Cerise Press - www.cerisepress.com

Blue Door Dream, by Josie Gray


"Cerise Press, an online journal based in the United States and France, builds cross-cultural bridges by featuring artists and writers in English and translations, with an emphasis on French and Francophone works. Co-founded by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, Sally Molini, and Karen Rigby in 2009, Cerise Press hopes to serve as a gathering force where imagination, insight, and conversation express the evolving and shifting forms of human experience."

One of the editors, Fiona Sze-Lorrain, is a frequent contributor to CutBank Reviews - read up on some of her accomplishments below.

FIONA SZE-LORRAIN (Greta Aart) writes and translates in English, French and Chinese. Her collection of poetry, Water the Moon, is forthcoming (2010) from Marick Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry International, Alimentum, Caesura, Ellipsis and other journals. Non-fiction includes Silhouette/Shadow: The Cinematic Art of Gao Xingjian (Contours, 2007) and Critical Issues on Interculturalism (Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2004). Also a zheng concertist and theatre artist, she lives in Paris, France. Her website is

fionasze.com.

Fiona Sze-Lorrain is joined by Karen Rigby, an occasional contributor to Cutbank, and Sally Molini.

Rarer and More Wonderful

Scrambler Books, 2009

Reviewed by Michael Roberson

In the first of four serial poems that make up Trevor Calvert’s Rarer and More Wonderful, the poet begins by tricking the reader.  After a netherworld portrait (one anticipated by the gnashing black wings on the cover) of some winged and clandestine “She,” who quotes Paul Virilio, the reader must confront an abrupt apostrophic address:

 

Pull your arms about you, tighter

you will not like what comes

next.  We ask you to trust.

We ask that you find identity

with us.  We will be

your apologue.

To read on is to be implicated in every plural pronoun: to assume responsibility for a burning house, to be the voice of reason, to be the voice of chastisement, to be an advocate for robo-eroticism.  But, taking Virilio as a hint, perhaps Calvert uses the trickery, the oddness, the disorientation in order to implement frictional moments where poetry operates in resistance to the speed of modern living.  Nonetheless, finding oneself in what the poet calls a “Struck Landscape,” the reader learns quickly that orientation requires acquiescing to the cryptic, uncanny and haunting personae that inhabit this realm—part Underworld, part Nietzschean prison house. 

Imagine a city as a sigil, an alphabet, and

then a language.

 

I walked throughout the city and watched

as raccoons dived past grates and plants

uncurled in their gardens.  I swept the city

into myself and began to read.

 

Allegories of tunnels and leaf-blown asides.  Everything in its place:  a city

full of metaphor and order.  Unraveling the city, I did

not notice something, too, folding into me. 

Following the poet’s “I” as a protean “You” the reader must navigate both the poetic landscape on the page and an imaginary landscape made of language.  The result is a kind of schizoid chronotope induced by a pathology of reading, where even the poet worries “that poetics were not enough” to enable a safe return to the role of passive reader.  But nevermind a safe return, read on.     

While the first series enacts a kind of ventriloquism in which the reader is subsumed in the personae, in the second, aptly titled “The Morality of Puppets,” Calvert introduces Punch and Judy, the puppet faces of diabolical domesticity.  And if the reader has learned anything from the previous series it is to appreciate the slyness of the crafted poems, and to be on guard, even in moments of embedded reflexivity:

There is always a trick to language that invokes

secrecy, but inevitably evokes a sense of

artistry.

In “The Morality of Puppets,” Calvert offers meditations and portrayals of Punch as the ultimate anti-metaphysician (again Nietzsche, plus Artaud):

He does deign

arm-wrestling

with ubermenschen.

*

His is one of

anti-this,

anti-that.

He refuses

vitamins;

refuses his

interpretations.

*

His red hat

steeped in threats

thrusts upward

accusingly

and his audience

laughs every time

a murder

is made.

*

Lungs full

 

of god

knows what

is what is

fulfilling Punch’s

introspection.

Calvert’s line-breaks work well and cleverly, precise in their reiteration of detail.  Precision also characterizes the inimitable, dark humour.  In one poem Punch plays Hamlet’s father.  Upon  misplacing his hat, Punch asks the guards where it is and decidedly

[…] pulls

the beanie right

from the guard’s

head, but forgets

to take the

head out!

