Boys by Daniel Edward Moore

Review by Lauren Davis

“…where a man’s wound is, that is where his genius will be. Wherever the wound appears in our psyches, whether from alcoholic father, shaming mother, shaming father, abusing mother, whether it stems from isolation, disability, or disease, that is precisely the place for which we will give our major gift to the community.”
― Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book about Men

The cover art of Daniel Edward Moore’s debut chapbook Boys will make you instinctively take a deep breath. It warns you that you are about to descend not into flat reality, but further into one man’s psyche with all its spirals and shadows. The cover reminds me of a David Lynch piece—part surrealist daymare, part hypnotic and dark nostalgia. What makes this art even more powerful is that Moore’s wife, Laura Coe Moore—the woman who likely knows Moore best—created it.

It seems fitting, then, that the first poem would be “The Architect’s Son,” a piece where “Leather is the love, you thought was a hand,  /  she said was a dragon’s tail.” An unnerving juxtaposition of rage and fathers and baseball gloves—we have entered the world of boyhood. And this is how we move forward as readers, into the darkness that will show us the light.

It is hard, while reading Boys, to come up for air. This is not a criticism. Instead, these poems create a landscape that so perfectly encapsulates what I can only imagine to be a frightful appointment—to be raised a boy in a society of anger and expectations and “Never Enough.” These are poems where the religions that are meant to give direction create their own trauma and end up leading us further away from our truth.

The universal father, a bloodied Jesus, the boy—together these personas create a peculiar type of trinity. And in doing so, they form a faith more likely to restore the soul, “a cathedral of gnashing teeth.”

The title poem (originally published in Hot Metal Bridge), in its violence and restraint, encapsulates the innate spiritual struggle weaved throughout the entire chapbook. The poem begins:

It sounded like
boys in the woods
kicking a dying wolf.

They called him faggot
and his eyes
rolled to heaven.

They called him hungry
and his face
ate the earth.

Moore’s exploration of queerness against the backdrop of brutality is a long look at “men wearing crowns of bloody tiaras” while “rejecting the soul of a boy.” So when the chapbook closes with the last line, “birds become hymns of smoke,” we are reminded that even in the worst of circumstances there is hope that we can rise above our struggles.

It is apt that one poem in Moore’s chapbook would be dedicated to Paul Monette, author and gay activist who died from AIDS. Monette once said, “Go without hate, but not without rage; heal the world.” Moore’s work exemplifies this quote.

Boys does not deny suffering. It does not deny the gift of anger, “like all religions based on blood.” Instead, it celebrates it. And in celebrating the darkness within us, we have the chance to be transformed.

Daniel Edward Moore is an award-winning poet whose works have appeared in literary journals such as American Literary Review, Columbia Journal of Arts and Literature, Spoon River Poetry Review, Rattle, Mid-American Review, December and many others. His chapbook Boys is forthcoming from Duck Lake Books in December 2019. His full-length collection Waxing the Dents was a finalist for the Brick Road Poetry Prize and will be published by Brick Road Poetry Press in February 2020.

Risa Denenberg is the curator at The Poetry Cafe.
She is a co-founder and editor at Headmistress Press and has published three full length collections of poetry, most recently, slight faith (MoonPath Press, 2018).

Bad Anatomy by Hannah Cohen

Review by Siân Killingsworth

In Bad Anatomy (Glass Poetry Press, 2018), over the course of twenty poems, Hannah Cohen opens a window for readers into a world of isolation, regret, and danger at the edge of the speaker’s self-destructive tendencies. Using a broad variety of poetic arrangements ranging from ragged free verse to restrained couplets to ghazal, Cohen allows herself to run wild with form. Wildness seems to be an underlying drive of this book, as poem after poem incorporates images of monsters, monstrosities, defiant wrongness, and a celebration of imperfection.

Cohen’s poems pull the reader into an already-running engine, a monologue in media res. Readers witness and listen to a speaker who reveals her deepest feelings and worst fears about herself as she recognizes their movements. This speaker is an unreliable narrator who confesses to drinking, making questionable and self-destructive decisions, and laments her own body’s betrayal.

