To Those Who Were Our First Gods
Nickole Brown
Rattle, 2018
Nickole Brown’s To Those Who Were Our First Gods explores the profound links between human beings and our animal kin. In language both colloquial and lyrically charged, Brown examines how predation and kindness play out on “this whole stubborn, / beautiful, fucked-up planet,” which is spinning toward ecological doom, pocked (at least, in America) by chain-stores and fostering “this clocked-in, bottled, florescent-lit existence.” In “A Prayer to Talk to Animals” Brown articulates the central impulse of the chapbook:
…Oh, forgive me, Lord,
how human I’ve become, busy clicking
what I like, busy pushing
my cuticles back and back to expose
all ten pale, useless moons. Would you let me
tell your creatures how sorry
I am, let them know exactly
what we’ve done? Am I not an animal
too? If so, Lord, make me one again.
Give me back my dirty claws and blood-warm
horns, braid back those long-
frayed endings of every nerve tingling
with all I thought I had to do today.
To Those Who Were Our First Gods focuses on more than what we’ve lost by estranging ourselves from the natural world; it upholds and elegizes “that iridescent song,” “the soft and liquid cathedral” of the animal’s body, which, more often than not, ends up wrapped in a black bag and thrown away. Reading Brown’s poetry reminds one that to be an animal is to be alive in desire and suffering.
Traveling Cluster: Poems in Italy
David Giannini
New Feral Press, 2018
Traveling Cluster, David Giannini’s latest chapbook, is an incandescent travelogue, an homage to Italian culture,
a love note to Italy itself. Giannini details his travels through Rome, Florence, Venice, Tuscany, Umbria and elsewhere, while paying tribute to the likes of Michelangelo, Dante Alighieri, and Federico Fellini. Giannini’s masterful craftmanship, his humor, and his varied formal approaches make this chapbook a journey as enjoyable as the one the poet took himself. Traveling Cluster always remains cognizant of the English fascination with Italia; Byron, Shelley, and Shakespeare all receive mentions. “In Verona” affords one such instance:
As if Shakespeare
could turn in
his grave after
Giampiero
our guide
tells of Juliet’s
balcony and her
statue removed
from the courtyard
because thousands
of tourist hands
cracked
its bronze
breasts
by rubbing them
“for luck in love”
and I wonder
does anybody
care who
now visits
her perch and
house walls
fucked
by graffiti.
Giannini quotes Anna Akhmatova early on in this chapbook: “Italy is a dream that keeps returning for the rest of your life.” How fortunate that the poems in Traveling Cluster allow one an immediate return to such a dream.
The Body as Passage
Nathan C. Lipps
Open Palm Print, 2019
Reading Nathan Lipps’s The Body as Passage calls to mind lines from Robert Bly’s translation of Goethe’s “The Holy Longing”: “I praise what’s truly alive, / What longs to be burned to death.” Lipps stacks and splinters images in a devotional poetry that seethes with life and longing. Grief, loss, and a reaching toward the sacred braid throughout the simple want at the center of these well-made poems. Lipps charts a certain type of spiritual loneliness against a stark midwestern backdrop—ruined barns amidst acres overgrown with black locust trees. The first poem of The Body as Passage, “Before Death,” exemplifies the strengths of the collection as a whole:
A bird in the kitchen
this morning.
It was enough.
A song among tangerine bowls.
Near the open window
atop the butcher-block table—
grapefruit,
a spoon.
Unequivocal.
Peering out into darkness.
For Sunrise.
Knowing
it will blind.
Too much.
Hallelujah.
Even the seeds.
Like many of Lipps’s other poems, “Before Death” proceeds austerely, with a quiet confidence, toward the ineffable. This chapbook, the first book by Lipps, surely presages strong work to come.