Like a “pop”

Punch plucks

the head,

replaces it

with his

own.

“Now

my hat

is red

again,

hooray!”

As the poet Graham Foust notes in his blurb, these poems are “aptly named.”  In the deceptively clipped lines and faceted stanzas, Calvert has shaped poems from fresh and unusual sources:  Continental philosophy and literature, Ancient Greek literature, Christian apocrypha, Japanese fashion, popular culture, cyberpunk aesthetics, New Age rhetoric, and Punch and Judy theatrics.  Such an eclectic mix leaves no shortness of surprises.  

Like the previous two series, the third, “Probability Map,” offers no assurances.  Relying on a “Probability Map” is like believing that facts are truths—a point made thematic throughout this series.  Origins, systems, structures, worlds are all suspect and subject to the poet’s reconsiderations.

Cosmology, when observed, is likely

a poetics of relation and space.

A proper booster shot of postmodern thinking can fend off the symptoms of anti-foundationalism in these poems, but what disconcerts and pleasures equally are the moments of nonchalant syntaxes clicking against the erudite punnings.  In a poem called “Parabasis” the poet riddles

let’s move back to causes, a posteriori

pneumatic arrangement of limbs.

He follows with

“Let’s meet for lunch, say noonish?”

Inevitably the juxtaposition of quips and the rich syntactics suggest a thorough schooling in the humour, craft and philosophical edge of Language poetics. 

In the final series, Calvert offers “An Approach to Ending”—a coda, not an actual end.  In this—the shortest of the serials—readers will be keen to reading the secrets of how Rarer and More Wonderful is constructed:  poems that

hid

 

something fierce and terrible and patient,

an idea we could not quite grasp. 

In the opening poem of the sequence, the poet acknowledges the reader’s persistent experience of feeling on the verge of meaning, so often distracted by other, curious vectors:

some sense of determination

and exploration and how does

one begin to approach an end

to something when her only

compass is a feeling of lightness

sometimes at the base of the skull?

The experience of reading these poems resembles either intoxication or inoculation by some nepenthean elixir, what the poet calls a “tincture of an event.”  Sometimes the lines drop quickly in columns shaped like a syringe or sometimes they break like the brim of a good tumbler. One cannot simply read this book once, drawn back to it by the allure one might associate with an absinthe cocktail.  In fact, a kind of esoteric romance haunts these poems—edgy, dangerous, complex.  Being that this is Calvert’s first published full-length collection, and the first book by California’s Scrambler Books, readers have much to look forward to from the future of both.

**

Trevor Calvert is a writer, bookseller, and recent library school graduate living in Oakland, California. His poetry and reviews have been published in various journals and magazines, including Omnidawn Blog. His interests include puppets, vocabulary design, and martial arts.

**

Michael Roberson is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Calgary, where he also edits dandelion magazine.  His dissertation examines the role of ethics in post-Language poetry. 

 

 

Something Has to Happen Next

                     

 

& Full Catastrophe Living    

University of Iowa Press, 2008

Reviewed by John Findura 

A teaspoonful of the matter that makes up a black hole would weigh more than the visible universe, and may weigh more than the un-visible universe as well. Black holes have little in common with contemporary American poetry, except for the fact that for most people, both are invisible. Some poets, however, have something in common with the phenomena: they are able to take a little bit from here, a little from there, and compress these bits into poems of few words that still carries the weight of something much larger. Andrew Michael Roberts’s Iowa Poetry Prize winning “book of small poems” (as he has called it) Something Has To Happen Next certainly contains poems short on words but big on the necessities of life — humor, liveliness, emotion, and profundity. Though this first effort at times feels ethereal, it quickly gains weight as the pages advance.

The opening poem of the book’s first section, “dear wild abandon,” brings notice of what’s to come:

            you little

            time

 

            bomb.

The white space between “time” and “bomb” acts as a buffer, slowing the countdown to the “bomb” going off:

            if I bite

            and swallow, would you

 

            explode in me?

The sexual allusion may or may not be there, but there is no escaping the fact that yes, there will be an explosion.

Other poems in the collection do not need the fireworks. An example is “the moon,” which in its entirety reads:

            all the other moons

            get their own names.