The title poem, “Bad Anatomy,” appears early on and encapsulates the problems the speaker is grappling with. She feels not herself in her body, instead she feels that the “universe keeps me / betting against my conception,” and further admits she’s “unable / to divine the good.” As the poem ends, she claims defiantly that she doesn’t “need help / to empty my chest of its hope.”

The desolation and despair the speaker feels is the water this book is moored in, and the sense of bodily wrong pervades. In one of my favorite poems, the speaker morphs into a monster in “Self-Portrait as Grendel,” revealing,

I myself am half-hell
and half morning

/ / /

A new head, a different name,
but still my skin.

Cohen uses her speaker’s confessions to provide a context for a larger malaise. The book itself becomes a lament on the instability and inconstancy of a life, the missed opportunities due to the speaker’s struggles with pain, isolation, and depression. This speaker is willing to bare it all: to pull back the veil to show the feeling of being on the brink of something even more serious.

But before readers dive too deeply into the pit of despair with Cohen, she pulls us back with humor. A delicate stream of sarcasm or sometimes false bravado sparkles through the book, reinforcing the authenticity of this speaker; it is as if she were in your living room or at the other end of a phone. Witness this skillful play in her poem “Like Someone Driving Away from her Problems,”

even god doesn’t believe
in the rusty jesus-saves
signs can’t save her

The poem “Superficial” is where we really dig into the idea of bad anatomy. Here, the body has gone wrong and seems to be a stand-in for the speaker’s battered and distorted psyche. Opening with the horrified discovery of a specific type of birth defect, the speaker compares herself to babies “born with their intestines / outside their little baby bellies.” This gruesome image of bodies turned inside out serves up a metaphor for the speaker’s sense of self. Her own discomfort with her gut instincts and feelings are out for display, in contrast to the physical way surgery would be used to correct a birth defect. The intent of the poet seems to be to reveal the guts and gore and make us sit with the discomfort of existence.

In a gesture appropriate for this book, the final poem “Body as an Alberto Giacometti Sculpture,” refers to the stretched-out, abstracted human figures created by the sculptor (1901-1966), which are widely recognized as representing alienation, loneliness, and existential dread. This slim poem trails down one page and trickles onto the next with a blunt directive to the reader to see this alienation, the pose held by the speaker so that we may bear witness to it, this “beautiful arrangement / of flesh that isn’t love.”

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I thought it would be clarifying to include an interview with the poet herself. Cohen was gracious enough to answer my questions, in this email exchange:

Siân Killingsworth: When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems?

Hanna Cohen: Like most writers, I started writing at a young age. I loved writing and illustrating my own stories and sharing my “books” with family members. As I got older, my writing interests shifted from writing stories to poems. I read Poe and Keats and Yeats. I wrote tons of garbage angsty poems as a teen. I still write garbage angsty poems—they’re just (hopefully) better written. I’ve written nonfiction (and am attempting to write fiction) but I primarily think of myself as a poet first.

SK: Where do your poems most often come from— do you use prompts? Do you overhear conversations and springboard off those? An image, a sound, a phrase, an idea?

HC: It’s a mishmash of all the above! Sometimes I’ll hear a weird sentence out in public and write it down, so I don’t forget it. I mostly write based on how I’m feeling. There are certain themes I keep coming back to (identity, family, Judaism, depression, etc.) but I also like to write nonsense for the sake of generating lines of material. I don’t use prompts a whole lot since I don’t like forcing myself to write.

SK: Which writers (living or dead) do you feel have influenced you the most?

HC: It’s hard to say who exactly influenced me, but the most obvious answers would be Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Robert Lowell. Nowadays, I find myself reading Jewish poets such as Rosebud Ben-Oni, Rachel Mennies, and Erika Meitner. Though his writing style isn’t exactly seen in my work, William Butler Yeats continues to be a poet I return to.

SK: What are you reading now?

HC: I just finished The Book of Joan by Lydia Yuknavitch a few weeks ago, which was all parts amazing, slightly off-setting, and powerful. I had purchased the novel a year ago, so I’m happy I finally read it. The most recent poetry collection I read was Lauren Milici’s Final Girl and Emily O’Neill’s You Can’t Pick Your Own Genre double feature collection.

