Texture Notes, Sawako Nakayasu

Letter Machine Editions, 2010

Chicago, Illinois

http://www.lettermachine.org/

ISBN: 0981522726

by Karen An-hwei Lee

The latest collection by translator and poet Sawako Nakayasu, Texture Notes, features 48 original journal entries dated from 2003 to 2004, arranged in a variety of textures and rhythms. With echoes of Zukofsky poetics and Steinian word-play, Nakayasu explores the poetic challenge of describing physical textures in the external world: bicycles, fresh laundry, love in the air. To this end, the kaleidoscopic prose fragments resist simplistic interpretations, playing with formal categories of definition in a choreography of word-objects reminiscent of the early Modern objectivist poets:

7.9.2003

Ant-sized objects, in the order received:

Ant, microchip, staple, pine needle, dimple, pebble, the ant’s twin, a one-to-one scale model of the ant, another ant of the same size, dust, crumb, fingernail, crumb, staple, mustard seed, the letter ‘I’ typed in 12-pt. font…. (19)

Focusing on “thingness” in the abstract and concrete senses, Texture Notes investigates the texture of bicycles in its first succinct prose poem, contemplates the textures of absence in an elegant one-line poem, 10.4.2003: “layers of loss” (7), and directs the reader’s attention to self-referential components in 11.8.2003: “Line trying to crumple its way into texture…” (17).

Nakayasu’s book-length collage is a recombinatory syncopation of astute observations: “Combined sum of the texture of one word at each moment everywhere, thicker than it is true” (11). With varying poetic densities at once macrocosmic and minutely liminal, the contradictions of urban life are depicted in miniature:

9.20.2003

Thirty thousand unanswered minutes, eight arms filled to capacity three times over, a four-year-old tree attaining twice its current height thanks to the tears of a widow, one small Chinese girl and a couple of kegs, five million rotations of this old fan, whichever comes last.

Or the rock that develops a dent, small stone in my hand.

Waiting for.

The rock to grow, spread, answer, spin, cold and smooth, after all the rain in my hand, or before it stops, or before it returns, quickly now -- (67)

At times, the poems take on the surreal allegorical qualities of a Russell Edson fable, as in 4.6.2004, whose first line begins: “Texture of a field of fried umbrellas” (9).

…Enough fresh oil was used in the frying of these umbrellas that theoretically the should repel any sort of fluid which takes a shot at the field, and in fact this is true, but the unfortunate inherent shape of umbrellas encourages the rain to slip inside the crevices between one fried umbrella and another, getting the toes of the children wet, whether they are there or not. (9)

Tinkering mischievously with a reader’s expectations, Nakayasu swiftly mingles the textures of word-objects as nouns by using language usually applied to other categories of definition. An emotion, for instance, is portrayed using meteorological language: “Love as described by the heaviness of air, measured by a repeated rise in humidity” (13).

According to the Etymology Dictionary, “texture” derives from the Latin textura for “web, texture, structure,” and from the stem of texere “to weave.” The word “text,” similarly, originates from the “wording of anything written” with its root in the Latin textus: “Scriptures, text, treatise,” also sharing a genesis from the stem of texere.

In perfect resonance with its etymological origins, Texture Notes weaves epistemological questions about categories of knowledge, or how we know what we know about the world, culminating in the phenomenon we call beauty.

8.22.2003 ….People, pilgrims, innocent bystanders, drivers-by, tourists, and locals alike come and gather, independently and in their own time, in their very own time, to admire it. And enjoy it. To provide a physical, chemical, psychoanalytical, or textural analysis of it. To assign it values of beauty.

---

Sawako Nakayasu was born in Japan and has lived mostly in the US since the age of six. Her most recent books are Texture Notes (Letter Machine, 2010), Hurry Home Honey (Burning Deck, 2009), and a translation of Kawata Ayane’s poetry, Time of Sky//Castles in the Air (Litmus Press, 2010). Her translation of Takashi Hiraide’s For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut (New Directions, 2008) received the 2009 Best Translated Book Award from Three Percnt.

- - -

Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Ardor (Tupelo Press, 2008), In Medias Res (Sarabande Books, 2004), and a chapbook, God’s One Hundred Promises (Swan Scythe Press, 2002). Her books have been honored by the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America (chosen by Cole Swensen) and the Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry (selected by Heather McHugh). The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, she chairs the English department at a faith-based college in southern California, where she is also a novice harpist.

Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone by Matthew Shenoda

BOA Editions, 2009
Rochester, NY
www.boaeditions.org
ISBN: 978-1934414279

Reviewed by Mike Walker

Matthew Shenoda’s new book of poems dwells on the historical and contemporary cultural and physical landscape of Egypt, covering a vast expanse of topics and images associated with the nation. Shenoda teaches poetry and writing and is Assistant Provost for Equity & Diversity for the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts and while nothing in his biography is quite clear on his associations with Egypt, via his poetry it is obvious that he has a deep background and empathy for the country and its people. The teacher in Shenoda is also obvious in this work, as he even includes at the back of the book a glossary of many terms germane to Egypt he uses in his poems. Shenoda seems, beyond all else, excited to share an intimate portrait of a complex modern nation (with a long, varied, history which is just as complex) with his reader. That said, at times his writing seems nearly trite and his images appear close to something we’d expect from an Indiana Jones movie or Disney ride. Mummies, tombs, palm trees, poor native kids in the streets, all make their entry into these poems and at times I felt while reading that I would have a more accurate and clear sense of Egypt as a real nation—an actual place—via a Lonely Planet guidebook.

A deeper reading of Shenoda’s work though provides a more acute, powerful, view of Egypt. Although his writing is on the surface easy enough to explore, Shenoda proves to be a poet we need to take on with due care and a lot of time. His poetry holds riches if we are willing to spend the careful moments in finding these; he gives us a very real Egypt, and helps us understand how the most common images of this nation remain the most lasting in the cultural dialog most of us have with Egypt. Those rewards are powerful and worthy reasons for reading Shenoda, however, at times his emphasis seems a bit too pedagogical and less concerned with the art of writing. I do not doubt the images and experiences I gained via these poems are very personal to the poet but some seem too easily designed to convey a certain impression or feeling, and taken outside of the context of ”poems about Egypt”, many of these poems do not hold their own as interesting works of poetry. To give Shenoda the benefit of the doubt, his book is about Egypt, about a given topic and set to explore that topic in depth. It is probably unfair to expect additional merits from poems that are foremost employed to the goal of serving a certain topic and working as a cohesive unit. Still, a poet such as Jorie Graham can write about a spruce tree and also address a handful of other issues in one quick page while Shenoda takes at times a couple pages to sit us down in the desert and paint one single image.

I dreamt of this exodus
This wrapping back into
What had been unwrapped
And again beginning to see Home

thus Shenoda begins his poem ”Ecology”, which like many of his poems in this collection dwells on the process of being away vesus returning home, whether it is a collective home, a metaphorical one, or a personal one.

It is time for us
to dig
unearth the earth from itself

Shenoda tells us at the close of another poem, perhaps imploring us to undertake (in very literal terms, undertake) the greatest journey, the hardest exodus, of them all. Shenoda doesn’t lack for images, his ”buzzing telephone wires” in yet another poem I especially find powerful knowing of Cairo’s chronic issues with telephone service and the apt metaphor of telephone chatter for the many lives causing such speech in this sprawling city. However, sometimes I felt in reading Shenoda that the metaphors, the images, piled atop each other and didn’t quite have a clear direction in which to travel. Sometimes, his poems feel like a very astute and useful dictionary has been upended like a box, spilled forth its collection of words. I think the problem I experience with Shenoda’s writing is that I obtain from it striking, powerful, images but they quickly overlap and become too much like the image previous on the page I just turned over. I am sitting there, reading, and thinking ”in a place so varied and dynamic as Egypt, isn’t there more to speak of than old tombs, brotherhood, palms, and religion?”. Yet these are, if not the core themes exactly, the repeating motifs of Shenoda’s poetry. It feels something is missing, something both of modern Egypt and something of ancient Egypt beyond those things we all already know of this great culture. Yes, mummies, yes, tombs . . . but what else?

Perhaps though Shenoda’s project points at the problem faced in most any effort to revisit ancient texts and to write poetry about historical cultures. I have encountered the same issue when writing about Russia in the 1800s or about the Celts myself: how do you bring esoteric details to life to readers without dwelling on what they already know? How do you find focus germane to the nuances that intrigue you while firmly grounding your work in the period and place you’re interested in and making that geography evident? It is difficult to write of a place anew. For Shenoda, his work is really cut out for him as he is not only writing about Egypt the Ancient but also Egypt the Current: that’s a lot of space and time to consider in a slim book.

a child cups her hands in river water
knows too much about her history to drink

Here, and in other poems the image of cupped hands is used to represent, I think, not only the true, actual, cupping of hands to bring water to mouth but the broader need and action of moving water and other goods into one’s own control. Egypt’s history, in many ways, is a primary national resource, something that can be marketed for the sake of both tourism and associated economic benefits and also for the sake of national pride. Shenoda does a fine job in walking between the silent stones of history, the everyday lives of normal Egyptians, and the broad, grand, view of the nation that is on the forefront of its international relations. While in places I find his poems nearly trite in their stock images and his voice lacking in enough detail, I also find that his effort to be encompassing, as Shenoda is taking on a huge duty and taking such very seriously.

We run our fingers in sandstone,
Speak stories in rivets and impressions.

In fact, this seems to be how Shenoda himself speaks, how he writes. Using various touchstones of the experience of Egypt, he twists together a comprehensive story. The fact is that this story is lacking in places on details, lacking in plot if you will (for this is a narrative, though one composed of poems; for Shenoda’s stated purpose to be carried out, the overall function must be a narrative one). However, altogether, perhaps this isn’t such a bad thing: I can think of many books of journalistic and travel photography that are high on emotion, high on variety, but very low on real detail and leaving you wishing for more. Shenoda’s poetry provides a dashing view of Egypt and makes me want to dig deeper into the history and contemporary culture that has inspired his writing. It is a bit like looking at a city via Google Earth: you find yourself at times wishing to be down at street level. In fact, I plan to dust off André Raymond’s amazing, magisterial, history of Cairo due in part to reading Shenoda’s poems.

In conclusion, I am not awestruck with Shenoda’s poetry the way I was awestruck when I first read Jorie Graham’s work or Victoria Chang’s book of poems, Salvinia Molesta. His work simply doesn’t impress me in a way that I connect with hard and fast, but there are ample merits to his poems and in the depth and scope of his project. I would recommend that his book should be in the hands of anyone with a keen interest in contemporary creative writing on Egypt, North Africa, or the Near East, or anyone who has enjoyed Shenoda’s previous efforts. To the reader new to Shenoda, I am unsure whether or not this book is the best of introductions because its theme demands a lot of the reader and doesn’t offer up as much, at least in my own case, as I was expecting. Perhaps after re-reading Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone I will take from it what Shenoda intended, for now it is an interesting collection of poems that has some strong points, but simply not quite the caliber I was expecting given the grand scale of its ambitions. That said, I am warmed to know there are poets like Shenoda who are not afraid to tackle such ambitions.

• • •

Matthew Shenoda's poems and writings have appeared in a variety of newspapers, journals, radio programs and anthologies. He has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and his work has been supported by the California Arts Council and the Lannan Foundation. Shenoda's debut collection of poems, Somewhere Else (Introduction by Sonia Sanchez) was named one of 2005's debut books of the year by Poets & Writers Magazine and is the winner of the inaugural Hala Maksoud Award for Emerging Voice, granted by RAWI , as well as a 2006 American Book Award. His latest collection, Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone, was published in Fall 2009 from BOA Editions. He has taught extensively in the fields of Ethnic Studies and Creative Writing and is currently Assistant Provost for Equity & Diversity and on the faculty in the School of Critical Studies at California Institute of the Arts. He lives with his family in Los Angeles.

• • •

Mike Walker is a writer, journalist, and poet. His original research and other academic work has been published in: AirMed, Goldenseal, EcoFlorida, BrightLights Quarterly, the ATA Chronicle, Multilingual Computing and Technology and other journals. His journalism in: The Florida Times-Union, The North Florida News Daily, Satellite Magazine, Twisted Ear, and other publications. His poetry in: Meanie, the Church Wellesley Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, and other publications. He lives in Gainesville, Florida.

Oracle Bones

Review of C. Mikal Oness’ Oracle Bones

Paperback

Lewis-Clark Press, 2007

by Karin Schalm

One of the most difficult tasks of a poet is to capture life and death while invoking the musicality of language. By capture I mean more than portray or show; I mean enact. A good poet translates emotion into words, inviting the reader to share an echo of what was originally felt. A great poet transforms emotion into song, creating a reverberation that engages the reader’s own psyche. At his best, C. Mikal Oness is a great poet. In his first book, Oracle Bones (Lewis-Clark Books, 2007), Oness demonstrates a mastery of language that engages the reader on a strong emotional level.

Oracle Bones is divided into three sections: Divinations, Scapulimancy and Charms, with an introductory poem, “The Handworm’s Hipbone,” setting the stage as an exploration of “the dark”:

He pe sceal legge leaf et heafde

Under the overturned wheelbarrow,

in the dark of that insulated space

warmed by the decay of last year’s leaves,

is the dark of the dark and building soil,

is the dark of the ever-dampening.

And when I overturned the overturned

wheelbarrow, the dark flew out like a covey,

like sparrows, and having been for so long

so used to all of its damp and warm

containment, and having fled so quickly,

it left behind the decayed, or half-decayed

body of an ordinary bird, a black bird,

the remnants of its red brassards browning

beside it. The remnants of last year’s leaves

also lain by its head for so long as to be

blackening beside it, silent and benign,

as if sent there by charm to diminish

some inconsequential thing shamefully

placed in a dark space in a dark time

to become naught in the heart of the harrower.

Oness’ goal in Oracle Bones is to decompose the darkness, to diminish shame. He does this partly by letting it fly free like “a covey” and partly by placing it next to something more “benign, as if sent there by charm.” The first technique involves the telling of the story—liberating it from its dark, hidden space of silence—and the story Oness tells involves dark confession as well as transformation.

In the first section, Divinations, we learn from “August 1990” that the poetic narrator accidentally killed his friend and mentor, Don, in a tragic car crash five years earlier. The source of the narrator’s great shame is that he was driving drunk. This is the main event of the book, the event that less significant events—like leaves—blow up against. The poem begins with small details of the narrator’s brunch with Don before the accident:

And it seems now as if brunch were a dream—

a fourteen dollar plate of shrimp and ham,

champagne from ten to twelve, and staggering

to my car. What did we talk about? Our jobs?

It continues with the startling clarity and painful consequences of the crash:

I only remember this: a sharp right turn;

in retrospect, a dreadful look of horror

on a woman’s face; then time goes past; I wake

to a loud slide, a crash of glass; my dash

board spins; I fall against the roof, the road

through the open window; I pull myself

out of my car, I think; I walk myself

past Donny, past a full crowd looking on.

I was, I say. I drove. It was me driving.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. I understand. I’m fine.

And powerless—that’s what it is you know—

on the curb pulling my ripped shirt over

my head, refusing help from the paramedics—

I am refusing help for the last time.

Because years later walking down the street,

or sitting on my bed at night, it comes

to me that I have done this, and someone

is dead, and that a mother must still weep

just north of here; I can begin to hear

her now. I can begin just now.

Oness builds both meaning and musicality through repetition. When the narrator is “refusing help from the paramedics,” the reader sees how unaware he is. Later, he is “refusing help for the last time” because he realizes how much he needs it, and not just for his physical wounds. The mother who “must still weep/just north of here” is finally something he can “hear.” All of the talkiness of the poem slows down, inviting the reader to be in this quiet space with the mother’s sorrow. Just as the narrator “can begin to hear/ her now,” he can also “begin just now.” He is beginning the process of healing through accepting, truly accepting, his part in the tragedy. This is a powerful place to begin.

The second technique Oness uses for decomposing the dark seems inherently flawed. The narrator refers to placing something benign as a charm next to the dark. “The Handworm’s Hipbone” opens with a mysterious Old English quote described in the appendix as a “charm against wens.” Not familiar with the term, I learned that wen means “a benign skin tumor, especially of the scalp.” This definition deflates the power of the mysterious Old English as well as the enigmatic definition Oness supplies, and not (I might add) in a good way. The terrible beauty of the “dark of the dark” is trivialized when seen in comparison to a skin disease. Perhaps this is Oness’ goal as well, to render the darkness as “naught in the heart of the harrower,” to make it disappear, or to decompose into something indistinguishable, and therefore less significant.

Unfortunately, the book loses some steam after the opening act. The reader catches glimpses of Don, the master ship crafter and mentor, in lively imagistic poems like “Sorbies” and “Chisel.” For the most part, the narrator’s earlier moment of recognition—awoken by intense tragedy—dissipates, shrouded in references to fishing, boats, Beowulf and runes (thus the title Oracle Bones). By section three, Charms, Don has almost completely disappeared. In “Mentor,” the narrator claims, “Forgive me: I have simply forgotten who you are.”

Oness seems to drop the main event of his book out of convenience, though, rather than a true act of decomposition. When asked about the different syntax and approach in poems like “August 1990” and his Beowulfian “Sea Voyage” in an interview with Sheri Allen, Oness said that he simply assembled the poems he had written over a period of time.

The poems were written at different times as I was engaging in different formal projects, and then, like so many others who put together books, I emptied a large room and played several games of poetry solitaire with the poems, experimenting with arrangement (Oness, The Southeast Review online).

When the narrator tells the story of the birth of his own child, it’s a bit jarring—like pushing in a puzzle piece that doesn’t quite fit. There seems to be yet another dead child to account for, a child of the narrator’s. At the beginning of “In Memoriam” he says “All our relatives have turned to roses/in my mother’s yard, as has my child.” This losing and gaining of his own children is a compelling story, and definitely one I want to hear, but not in this collection. If these poems had appeared in a second book, they would have seemed cathartic. In this context, they seem simple-minded and self-serving. They make the whole enterprise turn sour for me, like a compost pile someone forgot to turn and pawned off as soil. For example, the poem “Struck” shows maple leaves alive and shimmering in light:

Under the silver-leafed maple, my house

gleams: inside, my one-year-old.

In any breeze the tree shimmers

wagging underleaf to overleaf.

A white light burns in a pure wind.

I want to believe that the purity of this wind is real, that there’s a sweet light emanating from the narrator’s house, his home, but I’m not yet ready for this. The wound from the car accident is still so fresh in my mind that I need more time to heal. All the charms and runes and fancy terms like “scapulimancy” (which refers to the heating of bones to produce cracks which are interpreted as oracular signs) feel like a distraction to me, a denial of the work at hand. Unlike the passages where Oness is great, where we are asked to embrace the oracular wisdom of his words.

*

C. Mikal Oness is a homesteader, poet and printer, living in rural Minnesota. He is the founding editor and director of Sutton Hoo Press, a literary fine press producing hand-made limited editions of poetry and prose. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Missouri, Oness has received the Toi Shan Fellowship from the Taoist Center in Washington, D.C. His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Shenandoah, The Colorado Review, Third Coast, The Bloomsbury Review, Fence, Puerto del Sol, and other magazines. His work has been awarded the Mahan Poetry Prize, an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award from George Mason University, and a Wisconsin Arts Board Grant. His book of poems, Water Becomes Bone, was published by New Issues Press in 2000 and was awarded the Posner Prize in Poetry by the Council of Wisconsin Writers. He has a limited edition chapbook, Runian, from Bergamot Press, and another limited edition, Privilege, from Cut Away Books. His manuscript, Oracle Bones, was selected for the Lewis & Clark Expedition Prize and was published in 2007.

*

Karin Schalm lives with her family in Missoula. She works as an administrative assistant at The University of Montana, rising early most mornings to walk her dog in the dark. She is a Master Gardener, a labyrinth lover, and a big fan of mountain wildflowers.

Water the Moon

Poems by Fiona Sze-Lorrain Marick Press
Paperback - November 2009
88 Pages
ISBN: 978-1-9348511-2-8

Reviewed by Z. Cody Lee

Every book of good poems contains moments that I have taken to baptizing “Catch-alls.” First, because they are the passages that get copied into our notebooks and journals, which, indeed, I once heard a poet call “catch-all books.” However, I tend to identify with the term more in its metaphysical sense, in the sense that these catch-all moments are actually catching/capturing all that poetry is supposed to do and, quite simply, that is why we extract them: the language is doing just what we had hoped language could do; it is doing precisely what we needed it to do—whether or not we can put our finger on exactly what or why that is.

I have been waiting a long time to read a book that fields questions of heritage, identity, and exile with such tact and polish. If I could stack a few of my favorite catch-alls from Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s new collection, Water the Moon, it would look something like this:

***

Those who perished

before arriving

build their tombs in those

who escaped.

(“Tibet”)

***

I imagine the void

of your solitude, crystallized instants

through which I observe

you are now at peace, ready when time ends.

(“Reading Grandmother”)

***

So what if the shroud of Turin never

soared, and sunlight confessed

nails piercing feet as rust?

(“Mysticism for a False Beginner”)

***

Yet the light is no mystery — the mystery

is how something moves to filter light through.

(“Steichen’s Photographs”)

***

What I see this book doing as a whole is very much different from what I see it doing page-by-page. What is accomplished in its totality reminds me of a poet who is taking a picture of her reflection in every windowpane she passes as her taxi speeds through town. And that taxi is bringing her to a place where she knows only one or two people, a place where she might or might not blend. Each photograph, in this description, later becomes a poem where memory and actual presence are held in the transparency of the glass as the poet tries to capture what is fleeting, what will soon be no more; for in each window so much is happening on both sides of the pane despite the poet; and what is happening on each side is both a part of and apart from the action on opposite side.

The manuscript is broken into three sections—Biography of Hunger, Dear Paris, and The Key Always Opens—which I will address here as closed units leading into and out of one another.

The themes, if you will, of the first section, Biography of Hunger, seem to travel in teams. The first six poems call upon well-known and easily accessible Chinese cultural figures: Mao, Confucius, Tibet, The Great Wall, Buddhists, as well as plenty of east and red evocations. And while the imagery seems to have at least one foot in Asia, the tone of these opening poems situates itself in a much broader spectrum, often charged and political—ranging from a tattered, all but empty letter between father and daughter to a letter addressed directly to the Chairman himself. Because the confessional, autobiographical allusions cannot be missed, these first half-dozen poems let us know who will be guiding us through the book and, importantly, where it is that they are coming from. We read in “Par avion”:

His letter translated nothing but instructions,

Confucian wisdom (One must not sit

on a mat that is not straight), from

father to daughter, two cultures apart.

The latter half of this first section begins to move away from China and into, most notably, Europe—the second “team” of images. With almost the same frequency that we encountered terms like “Year of the Monkey” in the opening poems, we see the language here peppered with French idioms and places—rendez-vous, mise-en-scène, nouvelles, vérité, Luxembourg Gardens—as well as other notable Europeans—Bach, Schubert, Plato, Beethoven. The energy and mood are also notably different in this half of Biography of Hunger. There is an urgency to explain (or at least to comprehend) large concepts like truth, mortality, loyalty, and loss; while simultaneously there is an anxiety present, a sense that the hard-earned knowledge gathered from one culture will not translate to another. We hear the speaker asking, “Can these things in my life mesh? Can they join?” In “A Course in Subtlety” we read, “I introduce my mother to my French husband. / Silence lost gravity and hit / the floor.” And then later, in “New Growth,” presumably the voice of the mother speaks, “Married daughters are strangers.”

The poems of the second half are just as marked by loss and powerlessness as the first half, only here that defeat is personal, whereas before it was political. All the same, as this first section moves toward Europe, we find ourselves appropriately positioned for the second section of the book, Dear Paris, which opens with a Cavafy quote: You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore. / This city will always pursue you. Here we are aware that this quote serves as both introduction and conclusion. In one way it acts as the speaker’s formal resignation that she might never actually blend the two cultures together from the first section—Europe and Asia. While, at the same time, a subtitle like “Dear Paris” calls to mind the infamous, infectious city of Paris, wherein the quote might be taken more literally at surface value.

The poems in this second section take place, for the most part, in Paris proper. They include an actual poem-letter to Paris, a brief history of France and the French mentality, and an ode, of sorts, to chocolate. The language and tenor of there seventeen poems avoid redundant and pompous insertions of the French language, which we might expect from a poet not as considerate and adroit as Sze-Lorrain. While all the while we are always aware of where we are, we are in Paris all this time, situated directly in the hubbub of French life. For the most part these poems stretch long and narrow down the page, with very few lines longer than ten syllables.

While being a section of poems set in Paris, there are interesting moments where the speaker finds symbols, moments, artifacts, and reminders of her former life. Be it in a Chinese restaurant on Rue Sainte-Anne where:

...the chef spreads a gauze

of soy-sauce around the heap, the circle

like a brush stroke of Zen calligraphy.