The obvious information here is reinforced by these two short sentences floating isolated against the white page. Roberts makes good use of the white space to create aesthetically pleasing poems. Not only is each line break perfectly placed, but the pacing is sure. Take for instance the next little poem in the collection “what i know of the moon”:

            i am only half myself.

            the other side’s

            a dark idea

            i like to believe in.

What is most interesting here is Roberts’s notion of the beauty of the dark side of the moon, the “dark idea” he likes “to believe in”. It brings to mind the duality of man, the need of that dark side to keep us whole. Striking too is the fact that the poem preceding it, also about the moon, is only half its size. It’s almost as if this half-moon has doubled its size to four lines and now is not just a reflection of the moon, but has become inward looking and no longer in need of a label in order to exist.

While Roberts is busy distilling the universe, the other 2008 Iowa Poetry Prize winner, Zach Savich, is carving out his poems from solid earth in Full Catastrophe Living. The “toothy stars” of Something Has To Happen Next are replaced by scrapings on exposed strata and the “smell of black walnuts crushed on the road” (“Black Walnut Adoration”). Like that smell, these poems are full and rich with a deep flavor of earthiness.

Savich likes to stretch out in poems like “Don Quixote,” “Fool,” and “Poem for My Wife If We Are Married” but it is in “Serenade " where this lengthening of line is most effective. While it is certainly not surprising to find Degas or Caravaggio turning up in poems, it is refreshing to find:

            My friend the trumpet player emptied his spit valve onto pigeons.

            He watched a woman climb onto her fire escape, nude,

            her husband cursing form the window. I gave up on

            the biography. I left the rave. Ann held her head.

Ann holding her head reflects nicely on the beginning of the poem, where indeed

            In the painting by Degas, the dancer is not

            on a cell phone, but holding her head. I left the museum.

            Ann was sick.

Does this count as art- reflecting-life-imitating-art? Regardless, the final two lines clear everything up by leading us from a darkened room to one where everything is still obscured: “I put on some shoes I found on the bridge, then left the bridge. / Ann bruised. Her mom showed up. It was July.”

Throughout Full Catastrophe Living, Savich intersperses shorter poems and sonnets, nicely breaking up the denser texts. The short poems, however, never reach the level of the longer pieces. Perhaps it is the sustainment of image and metaphor in the longer pieces that works so much in their favor. Certainly, shorter poems like “Federal Case” are never given the chance to develop. Compared to Andrew Michael Roberts’ shorter pieces, and in relation to his own longer works, Savich’s shorter poems don’t hold up as well, don’t carry the same weight, and ultimately add little to the collection.

Both Roberts and Savich have put together volumes that are worthy enough to be read and may even require multiple readings. It is no surprise that both are issued through the University of Iowa Press — the Iowa Poetry Prize has definitely been showcasing exceptional work. If you happen to be the type of person who prefers to keep your feet on the ground while craning your neck to see the stars, it would be a wise decision to pick up both books. If you’re not that type of person, it would still be wise to track these down.

**

John Findura holds an MFA from the New School. A Pushcart Nominee, his poetry and criticism appear in journals such as Mid-American Review, Verse, Fugue, Fourteen Hills, No Tell Motel, H_NGM_N, Jacket, and Rain Taxi, among others. Born in Paterson, he lives and teaches in northern New Jersey.

**

Andrew Michael Roberts is the author of Dear Wild Abandon, selected for a 2007 PSA National Chapbook Award, and Give Up. His poems can be found in journals such as Tin House, the Iowa Review, LIT, the Colorado Review, and Gulf Coast.

**

Zach Savich received a BA in English from the University of Washington and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop; he is currently in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he is a teaching assistant. His poems and essays have appeared in such venues as the Colorado Review, the Beloit Poetry Journal, jubilat, Court Green, Denver Quarterly, and the anthology Best New Poets 2008. He is an editor at Thermos Magazine.

The Heaven-Sent Leaf

BOA Editions, 2008

Reviewed by Karen Rigby

Money is not evil. It is the love of money, or so the proverb goes—the pursuit among the hustlers and rainmakers, the hunger that inspired alchemists to try turning lead to gold—that leads to tragedy in so many stories. In Katy Lederer’s newest collection, the desire to distance oneself from the financial world is a recurrent theme. With its legendary robber barons and tumultuous history, the New York of these poems would set the perfect stage for an energetic series: panoramic in its breadth, sexy, and even damning, presenting glittering vices, a high-rolling playfulness, or a satirical critique.

Lederer, however, has chosen an unexpected and much quieter approach. Money isn’t turned into a grand idea. It is a means for describing the private exchanges in the speaker’s life—that bartering between “The brain pumped up with longing” and the soul.

These forty-five poems employ mostly linear, sonnet-like forms. They rely on a reflective, first-person voice. The images are simple and concrete, spaced throughout the book rather than forming densely woven patterns—they include “cups of breakfast blend,” “dark, expensive chocolates,” a “vial of Botox,” “emerald-green flow,” and a cello, among other objects. Many of the titles derive from the opening or closing line, or from a phrase contained within the poem. These plainer titles are in keeping with the poet’s sensibilities; there’s a strong sense that the message is often more essential than the manner of its expression, and that the poems, however cool in their atmosphere, are meant to reach the average reader.

One of the notable threads in this book is the difference between office workers and poets:

Me, a brainworker toiling in pristine white hallways.
Abnormal, aboriginal, endemic to this site.
Some people sell their wares outside.
In the pristine light of Times Square they are singing.
In their noses and nipples, the glinting of rings.
Let us call them unoriginal.
Let us call them all these awful things.
The busy unoriginals are throwing out their trash.
But on this lovely parchment they are writing priceless poems.
They suppose that by such rendering they’ll be remembered after
death.
They suppose that by such influence their souls will sing eternally.
In the hallways, we are killing time,
Its blood now thick and lurid on the freshly painted walls.

The speaker is aloof, but does not spare herself from criticism. She doesn’t belong in these hallways and may even possess a small envy of those “unoriginals” who are free to write. Poets reappear in “A Nietzschean Revival”:

These poets speak of capital as if they had the least idea.
I ask you: what do poets know of capital?
Across this harp, their fingers play a Nietzschean revival.
I envy them their will to power.

And again in “The Dead-Level”:

The poets standing, one by one.
I lie here, shaking, all alone, the cosmetician in the hall.
Lord, let it cover me, this sheet.
Immaculate particulate.
I hide here in your cleanliness.
The poets standing, one by one.
What shall I make of them, beneath this light?
Their hair is white, their eyes are white, their skin is porcelain white.

A complaint is being registered about the nature of white-collar brainwork. In another poem, "Brainworker," the speaker writes: “To learn to keep distance./To learn to keep drear managerial impulse away from the animal/mind (19)."

The distinction between two modes of thinking could prove puzzling or even artificial for some readers: why doesn’t the speaker appear to entertain the possibility of disparate halves (logic + rationality / spontaneity + creativity) working in conjunction with each other rather than in opposition to each other? Later, the speaker expresses “this wish to be penniless, free.” Being“penniless” is almost a romantic hyperbole for a more poetic lifestyle. As the book progresses, the speaker says, “I am waiting, like an animal,/for poetry.” What was once viewed as the providence of those “unoriginals” has become vital. What seemed incomprehensible has become alluring. The transformation is critical to understanding The Heaven-Sent Leaf. Money may have served as the hook, but self-discovery and the pain involved in any difficult moment of transition emerges as the salient theme. An uneasy, ambivalent peace is finally reached between the spirit, mind, and heart in “A Triumvirate”: “Dilapidation of the spirit as the heart gives in, the mind gives in./These three, a triumvirate, laughing./This bitterness breaks me.”

Writing about office drudgery can sometimes result in a flatness to the language, or run the risk of reinforcing familiar views. While this series doesn’t entirely escape such problems, the ambition is nevertheless admirable and the topic is prescient. The title would appeal most to readers seeking affirmation of what it’s like to be trapped in the “pristine white hallways,” or for readers already familiar with the author’s previous work.

* *

Katy Lederer’s books include Winter Sex (Verse Press, 2002) and the memoir Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers (Crown, 2003), included in the Publishers Weekly list of Best Books of the Year 2003. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Harvard Review, GQ and elsewhere. She has been anthologized in Body Electric (Norton), From Poe to the Present: Great American Prose Poems (Scribner) and Isn’t it Romantic (Verse Press), among others. Educated at UC Berkeley and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, her honors and awards include an Academy of American Poets Prize, fellowships from Yaddo and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a Discover Great New Writers citation from Barnes & Noble.

* *

Karen Rigby’s recent work appears in Meridian, Quarterly West, Canteen, and other journals. She is one of the editors at Cerise Press.

The Cosmopolitan by Donna Stonecipher

Coffee House Press, 2008
Reviewed by Kristina Marie Darling

Recently selected by John Yau for inclusion in the National Poetry Series, Donna Stonecipher's The Cosmopolitan presents a vision of travel that encompasses an exploration of one's surroundings as well as the discovery of new terrain within one's self. Written as ornate prose poem sequences in which quotes from other texts are often embedded, the works in this volume use their hybrid form to document the emotional and intellectual states that are evoked by place. Just as the miniature travelogues are structured around newly unearthed insights, Stonecipher's poems gracefully depict one's inner life as governing the ways one inhabits the world.  

In conveying these themes, Stonecipher's use of such diverse texts as Franz Kafka's The Trial, Claude Levi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques, and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus to illuminate her own work proves striking. Frequently presenting the reader with memorable quotes arrived at through various author's literary allusions, the poems offer their speakers' small epiphanies as literary journeys in themselves. A poem entitled "Inlay 2 (Elaine Scarry)," which uses text from Scarry's Dreaming by the Book, exemplifies this trend:

If only our troubles were those of the town planner. Our freshly prepared grid, where to position the park, the town hall, the elementary school, the bored housewife fucking the plumber? The town is a given. The town waits like a fate for the town planner, who slowly reveals it with a blue pencil.

'Daydreaming originates in the volitional' (15).

In this passage, the poet presents Elaine Scarry's statement as an insight arrived at through a journey of intellectual inquiry, suggesting that travel remains a dialogue between oneself and the literary and cultural texts evoked by a given place. As the piece unfolds, this travelogue of consciousness ultimately obscures the reader's ability to definitively locate the speaker, privileging one's ability to trace oneself emotionally and intellectually.

Likewise, other works in The Cosmopolitan question the extent to which one can journey through the world without unearthing an undiscovered aspect of self. In this respect, the poet establishes reciprocity between one's inner life and surroundings. She writes, for example, in "Inlay 6 (Mary B. Campbell),"

The group of students touring Chartres was told by the bespectacled guide that the stained glass pictures were not merely pretty, but actually scripture for the illiterate. Years later, one of the students would remember this while reading at a desk facing a window and think: What beauty isn't born out of the missionary position? (29)

Here Stonecipher forges unexpected connections between the character's memory of the cathedral and the manner in which he or she perceives future works of art. In many ways, the poet suggests that the character's past experience of Chartres enables and validates later insights about beauty and artifice. Like other works in the collection, "Inlay 6 (Mary B. Campbell)" depicts one's experience of place as complicating one's experience of self, suggesting that the two remain, in some respects, inextricable.

Moreover, Stonecipher uses this complex relationship between oneself and one's surroundings to offer incisive cultural commentary, highlighting the dissonance between one's inner life and the exterior world. Frequently juxtaposing the narrator's intellectual journeys with an increasingly commercialized travel culture, the poet often hints that a lucrative industry resides behind many individual's desire for such introspection and self discovery. She explains, for instance, in "Inlay 12 (Owen Jones),"

One loved; one did not love; goods changed hands. She was looking for the seed pearl dropped off the scale in the middle of the vast outdoor market. At the airport, he reached into his bag for his cyanometer — which of the fifty different kinds of blue was this particular sky? (50)

In this selection, just as the character in the poem attempts to empirically determine "which of the fifty different kinds of blue" that the sky is that day, characters recur throughout The Cosmopolitan who treat the world as a "conquerable entity," which can be subjugated through travel. Although acknowledging the prevailing (and frequently consumerist) approach to exploring one's surroundings, Stonecipher depicts her narrator as still "looking for the seed pearl" that has been lost amidst the commercial fanfare, striking an optimistic chord with the reader.

