Review: Margaret Bashaar's Letters From Room 27 of the Grand Midway Hotel

Letters From Room 27 of the Grand Midway Hotel  
by Margaret Bashaar
Blood Pudding Press, 2011
Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom

Margaret Bashaar's second chapbook, Letters From Room 27 of the Grand Midway Hotel, is an unforgettable ride through a landscape that has frozen in time one particular summer, seen through the eyes of two young women, Mary and Claire, and the man or men who inhabited this space with them at a time when their lives were altered.  The space in question is a haunted hotel in a "dead coal mining town" in which the only attractions are seedy bars, cemeteries, junkyards and abandoned train stations.  It's Bashaar's intensely original, erotic lyricism that reanimates the denizens of this haunted summer and makes us care about them.

The chapbook, from Blood Pudding Press, is an object of art visually as well.  Mine was bound with soft purple ribbon to match the fleshy-purple marbling of its pages.  It's always fun to open a chapbook from this press to see what flutters out:  in this case, a delicate blue heart and a sexy, creepy little booklet.  

"Sexy" and/or "creepy" can describe a lot of the poems here, though many are also tinged with notes of shame or wistfulness at the memory of a certain kind of loss.  Others affirm the strength of a survivor who has absorbed the power of the once-powerful entities she has eluded or defeated.

In "The Girl Who Lived at the Hotel," Bashaar writes of Claire, "When she tries to remember a name, the feeling/ of sun on her neck, her throat is suddenly open./ Water spills out of her mouth and it is the remembering/ that loosens her joints, makes flowers bloom in her palms."


Mary, "The Girl Who Kept Secrets," is as hermetic and self-determined as Claire is spontaneous and vulnerable:


She gets a hold on everyone she meets,
fingers gentle hooks, folds up tiny boxes,
whispers into all of them the secrets she can't keep.
She ties them up, stacks them to the ceiling in her closet.
She's six deep by now.
She holds the answers to questions under her tongue
before she breathes them into boxes,
before she learns how to forget them entirely.


In "The Unmaking," we are introduced to the mysterious figure of Claire's lover, the demon hunter, who "... wraps around her wrists and he pulls her along,/ he pulls her along and her feet barely touch the ground./ They go up the hill, up over the sidewalk,/ the stones,/ up to the water tower, up to the cemetery in its shadow/ and he leads her between the headstones and it is dark and it is cold."


In "The Leaving of It," Claire begins to slough off the influence of the haunting, viewing the hotel now from a more distant vantage:  


She is half way home from where she balled her fists and prayed
for a garden three years ago, but she was something else then, 
a linen thread, an unlit candle.  Her lover told her she was in his walls,
that she was a part of him he could not carve out and she did not believe him.
She is still not certain if he handed her an apple or a peach,
if she's been tossed out into the ocean like a caught fish
or if she is still on a boat somewhere, gasping,
but she has gasped so long she no longer remembers
what it is like to breathe.


But in the next poem, "Claire Visits the Old Hotel," she is drawn back to the place:  "... She could never separate/ these dark rooms from the summer/ and summer went to hell/ with its honey wine and monkey breeding."


It's Mary who makes a clean break with the hotel in the poem that follows, "Baleen."


... She laid the road out in
front of her and drove and drove until she came to an ocean that gnawed the
land with foamy white teeth and she waded out into the surf with the cat in his
crate in her arms, lifted him up over her head as the waves rolled over her, and
when she was shoulder-deep she dropped the cat into the water and he was, in
and instant, transformed into Eden's whale, fur sucked into his mouth for baleen
and Mary startled only for an instant.  She leaned against his bulk.


She pushed him out to sea.


The cycle's longest poem, "Meditation on Ichthyosaurus at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, PA," leaves the setting of the hauntings and their aftermath and speaks to Mary/Claire's growing sense of universal awareness, but perhaps there is an allusion to the demon hunter here as well when Mary/Claire addresses the ancient marine reptile:  "I have eaten you in every lifetime and yes,/ you have devoured me and now/ I stand here and we are both bone and we/ are each monsters the other could not quite imagine."

In the poem that follows, "Claire writes a letter to the demon hunter upon learning about the God Dimension," Claire seems to make peace with the situation that "There is no shaman,/ no road woman,/ no man reincarnated/ 14 times with hands/ dry as old paper,/ no surgeon,/ no vow that can root out/ the sliver of the hotel's wall/ I carry under my skin./ My heart has grown around it./ I think of you/ when I realize this."


