kingsoftrain

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…

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…