SK: Tell us a little bit about your collection: What’s the significance of the title? Are there overarching themes? What was the process of assembling it? Was is a project book?

HC: Bad Anatomy takes its title from a poem within the chapbook. I wish I could say I had a thorough process but really, I chose the title because it sounded cool. The book doesn’t have a true narrative but rather an emotional landscape of depression, isolation, lots of self-deprecating humor and even flashes of hope. There are other subjects present (drinking, body images, etc.) but those are the more immediate themes.

When it came to arranging these poems, it was important to have words and feelings “echo” each other. What’s on the surface of the poem versus the interior, and so on. I’m forever thankful to the poets who offered insights and edits into the order of the poems—crafting a collection really isn’t a solitary job.

Most of the poems in this chapbook were written during my time in graduate school. However, those poems didn’t make the cut into my thesis due to the different subject matter. When I learned that Glass Poetry Press was having an open reading period for chapbooks, I basically took those twenty-odd poems and compiled them into a chapbook. The rest is history.

SK: Tell us briefly how your poetry has changed since you began writing.

HC: I think I’ve become more particular about the weight of words, and where to place them within a poem. I’m also challenging myself to write poems about subjects that I hadn’t considered, trying on new forms, and allowing myself space to NOT write. Since I work a day job, writing time is far more precious than when I was in school.

 SK: What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

HC: If you can’t think of a title for your poem, just start the title as “Poem After/About/On [Insert Subject Here]”. It’s simple and direct. My newest poem, “Poem After Reading the Chapter in Stephen King’s It Where the Word “Kike” Appears Six Times” (forthcoming in Cherry Tree), is an example of this.

SK: What a great suggestion! I’ll try this in some of my newer poems. Sometimes I struggle with titles because I don’t want to be too obscure. This will do the trick, I think.

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Hannah Cohen received her MFA from Queens University of Charlotte and lives in Virginia. She is the author of Bad Anatomy (Glass Poetry Press, 2018). She is a former contributing editor for Platypus Press and currently co-edits the online journal Cotton Xenomorph. Recent and forthcoming publications include Cherry Tree, The Rumpus, Berfrois, Entropy, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Cosmonauts Avenue, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for Best of the Net 2018 and has received Pushcart Prize nominations.

Risa Denenberg is the curator at The Poetry Cafe.
She is a co-founder and editor at Headmistress Press and has published three full length collections of poetry, most recently, “slight faith” (MoonPath Press, 2018).

Carry On (elegies), by Adam Deutsch

Review by Lennart Lundh

“Carry On,” the front cover says, coupling those two words with “(elegies),” and that’s a double-edged phrase, the title poem being about carry-on luggage. Adam Deutsch’s chapbook of twenty-five poems is double-edged throughout. On first reading, it’s very author-personal and self-referential, as elegies often will be, but a later, careful oral reading makes the poems reader-personal, universally affective, and quite rewarding.

It quickly becomes obvious that none of the poems are elegies in the confined, traditional sense. Even “Great Aunt, Winter, & Sun” (p. 15), while written “for Marilyn Adler,” makes little reference to the deceased, and is more about the graveside ceremony that will “never really fill the hole” felt by the family. The bulk are, however, clearly about some form of loss, the sense of loss, or the aftermath of loss.

“The Roads Will Be Closed” (p. 5) swings from a classroom non-incident to the Cold War of the Fifties that now can only haunt but not harm:

I was schooled, too,
and my parents,
their sisters and brothers,
looking at the bomb shelter signs
beside the basement doors.

           

Individually spoken, but perfect for the universal impact of today’s world, “Packing Heat” (p. 6) concerns itself with the loss of principles, saying of a job offer after a year’s unemployment, “I must wrestle down / genuine objection to wearing a gun.”

“What Cuts through the Woods” (p. 8) speaks of urban sprawl’s impact on community, saying, “We all drink from the same well.” in a foreshadowing of the title poem. “Carry On” (p. 20), with the accent on the first syllable rather than the cover’s suggested last, re-emphasizes the “we” to make its lines resonate with truly shared loss:

We’re exiles of an old country’s
long gone century, erased analog tape.