All points considered, Donna Stonecipher's new book is a meditative, philosophical read. The Cosmopolitan refashions the time-honored form of the prose poem while raising fascinating questions about travel and self-discovery. Highly recommended.

**

Donna Stonecipher is the author of three books of poetry: The Reservoir (Georgia, 2002), Souvenir de Constantinople (Instance, 2007), and The Cosmopolitan (Coffee House, 2008). She also translates poetry and prose from French and German.

**

Kristina Marie Darling is a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis. Eight chapbooks of her work have been published, among them Fevers and Clocks (March Street Press, 2006), The Traffic in Women (Dancing Girl Press, 2006), and Night Music (BlazeVOX Books, 2008). A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Kristina has also written on contemporary literature for The Boston Review, The Colorado Review, New Letters, The Mid-American Review, Third Coast, and other journals. Recent awards include residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Mary Anderson Center for the Arts.

The Halo Rule by Teresa Leo

Elixir Press, 2008
Reviewed by Amy Schrader

Given the lush stained-glass art on the cover of this volume of poems, I was relieved to learn in an opening epigraph that The Halo Rule is not a new age directive for living, but rather a sports term. The title poem tells us that the halo rule “intends to protect/ a return man by two yards.” Indeed, this rule—in effect from 1983-2003 in NCAA football games—gave a two-yard circle of protection to punt returners. The idea was to save the returner—who must look up in order to catch the ball—from a jarring full-speed tackle. Leo’s poignant observation follows:

Not so
elsewhere. For us, it’s

sideswipe, no berth, the
deference of play to hurt,
rough lust. (19)

Indeed, in this collection, Teresa Leo writes not about the spiritual, but the physical — the violence that “rough lust” enacts on our bodies and minds, and the ways that our biological urges can (and will) destroy us without hesitation or warning. Desire is the primary concern of The Halo Rule, and appears in most of the poems in some way, even if only to mark its absence or its transmutation into a closely allied urge or feeling such as despair. Recurring tropes here are addiction, possession, hunger, and the color red — all common metaphors for sexual desire. Incendiary images are numerous:

The kiss, if not gasoline, then turpentine, // or two red peonies in a cardboard tube… (4)

I won’t say I’m fire and in it… (4)

“…Come find me at night // and we’ll go up in flames.” (37)

…you said my hair was a creature
unto itself, a dark and dangerous thing
that could set the world on fire. (42)

Leo divides her book into four sections, each of which examines a particular phase of a sexual relationship. The narrative arc of the book begins with the end, and the first poem we encounter is entitled “P.S.”

The end is not near. We’ve passed the end, and it’s so far back
it’s like the tit of a cow in a field of poppies, a dot in a field…

Not only are we already at the end, we’re long past it! Appropriately enough, Section I deals with the final throes of a turbulent relationship: “We’re flatlined, sandblasted, / pummeled, untoward (12).” We meet two lovers, each seized in some way by sexual addiction and violence. There are glasses thrown against the wall, punches, jabs, chokeholds, “come-heres and fisticuffs (6).”

Section II takes us back to the beginning of this relationship with a series of poems about a modern Narcissus, poems exploring the chase, seduction, the art of wooing, and, of course, self-love. Yet even as the two lovers are meeting for the first time, Leo calls out a warning: “The woman // stood and turned. He was already thinking/ of the beautiful and various ways he could leave her (21).”

In Section III, we see the two lovers in the middle of their relationship, and their dynamic is clearly about sex and not much else:

After we fuck, he comes to himself,
back from a scattering of parts and phrases,

pulled from a starkness too violent to remember
(though fragments jostle in the back of the eyes

in a furious attempt to make it)
and says, “I can’t do more than this.” (41)

Finally, Section IV brings us back to where we started, forcing the reader to experience for a second time the couple’s goodbyes and leavings. The last poem in the book, “Aubade”, is a fitting end, bringing us full circle to dawn—a signal that the lovers must now part.

As I read the book, I found myself wondering if Leo strove for such unwavering thematic content; it feels more as if she happened on it incidentally, organically. As a poet, I understand the drive to write our obsessions again and again. By the end, however, I had more of a reader’s-eye view of how consistency can become slightly tedious over the course of an entire book. Pair that consistency with Leo’s fairly uniform (albeit very well-crafted) poetic style/approach, and there could very well be a little bit of reader-fatigue by the end of the collection.

