines

his light on the wilds, a great white rhino startles and stops>

a football from the jeep.”

The surreal nature of the poem comes to its crux with the haunting line:

“Voices trespassed speech, surfaces failed colour.”

Wolff’s poems draw connections and seek to find balance through opposition. Every force of nature, every state of existence is dependent on its opposite. As Wolff puts it, among all things: “Eventually/ the differences collapse.”

Kian Vaziri-Tehrani is a Canadian-Iranian writer living in Montreal. He is currently in the third and final year of his B.A. in English & Creative Writing. He works for Vallum.

Featured Review: Inclinations, Preoccupations, and Obsessions: A Review of Klipschutz’s “THIS DRAWN AND QUARTERED MOON” by Bill Neumire

Inclinations, Preoccupations, and Obsessions: A Review of Klipschutz’s THIS DRAWN AND QUARTERED MOON (Vancouver, BC: Anvil Press Publishers, 2013, $18.00, 96 Pages) Review by Bill Neumire

In an interview with Canadian poet Jon Cone, Klipschutz (the pen name of poet Kurt Lipschutz) confessed, “I’m a frustrated playwright, essayist, short story writer, pundit, Casanova, cultural anthropologist…the list goes on. Which leads to a crazy quilt of approaches and subject matter: it all gets poured into poems. There are no conscious themes, just inclinations, preoccupations, obsessions.” This assessment is pretty quickly confirmed as one reads his latest poetry collection, This Drawn & Quartered Moon. It’s a real buffet of form: erasure, rhymed quatrains of iambic tetrameter, ghazal, free verse lyric, epistle, prose poem. There are nonce forms and flash-fiction-esque pieces, and sometimes, as in ‘Elvis the First,’ the poet changes forms within a single poem.

This Drawn & Quartered Moon charts the collision of a nostalgic American past with the personal ‘eternal present’ of the speaker (a speaker who, in most cases, seems to be the autobiographical lyric I of the poet) and the complex comingling that follows. The poet’s father was apparently Elvis’ doctor, a point that serves as his portal to cultural commentary, sketches of characters from his life and times, and riddling songs of interior monologue. Klipschutz centers his book on a poem titled ‘Elvis the First,’ about which the poet explained, “The poem is ‘about’ Elvis Presley, but also about my family, and reaches back to some rough times, when the ’60s were just kicking into high gear, when my siblings and I were starting to do drugs, and my parents didn’t have a clue how to handle us. Then my dad became Elvis’s doctor. … the poem gave me a way to write about family.” Indeed, the collection mixes a sense of history and nostalgia with the eternal present of the speaker’s self, his running interior monologue, even as the markers of his past fall away and his anxiety heightens: “Don’t mention the old days. / You’re talking to yourself again”.

The boo’s most engaging moments are in its formal amusements and its profiles and vignettes of quirky characters. Take, for example, Oliver Othello King, Jr., a Viet Nam vet the speaker met on public transportation:

Double O. King, that’s what they call me … Airborne Rangers, Fort Campbell, Kentucky. How many people you suppose you can kill in two years? … Death from the sky. Just so you can stand here.

When these poems fail, they come across as nothing more than reportage, a workshop word wielded when a writer writes without depth and craft to transform an event or experience into something more, but when they succeed the “reportage” serves to erase the speaker and transport the reader into different eyes; this happens no doubt most frighteningly so in “Slab of Consciousness,” a poem for which the form emanates naturally from the content: it’s stilted, with periods after every word or couple words. It’s truncated life. It cuts out the speaker, makes the experience blunter, sharper, more painful:

The facts. It’s gone: Her future. Bright. The town. On it. At the Bubble Lounge. Outside. A fare like any other. Dumped. The body. Him. Her ATM … Results. Still inconclusive. Weeks away. Semen. And if so? … Breathing. She stopped breathing. People do.

It’s like the coldly clinical diction and syntax of an autopsy. The language can be fresh and arresting, witty and satirical, as in “I shall not want / for the Lord is my Home Shopping Network” or poignantly discomforting, as in “Winter passes like a meal / that sits and hardens in this sewer of stopwatch light”. In another impressive moment from ‘The Red Wheelbarrow of Fortune,’ we get expected language and the slogans of contemporary poetry, but the language is then deployed unexpectedly such that it creates tension between the lazy comfort of the phrases and the crafty new rearrangement and juxtaposition of them, all of it preceded by that image—an impactful discomfort and surprise—of the children:

Children cheer a flag of fire
A car commercial ends
Hearts of darkness fill with light
The wind is up—so much depends…

One can almost hear that “depends” slip into “deepens” at the end of the stanza, which is exactly what this strategy does: it deepens the shallow catch phrases by juxtaposing them in intriguing ways and adding that sonically pleasing yet topically disturbing “Children cheer a flag of fire.”

Alas, this self-amused collection frequently provokes a groan like a bad pun. The speaker actually verbalizes an anxiety about this cheeky cleverness (the contradictory self-referential anxiety can admittedly be funny and interesting at times), which creates a sense of self-criticism that makes this a bit of a therapy session as the voice can even get defensive: “Okay, so my ad libs are scripted. / Like you’re never wrong. / Try running a 10k in my teeth. / Go drown your lawn” (88). But sometimes the language downright slips into abstraction and sentimentality, as in “Love lusted for Itself, pent up inside the prison of the heart”. The poems are formally diverse, but as often as individual pieces feel well-formed, the whole ends up feeling purposelessly diverse and perhaps unprofitably too long.

These poems as independent units are not Steven’s poems that “resist the intelligence almost successfully,” but rather they are, to use the controversial term, accessible. That may be part of the poet’s “street sage” mission, as Klipschutz has been in the news for such public displays of poetry as reading poems to taxi cab passengers. Like most choices, though, this one to be a sort of self-proclaimed laureate of San Francisco carries a price, the price of coming across as watering down the poetry to make it easier to understand. The flipside is that it is a poetry that is approachable, that invites a broader audience than stuffy, draconian reviewers like me, a poetry that laughs and shudders, reminisces and opines. It’s a poetry that swallows history into its eternal present, the speaker’s consummate offering to the reader.

Bill Neumire‘s reviews regularly appear in Vallum, and his poems have recently appeared in American Poetry Journal, Istanbul Review, and The Laurel Review. His first book of poems, Estrus, was published last year. He lives in New York with his wife and two daughters.

This review was published in issue 11:1 Thresholds. To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes