Review: Karen An-hwei Lee's Phyla of Joy

Phyla of Joy
by Karen An-hwei Lee
Tupelo Press, 2011
Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom

Karen An-hwei Lee's third collection, Phyla of Joy, shines with poems of refined craft and subtle linguistic play.  Love of language, love of the divine and reverence for the embodied human feminine each together and in turn animate the delicate interior and closely magnified exterior landscapes of these poems.

Many of the poems include in their titles the words "Prayer," "Dream," "Meditation" or "Psalm."  In Lee's work, a dream, a prayer and a mediation are cut from the same cloth.  To wander the world with eyes and heart open to nature and to the divine is to meditate, to dream and to pray.

Sometimes, as in "Meditation on a Cenote," an observation leads to a small but profound self-discovery:  "Memory is a cenote or limestone pool/ where the moon's underground eye// confesses fawn-colored vapor/ or sublimates violet irises in a jar —/ the self's watery other, shyly adrift// as the body:  a cenotaph, water monument/ for the self who is missing elsewhere,/ empirical matter in a field of spirit."

"Preservation of Rare Languages" is a lamentation on the inevitable loss of once vibrant and dynamic tongues around the the world,  which women strive to keep alive by intergenerational transmission.

In "Faith By Hearing," she writes of "studying books by the light of fireflies,/ by ch'uang, the ideogram for window,/ source of fires paired and housed/ passed from woman to woman,/ inherited only from mothers,/ phosphorescent hum."

In Horses of Famine, Horses of War," a blind woman acts as a sort of oracle for a language that is as incomprehensible as the nature of life itself:

A blind woman considered the inverted thinness of cigarette paper, almost
fish skin or petal.  A man is passing on and no one knows his name.  Paper
with a name on it floats out of her hand.  A book is a closed green circle.  Or
a woman whose first name sounds like sycamore-fig whispered.  Or a book
is a shore.  It encircles hungry fish consuming these words.

As with the lyric entreaties of the old poet-mystics, language for Lee is an imperfect but necessary means of approaching the divine.  The answer to such entreaties is sometimes silence, at other times grace, as in "Psalm I":  ".... Young stars are only/ hundreds of millions of years old.  God turns on the light in her body,/ a soft lamp with a paper shade a mother uses while nursing her infant."

Later, "Psalm III" references the double helix of DNA in a stream-of-consciousness mediation on human nature:  ".... Open/ your eyes.  Double strands of inheritence.  Chirality.  Our nucleotides/ are right-handed optical isomers.  What is the probability of this in/ nature.  Why carry this urn of ash, yesterday's blindness.  An orphan in/ exile sketches a rose under a full moon...."

In the series of poems entitled "Selenographia," a woman's aging body is compared to the moon's surface.  In "Selenographia III," the narrator asks, "Is this the body observed without conjecture/ dripping on the smooth rim of her personal sea/ with whispering clocks of lunar craters/ formed long ago when the world was// a thread of light in the beginning?"

However, earlier, in "Invocation," a young girl's mother affirms the speaker in rejecting the objectification of her body in language, insisting on the girl's own fluid self-definition of her embodiment:

Your body is neither flora, fauna, nor brass.
You are not a mountain range.  Our voices,

ringing as one, are not the boat-laden rivers.
We are neither rain nor sorrow.  Speak.  I am 

my mother's daughter, four summers old.
I am a strong girl, fourteen summers.

Lee's  sense of the feminine is one of self-aware presence, as she hints in the opening poem, "Yingri":  "Inside me is a bridge, or the beams of a house" — maybe a bridge to the ineffable divine.

The "garden boat" she goes on to mention, atop "an old ground swell," could refer to language, the vehicle of transport between the two.

Review: Sandra Kohler's Improbable Music

Improbable Music
by Sandra Kohler
Word Press, 2011
Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom

The poems in Sandra Kohler's new collection Improbable Music seem to draw on decades of mindful observation, both of the daily dramas inherent in family life, rivalries, resentments, addictions, and the dramas that unfold on the world stage, conflicts, wars and the legacies that violence bestows to those who must endure it. In both these realms there is the specter of loss and the void it leaves.

The collection's first poems deal with family: intergenerational loss and estrangement and the tension between siblings who are now without the parents who once bonded them. Sisters spar with and comfort each other in turn and a brother wonders whether he can save another from years of steady, incremental self-destruction.

In the final stanza of the collection's opening poem, “From the Albums of Strangers,” Kohler writes: “The dead cannot be/ robbed, the living touched; home is the place/ you can't get from here, your body the naked/ fact that cannot be hidden. The loved traveler/ who returns cannot be embraced, only held/ at arms' length and gazed into, a mirror,/ impenetrable, remote, impossibly close.”

