Author Archives: Halubschock

Review of then telling be the antidote by Xiao Yue Shan

Xiao Yue Shan. then telling be the antidote. Tupelo Press, 2023. 79 pgs. $21.95.

Xiao Yue Shan’s first full-length collection, then telling be the antidote, reveals the power of speech when speech and even to some extent thought are threatened. This doesn’t mean, however, that the poems are vociferous or strident, for they are not—they are meditative, soft-spoken, their tone often understated. Quiet as they are, they’re made of memorable language and imagery, sentences that are deceptively straightforward, their uncomplicated grammatical structures opening up multiple layers of meaning. Many of the poems are composed as one long stanza, often with long lines and left-justified margins, but several vary from this structure, exploring other options the page offers. They approach form, in other words, as thoughtfully as they consider word choice and metaphor. The collection is disciplined, filled with strong poems that each contribute to book’s effect.

“the coming of spring in the time of martial law” illustrates many of these characteristics. It begins:

I could tell you this: marigolds are a night flower.
in the hour of my birth there were men in the streets,
some with knives and some between skin and some
peeling open buds with swollen hands trying to find
a home to hide in. my mother fingered a ripened
bowl of hot water, carving out upon its surface the lines
by which our family would occur.

The opening statement is provocative; on the one hand, it’s puzzling—why such a set-up for an apparently insignificant fact? But then, readers might ask themselves, is it a fact? Are marigolds night flowers? Any gardener will tell you no. Marigolds thrive in sun. To say that the first line is wrong seems simplistic, though, so it might be more fruitful to ask how a marigold is a night flower. Already, the poem is flaunting mystery. The content of the second line seems entirely unrelated to the content of the first, as the tone becomes more ominous, with the first line’s adjective “night” contributing to this sense, through the next several lines that develop this sentence. Among all the things we don’t know by the end of the second sentence—why do the men have swollen hands? why would a home need to be a place to hide?—what we do know is that something here is not right. As Shan is developing the poem thematically in this opening section, she’s also developing a pattern of imagery she began with the marigolds. The men are “peeling open buds,” and her mother is fingering “a ripened / bowl.” Word by word, phrase by phrase, the writing is exceptionally careful.

Following the speaker’s birth, the poem continues with a litany of deaths: a teacher, a neighbor, someone whose offense was to complain about food, a mother and daughter. Here, everyone speaks in whispers, and readers mustn’t forget the title, “the coming of spring in the time of martial law,” its second half undercutting the symbolic resonance of its first half. Now, it’s night again, and “a song about marigolds prayed through the radio.” Now we get a sense of what the speaker meant by her opening line—marigolds are flowers that ease the dread of danger during anxious nights. The poem concludes with a description of the children’s attempts to reassure themselves: “stay still, / just like you’re dead. we whispered to hear ourselves speak.” The people are not silenced despite their government’s attempts to terrify. Their existence may in some ways be like death, but they remain alive, and the poem testifies to that life.

The poem immediately following the witness of “the coming of spring in the time of martial law” is “witness.” Although its language is more playful, the tone suggests that the poem is prompted by some unidentified sinister presence. Here it is in its entirety:

there is a long time and a time longed
for. a spectator and a combatant, the order
dreamless between them. river on pause, an especially dry
spring. departing day clearing the table of broken bread,
the light being something one turns off so as to finally sleep.
then there is someone to commit the act and someone who cries
enough. you will know once you have heard in the neverness
a promising silence. what does not happen here clasps
the entirety to its breast. what is everywhere cannot
happen here. anything short of forever is a long time,
there’s never any news coming from the other side,
save for some enormous music
we all cup our ears to hear.

This poem challenges readerly expectations several times. The pun on “long” in the first line could suggest that this will be a more light-hearted poem, or perhaps one marked by nostalgia. We could expect an additional pun in the following line, “spectator” and “spectacle” perhaps, and if not that, then the object a spectator would seek out. But what we get is “combatant.” Are the two companions, cooperating against some unnamed victim? Or is the combatant forced into this role for the pleasure of the spectator? By the poem’s mid-point, a victim emerges, “someone who cries / enough.” Time then seems to stretch toward eternity, not as reassurance but in hopelessness. Similar puzzling manipulations of language occur in the remaining lines, with “here” excluded from “everywhere” and “forever” apparently contrary to “a long time.” Time seems not to pass in this place, in the sense that nothing seems poised to change, aside from day turning to night, which is why the situation, whatever it is, seems so hopeless. However—human beings are creatures driven toward hope, and the poem offers subtle hints that all is not lost. There’s “a promising silence” and then music, “enormous music / we all cup our ears to hear.” This poem doesn’t offer readers a specific situation to analyze or categorize, instead implicitly suggesting that “here” could in fact be, if not “everywhere,” then anywhere, even in those places where we reassure ourselves that “it,” whatever it is, could never happen. Shan’s skill with the sonic effects of language and particularly with lineation is evident throughout the poem. Most telling is how the reader can ponder this poem without feeling confused, can sense its meaning without absolutely grasping it.