[GATES]
Sahar Muradi
Black Lawrence Press, 2017
Sahar Muradi’s [GATES] elegantly engages the dislocations inherent in language, war, and illness. Muradi’s chapbook deftly renders the fractured ruminations of a young person coming to terms with her father’s cancer and America’s war against her ancestral homeland. As the chapbook’s title suggests, each poem is a threshold, a point of departure, which is also a point of entry. The first poem of the book illustrates well this liminality:
The one that belonged to her
The one where the light hit for the first time
The one between our houses
The one I crawled through to sleep on his chest
The one the dog squeezed through
The one at three over the candle and cake
The one at three at the checkpoint
The one between the earth and the sky, the refrigerator with wings
The one where he met us after one year and was a stranger
The one at the park, the one at Up Park, the one at Down Park
The one that pierced my face and they pointed and laughed
The one that took them away from me in a tube and sent them back to me tired
The one he went through, hairs shooting out
The one she went through, blood turning up
The one we all went through to get to the blinking lights with the cherries
The ones we put up when she was born
The ones we passed to leave for good
The ones we paid quarters to get through
The one they learned the names of Presidents for
The ones they needed social security numbers for
The one I touched in the dark of my room
The ones we couldn’t talk about, ever
The one we had to close behind us to stay in, to keep neat, to not be tempted
The one we tried to jump and failed
The one he jumped and wasn’t forgiven
The ones in the books that made animals of us
The ones that told us who we weren’t
The ones that hurt, that swung and cut and rattled long after they left
The ones that kept flowers
The one I went through to go north, to go abroad, to go east, to find my cardinal ways
The one she went through too tired to find her way
The one they have chosen to give them purpose
The different one I have chosen
The one I haven’t yet found
The one I am looking through now with the narrow slots and passages unseen
Here, as elsewhere in [GATES], Muradi combines a finely-attuned imagistic imagination with a bighearted embrace of the ordinary. Sahar Muradi writes as original and as compassionate a poetry as one would expect from a poet who proclaims: “I will wear my wounds in chapters.”
Spoiled Meat
Nicole Santalucia
Headmistress Press, 2018
Nicole Santalucia’s Spoiled Meat capers along the interstates and through the one-horse towns of central Pennsylvania, past and present. Santalucia’s antic foulmouthed lyric engagements with everyday life foreground the madcap and the astonishing; as she writes in “Barefooted Lesbians”: “Just yesterday I fell in love, I fell on the sidewalk, / I fell into a pile of jackknives.” Spoiled Meat explores the homophobia and the misogyny graffitied everywhere across the suburban and rural landscapes these poems render so well. Oftentimes, the poems address how violence intersects with misogyny and homophobia. “Supermarket Blowout” provides a characteristic example of this intersection in its final lines:
The corn in aisle nine pops
when you pay
with your NRA Visa.
In the gun-shaped produce section
there’s a raffle for the 20-gauge-melon-
pump-action with a 26-inch barrel.
To enter, all you have to do
is show up and say, I hate gays.
Santalucia’s response to this hatred is a surreal, slapstick, and, ultimately, vivifying humor. Don’t be afraid to walk barefoot across the cornhusks, shotgun shells, and chicken wing bones that litter the floor of these poems; the trek will provide you with many consolations, not the least of which is a good old-fashioned belly laugh in the face of the pure products of America as they continue to go crazy.
And God Created Women
Connie Voisine
Bull City Press, 2018
In the poem, “Via Dolorosa,” Connie Voisine writes: “What I took to be a ticket / turned out to be some kind of evil sprite / who might fill my mouth with cement…” And God Created Women levitates throughout, in just this way, between menace and magic. Voisine’s ultimate subject is the beleaguered and blessed self; as Voisine notes in “Self-Portrait as Sphinx”: “…Strewn is me, / not human, not any one thing, who must / accept the awful answer…” The poems in And God Created Women are barbed and beautiful, twisting with an ache that renders them unforgettable. The best poem in the collection, “(Her) Middle Ages,” consists of stutter steps, snippets of conversations, non sequiturs, and sentence fragments that accrue into an overwhelmingly powerful examination of the bonds between mothers and daughters; the poem begins: “I know men who would // rape you. That’s why. // As long as the sea is wild.” Voisine’s poems pierce and rend; And God Created Women is the kind of chapbook that will wound you into remembering it.
Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019). Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America (NYQ Books, 2018).