Porridge now smoking under my nose,

I confess an old habit — with a spoon, I dig

a hole, cavernous, right in the middle,

where ribbons of dried pork flurry out

and untangle themselves, like moist

brown roots expanding skyward.

Today, I still have no idea

how to eat porridge with chopsticks,

without stirring it into chalky ripples.

Or, again in a restaurant, we read in the poem “China”:

What — after revolutions — remains exquisite?

Paris has houses but here is not your home, says

the Maître d’hôtel frostily. Pas du tout, the beggar says.

No weighty words, he casts a legless shadow over the table.

And it is interesting that the element from the speaker’s old life in China—be it physically, genetically, or in memory—that reappears most often is food. This is most striking in a book of poems that opens, in the first section, with a poem that is, on the surface, about her grandmother cooking moon shaped snacks. It seems the speaker uses food, or perhaps more precisely, the energy locked inside food as a way of moving through time, space, and geography. Seven of the seventeen poems in this section are centered around food and/or hunger—“Eating Grilled Langoustines,” “Breakfast, Rue Sainte-Anne,” “L’Assiette dea Trois Amis,” and “Snapshots from a Siamese Banquet,” to name a few.

Where the fist section of poems deals with two cultures coming together, the second section deals with cultures coming apart, or being picked apart, boiled down like basic, “traditional” servings of food. The third section, The Key Always Opens, while not belittling the complexity and deftness of the preceding sections, explicitly takes on some pretty large themes: art, god, science, music, and literature. There is not a single poem in that does not openly call forth Einstein, Celan, Edith Piaf, Bach, Van Gogh, Chopin, the Guggenheim, Gertrude Stein, Diane Arbus, or Virginia Woolf, to name some.

Though often times the poetry is simply evoking a sense that one is surrounded by these figures but not necessarily interacting or communicating with them, they are there nonetheless, their presence is felt. Sometimes the speaker merely passes by a statue, or hears a line from this or that poet, or overhears and recognizes some classical notes. For example, in “Instructions: No Meeting No World,” we read, “Hang a bicycle tire on the door and Duchamp’s / portrait on toilet walls.” Lines like this, and others indicate a stance that perhaps we are surrounded by “high culture” to the point of gluttons. There are moments when we might hear the speaker saying, “ENOUGH!”

Formally, the poems here, in this last section, are more expressive of the poet’s abilities to use both fixed and experimental units of verse. The villanelle, “Along Ludlow Street,” for example, is an example of this. Or, “A Lot had Happened: A Five Act Play,” modeled after Gertrude Stein, shows the poet stepping away from standard poem-on-the-page poetics and exploring language through a slightly modified lens.

These closing poems are rich and beautiful and noticeably different from the poems of the first two sections. It feels a bit like the poet let her hair down and, in many ways, the poetry responds rather willingly to this relaxation. “A town sleeps next to a rising dark force. / This night whispers eternal,” from “Van Gogh Is Smiling;” or, from “Rauch of Celan,” the lines, “At dusk the dead soar on iron wings, / the living grope around a mutilated day”; lines like these seem to exemplify Sze-Lorrain’s ability to reach into metaphor and shake sounds from it like apples from a tree.

One could hardly do better than this amazing collection of poems. Whether they are read one by one over the course of a week or all in one sitting, they have the audacity to look back at us and narrow their eyes. Often I sensed from the lines what the poet states herself in “Steichen’s Photographs” that “Souls inside them are probably speaking.”

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Fiona Sze-Lorrain (www.fionasze.com) is an editor at Cerise Press (www.cerisepress.com). She lives in Paris, France and New York City.

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Z Cody Lee is a poet and letterpress printer. He lives in Missoula, MT where he is currently finishing a translation of the complete poems of Blaise Cendrars. See his fine press work online at www.gendun.com.

Arranging The Blaze

Arranging The Blaze
by Chad Sweeney
Anhinga Press, 2009

Reviewed by Edythe Haendel Schwartz

Chad Sweeney’s recent collection, Arranging the Blaze, offers a harrowing yet hopeful view of life in the 21st century. With keen perception, seamless shifts in tone, musicality, and figures at once precise and expansive, Sweeney probes the individual’s attempt to structure and sustain a sane and grounded life in a world rife with injustice and hypocrisy. And whether Sweeny addresses history, tradition, work, faith, identity, or concerns about the future of the planet, he does so while exploring the power of language to tell and to heal.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the short lyric “White” which serves as a map for poems to follow. Consider: “The foam of the sea is white // gypsum scowling the hillside, / the sun-bleached bones of crows.” Here we see land ravaged by mining, loss of habitat and life– not a pretty picture, yet the speaker quickly alerts us to the issue’s complexity: “White is neither yes nor no.” Perhaps the speaker intends to calm us, but only briefly, as he soon commands: “Look at the rim of your thumbnail,” suggesting we have had a hand in what has happened to our planet. Finally, “White is not kind. / Look at the cotton opening its seed.” The image recalls the numbing work of slaves, the stubbornness of racism, but also opens the possibility for growth and change.
Many poems in the collection bridge the personal and the universal. The long poem, “Genealogy,” offers not only a fine example, but also a clear sense of Sweeney’s breadth and technique. In the first two tercets, Sweeney grounds us in his experience:

Along the streets
the candelabra
in amber points of sun

reflected,
Car glass, arc-of-roof, antenna.
It is in me.

In line three, the echo of “ America The Beautiful,” foretells the poem’s direction. We soon learn of incidents troubling to the speaker’s family, incidents that impact the speaker still. The incantatory refrain, “It is in me,” works to sweep us into the speaker’s observations. Here, they reflect on faith:
Mother before she was my mother,
Sherryl hung
By her knees from the redbud tree

allowing the white Sunday
dress to flow over her head,
allowing

her hair scented with lye and faith
to comb patterns in the dust,
recording the day upside down.

