kingsoftrain

In This Quiet Church Of Night, I Say Amen
poems, Devin Kelly
Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2017

~

‘…Father turns his head, I think,
to watch me, & this goes on forever.’ – {from} The Wind In Galway

With confession’s nostalgia for the crystal ball, Devin Kelly’s In This Quiet Church Of Night, I Say Amen gives away blood’s belongings and yawns itself over a lived-in kindness known maybe once or twice to you as a child when clicking you went with your bones through the sigh of a strange house the morning after a sleepover. This is a precise and expansive poetry, a poetry of scope and spotlight, somehow able to amble oddly behind inquiry while at the same time calling out distance for the shortness of its answer.

‘…The body is holy,
because I miss it.’ – {from} My Grandmother Is Holy

I have long held that…

Café Crazy
poems, Francine Witte
Kelsay Books, 2018

~

…my sister lives alone in a house
that holds her like it’s a giant mouth
and she is just a word it wants to say. – {from} My Sister is Dying

I had this dream in which the person who sawed me in half also doubled as my audience. I asked two people what the dream might mean, and both said the same thing. By the time I’d forgotten what both had said, I had finished Francine Witte’s Café Crazy. My heart had stopped. A ghost, I’m sure of it, was trying on a dress. The dream was unreachable and what I made of my unpopulated presence was that loneliness disappears twice. Since then, I’ve turned backward through the pages of this book that I might unhear my memory of applause and be, again, handless in the spirit…

thru April 23rd, Lulu is offering free mail (or 50% off ground shipping) with coupon code of SHIPIT2018

poetry collections, mine, self-published, are here: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/acolyteroad

~

private publications are available via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com) or https://www.paypal.me/BartonSmock, as such:

chapbook, [BASILISK], 64 pages $5.00
(Feb 2017)

chapbook, [the accepted field], 84 pages $5.00
(May 2017)

chapbook, [in this life another is you], 64 pages $3.00
(Oct 2017)

~

PDFs of some collections available at gumroad: https://gumroad.com/bartonsmock

call for submissions: https://isacoustic.com

~

4/12/18:

I have privately published a work of mine consisting of 60 poems that I am calling {mood piece for baby blur}, and am making it available to anyone making a 5.00 or more donation to my poetry journal {isacoustic*}

{mood piece for baby blur} will not be made available in any form but this one.

donation can be made, here:

https://www.paypal.me/BartonSmock
(bartsmock@gmail.com)

be sure to provide a physical address…

patient.
poems, Bettina Judd
Black Lawrence Press, 2014

~

Do not let her know
terror
belongs to you. – {from} Fill A Woman With Meaning

This, a work of relentless becoming; able to achieve via line break, lyric, and research by association, a personable voicelessness that, with its investigative balm, summons those bodies brutalized by a past of another’s making into the nowness of caring.

The eyes, here, reach into the blank visions of male blindness and guide phantoms home from departure that they may arrive in reader and writer alike to unhaunt, or haunt correctly?, the overlong wait of the black, the female, spirit.

In what is both a clinical indictment and a worshipful reclamation, Judd does not merely brush at fossil, but resets the bone.

Sound a theft, mouth a password. Ghost a balloon popped in a dream. What a carefully wrought, and ongoing, thing, is Bettina…

VOID SETS
poems by Michelle Gottschlich
Monster House Press, 2015

~

A glitch in understanding
doesn’t know what it causes – {from} void sets

Comforting in their deceptive urgency, the poems, the parenthetical extractions, the half-rescued clarities, in Michelle Gottschlich’s VOID SETS seem conversations overheard by confrontational angels. These are verses that skip funerals to attend ghosts. Here, a thing left is a thing finished. Here, forgiveness and apology are differently godless. If our machines have made place too crowded for exodus, Gottschlich’s direct silences form the discolored language of exit. In the tense sanctuary of this book, I found myself worrying if I’ve made the right impression on my body, questioning why I pray over ‘first thought, first thought’, and wondering if the buttons I press come out of nowhere. Gottschlich is a poet of wrecked nostalgias and of the plainly dressed ongoing and has presence enough to aim…

dark acre
poems, Canese Jarboe
Willow Springs Books, 2018

~

He made a face for me: cow pelvis fixed
to the inside of a welding helmet.
– {from} LANDSCAPE W/ MY FATHER & A DEAD MAN’S HARMONICA

I have been startled by a foregone thing, by this dark acre, by this communique decoded by the poet, this Canese Jarboe, who here gathers an imagery that doesn’t die on the page but goes forth to envision a lonesome and peopled secrecy that attempts, with odd accuracies and interior wishes, to overcome landmark via recognizable deformities. Thrice read, this work lives where written. Pokes the eye in the back of the head. Has nostalgia for the unlocatable.

~

reflection by Barton Smock

~

book, info, here:
https://willowspringsbooks.org/presenting-canese-jarboes-dark-acre/

ghost exhibit
poems, Melissa Atkinson Mercer
Glass Poetry Press, 2018

//I try to be someone no one will love – {from} exhibit 2

As if comma has been unspelled and period, hidden, Melissa Atkinson Mercer’s ghost exhibit is breathless, but not winded, and crumbles dirt over bread crumb as it makes its way by spiritual detour toward excavation’s replica with the knowledge that forgiveness is a human shortcut.

How creatively we root the artless insult and take the phantom’s blood for vivid milk. How hands-free these poems, here, pray in the privacy of their author’s creatural ask. How earthly their declarations. How open they are to the second language of the reader’s eye.

How oh we recite before learning to speak.

~

reflection by Barton Smock

~

book is here:
http://www.glass-poetry.com/chapbooks/ghost-exhibit.html

Yolk
poems, Camonghne Felix
Penmanship Books 2015

~

mother, a mare overwrought with the front seat
of her son’s slaughter…

…every day of this trial he dies’ – {from} Zimmerman Testimonies: Day 1

Shrinking from regression in the withheld aftermath, poet Camonghne Felix, with Yolk, grounds the otherness of now in the levitations of a peeled-off then. With language like ‘adolescent moon’ and ‘immature pond’, this is a speaking that draws on the undertow to break hallelujahs over angel ash and this is verse to vandalize the dreamy blight. Yolk sleeps with its mouth open might it echo in the hole of a bloodless rabbit. Chalking the elsewhere, Felix is a student of presence. As there is no shortage of future evidence, Felix does not use hunger to prove starvation but instead deepens the meat in the shallows of a body wrongly imagined by lower foods. Leaves god…