In “The Age of Departures,” the narrator observes: “Once we thought each farewell the end/ of a world. Each is; worlds end every day./ The unthinkable is the natural: we learn this/ as we did our first language, slowly,/ unconsciously, resisting, disbelieving.”

Personal mortality is confronted in “White”: “... For days now, a recurrent pulsing in/ my diaphragm nags, aches, sets me to imagining/ fatality; this morning I realize why it's familiar:/ a fetus' quickening. The omens of life and death/ are twins: the threat of death, the promise of life;/ the threat of life, the promise of death.”

In “Transitions,” Kohler lightens the tone by indulging in some nimble language play, while remaining philosophical:

The first day of hunting season: I come to

the gray window and bring my gray landscape

to bear on this one. Bear is not what they're hunting

but buck. The heart is at bay, the heart astray in the

deepest woods, lost. I am going to the river, I'll

walk till the day is found again. That will

happen when my eyes permit it.

Later in the poem, she simply states, “I pick up my gun, my life.”

The poems in the collection's second section are centered around the appearance of a heron, dubbed Heraclitus, at the same river (but is it the same heron?) The Heraclitus poems are leaner and more impressionistic than the bulk of those in the collection, but with Kohler, it's often the meatier poems that pack more punch.

In those grouped together in the third section, “Writing the Wound,” the personal and political converge in moments of urgency. 

 

In a poem about the outbreak of war in Bosnia, Kohler muses: “We are only what we can bear to resent./ Does any of us star in anything other/ than the dark dream of the soul, its/ betrayal, its secret history of irrevocable loss...”

In a later poem she observes, “Rain and sleep and bombs. Yesterday we bombed Iraq./ Blotches of cloud over hills, to the north vanishing into/ fog, to the south, thickening to slate. A small gray-haired/ woman walks up the path as she does every morning./ Wind rises in the bare twigs of the mulberry...”

In “Heraclitus in Eastern Europe,” Kohler describes a grim sort of “human nature preserve”:

Our century's mapped in the forests,

rivers of Eastern Europe: rail lines stitched like

a wound leading to the Polish camps, mines

studding Bosnian wetlands, unmarked bones

beneath Balkan soil. It's our nature preserved

here: wars and their aftermath embedded in

the landscape, imploding at a touch, a step.

In “Borderlands,” she gazes unblinkingly at the full horror of war, the personal devastation that is forced on the uninvolved, a mother from a nonpolitical family who “never threw a stone.”

…the head of my son

was on one of the greenhouses...

four hundred meters away,

the head of my son. And I

kissed it,....I saw a hand

in one of the trees, and

I kissed the fingers.”

Kohler ends “Reading the Hebrew Scriptures” with “... None of our models of what life/ can be mirrors its intricate living machinery,/ answers its raw cry.”

The poems in the final section return to the realm of the personal. 

 

In “September Song,” the tone is somber: “... The garden's// become a scrim, a facade, something essential lost: we// stay in the garden but Eden walks out, leaving it....”

The collection takes its title from lines in “Maybe Sibelius”: “In the dream we are dancing,/ while making love, to improbable music, maybe/ Sibelius....”

The narrator has absentmindedly put words to this scrap of dream-music, the Beatles' “I've got to get you into my life.” She's unsure what the words signify. She bickers with her husband. He says she's obsessed with the garden.

The poem ends: “The rain/ is a sudden burst, deluge. You are what I have/ to get into my life. You are what I have. What/ if, hurtling through these storms, we forget to/ touch, to make the gesture that will heal us?”

In each of these poems, there is a chance of healing, of connection, a question that is raised like “the interrogative curve” that Heraclitus makes “in the scratched geometry of reeds...” Sometimes the chance is embraced.

These are poems that look deeply into the heart of matters and often emerge with not answers but solace in what can at least be shared.

“September Song” closes: “Pour me a small cup// of the wine we were drinking the night you first realized/ my laughter would be the last sound that warmed you,// the night I saw lights flicker at the end of my vision,/ and knew loving you was the mirage I'd subsist on.”

Review: Jenna Le's Six Rivers

Six Rivers
by Jenna Le
NYQ Books, 2011
Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom

In Jenna Le's accomplished debut collection Six Rivers, the poet draws inspiration from the bodies of water she has known – from memory, from her mother's reminiscences, and from the collective imagination.

Exhibiting a rare natural ease with demanding forms ranging from the familiar sonnet and villanelle to the lesser known French triolet and Japanese haibun, Le imbues even her free verse poems with a certain formal sensibility. Nothing in her style is haphazard, yet the poems' narrative candor and lyric intensity keeps them fresh and vibrant and occasionally searing in their brutal honesty and self-deprecating humor.

The narrative trajectory of the collection can be read as a sort of bildungsroman told from the perspective of a second-generation American who achieved the proverbial dream her parents aspired to, for themselves and for her, at a young enough age to feel the limits of its promise. In "Ada Lovelace," we hear the tale of a young woman gifted in the pure science of mathematics who could not entirely elude the vestiges of poetry lurking in her genome, the legacy of an absent father once larger than life and subsequently repressed by a pact between mother and daughter that took the form of linear equations and geometric proofs.

The poem ends with lines addressed by a friend of her father's to young Ada on meeting her at a party: " 'Young lady,' he mused,/ "your mouth is exactly like Lord Byron's.' "

The collection begins beside the Perfume River of Vietnam, the narrator's ancestral home, where in the opening poem we learn that her mother once lived in a "brick house overrun by chickens."

The first river of the narrator's own childhood is the Upper Mississippi which flows through her native city of Minneapolis. In "Trick," she employs a simple but potent analogy to tell the familiar American story of an immigrant couple's attempt at assimilation, with its attendant longing and persistent alienation that is subtly transmitted to their American-born child: "America, you're/ the Halloween costume/ my immigrant father/ rented and never returned." The poem continues, "Dressed up in you,/ my father seduced/ my starry-eyed mother/ behind a tall hedge.// But now the costumier/ is demanding you back./ He calls our house daily,/ ringing the phone off its hook."

The next section, set on Boston's Charles River, begins with the poem "Remonstrance" that sets the tone for the sensual poems that follow with "Here in Massachusetts, brine scents the sky/ in a way that masks the small individual/ odor of your sex."

The section set on the Hudson River continues in this sensual mode. These lines from "Three Short Poems on a Common Theme" are pitch-perfect in the subtlety of their eroticism:

I couldn't sleep a wink all night: my brain agitated its solitude

like a washing machine/

filled with copies

of your immaculate white shirt."

Knockout lines are the exception here, though, as the collection isn't riddled with extractable gems that outshine their context. The punch in these largely narrative poems is in their skillful construction and their delicate unfolding. The surprises they yield are subtle but satisfying.

In the section entitled "The Aorta," Le draws on her medical background for inspiration, and in a poem about Claribel Cone, one of the first American women to attend medical school, she quotes Henri Matisse, of whom Ms. Cone was a patron: "Matisse described his art/ in this way once: 'It starts/ as flirtation, but it ends// as rape; it ravishes me."

Looking beneath the provocative phrasing, this quote seems to apply as well to the literary artist. Is Le thinking of the revision process, in which the roles of poem and poet, subject and object, are often reversed, and the poet in the end serves the poem?

In “Ada Lovelace,” the narrator speaks of her math tutor: “He seized up geometric concepts as though they were cold-blooded eels,/ sliced off their heads, and proceeded/ to dissect them with sexless fervor.”
 

In poems like “Art Lessons,” where “if there are no straightedges,” love, art and violence are again mingled: “... My dear// if I'm ever reprieved from hanging, we shall/ be lovers. But if I'm ever reprieved from love,// we shall be hangmen, and your silken voice/ the rope.”

The collection's final section, entitled "The River Styx," includes a "Hymn to Aphrodite," which closes with:

Teach me to stop trying to mix

shyness and love,

two substances that are as averse to mixing as

oil and tears.

In these bold yet delicately crafted poems, Le's unique voice and formal technical prowess present the substantial promise of an emerging poet with much to offer.

Review: Joannie Stangeland's Into the Rumored Spring

Into the Rumored Spring
by Joannie Stangeland
Ravenna Press, 2011
Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom

Joannie Stangeland's Into the Rumored Spring was dedicated to and inspired by the author's close friend, a breast cancer survivor, although I believe the fine craft and broad scope of the poems it contains will speak to almost any reader who has struggled, in matters both profound and mundane, and survived.  However, it's difficult to imagine a more authentic gift from one author to another (the friend, we learn in these pages, is also a writer) than honest, thoughtful poems like these.

They not only testify to the empathy a loyal friend can offer, but, in addition to their fine craftsmanship, they are filled with moments of unexpected beauty and flashes of unsentimental insight.

The collection opens with a poem of despair, as the protagonist is caught in the "cruel silk" of cancer's "Web of Days."

