ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.Com
Chapbook Reviews
It has been said that no one reviews chapbooks; but much of the best experimental writing begins life in Chapbooks. So Chicagopostmodernpoetry.com has decided to review chapbooks. This is an open review page, hence in you want to submit a chapbook review please do so and I will post it.
Chapbooks are the great oxygen for poetry. In these little saddle stitched books much of the new writing in the USA and around the world first sees the printed page. I have chosen the following three chapbooks to review mostly because I just finished them and they are by poets who interest me.
Regards
Ray Bianchi
Spring 2004
Sĭn ∙thĕt' ∙ ĭk by Joe Ahearn
Sin thet ik, is a chapbook that began from a series of email conversations between poets and friends in Dallas, Texas. as a person who was intimately involved in that conversation these poems have a particular resonance for me as a poet. The idea of Synthetic poetry was a response first posited by the poet Elana Abernathy who asked about the Post-Language poets how do we recombine the personal into a poetics that is very much about the work and seems to run from the personal the intimate. This began a series of conversations that in the end led to growth from a remarkable group of poets. Joe Ahearn is an accomplished poet he has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has been a poet in residence at Squaw Valley and he brings a rawness to his writing that coupled with elegance that is not found among many of today's controlled and boring poets who want to either shock or get published. These are poems that make you think and also corrode any sense of feeling comfortable. The influence of Pound is evident in this work and the inclusion of a poem that is false index, a poem based on the Pisan Cantos and many other challenging works makes this chapbook important and interesting. A good example of this is the first poem in the chapbook,
Killing Floor,
"I eats the food you fried
I wipes its hands on its shirt
I stab itself in the belly"
This is what this work does it stabs you in the belly and when all your blood drains out of your body you realize that you have read great poems and you are empty and full again. Joe Ahearn has a new book as well that is out from Firewheel Editions.
Seeing Eye Books, 8128 Airlane Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90045 USA
In contrast to Joe Ahearns' Poundian control, Lawless, By Jen Hofer is a virtual poetic Amazonic selva, wild and full of images, power and changes that make one wish there was a joke section in the middle and a place to rest, this work is powerful and upsetting at the same time and this makes it also challenging and excellent.
One example
" of present damage of lack of damage
no expectation, no exempt
dancing lessons brittle
no moment, no movement
in exhaustible pirouettes at a graveside
in the sense that they are evidence of the directions bullets may be taking
This is writing that asks allot of you and also opens up new ways language can be understood. Jen Hofer is at the edge of cutting in terms of poets. Sometimes her work moves so far over the edge that you feel as if you are riding a motorcycle on a tightrope at 1000 miles an hour but sometimes this is good. She always makes work new but this chapbook nears the kind of excellence we find only in later older work. There are echoes of Susan Howe, Pound, Paz and many other pillars here with a unique sense of self that make this a work worth reading and wishing it has a wider audience.
Notebook. Knife, Mentholatum. by Simone Muench
There are poets who when you first read them are not intriguing but you find bits that work. I found this to be true with Cummings and Roethke poets with whom I do not share any affinity with but have come to respect in their own space, the way I as a Catholic can respect a great Synagogue or Protestant Church, it is not home, it is not comfortable but it has an integrity which is attractive on its own merits.
Notebook. Knife. Mentholatum. by Simone Muench has that kind of feeling. The first thing one notices in this chapbook is the use of form, couplets, line breaks, titles that actually integrate with the poem. " of ache and tomorrow; or bone crack for having moved so fast" we are not talking about work here that is not thought through and the sense of a poet who is writing well crafted verse, not collage, not language art but verse is here in this work. There is an Eliotonian sense of old and musty in the work but it is also nostalgic as well.
Jack Gilbert said once that " if you really want to be a great poet
write love poems, if anyone publishes them, you are great poet? " Ms Muench does
not write love poems but she does write Poetry, with a capital "P" . Some of the
portions are a little contrived like the use of French titles for example, but then
just when I want to throw the chapbook against the wall, a line, a couplet and
juxtaposition pulls me back in and I go on with the Via Dolorosa of this work
with all its falls has merit and has parts that are interesting. " here taste this, be this"
Autumn 2004
Ugly Duckling Presse (this is a little affected, but it is from New York,) needs to be supported in everyway
possible their books do honor to poetry, the quality of the printing, and design is extraordinary in the
true sense of the word. Mark Lamoureux, author of City/Temple has created a small chapbook that
holds more poetry than allot of 200 page tomes to poetic self-absorption.
