reviews for Ghost Arson:
review by Dd. Spungin
Experiencing Barton Smock’s poetry is similar to living in a foreign country long enough to begin to understand the language.
Smock’s language is always intriguing, often foreign, more often brilliant in its ability to put images and concepts in the reader’s unsuspecting mind.
Certain poems/passages all but announce their meanings, as this from Gameshow Fatalities:
“see one of my children worrying less about suicide
and more about where it should happen. see: tub. see: easier
for a mother to clean.”
And some slide an idea into your consciousness such as this from Untitled:
“eternity
is a doll
reading
a menu, memorizing
a license plate
and doll
the first
eating disorder
in space”
Smock can shock, as well. Here, from Gestural Transportation, this standout stanza:
“the bread crumbs were eaten not by birds but by a
starving boy with a lost voice who’d wandered from his
home in a delirium brought on by a toothache. also,
Hansel & Gretel were two rich kids who killed someone’s
mother.”
The ethereal makes an appearance in the poem, Snow:
“say even god / would leave / this church
to step on the bones of a star”
Smock uses familiar subjects in much of his poetry: parents, siblings, children, but they are traveling in places that always surprise and make the reader stretch; it is a stretch most worthy of the effort.
To read these poems is a journey into a new art, and a privilege for the reader.
~
review by George Salis
It seems to me that a lot of modern poetry is not poetry, but simply non-fiction with line breaks, so it’s refreshing to read modern poetry from an actual poet. As he first demonstrated with infant*cinema, Smock is conscious of language, of the power of a few words, or few words, and his mostly minimalist poems have the ability to evoke endless dreamscapes. The infinite from the finite, another paradox from paradoxical poems, poems that are like alternate or anti-paracosms. For example, here is one titled “Mooon.”
moan, fossil. how do my feet look in my mother’s belly?
my heart is a pink flame / is my father’s / fingernail.
father calls me antler. I don’t know this yet. I will be
shot
by many hands.
By simply including an extra ‘o’ in the word ‘moon,’ elongating what Sir Richard Burton called the “corpse upon the road of night,” Smock conjures a wolf’s howl, a cow’s lament, creatures of childhood’s imagination and myth. And then we are given the juxtaposition, the amalgamation of vestigial past and fetal future and beyond, to the (moon) shot of doctors? adulators? murderers? An unborn heart metamorphosing from flame to fingernail, or existing as both simultaneously, like Schrödinger’s cat, until postnatal wave collapse. The phrase “father calls me antler” tells a story in and of itself, a mysterious nickname/endearment/joke/snide….
Considering Ghost Arson as a collection, there are obsessions or at least repetitions: owls, milk, ghosts, etc. The pinnacle obsession being god in all forms and personalities (“you picture god as a toddler studying a map” or “the airway of a god with a tail”), the word itself repeated nearly to the point of semantic satiation, a term coined by Leon Jakobovits James, who also suggested that the phenomenon could be employed to ameliorate phobias. Consciously or not, perhaps Smock is attempting to exorcise a theophobia. Conversely, the recurrence could be a mantra reverberating across poems.
Some of my favorite images include:
“step on the bones of a star”
“a snake made of milk”
“ear-shaped mirrors”
“spacesuits for stillborns”
“the owl with hands”
Surreal and soft-spoken, to enjoy Smock’s work one must learn to take pleasure in balancing on the fringe of the unknown and admiring the abyssal veil that stretches before you with scintillations that echo fallen stars. Read him and dream.
~
Ghost Arson (Kung Fu Treachery Press 2018)
have copies, on my person, now.
if you’ve read it or skimmed it or rewritten it…say something somewhere.
if interested in reviewing, contact me at ghostarson@gmail.com
book is 15.00 / orders can be made via paypal to ghostarson@gmail.com or by using link:
PayPal.Me/ghostarson
*be sure to include your address in the notes field
**all copies will be signed
or one can send a check to:
Barton Smock
5155 Hatfield Drive
Columbus, OH 43232
on amazon:
at barnes & noble:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/ghost-arson-barton-smock/1129931893?ean=9781946642868
facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/ghostarson/
a cricket
with a soft spot
for my son’s
cough
(in echo’s
unpainted
church
it is god until it hears its parents fight.
what her brain does to language could fill a tail with the dreams of a snake
some of which
are
my sleep
is my blood.
touch is the music of hell
said we
(sang mom
Descansos
poems, Katherine Osborne
salò press (2018)
~
~ A red snow boot was carried out by the tide. -from (mid-swim savannah)
Listening is as listening mourns. In Descansos, Katherine Osborne memorializes with voice the sound that suddenness might make if blessed by longevity. How stirring, this outsider’s verse of inclusion. In which vault is our safekeeping? What is quieter than a moment of silence? There are asks, in this work, that will make you breathe under your breath. Osborne has command of occurrence, and gives the subtle order that whatever happens be randomly stunned. I am not sure what answers Osborne has gotten, but am glad for the auditing, overdue as it is, of grief’s word choice. If our passage has come to mean how bored we are in vehicles both idle and moving, Descansos takes our vacant stare for an absent glimpse and marks itself with vision.