We’re plowing through this life
in our longings so mighty, a bird swoops
up ahead and is creamed by the bumper.

At the physical center of the book’s thirty-seven pages, a pair of poems bring us to the two sides of our elegies and rememberings. “The Center for Personal Growth is Next Door to Cremation Services” (p. 16) describes those who refuse to let loved ones go, ending a short list with the recognition that, “We’re of a people / who keep absence / near. Handy / as duct tape.” This sets the stage for “Strangers, Autumn, & Gray” (p. 18), with its dedication “for those in the City of Ithaca Cemetery.” It speaks, in twelve lines, of those who have let go:

A whole other mass, back in their ground,

/ / /

. . . the monuments
abraded smooth, generations’
worth of runoff, drizzle, and pour.

There are, of course, other things than death to be found here. We’re treated to small, but serious, observations. “Golden Hill” (p. 34) says of preparing food, “Every beet I cut / looks like a heart / on fire in a Mexican / art piece.” and later points to “a flower dealer / watching a woodpecker / with priorities in order.” In “Our Advances Are Not Unique” (p. 24), the subject is how “A sugar maple’s arms built a chest / around the block’s telephone wires . . .”, and the closing “Returning” (p. 37) leaves us with “An incredibly mysterious current event: a garage / door is wide open, waiting for anything.”

We often think of elegies in terms of someone else’s physical death. Deutsch’s work comes to remind us that parts of each and all of us are dying every moment, often unnoticed until later. There isn’t always time or reason to mourn or feel melancholy, not until the speed of life slows, or an absence catches us by surprise. The message, as well as the poems which convey it, are well worth the reader’s consideration.

 [BUY IT!]

Adam Deutsch is the publisher at Cooper Dillon Books, and has work recently or forthcoming in Poetry International, Thrush, The Cossack Review, Ping Pong, and Typo, and has a chapbook called Carry On (Elegies). He teaches in the English Department at Grossmont College and lives in San Diego, CA. He can be found at adamdeutsch.com

Risa Denenberg is the curator at The Poetry Cafe.
She is a co-founder and editor at Headmistress Press and has published three full length collections of poetry, most recently, “slight faith” (MoonPath Press, 2018).

She May Be a Saint, by Sarah Nichols

Review by Siân Killingsworth

Sarah Nichols’ micro chapbook She May Be a Saint (Porkbelly Press, 2019) is an enigmatic exploration of a chimeric speaker, recounting the disintegration of a former identity and the darkly lyrical creation of a new self.

This book is composed of seventeen centos—short poems created entirely from lines and phrases selected from works of Sylvia Plath and C.D. Wright. It seems to me that Nichols chose these two poets’ works because the source poems are densely packed with images that are easy to pluck from a poem and repurpose. Only a few of the lines are recognizable because Nichols so expertly weaves them into a new, unique series of portraits. Admittedly, I have not read a lot of Wright, so her voice seems to me wholly subsumed in this creation, while Plath is still distantly identifiable – but perhaps only because she and her work have been so mainstreamed into contemporary consciousness via movies, anthologies, stories and the ubiquity of her most famous poems.

These poems are brief, with short lines comprised of few words. As a collection, She May Be a Saint is incredibly tight, as each poem builds on those preceding it in a lyric narrative that has a clear, multifaceted arc. It begins with the revelation of a self. The self goes on to describe her creation and we understand that it is in fact a re-creation in response to an unnamed trauma. In employing the voices of these other poets, Nichols creates an unsentimental speaker who describes a unique experience.

The speaker, “an unidentified woman,” opens in the first poem, “Once I Was” by inviting the reader to,

            Call me the
            Duchess of nothing 

To self-identify in this way, the speaker permits readers to acknowledge some measure of her stature and its simultaneous absence. A prominent member of European royalty, a duchess (or duke) ranks immediately below the monarch, yet to style oneself “the Duchess of nothing” is to suggest the meaninglessness of such a title and also to herald the imminent revelations of her dominion found in the poems that follow.