The poems in this chapbook are variously sensual and introspective, mysterious and candid, vaguely lurid at times, yet always captivating.  Like Bashaar's heroines, her readers will find it difficult not to return again to the haunting landscape she creates in these poems and try to understand just what happened there and why they can't seem to forget it.

Review: Marilyn McCabe's Rugged Means of Grace

Rugged Means of Grace by Marilyn McCabe
Finishing Line Press, 2011

Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom

Early on in her powerful first solo collection, Rugged Means of Grace, Marilyn McCabe establishes a direct voice with the capacity to address the unthinkable instant of sudden loss.

She writes in "If Beauty Is Just the Beginning of Terror":

where we stop short and are gone:
like the way the wind came
one day after Dave died
in a flurry of bike and deer
and clouds built themselves
an empire and the trees
bowed down and roofs fled,
barns collapsed,
sewers spewed
and all was gray and green,
then gone too blue
and the ghastly sun
like an operating room lamp
on the glowing insides of the patient,
the place where no light should go.

Quiet.  Take the soft heart
from the body streaked
blue, white, red,
cup it like a bird in your mortal hand,
but it can't fly, as time does.
 
Time has the power to move on, the speaker implies, but the heart is in time's thrall and must wait.

At the close of "Marie," about Curie's loss of her husband Pierre, the narrator states:  "I am held by this luckless substance./ The luminosity cannot be seen./ It is the end of everything./ Tell me how to live."

In the next poem, dedicated to Mme. Curie, the scientist is asked, "What drives you, woman, to melt/ and weigh, melt and weigh,/ distill yourself (a glorious poison)?"

The poem that follows, "Burning Bush," begins by addressing the mystery of life on earth, once the exclusive realm of religion:  "The Genome Project guy thinks God works/ in deoxyribonucleic acid/ His wonder to behold."

It closes, "How we parse this profane world,/ find smaller, smaller/ sacraments,// holy fire,/ spiral of smoke/ from which we can't avert our eyes."

"Holyland" continues the contemporary speaker's search for meaning in a landscape which carries the heavy weight of history but is subject also to the indifference of a chaotic universe:

Be lost.  No place more perfect:  dry sea of tides,
vortices and waver of the ancient dead
home here on holiday, old rivalries and piques.
Stars on which to navigate shift against the bloody night,
some shooting swift as shots.  Everywhere I see
myself and its opposite in mirrors made bleary
with time and a strange silvering that comes of air
and water's persistent search.

The varied natural subjects of "Bestiary" allow the more playful side of McCabe's voice to emerge.  "Lettuce" laments:  "Such sturdy substance/ at my source, one seed,/ but risen rosette, now/ this labile, sea-/ like self, I'm silly,/ frilled as a lizard.  Unsolid,/ I'm salad.  What the hell's/ happened to my head?"

In this brief collection, pilgrimages for meaning are interspersed with more mundane anecdotes, like a trip to the dentist's office in "Open Wide."

Throughout, McCabe relates in direct and detailed, sensory-rich language a succession of earthbound, sensual encounters with the profound.  The title comes from the closing line of "Lac du Saint Sacrament":  "... This/ is my body, visible sign of invisible/ reality.  You dissolve me:/ earth's impulsive intentions,/ its inadvertent and slow evolving violence./ You are a rugged means of grace.

Each encounter permits a little more illumination, even if no conclusions are reached beyond recognition of the artist-seeker's role of transient observer.  "Signs of Passerines" begins:  "I try not to think.  All the things I've left behind./ My name on a white page, clack of my words clattering down./ The window:  taking it apart.  The center."

Guest Review: Patricia Lee Lewis's High Lonesome

High Lonesome by Patricia Lee Lewis
Hedgerow Books/Levellers Press, 2011 
Reviewed by Claire Keyes 

Spinning worlds out of language, writers require us to attend, to read, to listen.   The best writers are also those who listen, whether it be to the speech of others or to the messages they hear in the language of leaves or rocks or ocean.   Patricia Lee Lewis enters that rank of skilled listeners with High Lonesome, her second book of poems.  In this book, Patricia forefronts the art of listening as a dynamic act of connection.

“Jazz,”an emotionally intense poem, enacts a scenario where a 21-year-old musician-daughter asks her mother to “listen to that” jazz.  But, more importantly, to listen to her say, “I am pregnant and I am not ready.”   The mother is non-judgmental and concerned.   Desperate, the daughter asks her mother’s help. “And you knew that I would,” the poet writes.   They leave the jazz club and walk home, “parts of one song, one knowing/ remembering, one telling, one listening.”   The narrative of this poem is interlaced with imagery from modern art (“Blues like Picasso’s blue figures”) and jazz (“high notes on clarinet, shrieks of the horn”) which help weave the strong emotions into a wider aesthetic tapestry.