That said, even if I occasionally found myself wanting a poem that looked or sounded just a little different than the others, Leo’s obsessions happen to mirror my own, so I was more than happy to immerse myself in the dark minutiae of this unraveling sexual relationship. The strength of the book lies in the strength of the individual poems. They are well-crafted, and Leo clearly delights in language and well-turned phrases. One of her techniques is to simultaneously present two conflicting realities:

...the way I didn’t see the curve ball coming,
the one that clipped my left hip as I swung the bat,
missing and not being missed. (3)

…the long, slow torso of a woman bent back, seeing / and not being seen. (6)

Thus, the reader must consider both x and not-x; they are somehow both equally true. This is what good poetry should be able to do, to look at the many facets of a complicated situation and recognize the truth of them all. Similarly, Leo is interested in adjacencies, which strikes me as an interest in metaphor.

…How, if at all,
does adjacency fit in, the militant but not mindful,

his four: lust, luster, lash, then less and less…
my four: drugged, deranged, demonized, damaged. (27)

This type of sound-association also shows up in the book as near-rhymes separated by slashes, which is a sort of violent, unvarnished way of making comparisons. Without putting the words into a full sentence, Leo mushes two words together, puts them on equal footing, and leaves it to the reader to draw conclusions from their proximity. One of the poems describes this method as “the bereft/theft rhyme of desire and seizure” (26). Throughout the book, Leo also gives us baroque/throat (22), read/delete (24), famine/feminine (28), and

the estranged/deranged
call and response,

off-key, off-kilter,
an intersection of streets

where Wood meets Division,
Hope meets Power,

the mute improvisations
of a love-sick blood. (68)

Since this collection had the occasional tendency toward repetition and the “expected” view, I particularly enjoyed the off-key notes in The Halo Rule. Ultimately, the poems’ physical presence and honesty allows us to appreciate the collection for what it is:

…Just a book of poems

in a stark white envelope, little disclosures
that sway into oblivion the way bamboo floor boards
give suddenly under the body, its weight. (28)

**

Teresa Leo's poetry and essays have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, New Orleans Review, Barrow Street, Painted Bride Quarterly, Xconnect, and elsewhere. She has been a resident at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Blue Mountain Center, and the Vermont Studio Center, and has received fellowships from the Pew Fellowships in the Arts, the Leeway Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She currently works at the University of Pennsylvania.

**

Amy Schrader received her MFA in poetry from the University of Washington. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming from Fairy Tale Review, DIAGRAM, and Filter. She lives in Seattle.

Superfecta by Clay Matthews

Ghost Road Press, 2008

Reviewed by Joshua Robbins

Every so often one comes across a first book of poems that radically shirks off the normative first book formula which says, “This profound stuff happened to me and I’m going to tell you what it means.” More often than not, the product of the first book equation is a poetry that meets our expectations (however low they may be), but fails to address the urgency of our times. Thankfully we have Clay Matthews’s first full-length collection, Superfecta, to prod and admonish us, to remind us that poetry can have something to say in the face of American vulnerability, mortality, late capitalism, ubiquitous pop-culture clutter, and urban sprawl. And for readers willing to risk betting even just a little time and effort, the payoff they receive will far exceed their meager investment.

For Matthews, who has previously published two chapbooks, Muffler (H_NGM_N B_ _KS) and Western Reruns (End & Shelf Books), the concept of a payoff is integral to the arc of his book, the title of which is derived from the world of parimutuel horse race betting. When betting the superfecta, the bettor must successfully predict the order of the first four finishers in a race. Picking a successful superfecta involves complex combinations and sequences at long odds. The winnings, though, are correspondingly much higher. The same goes for our experience of these poems.

For an epigraph, Matthews quotes from Emily Dickinson’s #254:

‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—

While hope is certainly a theme for Matthews, reading poems like “Poem with a Forecast at Either End,” “Self Help for the Lost and Found,” and “The Prayer Mechanism” among others, one recalls Dickinson’s other famous words, “Poetry dwells in possibility.” Sometimes these poems harness the potential of narrative and the saving grace of memory. Sometimes it’s landscape and place. Other times these poems express what feels like a renewed religious faith struggling with what remains of doubt. Consider these closing lines from “Eternia”:

I'm lonesome sometimes
again. I've been coughing up the evils of the universe
in the sink and watched once more the other night that movie
about He-Man. Look at that name. What a strange film
there is covering the window. It looks like everything
outside is blanketed with the saddest glass in the world.