Upside down, Sherryl sees “the smart white house of Mary’s father, who emerged in his Sabbath “black to cast / a look of such contempt // and hurry his daughters into the car.” She feels shame that stings into adulthood, and the speaker again intones “It is in me.”
In the stanzas that follow, the speaker shifts locale, first to the natural world, where he observes “Color roots spoke to turtle eggs // and asks, “Is it jade? Is it flint? / Did waves grind it / in a mill? It is in me,” then back to family, his grandfather’s death in a tractor accident, his father leaping “down from that tractor / to bury his own // boyhood, eleven years old and Irish, / fatherless, godless, barefooted boy[…,]” and finally to the role of art and language in human history. Celebrating his heritage as a maker, Sweeney recalls “the first hand to blend / pollen and clay against the cave wall, / mother //of Lilith, Harjo and Levertov, / mother of jasmine clutching at cliff ledge. “
Other poems that explore the evolution of humans as makers are “The Welders,” and “The Arc of Intention.” “The Welders” places the reader in Black Rock Desert, Nevada, where the speaker watches welders build a carousel. In tercets built with short lines and startling images, Sweeney creates the sense of physical strain, allows us to taste the grit – the welders, “angular on one knee, atop a ladder, amidst flame and their own private cloud // of dust or smoke.” By placing the enjambment after “cloud,” Sweeney alters the pattern of intonation and stress, thus stretching meaning. The poem’s speaker sees the welders as “magicians” who use their skills to forge connections. The speaker reminds us such connections have sustained us “wherever theory / or bone // needed binding.” Examples follow: “iron / among malachite, / Irish among their dead.” Iron must be extracted from malachite to be useful. People must be rooted in culture to survive and thrive. But there are costs.

scars beneath the breasts
where the coal train crosses.

As in “White,” we observe the scars to land and people. End-stopping the line with “crosses,” intensifies the word and raises the specter of burial, a subtle reminder to care for our land even as we use it, and to care for the people who work it. The speaker continues:
Civilization
depends on this,
this math
at the wrist, at the mouth.

Yes. Civilization depends on problem solving to build connections, be they “math” at the wrist as in welding, or “math” at the mouth, as in language. The cadence of this striking metaphor returns the reader to the welders, “laughing now”/ […] holding the cold beer // against the vein in their neck.” The carousel is built and running. The poem is finished.
In “The Arc of Intention,” the speaker shares insights gleaned from leading a San Francisco poetry workshop for youth from Central America, many of whom have likely known the trauma of war. In a series of melodic couplets built of clipped lines, some with only one word, we join the students in acts of naming, in the joy and challenge of articulating the world in a new tongue. The students write, “fixing the light of their gaze // inward / where the pencil is a scorpion, // a storm, / a glove. ” Again Sweeney contemplates the insubstantiality of language, the way a word has no reality beyond itself, yet insubstantial as it is, the word enables us to name our world. As the poem moves forward, we find the students at the windows observing freighters in the bay, gulls–
[… ] to name
this world with the awkward
words, the borrowed words,

yet they are naming,
and through the windows the city

rises to meet them
fire escape, goldfinch […]

The speaker tells us “they try on the new // syllables like oversized robes, /
some soldier’s lost boot,” as they let go of an old life and prepare themselves to negotiate what lies ahead.
In this way the words are tamed,
even loved, […]

Everywhere in “The Arc of Intention,” we find the joy of language– in the experience shared, and in the poet’s skill to tune and love the word.
“Dolores Park,” a San Francisco landmark, is the setting for one of this collections most complex poems. With diverse poetic strategies -- Whitmanesque anaphora set against one word lines, neologisms, oblique reference to writing, and playful spacing-- Sweeney propels the poem toward hymn. In so doing, he gives voice to the microcosm of the world that is San Francisco:
“Dolores street leaps from its map a living thing
crossed, relined, alert or livid eye,
Leading Tierra del Fuego to New York, barefoot and tired,
Old Man Road–

The poem’s speaker observes people on the grass, the grass itself:

In grass grown soft but not to itself soft
soft only to the woman supine in office clothes mutejoydown
and soft to the lovers lying close and naked despite their clothes
and soft to the carpenter who rests carbuncular in dreamsmile beside
his hammer
and soft to the shadow of clouds without syntax clean and empty of
water[…]

As the speaker moves us through the poem, we find each space reflects on the human

crisis below the image. So too does each word define experience for the people who inhabit “Dolores Park.” The poem continues with the speaker repeating small words as if awestruck:
The palm trees toe their hill
and now and now: and: and: now is: and: and memory tree
and material tree: each of a weight:
and the church tower says forever above the butterflies
and the street erupts from ideal and real equally
and cars grind up the hill against the chains[…]

Under the grinding of the cable cars, the poet-speaker reflects on his world, on the

made thing, and his own place in the cosmos. The final stanza brings us to the close of day:

After work, the hour of dogs:
a beagle hunts the tennis ball with original glee,
all else dim beyond that wet star:
life as composition in drafts, approximations […]

While “Dolores Park,” celebrates the word and the world, the poem closes with a stark image of the risk faced by our planet and its inhabitants. The speaker rests on the grass, observes the city, “in weightless ideal / in line and dome / like history to the safe, / soft as thistledown, / the bombs falling quietly into a summer dusk.” This poem is at once leisurely and urgent, joyous and disquieting, as is this fine collection.
What ultimately makes this book a must read is Sweeney’s ability to make us care about the private and public challenges of our time. And with exacting craftsmanship, Sweeney gives us pleasure as he speaks to our concerns. Both technically and imaginatively, there is nothing cautious about “Arranging The Blaze.” In taking risks to achieve a fusion of form, tone, and meaning, Chad Sweeney gives us a finely wrought analogue for the natural and human world of the 21st century.

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Chad Sweeney is the author of three books of poetry, Parable of Hide and Seek (Alice James, 2010), Arranging the Blaze (Anhinga, 2009), and An Architecture (BlazeVOX, 2007) and the chapbook A Mirror to Shatter the Hammer (Tarpaulin Sky, 2006) -- as well as the editor of Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds: The Teachers of WritersCorps in Poetry and Prose (City Lights, 2009) and coeditor of the journal of poetry and translation, Parthenon West Review. Sweeney’s work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2008, Crazyhorse, New American Writing, Colorado Review, Black Warrior, Barrow Street, Runes, Verse, Volt, Passages North, American Letters & Commentary, and elsewhere. He is working toward a Ph.D. in literature at Western Michigan University, where he teaches poetry and serves as assistant editor of New Issues Press. He lives in Kalamazoo with his wife, the poet Jennifer K. Sweeney.

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Edythe Haendel Schwartz ‘s collection, “Exposure,”was published by Finishing Line Press, Georgetown , KY December, 2007, and was nominated for the California Book Award. Her work has appeared widely in journals including Calyx, California Quarterly, Cider Press Review, Earth’s Daughters, Kaleidoscope, Poet Lore, Pearl, Potomac Review, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Spillway, JAMA, Runes, Passager, Water-Stone, Natural Bridge and other journals, as well as several anthologies.