The religious elements of saints are jettisoned in favor of a more pagan supernaturality. The title is taken from Plath’s poem “Poem for a Birthday: Maenad,” and appears in “Once I Was,” signaling to us that this poem and the series that follows focus on re/birth and a watery spirit concealing (and revealing) her rage. In “Neat,” the water spirit is named again: the “undine-like maiden” is the blood running through veins.

Self-erasure is a thread that runs through the book. This Duchess notes “old happenings, / erased,’ and through the book makes oblique and overt references to her body being “a // coil, / blasted.” The speaker erases herself in order to create herself anew. Female saints of the past are known to have starved themselves, often to death, in the name of their religion, and their religious life was often founded in lieu of marriage. This physical diminishment has long been regarded as a form of self-effacement, and these acts were subsequently rewarded with sainthood after death. So, the Duchess, in a roundabout way, is the titular saint by way of self-negation.

Beginning in roughly the Middle Ages, some Catholic girls and women fasted to the point of developing anorexia mirabilis, a condition of self-induced starvation that often led to death. Their intention was to leverage physical suffering to get closer to God. Notable sufferers include Catherine of Siena and Saint Wilgefortis, both of whom took vows of chastity, abstained from food, and prayed for ugliness in order to avoid arranged marriage. Lack of food regularly led to these proto saints seeing visions and hearing voices, phenomena that led to a transformation from mortal to saint. In She May Be a Saint, the voices of others have been reshaped to speak for her – both Wright and Plath are manipulated and effaced so the Duchess’ own voice may come forth.

Many of the poems in She May Be a Saint refer to language, words, writing, ink, and carbon– a word with multiple meaning, calling to mind to the carbon of typewriter ribbon, carbon as replicated pages of print, the carbon graphite “lead” inside a pencil, and finally, carbon as the basic element of life. The Duchess replicates herself through telling, writing. She “drafted a / fictitious life.” Perhaps this is exactly what we’re reading: a juxtaposition of language, experience, erasure, rebirth. The opening poem again lays down the framework for this notion:

I poke
at the
carbon of it,

an end to the
writing.

Words to rid me
of

me.

As an opening statement, this powerful self-negation sets the stage for the Duchess to recount the traumas of the body, its difficult recuperation, and the novelty of a created identity with which to begin anew. About halfway through the chapbook, in “Invisible Wounds,” the Duchess reveals that she suffered an unnamed trauma twenty years in the past that forced her into “dormancy.” This is perhaps the reason for her original self-effacement. Rather than taking readers through therapeutic dissertation (as some poets do) that allows her to work through the trauma, the Duchess prefers to eliminate it and claim a new life entirely.

Since the speaker’s identity evolves continuously through the course of these portraits, it can be somewhat difficult to pin down because of this flux. We are witness to her body’s disintegration, its pain and the lessening of pain via drugs, we learn in “The Mask Increases” how her “bones soften,” yet all the while, she reveals, “I think I have been healing.” She “inhabit[s] a doll’s body” and later, in the poem “Other Bodies” seems to acquire a new body, which she calls “My new instrument.” With slightly eerie nod to gothic horror, the Duchess pulls back the veil on her wounds, tenderness, fear, resignation, and (spoiler!) a hint of threat at the end.

Nichols’ micro chap is spare and concise, but each poem is crisp, brimming with electricity and mystery. As a reader, I was left feeling somewhat breathless, as one might feel after watching a psychological thriller. The Duchess’ self-immolation and regeneration is a gift to readers, letting us closely observe and feel the transformation from a wounded spirit to a powerful one full of potential and intent.

Sarah Nichols lives and writes in Connecticut. She is the author of eight chapbooks, including This is Not a Redemption Story (Dancing Girl, 2018) and Dreamland for Keeps (Porkbelly Press, 2018.) Her poems and essays have also appeared in Five:2: One, Otis Nebula, The Fourth River, and FreezeRay.

Risa Denenberg is the curator at The Poetry Cafe.
She is a co-founder and editor at Headmistress Press and has published three full length collections of poetry, most recently, “slight faith” (MoonPath Press, 2018).