kingsoftrain

thaw
poems, Chelsea Dingman
University of Georgia Press, 2017

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To love snow is to admire water. Is to vanish twice. What touch Chelsea Dingman’s Thaw has gives disappearance a third act. The language here returns the ear and forms distance to the shape left by the soundless siren of the world’s slowest ambulance. Fathers leave early to chew the root of abandonment. Brothers clone themselves to play hide and seek. And mothers remain to curtain call skin. These poems story themselves in the staying power of travelogue, and are meticulous in their scrapbooking of absence. What’s more, with Dingman as both acolyte and guide, they invite loss to confront those it’s taken.

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reflection by Barton Smock

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book is here:
http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/books/thaw

Two Towns Over
poems by Darren C. Demaree
Trio House Press, 2017

*Winner of the 2017 Louise Bogan Award

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Nobody tosses
out the drugs

of the dead.
That’s not how
this works. – {from} Monroe Mills, Ohio

Darren C. Demaree, in his book Two Towns Over, blesses a cursed Ohio with a populace whose touch is fighting an infection.

I know this Ohio…I know what it’s like to step over the shadow of one’s ghost…to lay low so as to give death nothing to leap from. To jump rope in hell. Demaree points to places made for map that have instead gone on to shoulder nowhere, from bunk bed to basement, looking to be housed.

Each entry, each poem, is an abruption, an angry rendering of those hypnotic recognitions that ask the present for the past and the past for the present that there may be a future…