Some of the poems in then telling be the antidote are more concrete, offering the reader more stability, but they all leave us knowing that there’s much more to be understood from them, more certainly than a single reading, or three or four or five, can offer. The content of this book is often disturbing, but the poems’ meditative approach offers readers their own space of contemplation, apart from our frenetically anxious time. These are thoughtful poems capable of creating more thoughtful readers.

Review of Emily Dickinson’s Selfie by Jennifer Poteet

Jennifer Poteet. Emily Dickinson’s Selfie. Bottlecap Press, 2023. 23 pages. $10.00

I don’t think I’ve ever had so much fun reading a collection of poetry as I have with Jennifer Poteet’s chapbook, Emily Dickinson’s Selfie. I don’t mean that the poems are simply funny, although some of them are funny, but that what Poteet is able to do with voice and style is surprising, impressive, and delightful. In this collection, each poem adopts the style of another earlier poet, from Gertrude Stein to Walt Whitman, from Sappho to Robert Hayden, incorporating 21^st century icons—from the selfies of the title to Trader Joe’s and Botox and GPS and Uber—in order to re-imagine these other accomplished poets. These poems are not the parodies we see so often of Williams’ “This Is Just to Say” or the variations of Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” They are each their own poems, adeptly incorporating the voice of the poet under consideration, so that, for example, the rhyme in “GPS on a Snowy Evening,” alluding to Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” is entirely different from the rhyme in “Two Women in the Snow,” an homage to Plath. The fun for me in this collection occurs not only because Poteet is so skilled, and obviously well-read, but also because the content of each poem is just right, clearly but subtly enough incorporating details from the biographies or content of their own poems. We see Walt Whitman, therefore, at a Trader Joe’s rather than the supermarket of his own poem, and we read of Williams considering Covid.

Here is the opening poem, “Gertrude Stein Logs in to Yahoo! Mail”:

A password is a password
is a password. If I could only
remember mine, could I.
I tried Picasso; I tried Matisse.
After three times why
after three times why
does Yahoo! lock you out?
Maybe Alice remembers
what my password is.
She’s baking something in the kitchen
but yells out for me to try
Toklas this time.
Alice, without whom I cannot breathe.
Tender Alice B. Alice be Alice.
Toklas works.

On its surface, this poem conveys an experience we’ve all had, adapting to the inconvenience of modern convenience. The poem incorporates Stein’s stylistic gestures, the repetition, the incomplete sentences, the associative logic, so that even if the names were not present in the title and poem itself, we would recognize this language as a reference to Stein. Yet it is also more than that. There’s a turn near the end, as Alice becomes more than a background figure who keeps the household running, as Gertrude’s feelings for Alice are revealed as so much more profound than mere wordplay. In an extended analysis, I could say so much more about the thematic depth of this poem, its exploration of inclusion and exclusion and the nature of socially scorned relationships, but a short review is not the place for that type of reading. The potential fruitfulness of such a reading, however, supports my point that these poems are fun and also serious literature.

Here are a few lines from “Two Women in the Snow”:

We hum. We’re schoolgirl chums.
We’re two jolly gravediggers.
Sylvia says she wants to melt as snow does.
As for the piles we make,
I think they look like brides,
eager to shed their white satin dresses.

And here are a few lines from “On a Winter Sunday I See Robert Hayden in Shop n’ Save”:

I come up short and as I ask the cashier
if I can put some items back,
he slips me a fifty dollar bill
and disappears before I can thank him.

And from “Emily Dickinson’s Selfie”:

I take a secret picture
after pressing the last summer flowers.
In a long white dress and Birkenstocks
I dance, in grass, for several hours—

Each poem is uniquely executed, the craft choices smart and controlled. Most of us could probably write one or two poems in the voices of other poets whose work we know well. Very few of us, I suspect, could exhibit such a range—our own stylistic tics would eventually get in the way. Poteet’s range is what impresses me most. Emily Dickinson’s Selfie is her second chapbook. I hope we’ll be seeing many more collections from her.

Review of Testament by Luke Hankins

Luke Hankins. Testament. Texas Review Press, 2023. 21 pgs. $16.95.

Testament, this small collection by Luke Hankins, his third, accomplishes what chapbooks can do so well—thematically the poems are closely enough linked to warrant publishing them together like this rather than as a portion of a larger collection, and each poem is strong, making the collection feel weightier than the Table of Contents’ list of fifteen (often short) poems might suggest. Several of the poems are clearly set in 21^st century America, not so much because they refer to specific events as because they are infused with a constant awareness of violence, especially gun violence. Others, though, recall grace and tenderness so that as much as we might be tempted by despair, the poems urge us gently, gently, toward hope.

