Kill Class
poems, Nomi Stone
Tupelo Press 2019
~
My praise for this book is: I don’t know where to put my praise for this book. Nomi Stone’s Kill Class is disorienting and surefooted; is a landscape spiritual that weeps not away, but toward. Immersion is not a drill, and practice is born perfect. For all Kill Class so clinically prepares, the paused hungers of its verse, and the appetites therein, offer that perhaps we had our error and ate it, too. War calls it body; this violence that puts meat on the bone. And Stone asks for more. For the body to show its face. For wound to do the salting. For humanization to finish what it started. For transactional oneness. And for surgery, before we vanish.
~
reflection by Barton Smock
~
book is here:
the one where they pull him from the ocean and he’s alive and on his body are bite marks from another person
the one where he wakes up in the hospital and he’s my father and when I ask him what puppy he says there was a puppy with him in the car
the one where the puppy isn’t found but is also not found dead
the one where they want me to have more teeth and I tell them about the puppy thinking they’ll love me here or in a poem about a mouth that’s gone missing forever
the one where they capitalize God for being god
the pale finger of a mother’s purple god.
the eyes
the eyes
eat
while being
watched.
a son
skipped
by certain
animals.
As One Fire Consumes Another
poems, John Sibley Williams
Orison Books, 2019
~
John Sibley Williams is a poet who seemingly writes from memory those invisible psalms that cast language as a font and word as the codename of one who’s kept a diary of the search for yours. As such, the collection As One Fire Consumes Another knows what to say after it says it while liberating from footnote how the old might guide the current into outlining those shapes bent on being dumbstruck by the new . No findable thing need make a sound and the already lit won’t court what glows. No toy beast misses its childhood master and if a pin drops it is heard only by the late soul who’s left tapping on a calculator in the shadow of a cross. Both instructional and sudden, intentional and evoked, these irreplaceably devoured poems gain ground in…
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discontinued in total today those books of mine that were self-published, may revisit them, or ghost them instead. if you have one or two, hard in hand, thanks for that, then and now, and I hope they disappeared invisibly.
as a zombie
obsessing
over
a star (why
would an angel
learn
to eat
Emily As Sometimes the Forest Wants the Fire
poems, Darren C. Demaree
Harpoon Books 2019
~
If god were here, above this pool in backyard Ohio, I think he’d write with wasp. I say this as the imagined part-owner of a disembodied worry as gifted to any who might look up from Darren C. Demaree’s Emily As Sometimes the Forest Wants the Fire and feel a sort of third-wheel holiness in the running of a blood that sobers itself alongside Demaree’s converging of absence with artifact. As partnership may absolve loneliness of secretly playing tag and as shadow makes a lost feast for long animals, Emily, like inclusion, is untouchable. Using simile as bait for metaphor, and metaphor to say in the same breath both pain and paint, this verse fishes compass from the ashes of emergence. These are love, or better yet, loved, poems, but no phrasing here brackets…
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be
as an owl
and envy
the bat
its dancing
in the voice
of god (pray for the giant
who with
a camera
holds creation
over
the nude (then spider
your hands
to cover
the ears
of stones
but instead
ask the holy spirit
about the two
action figures
cleaning
themselves
in the dark…
(choose the god that will know when you’ve died
kingsoftrain 