These titleless poems invite you in, and then slice your fingers like a paper cut that stings and yearns to
be salved. The chapbook is a journey like a great Issac Asimov novel full of innovation and word usage
that opens up and closes at will.
for example:
"Burst heart
screamed out
through the spaces
between his teeth
& the corners of
his eyes"
This work is honest bracing "faces & faces & the flat effigies of faces" tears at you and when you finish this small book it leaves you empty wanting a longer tome to consume slowly.
So when can we expect more?
6x6 is really a magazine, but I had to review it because it is so
innovative and such an important work that is filled with poets whom,
I think are the future calling.
Nicole Andonov
Begins this work, and she uses words, language and the white of the page in such a way that I kept wondering if I was reading her work or George Oppen made female and Brooklynite.
"The south wind blows
whispers
through the cracks of the earth"
The use of language here while poetic is accessible and acts in this chapbook like a great overture to the rest of the work. The work is innovative but not in a way that makes you think you have been trapped in a cave with the staff of Small Press Distribution peddling archania and books that are as enjoyable as having your hairy back waxed.
Karen Weiser
Is an established New
York poet, which immediately makes this Chicagoan question if she is really any good or
if she is just good at hanging out with other
poets. Ms Weiser however has done something in this chapbook, she has
created a first act that is like the beginning of Siegfried or The Ring
foreboding and dark.
" The actual doorways are blessed
Lining up in parade of formations of
Arms, unidirectional and opening out
The ribcage of the house in swift strokes"
This small poems, sit on a large field of white and are like toxic chemicals burning through our apathy. I felt more than once that I was being personally challenged, like in the old Robert Conrad Ever Ready battery advertisement to "knock it off" If you dare. These poems are like a poke in the eye, but in a good way.
Yuko Otomo
Then takes us into a caramel world of tough prose poetics that required me to stop, look and listen. The French titles coupled with Asian inferences makes for a Poundian esthetic that is refreshingly un-accessible. These poems require thought and reflection, they do not make it easy and this is appreciated,
"standing in the rainy park
looking and waiting for Love
placing a tiny spoon &
its trembling faintly metallic element"
This work is many things at one time and is worth the sitdown.
Guillermo Juan Parra
"I don't write much
here in Caracas
mainly grow earth
fluent/dust
sleep my sentences
collected pages
typed on leaves
of elegance"
Fusion poetry, both Latin American, American and more is what Parra has done here these are innovative works that do not compromise the poet's sense of what is poetry. He has turned words into chant like verses that are hard to succeed with, Parra does succeed and creates the apex of this whole chapbook.
Arielle Guy
This sounds like a poet's name;
you can picture it, cigarettes,
dark clothes,
salvation army furniture
and an i-book of course.
" Trampling underfoot the hidden noose, absent
From all the pictures"
These poems are spread out all over the page the way estates in rich neighborhoods fill up huge lots; space is easy. The poems are not crowded like a New York neighborhood they are more like West Texas, spread out and hard to get to tons of emjambments and indentations that make the work, jarring and interesting. She spreads out the work and the range is great but I want more now------------
Jenna Cardinale
Nice Italian name- " a mouth rearranges" these are traditional stanzaed poems, but there is more to them than meets the eye. The texture is good and the use of language makes them interesting but controlled.
I wish they were a little less controlled so I could see the poems behind these poems. In the whole 6x6 # 8 is a triumph and it is very interesting and worth the sit down just make sure you have an entire afternoon to digest what is here.
<Answer Tag Home> Press
We are now back in the Midwest... too much New York is not good for this corn pone, pork chop reviewer.
Laura Sims is a rising star and a poet who brings out things that poetically don't always work, but the attempt makes them work. Bank Book is a Chapbook of poems written at her job at a bank location in Madison, WI where she lives. The book is published by <Answer Tag Home Press> press and is beautiful.
These poems are like a treasure map as you race across the page looking for the next clue and on and on.
"What price is this
a price
At all?"
Read these poems out loud and listen to the music of them they are better aloud and listened to a few times over. There is an inherent music and structure to them that makes this chapbook like a human figure with its parts deconstructed and ripped open to see what makes up the canvas.
g o n g press (email: g-o-n-g@earthlink.net)
What else can I say about Stacy Szymaszek- when the next epic poem is published it will have to come from her pen. The recurring nautical in her work is fascinating echoing Olson the way that good red wine echoes oak barrels.
" Bottoms of great lakes
feel each shoreline
packed with our industry
sand once received
bare feet of the huddle
around a boiling kettle
pillars rise from the water
more swimmers land"
Stacy's work is filled with lines that many poets wish they had written; they are lyric, but not traditional, and have a music that is unique, the way that blues must have sounded the first time it was played for an audience, something really new. This chapbook is a work written as an answer to Peter Kropotkin's work Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution it is said that Stacy was in commotion when she wrote it- well that commotion is now seated firmly in my poetic mind churning.