Star in the Eye

James Shea
Fence Modern Poet Series 2008--Winner of the Fence Modern Poets Series
Fence Books(Distributed by University Press of New England)
80 pp.
$15.00 Paper, 978-1-934200-14-8

Reviewed by Zach Savich

James Shea’s first book of poems, Star in the Eye, has lots of lines that cross the wires of proverb and punchline. Sometimes, such lines come without context, like the bumper stickers of an odd sect: “Easy to cross the river if you are part river,” says one section of “Dream Trial.” Another: “I am the opposite of a solipsist.”

More often, such announcements accrete, forming coherent scenes from declarative statements that have discrete integrity. The leaps between such statements can be excitingly large—“That’s the remarkable thing about me. / I am not a hawk that can swim” (“Runaway Model”)—but Shea’s voice stays steady, moving through propositions with clipped glibness.

Despite its cleverness, this voice is less cheeky than thorough-going and frank, suited for the poems’ strange and necessary labors. “You are the performance artist / who charges people to leave,” begins “Around the Wind.” In fourteen lines, this poem has the speaker landing a plane on that you’s street, a distance it’d be hard to traverse without Shea’s gift for bursting across surfaces.

Many poems in the collection have similar catapulting starts, jolting forward from an initial scenario or problem: “I just realized my recent error: no space/time” (“The Yellowstone Revolution”); “I dropped my soulish thingy in the parking lot” (“Runaway Model”); “You are not free to enjoy the nostalgia” (“Panopolies”).

Frequently, the sequential statements that follow are stitched together with startling and restrained pathos. “I live once supposedly,” concludes “Mechanical Foliage,” one of many poignant sentiments Shea delivers with the flatness of transcribed song lyrics. In the book’s opening poem, this approach makes cartoonish elements feel harrowing:

They gave me surgery on my mouth.
My eyes were packed with feathers,
and my whole face was painted flat.
An expert told me I was probably a joke.

(“Turning and Running”)

Elsewhere, Shea’s pieces show off their seams more, serving less as translations of pseudo-linear monologues than as compilations of linked utterance. “Storms,” for example, seems written by a language student whose only fluency is phrasal, evoking the book’s frequent themes of language study and travel (“The yukata is beautiful. / These are eggs. Those are eggs. / Who is that girl? This is / my bike.”). In “Haiku,” Shea makes a self-portrait out of potential haiku titles.

Upon Kissing You After You Vomited.
Upon Walking You Home and You Pissing
in Your Pants. Upon Asking a Complete Stranger
about Our Situation. Upon Reading Issa’s
Prescripts “Issa in a State of Illness,”
“At Being Bewildered on Waking” and Realizing
the Haiku Poets Were Not So Laconic and How
Could They Be?

Such conceits are fun, though I’m most impressed by the poems that use accumulating compression to stab with mischievous, imagistic clarity, not just create continuity or collage. The forty-five short poems in “The Riverbed” do this with dazzling range and scope; I wish they were printed on coins.

Italian Riverbed

Gathered along the riverbed,
She walked among us
Like a cameraman
At a wedding.

Riverbed on a Leash

The leash moves
Around the sitting dog.

Origami Riverbed

A child made a riverbed
Out of paper.
Then he laid it
On the river.

Baby Blue

After the movie
About riverbeds,
You said, I wonder
What it would be like
To be married.
I said, Yes!

The humor in Shea’s collection makes you cock your head, not guffaw. Continually starting and stopping, the morsels of this long poem—I’m tempted to quote many more—have a measured pace, highlighting how clipped statements, for Shea, are less quirky sloganeering than expressions of his willingness to be dumbstruck. In mixing reticence and exuberance, his tone is pleasantly odd, but not at odds with tenderness and awe; it conveys an amped-up sense of earnestly “defending everything from everything else” (“Idea of a Mutiny”).

Without such earnestness, it’d be easy for a poet with Shea’s ear and wit to be a sort of solipsist, entertaining us with an off-kilter interior view, but, being the opposite of a solipsist, Shea uses these techniques to express old fashioned emotions in original ways. In “Poem,” for example, we see self-consciousness blossom into self-awareness as Shea considers “how the world protrudes out at one:”

I was sad I was not the young boy
who passed me each day the way

water carries a ship, but I was happy
I saw him and this contradiction

saddened me, but I was pleased with myself
for having noticed it.

The self, in Shea’s poems, is composed as it speaks (“Whoa, I said, you hear everything you say,” concludes “University of Air”). Such composition requires slapdash improvisation but also has high stakes for its language—I love Shea’s subtle mulling of phrasing, such as in a section of “Dream Trial” that says, in its entirety “No, no, it’s alright. // Hey, no—it’s alright,” reminding me of Frost’s experiments with sentence tones. The difference between those two statements is enormous. Attentive to how tones grind against each other, Shea helps us hear it, and stop, but not be stopped by it; his is a minimalism unafraid of wordiness, that doesn’t collapse on itself but folds into an origami boat that floats on to further observations and memorable lines. For many poets, such lines occur only at the beginnings and ends of poems; you wander between them waiting for the rhetorical microwave to ding and say you’re done. Shea constructs an entire book out of them.

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A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, James Shea teaches at Columbia College Chicago and DePaul University. His poems have appeared in journals such as jubilat, The Canary, American Letters and Commentary, and Columbia Poetry Review.

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Zach Savich’s first book, Full Catastrophe Living, won the Iowa Poetry Prize. He has recently written reviews for Boston Review, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, and Kenyon Review Online.

Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems

Ellen Foos, Vasiliki Katsarou, & Ruth O’Toole, eds.

Ragged Sky Press, Princenton, N.J.

145 pages, paperback

Reviewed by Jane Dobija

Clothes are the poems that we wear. The billowing skirts, sculpted suits, and scruffy t-shirts in which we parade around tell even the slightly attentive observer about our histories, our hang-ups, and our lies. The subject of costume’s power, universal and unchecked, struck the mother lode with Maxine Kumin, Paul Muldoon, Margaret Atwood, Billy Collins, and nearly one hundred more accomplished poets, who contributed to a new anthology from Raggedy Sky Press called Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems. In their allotted pages, these writers explore the meaning of dress as symbol, history, and personal fate. They do so with a wit and wisdom that makes usually bitter truth telling palatable.

Only the dullards among us read costume literally, as Janis Butler Holm proves in a delightfully humorous piece called “If Paris Hilton Wrote Poetry” that reads like this:

Cute.