Recovery is excruciatingly slow.  In "The Hours of Waking," "... the day becomes more ordinary,/ a gauntlet..."

Stangeland writes in "A Crow Means Everything":

When the murder makes its own weather,
a wheeling dusk, that flurry
blocks what sun will show.
If there is one way to fly,
the crows will find another. 

Hope is elusive.  In "A Dream of Sound," "She breathes the sky,// listens for another story,/ the residue of last night's dream./ Wind shivers the smallest leaves."

In "More Than the Sum," there is a glimpse of acceptance:  "If a part of herself is missing,/ it is no longer a part of herself."

In "Tender, Then Bright," "What is no longer green is becoming green./ Next she will see the new leaves/ of the willows—so tender, so bright."

Interspersed throughout the collection are brief poems, each entitled "Intermezzo," in which the protagonist's husband and daughters bring home news and mementos from her old life and from the outside world she has been shut in from during long weeks and months of illness.  Her adolescent daughters are often described as "blooming."

Other poems describe dreams of returning to Venice, a rower's paradise, filled with stirring, almost taunting descriptions of the city's sensual delights.  The protagonist is an avid rower.

In the collection's final poem, set in Spring, she is finally ready to go back on the water:

The hull skims across the lake.
The sun is in her hair.

Leaves emerge, soft as moths,
shiver in the wind.

Spring streams around her.
She is blooming.


A moving labor of love, a wonderful tribute, these poems provide a window into the slow, day-by-day struggle against an insidious disease by refusing to shirk its starker aspects and by offering hope without platitudes.

In "When It Is Blue," Stangeland writes:

Her new body, built now for water—
sleek, streamlined—

a seal or a porpoise
(think of dolphins around the bow

as a schooner races along the coast
and the sails are full.) 


*Note from the author:  The author friend for whom the poems were written is doing well and approaching her five-year mark.  All author proceeds will be donated to Seattle Cancer Care Alliance.

Review: Marcia Arrieta's triskelion, tiger month, tangram, thyme

triskelion, tiger month, tangram, thyme
by Marcia Arrieta
Otoliths, 2011
Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom

triskelion, tiger month, tangram, thyme, Marcia Arrieta's first full-length poetry collection, opens with an epigraph from Jacques Lacan, "the unconscious is structured like a language."  Arrieta's poems seem to be structured in the way a language of the unconscious might be.  Like dreams, they merely hint at underlying realities, making no attempt to corner them outright.  Her lines are brief and her sentences are briefer, many composed of just one word.  One of the longest in the collection is found in the poem "learning to see," stating simply that "we must continue to believe in the magical."

Arrieta's poems have a spiritual component, not in a dogmatically religious sense but rather following in an Eastern tradition which found echoes in the West with Blake, Rilke and later the Zen-influenced Beat poets, now somewhat out of fashion in this increasingly materialistic new century.  Impervious to current trends, Arrieta's approach suggests she still views the poet's task as that of the mystic, to observe, if not for the purpose of intellectual comprehension, then at least of a cerebral processing of awareness and an experiential sort of understanding.

Her poems make no conclusions or value judgments, no pat statements, only observations, notes from the field.  They compile abstract objects into a montage of hints and clues that read much like half-remembered dreams.

At times the mystery of this terse, abstract style may confound the reader to the extent that it feels arbitrary and deliberately hermetic, in the way of a challengingly simplistic modern art piece or inscrutable Zen koan.  Not every line rewards and enlightens with repeated readings, but many do.  As Arrieta counsels in "Impossible," "binocular a feather./ pay attention."

In addition to Eastern philosophers, Western psychoanalysts (Lacan, Jung) and artists such as photographer Joseph Sudek and sculptor/architect Isamu Noguchi, Arrieta draws inspiration from modern physics, in particular Einstein's theory of relativity.  There are also several recurring motifs from nature, one being the "bear at the window," perhaps representing the wild, the unknowable, the dangerous.

In "the mysteries," Arrieta writes:

faraway in the land of imaginary all is calm.  we learn of symbols.
symbol the man.  symbol the woman.  all in the name of meaning.
all in the name of understanding.   the mountain in the distance.

We read there an allusion to Lacan's theory of the symbolic but also to the enlightened master, to Einstein the formidable genius, and even to the bear at the window, each represented by the distant mountain.

There is also a call to engagement with this world in all its mystery, both to observe it and to dive right in.  In the collection's first poem, "Almost Real," Arrieta writes, "read the sand.  swim in./ travel the sequence of numbers./ study the wave theory of light."

"in search of fireflies" ends with a sort of metaphysical math problem:

a gingko leaf is found
in a book of psychology.
equate the sunflower.

