kingsoftrain

patient.
poems, Bettina Judd
Black Lawrence Press, 2014

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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

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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

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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.

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reflection by Barton Smock

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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.

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reflection by Barton Smock

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

Yolk
poems, Camonghne Felix
Penmanship Books 2015

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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…

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…