View original post 10 more words
Emily Tuttle is a graduate of the University of Maryland College Park, where she was editor of two on campus journals and editorial assistant to ‘Poet Lore’ for two years. She has been awarded the Jimenez-Porter Literary Prize for Poetry. Previously, she has been published in Empty Mirror, Ghost City Review, Yes Poetry, and apt, among others.
/
The Heart is a Halfway House
My childhood dog is dying,
and my brother doesn’t know
how to pick him up,
His gray atrophied back legs
give way
to arthritis, and he is stuck,
long toenails grasping
at slick, wood floors.
And my brother is scared
to reach underneath and sink
into the urine soaked underbelly,
rise him back to his feet, pet the
pilling skin atop his head
racked with fleas and dry age, and
whisper simple words
into his ear
to let him know he is loved—
how painful it…
View original post 275 more words
a shirtless child sets my food on fire. I want to cut myself but part of me is still teaching god air guitar in an outhouse. stun gun. riding mower. I learn how to point and bulimia
is the ghost
anorexia
isn’t.
mother, in goodbye, means goodbye.
A Brief Way to Identify a Body
poems, by Devon Balwit
Ursus Americanus Press (2018)
~
Devon Balwit is a master of writing poems in conversation with other artists. She has written three other books inspired by writers and artists. In the case of this particular collection, all of the poems have an epigraph from a Sylvia Plath poem (save one), and a couple have epigraphs from Lucia Perillo’s writing. One immediately gets the sense from the gorgeous painting on the cover alone, that the speaker of these poems came to do battle. Whether it’s a battle of female against her responsibilities as a mother, the battle of female vs. her mate, or the female self vs. herself, no dark feeling of female “selfhood” is left unturned in the light of this poet’s words.
The book’s cover art by Cristina Troufa depicts what appears to be a fight between two…
View original post 727 more words
I.
GHOST ARSON
my first full-length, non self-published, work is titled Ghost Arson (Kung Fu Treachery Press, 2018)
I have copies, on my person, now.
~
if interested in reviewing, contact me at ghostarson@gmail.com
book is 15.00 / orders can be made via paypal to ghostarson@gmail.com or by using link:
PayPal.Me/ghostarson
*be sure to include your address in the notes field
**all copies will be signed
or one can send a check to:
Barton Smock
5155 Hatfield Drive
Columbus, OH 43232
on amazon:
at barnes & noble:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/ghost-arson-barton-smock/1129931893?ean=9781946642868
facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/ghostarson/
review by Dd. Spungin:
review by George Salis:
facebook live reading: https://www.facebook.com/barton.smock/videos/10155837390135423/
II.
HALF LIGHT
in June of 2018, {isacoustic*} released Heather Minette’s collection Half Light
review by George Salis:
https://isacoustic.com/2018/06/20/a-review-of-heather-minettes-half-light-by-george-salis/
review by Sara Moore Wagner:
https://isacoustic.com/2018/06/18/sara-moore-wagners-review-of-heather-minettes-half-light/
review by Crystal Stone:
https://isacoustic.com/2018/07/09/a-review-by-crystal-stone-of-heather-minettes-half-light/
View original post 474 more words
Knock-Off Monarch
poems by Crystal Stone
Dawn Valley Press (2018)
~
Knock-Off Monarch is a poetry collection for the visceral and the shifting, those who are lost and those who wish to find themselves. There are themes of nature evoked through the very title itself; images of southern living as someone from the “nawth” with descriptions of Mississippi convenience stores and conversations; religion with modern twists with titles like “My Family as Disciples at the Last Supper” and “Moses and Zipporah Attend a Roller Derby Game,” to name a few. Stone’s experience as a young woman navigating the tumults of becoming her own person, with femininity and queerness awkwardly holding hands as her sexual and self-identity are explored in her first poem, “First Impressions,” which proudly states, “I first admitted I was queer to a black woman.” The otherness in us seeks out the acceptance that which is “other” around…
View original post 667 more words
kingsoftrain 