In “The Reader,” the poet again becomes audience, this time for a six year old girl.   Attentive, she “listen(s) for the clues, how she’ll write the story/ of her life.”  The poet knows that “it’s up to [the girl] to choose/ which words to love and which to fear.”   In one of my favorite poems, “This Day of Being Born,” the poet writes of a woman who “speaks to herself” as she cooks some potatoes.   The poem evolves into a meditation on a beloved son who “went out” one day but “did not return.”   In her first book, Patricia Lewis also wrote about her son who committed suicide.  In this poem, she admits that she may have lost him, “but things/ he loved carried him to her as if he had asked them to.”   The poem then breaks into a lyrical passage about the very potatoes she is preparing:

                            Lovely, smooth, full of life, he is in you, she sings.

                     From the ground we dig and hold, we wash and boil,

                     we put you in a blue glazed bowl the color of his eyes,

                     we thank you and we thank the ones who brought you here.

The simple, homely task of preparing a meal becomes a sacramental act.   Once the potatoes are cooked, she puts butter on them, “lets [it] melt across smooth skins, watches pepper/ float in light/ pours salt into her palm and sprinkles/ as her father sprinkled holy water on her newborn’s head.” Reading Patricia Lee Lewis we learn to appreciate the simplest daily tasks.  She makes such duties magical.

“Kayak” takes on more adventurous material with the poet becoming separated from a loved one in her kayak.  In this poem she doesn’t listen because she can not hear.   She rues this: “if your voice had carried from the pier/ as through the one remaing seagull’s wings,/ perhaps you would have kept your place beside/ me in the sudden storm.”  Becoming separated from the voice she wants to hear, she grows desperate:  “drowning/ is the only sound, the cutting off of air/around your face, the silencing of movement/ toward me now.” Clearly, she has more adventure than she wants to deal with: “the kayak learns the river,/ and the heart the rushing cataract.”

Patricia Lee Lewis structures this poem beautifully, employing the device of a series of “Ifs” which function to build the necessary suspense.   The narrative elements are kept to a minimum, allowing the emotional material to take the primary position.   She’s not a story-teller; she’s a priestess of the heart’s passions.  In “Standing By Song,” she employs her voice to engage some standing stones, possibly in Wales where she locates another poem.  The woman in her poem comes to a “kneeling place between/ two great stones,”   Once there:

                                          . . .  she sends her voice,

                   low at first, the way she thinks a stone

                   might sing.   It reaches something original,

                   strong.   She feels it more.   The stones

                   begin to rumble in response.   She sings louder,

                   at the lowest frequency she has.   How else

                   to speak to them?  Something pushes

                   from within the standing stones; pushes

                   through her spine to make her stand,

                   make her start again.

What’s remarkable about this passage is its depiction of the power of the woman’s voice, so powerful that the stones listen.   Their listening and responding reinvigorates the woman.   She takes some of their strength into her own being: something “pushes/ through her spine.”  She no longer kneels; she stands.  

With this newly acquired strength, she offers herself to others in “Leopard Frog.”   Once again, she structures the poem around possibility with a series of “What ifs”:  “What if you should find me/ on a windy day, my body curled/ around a red oak trunk, my head/ at rest on granite, my hands in prayer.”  She encourages the “you” to notice what she looks like, to feel her cheek, to reach her hand inside her pocket and not to be afraid: “do not pull back, but pull within yourself/ and listen.”   Listening to Patricia Lee Lewis has its benefits:

                                 Perhaps you’ll hear the echo

                         of my voice, leopard frog, acorn,

                         panting of the bear, and you will rise

                         and walk to where the world

                         is waiting.  You will say, I found

                         a woman in the woods.

                         I left her there.

The engagement the poet offers is magical, just as this book is magical in its essence.   Become a good listener, she advocates, and the world will open to you.  As it has opened to her in these artful, compelling poems.   

Claire Keyes is the author of The Question of Rapture, a collection of poems. Professor Emerita at Salem State College, where she taught English for thirty years, she has also written The Aesthetics of Power: The Poetry of Adrienne Rich, published in paperback in 2009 by the University of Georgia Press.  Her poems and reviews have appeared in Calyx, The Valparaiso Review, and The Women’s Review of Books, among others.

Hey, Guess What!