Here is the opening poem, “Category Error,” in its entirety:

Hummingbirds are fighting
over the flowers in the garden again,
because beauty doesn’t make anything
immune to cruelty.

Imagine a world in which each
beautiful creature could be trusted—
and isn’t each creature beautiful?

The sleek, streaked coat of the tiger.
The iridescent scales of the snake.
The shockingly blue eyes
of the shooter on the evening news.

The last line is so memorable in part because it’s so unexpected. Until this point, the poem has seemed to be about the cruelty of what we call nature, the categories we’ve created to position creatures as “predator” or “prey,” creatures red in tooth and claw as they struggle against others for survival. Yet if we reread the poem, we can see that each line prepares us for the last, so that after we finish reading, the last line has acquired that sense of inevitability that characterizes so many good poems.

As is true with so many of the poems in this collection, Hankins’ effective but subtle craft choices contribute to the poem’s thematic resonance. The first two lines are about as syntactically straightforward—subject, verb, prepositional phrases—as a sentence in English can get. While the words “Hummingbirds” and “flowers” might seem conventionally, even stereotypically, poetic, the syntax, typical of fact-based objective writing, challenges any expectation that this poem will proceed according to Romantic interpretations of nature. Although the next several lines become more abstract, the meaning avoids becoming vague, partly because the language retains some concrete reference, e.g. “beautiful creature,” even in the midst of abstraction. In stanza two, the speaker is asking a real question—readers might be initially tempted to respond “of course,” but then think, “well, wait a minute” before they return to the affirmative. Finally, in stanza three, we return to concrete and specific examples, the “tiger” and “snake” perfectly representative of creatures that both fascinate and threaten. At the description “shockingly blue eyes,” some readers’ imaginations might drift toward the human, though others likely envision white tigers or other domesticated animals. Even those who think “human” here, however, are unlikely to anticipate that final line.

The final stanza is particularly musical. Hankins incorporates nearly every sonic device aside from end rhyme. There’s an abundance of alliteration: “sleek, streaked…scales…snake” and “shockingly…shooter.” There’s lots of assonance: “sleek, streaked” and “scales…snake” and “blue…shooter…news.” “Sleek” and “streaked” also form an internal rhyme. This music is exceptionally attractive, even as the content becomes much less comfortable.

This poem is not written to comfort readers, nor to reassure us that all, in the words of Julian of Norwich, will be well. Indeed, all might not be well, and readers are left to answer for themselves the poem’s central question: how can a creature who is a murderer, perhaps a mass murderer, perhaps a mass murderer of children, nevertheless be “beautiful”? “Category Error” is an ideal poem to open this collection, for it represents Hankins’ style as well as the understated tone and probing content of many of the other poems.

The title poem, “Testament,” is more personal; that is, the first-person speaker seems to be speaking of his own experience. It begins with a bit of linguistic delight: “I haven’t lived terribly well– / but I probably haven’t lived terribly, either.” In this, he resembles most of us. He has suffered defeat and despair, described as a “night-gilded chariot,” a type of vehicle driven by another who might have absolutely no concern for him. Nevertheless, he has also “just as surely fallen at the hands / of beauty, plain delight—utter / / surrender.” He is a human being caught in the throes of the human condition. This poem is exceptionally controlled, and at thirteen short lines exactly as long as it needs to be. Its language is tight, and the stanzas, all either one or two lines, contribute to its clean appearance on the page. Despite its content, in other words, its exploration of extreme emotional states, the poem itself is meditative.

Many of the poems in Testament are equally meditative. They vary widely in form, however. Hankins seems equally comfortable writing a villanelle or prose poem as he is writing free verse—and even the free verse poems explore form differently from one another. It doesn’t seem fair to say I wish such a carefully constructed book were longer, so I won’t say that. Instead, I’ll say that we should all be looking forward to the poems Hankins will publish next.

Lisa Fay Coutley, ed. In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy. Black Lawrence Press, 2023. 403 pgs. $29.95.

Lisa Fay Coutley has done a masterful job editing this new ambitious anthology of poems responding to grief. As every reader knows, grief is always complicated—because our feelings about the deceased are often complicated and because every death, as Hopkins so eloquently articulates, reminds us of our own mortality. The poems in In the Tempered Dark acknowledge the range of responses individuals experience, for let’s face it, not everyone who dies is a “loved one,” and even loved ones aren’t always loved absolutely or absolutely all the time.

And sometimes people or things are gone without being dead. Grief is accompanied by frustration, relief, guilt, despair, anger, bewilderment. So the poems here are more honest than many eulogies, but the anthology succeeds not only because of its variety of content. Stylistically, the poems are also diverse, which makes turning the page refreshing and often surprising. The range of voices confirms that this is an anthology, not simply a group of poems that could have been written by the same person. In addition, in a unique feature, each contributor has written a prose accompaniment to their poems, providing context for the content or thoughts on composition.