Shoes.

Me.

Cute shoes.

The rest of us are all disturbed by the dissonance between what clothes promise and what they deliver. “Living in Bodies” by Claire Zoghb reminds us that the hospital gown, with its “… single knot/at the nape” … “was sewn/to survive only so many/washings, so much bleach.” Diane Elayne Dees, for her part, reads the message young girls might not see in designs borrowed from the military. “In my dark visions,” she worries, “pre-teens slog through the desert/in Little Mermaid combat boots,/ … they load theirM-16s.”

Some accessories and undergarments are examined here as pure symbols. The “thin black ribbon/of customary bombazine” is a “badge of ruin” for the husband and wife who sit shiva for their child in Daniel A. Harris’ “Attire.” The double entendre of Mary Langer Thompson’s “My First Pink Slip” suggests that being female might not be unrelated to being laid off.

Other pieces of clothing are symbolic on an historical scale. The “White Cotton T-Shirt” in Margaret Atwood’s poem exposes the disconnect between the costume of The Sixties flower children and its source. “It made its way to us from the war, but we didn’t know that,” she apologizes before admitting how this “vestment of summer” actually “had been washed in blood.” Maria Terrone’s “Unmentionable” recalls tragedy, too. “A frayed label says/Triangle Shirtwaist Company,” the speaker of this poem notices about the antique lingerie that lies in her drawer. It calls forth images of “smoke, locked doors and fiery dives,” as well as a final question: “Did she hang by a thread for days/to die, or survive...?”

A number of poets in this anthology find whole chapters of their lives woven into the clothes that have been left behind. James Richardson’s “Family of Ties” always are “…Listening at the backs of doors, frozen/against the walls of closets.” The silky strands might be remembered as disguises that have been cast off, but then, one is slipped beneath a collar “…and we are dismayed,” notes the narrator, “to find that that they fit. Just when we thought/we had changed….”

In “How It Is,” Maxine Kumin portrays a woman in mourning who uses a piece of clothing to renew contact with a deceased life partner. She dons his jacket, searches the pockets, discovers a hole, a ticket stub. “My skin presses your old outline,” she tells the absent loved one. “It is hot and dry inside.” The notion that she might have saved him occupies one stanza, but finally there is unwilling acceptance of the loss. “I will be years gathering up our words,” she admits from inside “the dumb blue blazer of your death.”

For Maxine Susman’s empty nester, clothes represent both a loss and a rite of passage as she watches her son “Packing for College.” Her ambivalence would ring true with any mother:

Part of me says I’ll do your clothes

Forever if you’ll stay with us. Part says

Here’s your own jug of detergent….

It pains this woman to see that, “What seemed a closetful of everything/squeezes into one bulging duffel.” Susman leaves her in the semi-emptied bedroom to contemplate the loosening of her maternal attachment, “… the come and go between us.”

Dresses of all colors – little black, red, white wedding – frequent this volume’s poems about women. The writers are leery of the power of frocks and gowns to which their female narrators frequently submit. In “The Blue Dress,” Deirdre Brennan considers Henri Matisse’s intention toward a female subject, whom he paints in “voluminous sleeves/and rhapsody of frills….” The writer concludes,

He had to hate her to paint her

Out of existence,

To cancel her out, imprison her

Within great folds of cloth.

Lynn Wagner casts “The Little Black Dress” as a suspicious bitch that takes over one woman’s life. Anthropomorphized, this iconic piece of clothing “goes to cocktail parties” where it “titters and flirts” until “Anyman takes her home/ … in his red sports car.” The next morning, the costume is cast off, and its wearer finds herself calmed by the night out. The little black dress might have been in charge of the evening, but the narrator did not object. The poem leaves her with “voices quiet,” suggesting that, while wearing the sheath, she could act out her fantasies.

The wedding gown is seen as the most insidious of all the clothing culprits. For Lynn Emanuel, “The White Dress” is a “shroud/on a hanger” and “an eczema/of sequins.” Like the little black number, the white one has a plan of its own. It waits, “lonely, locked up/in the closet” to take possession of the “bouquet of a woman’s body.”

In the title poem, “Eating Her Wedding Dress,” Eileen Malone examines this ritual garb through the eyes of a spinster at her baby sister’s nuptial feast. The ceremony is over, and the young woman’s gown rests on a chair where “delicious damp fingerprints” sprout mushrooms on its velvet. The spinster sister devours it:

I release my tongue, lick salt

…

sliding all denial and neglect

like colorless afterbirth

down my slippery throat"

The older woman is conscious of seeming the “old hag” but decides, “—no matter, I no longer fear/I might be what I seem.”

A collection of poems about clothes would not be complete without a tribute to their opposite, nakedness. Billy Collins provides one called “Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes,” in which he meticulously records the disrobement of the author unlucky enough to be bound by 19^th Century fashion. “…I proceeded like a polar explorer/” his narrator reports, “through clips, clasps, and moorings/ … Sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.” The journey leads, naturally, to both sex and danger embodied in the sigh Emily heaves when her last hook is loosened. To make sure we understand the risk the poetess has taken by discarding the feminine uniform of her times, Collins immediately shifts her wonder back to his readers, reminding them that he also has heard them sigh …

… when they realize

that Hope has feathers

…

that life is a loaded gun

that looks right at you with a yellow eye.

But if one can get past the threat, the loss, the personal shame that clothing carries, one might, as Anca Vlasopolos suggests in “Loosed Garments,” find solace in one’s wardrobe. Annoyed by “zippers become perverse/and buttons … out of reach of loop,” her narrator, definitely a mature woman, probes the depths of her closet to find something she might wear. During the search, she discovers things cast off, “an old silk shirt/…shining/like polished silver” and “an outfit you’d forgotten/…sending sparks.” She tries these items on and finds they fit “like skin,” so “your girth now seems/positively svelte.” Comfortable with a somewhat fuller figure that suits her full life, she opts for a flowing outfit and finds that it gives her wings.

The varied takes on clothing in Eating Her Wedding Dress will send many readers scurrying to their own closets to discover what material, for poetry and for life, lies buried there. The truths told in this volume surely will enrich the search.

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Writer and journalist Jane Dobija is best known for her reports for NPR from Warsaw during the last Polish revolution. She is the editor of Corridors Magazine (www.corridorsmagazine.org) and is at work on a novel about Poland called In Solidarity.