THEY WERE BEARS, by Sarah Marcus (Sundress Publications, 2017)
review by Barton Smock
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Absence is not a magic trick. In this book, there are enterings and leavings and a loneliness that says I am home because I am here. In one wilderness, Cleveland is one big hospital (from No Children), in another, The boar closes the distance (from Damage Ready)
This book will do nothing to curb your addiction to trajectory. As for continuance, I wasn’t sure I could go on after reading the last line of the first poem. Marcus maps her land early.
You will question your body throughout. Body are you wanderer or are you deserter. Are you mouth or are you feast. Body have you devoured my eyesight. Every last bit?
Vastness is local. Ruin, a tourist. Pain a forward thinking journalist still covering the moon as made for man.
Bears are here, are moving in and out of a crowd’s exodus from a costume party for symbols. Some bears are not here, but are sick of being spirits.
I wish I could bring only what I need. But what of the other, dragged as it was for being necessary?
Marcus is a writer of both inquiry and finality. She has stones, not for, but from, the stoning. In the book’s last entry (Revival, Revival), this phrase: Unspell me. I was broken before I broke. This author, she looks back. This journey had a following.
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order here:
https://squareup.com/store/sundress-publications/item/they-were-bears-by-sarah-marcus-pre-order
further:
Sundress Publications to Publish “They Were Bears” in 2017
Imagine Not Drowning
Kelli Allen
(C & R Press, 2016)
available here:
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review by Barton Smock
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Kelli Allen rescues nothing in her book ~Imagine Not Drowning~. Instead, she makes an acolyte of stillness. There is lightning, here, and there are glyph-obsessed waters. Allen says ‘we keep vigil for signifiers’ (from Ghosting), and it feels final, feels already saved. Why follow? What does a named creature understand? I can tell you Allen makes one feel a name is still being said somewhere in a book signed by its readers. The language in this collection goes where it’s called, some borderless upward, some nest made for mouth. This poet can on one hand etch ‘direction only makes us brave the first time’ (from Bravery, you said, is not what it used to be) while on the other tattooing ‘every night is a lifelong sentence about home’ (from…
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not a fish
here
can go
missing
we ran around the empty crib. I let him catch a breath and he let me kneel. we tiptoed past private make-up to which his mother had been softly applied. he drank tea from an eggshell and I declined. I swatted him to let him know I was dying. his bent sister fell asleep and the boy was kind enough to believe her hair was a nightgown. I swatted him again to let him know I would live. the tea was gone. the rest is sadness.
reblogging as Lulu is offering 15% off all print books today with coupon code of LULU15
still have two privately self-published chapbooks {BASILISK, the accepted field} available in hard copy and free to anyone making said request to bartonsmock@yahoo.com
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most recent collection:
name calling
9.00
110 pages
published March 2017
http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/name-calling/paperback/product-23117082.html
~
a poem from [name calling]:
the boy-sleep of his hands
/ a pair of scissors in one room or a gun in two. a thumb war’s lame spider. four rootless prayers drawn on an echo. four awestruck sisters caressing with their ears the undeveloped skull of an infant. melancholy’s condoms. flowers for the arm-wrestler’s inoculated phantom.
~
readings:
the disappeared inventor of the present
her reflection
in surprised
water
imagined
while losing
loss
a dolphin
the shyest
mourner
witch
in a swimsuit
the building we enter to worship the church.
stones of boated nights.
a somehow
seasick
deer.
I have for appetite a pair of scissors and for despair a silent vase. I have a louse like a flower and a crush on a doll. I take my meals with a three-shouldered angel. the head of my abstract dog is highchair real. food is a ghost. I rake the hair.