Contributors include poets who are far along in their careers and already well known—Diane Seuss, Janet Burroway, Ilya Kaminsky—younger poets who have published one or two or three collections—W. Todd Kaneko, Malachi Black, Meg Day—as well as poets who will be new to many readers. This makes it challenging to cite just a few, but it also means that readers of the book will be richly rewarded regardless of how many reviews they’ve read. Rather than focus on one or two representative poems to examine in detail, as I generally do with single-author collections, I’ll comment briefly on several.

Composed on couplets, Rebecca Aranson’s “Star Dust” initially looks spare, with its regularity and frequent space breaks between stanzas. It seems to begin in media res: “And then somehow a slipping away, as if wanting no one to linger with you / at the door making plans for next time. You had come without a coat…” Readers quickly understand the circumstances. The deceased was likely elderly, the speaker’s father, living in a nursing home where the speaker’s mother also resides. The death seems to have been one many of us hope for, “a slipping away” after a long life. This knowledge, however, does not mitigate the grief of the survivors, nor does it do much to soften our knowledge of our human condition. In its last section, the poem brings the reader into its circumstances by extending outward. Here are its final lines:

Grief is in you from the start and in you at the end
and though sometimes your days are flooded with it,

and sometimes your days are clear, we are made of it
as much as we are made of the ruins

of the first flaming star, whose far flung dust still spins
us into being.

Aronson here complicates that uplifting cliché, that we are made of stardust, revealing a deeper and more complete truth.

Victoria Chang’s prose poem “The Clock” also explores the speaker’s father’s situation. Though alive, he’s experiencing dementia, an inability to think abstractly that Chang initially explores through the symbolism of an analog clock face. Interpreting it is more complicated than we often realize, with the numbers each standing for more than one idea—seconds, minutes, hours. About two-thirds of the way through the poem, she introduces another metaphor, leading to her conclusion:

If you unfold an origami swan, and flatten the paper, is the paper sad because it has seen the shape of the swan or does it aspire towards flatness, a life without creases? My father is the paper. He remembers the swan but can’t name it. He no longer knows the paper swan represents an animal swan. His brain is the water the animal swan once swam in, holds everything, but when thawed, all the fish disappear. Most of the words we say have something to do with fish. And when they’re gone, they’re gone.

What does it mean to remember without access to words? Each of the metaphors in this poem reveals something about the nature of human thought, our ability to understand one thing as another, to see a piece of paper and recall an animal, even an animal we might never have seen, to see a numeral and know that it signifies both a word and a concept. For readers and writers, this knowledge that words disappear can be particularly disturbing, even as we savor the image of a folded piece of paper and its representation of an elegant creature.

Several poems in this anthology grieve the non-human, including Jenny Dasre-Orafai’s “We Lost Three Billion Birds in Forty-Nine Years.” The speaker attempts to visualize the three billion, a number that is, if not literally uncountable, nevertheless unimaginable. The poem explores some of the other absences that follow, as well as the possibilities the birds’ absence ironically provide. The concluding lines are particularly suggestive: “We’ve got so much food in the feeder and / the other animals can’t get their fill.” The other animals—perhaps squirrels or chipmunks or skunks, perhaps ourselves. These lines articulate a call to conscience for human beings whose insatiable appetites have created this crisis of climate change and extinction.

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s “They were armed with long guns” is one of the most stylistically unusual poems as well as one of the most overtly political in the anthology. It is arranged into ten sections, beginning with a single-line opening: “and that’s how everyone they shot, died.” We know immediately that this poem will address gun violence in America. Three of the sections are titled “I, Rearrangement Servant” and consist of words composed of letters contained in the title, for example “Where were you last night? / Sheltering // in the theater…” and “it is early to be dying.” Three of the sections begin with the line, “I fear for my life at the following places (circle all that apply)” and contain options like “Shopping Malls,” “Parties,” and “Landmarks.” The third of these sections, however, contains only one word repeated twelve times: “School.” Two of the sections are more conventionally poetic in their appearance. In one, the speaker is leading a class discussion on a poem describing murder. In the final section, the speaker describes a “dollbaby” belonging to a friend’s son, a doll named Pete that shoots bullets out of its hand and feet. This toy that should provide comfort instead introduces the child to that most American characteristic: a gun. “They were armed with long guns” is conceptually ambitious and memorable in its execution.

All of the poems in this book merit extended discussion. Lisa Fay Coutley has thoughtfully edited In the Tempered Dark, selecting poems that complement each other in form as well as content, and choosing poems that also succeed individually in terms of craft. The range of the poems taken as a whole and the accomplishment of each one create a gratifying reading experience.