You probably guessed right, much appreciated readers, if you guessed that our Fall/Winter issue, Volume 3.2, is now available, just in time for your holiday reading pleasure.

If you haven't already, you can check it out right here.

And have a happy one!

New Issue Delayed, But Coming Soon

Our "Fall"/Winter issue will be appearing while it is still technically fall (astronomically if not meteorologically) but it will be a little delayed from when I was originally hoping for it to appear, by the first week of this month.

Aside from the server migration issue with the hosting service setting me back a full day's work or so, a shocking loss this week has made it difficult to focus on the work I had planned to do, and frankly, I've gotten pretty much nothing done in the last five days.

But as long as this annoying cold I'm fighting doesn't turn out to be the flu, with a little work this weekend and over the next week, hopefully the issue will launch by the end of next weekend, December the 11th.  It's going to be a pretty good issue, content-wise, I think, so I'm looking forward to being able to finally get it out there.

Review: Ann Cefola's St. Agnes, Pink-Slipped

St. Agnes, Pink-Slipped, by Ann Cefola
Kattywompus Press , 2011

Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom

In her new chapbook, St. Agnes, Pink-Slipped, Ann Cefola begins by exploring the transformational potential inherent in the ordinary moments of a woman's life:  having girlfriends over on a summer evening, kissing her husband goodbye in the morning, enduring a long commute to a downtown job, shopping, getting a makeover, reading a daily horoscope, celebrating an anniversary.

As the collection progresses, the subject matter grows weightier, in poems that deal with loss, grief, and the capacity of human belief systems to address the more elusive mysteries of human existence. 

In "Girl's Night Out," the child-free hostess of a garden soiree for friends glad to be relieved for a night from the responsibilities of motherhood imagines her uterus "untraveled as a new triple-digit Interstate,/ a wide boulevard Hausmann might have built,/ tree-lined and unpopulated, a passage I walk every day,/ sometimes fast, blindly; other times singing,/ My avenue, my very own.

In "The Boys of Iona Prep," who spy on the narrator and her husband's goodbye kiss from a coffee shop window, a daily ritual is charged with new erotic significance:  "Mid-kiss I catch his eye — unblinking —/ and I am no longer being but body, marriage no longer a distant vow".

In "Dance in the City," the darker voices of the narrator's family history won't be silent even amidst the most joyous moment of her life:  

At our wedding, the dead, close as my lace stroking the red

church aisle, chanted:  Lovrien's breakdown over grandfather's

affair.  Great uncle's depression-era suicide.

My father soon dead from drink.

All my life, I read their lives like so many required

tragedies, the twists to come or avoid.  We were like

that painting by Renoir, me creamy fragile in your arms,

you all black poise.  Music and color blotted out their voices

and we danced.  Anniversary after anniversary.  I tell

the dead to return to their tombs, but they won't,

they want our breath, they call it inspired.

"Teint Pur Mat," a poem about the seemingly frothy topic of a woman's lifelong romance with cosmetics application, hints at something deeper in the epigraph, a French proverb which is translated, "It's hard to be pretty."

In that vein the poem closes, "To swim toward grace, she knew what must be applied."

The title poem takes its name from a news headline, "Hospital changes name to Westchester Medical Center, White Plains Pavilion" and finds the formerly eponymous saint forced to roam the grounds, looking for new employment.  "Now she understands the dilemma of the dying:/ how they don't want to turn their backs on/ the sun-edged bloom, how one human spring/ can ruin paradise."

"Kerning" offers a pause for comic relief from the more somber tone of the collection's later poems with a defense of the punctuation-followed-by-two-spaces convention, comparing the white space they create within a page of text to "Twin beds made up perfectly./ Binocular lenses that form one image.  Miles/ of thought after reading a billboard.  The weekend./ Systolic and diastolic pumps.  Good fences/ that make good neighbors.  A swim lane's/ quivering blue lines.  Deus/ ex machina", exclaiming in the next stanza, "Save/ the double spaces!"  (For the record, this reviewer agrees.)

"February" speaks movingly of death in winter:  "If you must escape,/ the angel of late winter counsels/ my comatose father, do it now/ before the strength of green reappears.// Do it now before light floods day,/ before hope pierces maroon tree buds./ Before you see the unboxable blue sky/ and believe in beginning again."

"After" lyrically examines the moment at which the enormity of grief begins to give way to a certain curious haunting by what remains of the deceased:

Behind the opaque glass.  Not memory, not

bone — but unspoken balloons in a cartoon,

what would have been said, certain times.