In the phrase “the saddest glass in the world,” there are faint echoes of Biblical scripture and the Apostle Paul’s statement, “For now we see through a glass, darkly.” Matthews’s spirit seems equally sanguine and forward-looking — though doused with a heavyheartedness as he surveys the world.

Matthews’s poems possess a unique melancholy in which the trappings of America’s tradition of optimism are juxtaposed with imagery from America’s cultural clutter. This is a place where the individual’s voice becomes “nothing more / than a warm little praying machine” (“The Prayer Mechanism”). It is the place where video game arcades and “Two-hundred Pac-Man machines / with hundreds of three-letter initials” call into question “the essence of [the] subjective self” (Self-Portrait in a Chewing Gum Wrapper”), and even the DeLorean from the film Back to the Future compels us to wonder if we should “try to save the world or just try / to save ourselves” (“Self-Portrait in a Hollywood Car”).

Referencing pop-culture icons and even brand names has become a fairly fashionable tool in recent years for poets seeking to rough-up their listless imagery or to inject an ironic sensibility into their lyric. Very often these poems feel contrived. What enables Matthews to avoid sounding like a phony is that his allusions to pop-culture are connected to more pressing existential concerns. Here is the opening of “Mercy Mild”:

At the supercenter we were waiting
for the big televisions to go on sale,
which is to say we were waiting
for a larger version of The Price is Right,
in full color and spread across the screen
the way Antarctica stretches across
the bottom of the globe like a pair
of tight white underwear, the kind
my father used to wear in the bathroom
when he shaved his face each morning
and banged the razor rhythmically
on the side of the porcelain bowl.

In these opening twelve lines, we encounter several things we don’t normally expect to come across in poems: the supercenter, The Price is Right, Antarctica, a man’s tighty-whities. Also, it should be noted that we hear a nearly regular accentual beat. Aside from his highly crafted line, Matthews’s progression from the supercenter into memory is not necessarily poetically surprising in its movement. It does, however, allow him to tackle the bigger issues, to call into question the relationship between the self and commerce, the self and memory, the self and place, because “In the supercenter there are three versions of reality” and supercenters themselves “are no version / of reality, [they are] only an image of reality.”

Matthews’s work is refreshing because of its honest voice and his willingness to confess simple facts: that we all hope for “another day of absolutely nothing better to do” (“Self-Portrait as an Aging Human Type”); that in something as simple as a pickle jar “you see / every greed you have ever possessed / or been possessed by” (“Regarding My Sentimentality and Love of Hole-in-the-Walls”); that any kind of bet “is just another structure tugging away at our sad existence” because

Asking the American
middle class not to gamble is like asking us
not to breathe, to place our small, tired hands
over our hearts as some young girl in white sequins
over-sings the national anthem to which at least one
old man in the crowd will weep.
(“Elegy for a Bet that Couldn’t Lose”)

Many of the poems in Superfecta stayed with me, their images reverberating in my consciousness long after I’d set the book down. With their complex tones and the mixture of pop-culture, the honesty of Matthews’s voice, his attention to the details of the everyday, the poems in Superfecta oblige us “To bet on what we believe won't happen, / but hope for / nonetheless” (“Elegy for a Bet that Couldn’t Lose”). Clay Matthews is certainly a poet to put some money on.

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Clay Matthews is the author of Superfecta and two chapbooks: Muffler (H_NGM_N B_ _KS) and Western Reruns (End & Shelf Books). He currently lives in Johnson City, Tennessee. Visit his blog at http://claymatthews.blogspot.com.

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Joshua Robbins received his MFA from the University of Oregon and is currently a doctoral student and lecturer at the University of Tennessee where he serves as Poetry Editor for Grist: The Journal for Writers. A winner of the James Wright Poetry Award, his work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Mid-American Review, New South, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, the anthology Writing By Ear, and elsewhere. Visit his blog at http://againstoblivion.blogspot.com.