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)…