We were quick to get rid of the clothes,

and she has not appeared in dream.

But the jellyfish that follows —

squooshes underfoot, takes in 

salt water and sunlight.

That harms no one.  That floats.

The luminescent edges of its circular spine.

Finally, "Velocity" depicts the moments immediately before death, when it still seems avoidable, describing the Kennedys in the seconds before the assassination:  "His square head, jacket bunched at the neck, her wide delight/ as she turns to the camera.  Joy fills their bodies like/ an anesthesia that will fail them./ There is a prayer that says// Shield the joyful."

Despite Cefola's ability to look squarely in the face of human vulnerability and the chasm of grief, the poems in "St. Agnes, Pink-Slipped" tend to wind up accentuating the positive, crystallizing the moments of joy, wonder and clarity to be found in even the most tragic or banal circumstances, but in a truthful way and in clear, graceful language, without resorting to the convenience of window-dressing.

Review: Jessica Cuello's Curie

Curie by Jessica Cuello
Kattywompus Press, 2011

Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom

Jessica Cuello's debut chapbook, Curie, is a biographic poem cycle devoted to the Polish-French chemist, physicist and twice-honored Nobel laureate who became one of the most famous women of the 20^th century.

Cuello's lyrically spare yet sensual narrative style is well-suited to the subject matter of a serious yet passionate woman who spurned frivolity and adornment and pursued her work with absolute rigor but who also loved deeply and was fearless in her intellectual curiosity.

Curie, as shown in these poems, was driven by enthusiasm for her life's work in chemistry and physics as well as by her devotion to her husband and lab partner, Pierre Curie.

Other pivotal events and catalysts in her life included the devastating early loss of her mother and sister, who died within a year of one another; her romantic disappointment when the son of a couple for whom she worked as a governess obeyed his parents' wishes to reject her because of her poverty; her lifelong loyalty to her father and her native homeland, Poland, for which she named one of the elements she discovered, Polonium; and an affair she had with a married colleague after the death of her husband which made her a figure of notoriety in the French press for several years despite her international acclaim.

Cuello treats all of these topics with an agile grace restrained by understatement.

In “Schoolgirl,” we read how the young Maria Skłodowska “stands for the Russian inspector” and recites the names of the czars while her Polish-language books lie hidden in her desk: “All my life there was a motion/ outside me, and under the desk,/ the saved page. I performed/ at will. My little arms grew.”

The poem ends, “Then it crystallized –/ our shelves were full of specimens,/ burning outward in the dark./ They could not be contained.

In the final part of “Casimir,” a poem about her early suitor's rejection, Cuello's narration dispassionately relays the young scientist's mindset as she embarks on her studies:

In Paris I arrived

without a girl's desire.

I used my memory

for facts. With a porous

mind I woke,

tin roof slanted

over me. Alone

I made my myth

with a cup

of tea and radishes.

In a poem about the miscarriage that ended Curie's second pregnancy, “Fifth Month,” Cuello writes:

The child had been living.

I knew her like the form

in a sideways glance,

like three words

in a whisper before sleep

not ordered for sense,

the way we know everything

somewhere: the salts we will find

at the bottom of the ore,

my husband awake

in the kitchen, stiff with pain

when my eyes open.

The next poem, “Pierre,” which evokes Curie's despondency after the loss of her partner and husband, begins by recalling the tenderness of earlier times:

Slow, careful

as words, you climbed

the steps our wedding night.

Fingers cradled the railing as I would cradle

your head – no one else

feels. Has ever felt.

I wish I had no daughters,

no work. No garish daffodils

in a cup of water.

I was an eye climbing the stairs.

My eye saw out of my chest,

my head heavy

with emptiness.

“Rented Room,” a poem about the affair with Paul Langevin, Marie's colleague, ends, “Yesterday, I asked myself/ as though you were a compound/ why his body?/ My first answer: to merge.// But my second: to annihilate/ the self. I hate/ that you must plan your life.”

The cycle's final poem, “Last Day: July 4, 1934,” describes the hospital bed where Curie was nursed by her younger daughter, whom she had loved but never fully understood because of their dissimilar personalities:

Her fingers turn the sheets

and the static coat

my body walked in everywhere

loosens. Our bodies hum

together in a way

they didn't in our lived lives.

The metal bed glints

like Gallium warmed in hands.

The poems in Curie often begin by holding their treasure at a distance from the unfocused eye, but as the reader is drawn closer, she catches first a glint and then a growing sense of an underlying radiance. I wish more poets wrote like Jessica Cuello does here.