The section titles of this collection are often poems in themselves.  One is a simple semi-colon.  The final one is titled, "A Circle," and is followed by a brief poem:

imaginary lives.
invisible mountains.
galileo's ink-wash drawing of the moon.
nothing is isolated.
water.  rock.  flower.
fields.  woods.
trace the path.

The theme of unity emerges as, not ironically, the unifying force in this bold collection which feels equally comfortable with its experimental veneer and the timeless project at its heart.

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.

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.

Guest Review: Carol Smallwood's Compartments

Compartments:  Poems on Nature, Femininity and Other Realms by Carol Smallwood

Anaphora Literary Press, 2011

Reviewed by Aline Soules 

In our modern world and complex lives, we live in "compartments"–home, school, town, nature – the kind of compartments and realms Carol Smallwood explores, giving us what we know and questioning what we don't. "The Morning Warbler" may be seen "if one walks the bogs," she writes, "but does it sing in the morning?" What do we really know? Smallwood raises questions even as she leads us into a consideration of our own world with a direct, matter-of-fact approach. "Why Do Women Ask First about their children / when meeting other / women?" or "After a / hysterectomy did they package your remains in a / paper sack like the gizzard, heart, liver, neck, / inside a roasting chicken? 

Everything is delightfully jumbled, but beautifully detailed. "The Sewing Box," just like Smallwood's compartments, is filled with its own sub-compartments – thread bag, needle assortment, tray, and others-each, in turn, filled with its own details, whether a "myriad of spools," "potholder loops," or "a ring of white crocheted pineapples." She ties these objects together in the poem and also from poem to poem. For example, she sews the ring of pineapples on a "new J. C. Penney's case"; later, in the "Town" section, she gives us a poem called "J. C. Penney litany" with its "Flannel, Poplin, Wool, Cotton, Chambray, Chamois, Corduroy, Micro-suede" shirts and its "Amber, Indigo, Basil, Blue Abyss, Oatmeal, Olive, Espresso, Mushroom" colors, all in the "men's section" with "not a man in sight." 

The joy of these compartments is that they are all linked: the women's objects from "The Sewing Box" and the array in the men's section of the "J.C. Penney Litany"; the ants and spiders from the "Nature" section and the "Black Holes" from the "Science" section; and the questions that range through the book from "What'd happened to the Chinese damask / robe Nicolet had worn greeting the Winnebago's at Green Bay?" to all the answers the poet would "like to know"--"why snow's white" or "Why we know more of / the surface of the / Moon than ourselves."

Everything builds on her prologue-how we live between "the highest mountain / and the deepest ocean" and how we are all these compartments rolled into one. In this collection, the reader can experience a journey through our shared world, a journey beautifully guided by this skilled and generous poet.

Aline Soules, California State University, East Bay faculty member, has appeared in journals such as Kenyon Review, The Houston Literary Review.

Review: Thirteen Designer Vaginas by Juliet Cook

Thirteen Designer Vaginas, Juliet Cook

Hyacinth Girl Press, 2011

Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom

 Juliet Cook's provocative new chapbook, Thirteen Designer Vaginas, presents the author's 13 takes on, well, exactly what the title suggests.  Each poem in the chapbook is entitled "Designer Vagina" and explores this unique material for inspiration from a slightly different angle.

Many of these poems explore body image issues, the Western worship of youth and airbrushed perfection and the objectification of the female anatomy.  Others are labyrinthine body/self-reflections.  As in all Cook's work, there is wonderfully dynamic wordplay, an undercurrent of horror and little tolerance for the candy-coated comforts of euphemism but instead a tendency to err on the side of candor.  Visceral imagery is used to conjure mood, often a sense of suffocation or paralysis under the cosmetic surgeon's knife.

One poem sums up the aim of a combo "vaginal rejuvenation" (as the surgery is clinically termed)/lobotomy:  "... It's all about pleasing/ pink squiggles and tiny flightless wings."

The previous one begins, "I should switch to a robot model.  Snip, snip, pivot/ on oiled button mums.  Siphon out sputum;/ enter hot datum.  Flora approximated/ with keystrokes.  In this cube, I am perfect;"

In these poems Cook's signature motif of the "doll injection mold" is applied to the one aspect of anatomy the cookiecutter-variety plastic girl's doll explicitly lacks but which, for the adult woman, has nevertheless failed to escape the influence of the "injection mold" philosophy of shame for any sort of deviance from an arbitrarily prescribed ideal.

This chapbook is the first title from Hyacinth Girl Press, which describes itself as a feminist micro press.