kingsoftrain

hooked through
poems by Sara Moore Wagner
Five Oaks Press, 2017

to not die is what I mean. – {from} I Have No Love For Images

*

It was snowing. My teeth had vanished. I held this, hooked through, by Sara Moore Wagner. I read it then

and heard it when it said that death won’t keep still

and believed it when it suggested that maybe a school of fish is the tattooed decoy of pain’s removal

and I prayed humanly when its verse prodded objectification to give gulf its weight in animal.

Wagner is a poet who brings to her language the gift of both legend and locality. Instead of gutting one story to stomach another, she foregoes image worship and rewrites the ghosted psalm.

*

When we die, someone might
notice our grave and stare out
into the vastness – {from} Cattleheart Complex or Rebirth

~

reflection…

One Throne
poems by Rae Hoffman Jager
Five Oaks Press, 2017

Because it isn’t uncommon to mistake
an inkling for an omen.– {from} One Answer, and Making the Best of It

Rae Hoffman Jager, in her book One Throne, employs a lyric of transformative repetition. Answer knows nothing but its double and humor enters the ache trade armed with loneliness. After reading, I felt I’d eaten the doll out of house and home and that perhaps absence could indeed make heads or tails of being upside down. Which is to say I felt optimistically worried and deeply momentary. Jager is a priestess of distraction, and distraction, here, is the key to being present.

so think of this instead, dear—-
The ocean is so violent. – {from} First Loss

These are poems populated with cameo and propped up with a singular crookedness. Poems in which a young person, made anxious…

Adrenalin
poetry by Ghayath Almadhoun, translated by Catherine Cobham
Action Books, 2017

my heart becomes a wooden scarecrow to chase away Hitchcock’s birds

– {from} The Capital

In a voice of recent distance, Ghayath Almadhoun, in the work Adrenalin, as translated by Catherine Cobham, is able to distill a ceaseless thing with a billowing anxiety of verse underscored by dry nostalgias and headless histories that are revealed, in the final section Black Milk, as informers to the funereal travelogue of the unsalted body. This is not a wake, this is war, this is the honoring of the soft bullet in the ongoing inquiry of the stray man. This is not the face, done up, that one has to remember to recognize but is instead the zombie childhood our memory forgets repeating. The dead (here) are scene stealers apologizing to us for disappearing and the living (there)…

Third-Millennium Heart
poetry by Ursula Andkjær Olsen
translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen
A co-publication between Broken Dimanche Press and Action Books, 2017

~

But the refining of loneliness has begun, it’s going to be a
castle; it will become your castle that
can later gain two towers, can later lose one,
two walls. – {from} the section DARLING GLORIA

In reading, then re-reading, Third-Millennium Heart, by Ursula Andkjær Olsen, as translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen, I scratched, beneath other penciled-in marginalia, two things: perhaps I have avoided myself into existence and he takes a holiday as something maternal to do with your time. This book has goals for its body language, and, with a claustrophobic sparseness, seems a first for finality. These are entries written in the surroundings of your outer-sibling, where a red pacifier suns itself in a dream some hole is having about my mouth. Your…

Saudade
Traci Brimhall
Copper Canyon Press, 2017

A guerrilla prays faster. – {from} And Again I Say Rejoice

…I am orphic / am ophidian am orphan – {from} Misbegotten

In narrating the rebirth of grief in an unbegun world, in her Saudade, Traci Brimhall is both researcher and magician and together they wrestle nostalgia from the stasis of the jarringly doomed. The verse, here, is specific in its allness and, where history burns, Brimhall makes of word a thin sun and spares the ant the miracle of the half-circle.

This is heady stuff- traversal as transformation, a fluid storytelling of signs and markers, the novel as the church of the poem- and is nailed down, expertly, with an impending suddenness.

It is not preordained in feel, it is more…blessed? All inquiries mine, I felt like I was reading with each page what so clearly came next. This endeavor is…

Inquisition
poetry by Kazim Ali
Wesleyan University Press, 2018

~

Do strangers make you human – {from} Drone

This odd exactitude. This thisness. These inhabited levitations. These spiritual hashtags for the redactions of Babel. This poetry….found, founded, in Kazim Ali’s Inquisition.

To know there is always another text.

In a different book Jesus
never suffered, never was flogged or died
went whole into heaven without passion – {from} The Earthquake Days

To command, with embodiment, form.

…do swear oblivion
Has its own markers but where the buoy
Of being clangs its stellar ore – {from} All One’s Blue

This is a searching work, a locating text, and its voice is one that makes of ground a hymn to some future itinerary. Ali is a believer in, a writer of, histories unmade by a record-breaking presence. If he wanders into the loneliness of the long distance runner, it is…

SOME RECENT:

[wrist musics]

i.

every birth
makes god
look bad

ii.

a weird

parental

iii.

(glee)

iv.

ugly / earlier

me
than most

~

[wrist musics (ii)]

a drop
of blood
a movie
written
for egg’s
tear
in beds
of unmade
mirror

~

[wrist musics (iii)]

this crow
with its black
worm
knows your father
feels loss
in the neck

~

[no musics]

I am to bed without supper for hiding my face from the lord. in the city, my brother is handcuffed for biting his wrists. still unborn is the calf that invented sadness. do I look like what you feel when you look at me? I think there is only hell.

~

[being alone went by so fast]

we have in my city a museum just like this. I, too, am private and have lost an unabsorbed child. I am,

inventory, very motherly.

this one-man radio show…