kingsoftrain

No Farther Than the End of the Street
neighborhood poems by Benjamin Niespodziany
Okay Donkey Press, 2022

How just recently undiscovered the poems feel in Benjamin Niespodziany's No Farther Than the End of the Street, and how secretly they demand distraction. I've been ill of late, and in this lateness have come to believe that revelation does not come, after all, to those who wait. So I waited, and held, then read, this inescapably freed book. I am weak and want to say things simply. I strain to recall whole silences. I write that love is made of two people telling each other that they have a room at the hotel when neither of them do. Niespodziany takes the nameless and the familiar at face value and lets one mask disguise another. I am weak, I strain, there is joy here. In this verse, a neighborly, twinning joy...and a sadness brought to earth both by the alien mediocrity of grief and by those few doubled things that go through absurd shortages to single out loneliness.

/

Take 1
poems, Eliot Cardinaux
Bodily Press, 2023
bodilypress.bandcamp.com

In my wanting to appear forever specifically to no two people, I go back and forth, or went, here beside, in hereafter, of the writing of Eliot Cardinaux, as it is, or will be, in the chapbook Take 1. First take. Or perhaps: First, take. Oh title, oh instruction. This white space of abundance. This absent plenty. If it's true that the same poem comes to all over and over, then Cardinaux writes to each of how to be, differently, again. In the reading, I wrote a note-to-self to maybe unselve: I long to be in the moment and also I pine to misremember, though I am suddenly wrong to have ever kept them apart. As such, I am still being struck by these thrice thundered poems, by how they hold, and give away, the optimistic loneliness of the unexpected. As in the joke where god tells crow "Crow, this is your last, warning.", the poem looks, and can only look, where it's already. 

/

Vexations
poems, Annelyse Gelman
The University of Chicago Press, 2023
annelysegelman.com

Whatever it is you've been trying to say, or hear, can probably be found in the interior stoppages and outbound etymologies of Annelyse Gelman's spiritually forwarded Vexations in which the current devours the recent but goes on to imagine that it’s eaten a de-aged now and so becomes terrified of the present. Born invented, it ended so many times I ran out of weeping. Rooted in the everyday that has to relive with itself, it's a hard book to finish once. I found things because things were everywhere and I found things because they disappeared twice. With its snapshots of acceptance, vacated visions, and exiting accumulations, the verse makes of the moment an inquiry that speech isn't normally asked to speak for. A password, here, seems to know our password and Gelman creates access from a de-awed strangeness and discovers elsewhere as the anchor of locale. It looks like the world. It looks like my misunderstanding of the world. Illusions offer safe passage to holograms. Mirages aid in the evacuation of hallucinations. I look sometimes at my children as data sets of worry. I can't say how briefly I long for each. Vexations gives measure, and leaves one with a closeness glowing for the losses of its following.

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Dyscalculia
Camonghne Felix
One World, 2023

A blunt delicacy of slow care and tender economy, Dyscalculia, as doubly imagined by author and deeply reliable narrator Camonghne Felix, tells its story with its story. With break-up broken like the last romantic bone left as a soundbite trailing the howl that echo takes for snapping, it ensouls diagnosis with prognosis and makes of availability a border where on any given side a fringe context awards vision to those whose sight is an inheritance. Which is to say: It does the work. Felix uses verse as a suddenness with which to yield conversion from reversion while swearing on exhumations in a language that is both jarring and meditative. The performance itself designs a changeable, and elsewhere, audience that allows the reader to breathe above brackets and parentheticals as the marginalia of void and abyss. A warning, a trespass, a field, a comet- this is outside stuff that attends the inner. There is no reclaiming, here, of an old self, but rather a reclaiming of how one understands reinvention. To speak at its speaker, may we all ‘start to love what we know’, perhaps in stories such as this where the reading leaves those looking in the before-glow of its aftermath.

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OVERLAND
Natalie Eilbert
Copper Canyon Press, 2023

The wrongdoing, the math of it, so often abstract. Or hermetic. I sleep in a dark room where I pretend to sleep and my only light is my seasick joy. It is not right for me to misunderstand. Don’t worry, I only know this now in this undated now that comes before and after reading Natalie Eilbert’s considerate, final, and genetic Overland. If I fail, here, to say what comes during any writing of and, please keep at the very least that I almost didn’t make it through the book as I was taken into a particular sadness in thinking on those who will never read it. I guess it is no small thing to feel as a reader that one is in a good soft eye coming upon an egg that will hatch on sight. Overland is a decentering work, a work of shortlisted patience that checks our fictions and does not fake its wrongdoings to relieve relief. Soaked in the desolate allowances of solace that isolate permission, its verse is blessedly always a vowel away from reliving rescue, and it keeps the skull beneath the light bulb long enough to interrogate every ask. It hurts. Its devastating callbacks pinpoint flaw and fail. Earthly boredom, bodily boredom, the boredom of long beings who belong. Eilbert is serious about play and also about play. As in, we can’t use a name that has a name. As in, invention has no mother. I hope you will see these poems, and in the seeing I hope something is placed in the immediately created left hand of a hallucinating birdlike bird. As in, be carried. Its vision is a song to, and to, the loss of our dual invisibility.

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The New Quarantine
Johannes Göransson / Sara Tuss Efrik
Inside The Castle, 2023

So I'm just going to start in the middle, or the end. I have kids who can't laugh. They press button after button. I draw a smiley face on one of the buttons. I'm an uneducated vandal, you should know that. I don't know what happened. I got drunk before I got drunk. A week ago I started The New Quarantine by Johannes Göransson and Sara Tuss Efrik. It is an overwhelm. For some reason, the first thing I wrote in response to it was "A movie about three paper cuts." The thing is, I didn't follow that up, so I don't know what I meant by it, or what it was supposed to trigger in me. Anyway, THE BOOK, it seemed all heart and guts and inside joke and even more inside absolute immaculate un-fingerprinted leapfrogged footfalled sorrow. And I thought I was okay. But then, I got to the end of it tonight and all of those things are true, but also, everything is vividly falsified and now I am grieving a beginning. Look, explanation is a nostalgia. I try to make myself pristine. I was sick for six months this year and am better now but it fucked up my teeth. And people still want to read what I write. Hell is wrong with them. I am so not pretty but kind of able to film stuff in fake poems in between capitalisms. My youngest son doesn't make me think of death, but he should. He is not well and his not wellness isn't appropriate. I am all over the place and I am nowhere. I did not expect a week ago that The New Quarantine would childhood me back to now. I am a very basic lover of obsessions such as orphan and widow and mirror. Well, fuck. I am just going to say right now that I know for a fact that you're not going to stay with me this whole time because I am about to go so much more south SO RIGHT NOW if you love me or believe me or think my brain is worth the salt I turn it to, go buy The New Quarantine and while you're there or away, check out Haute Surveillance by Johannes Göransson and Toxicon and Arachne by Joyelle McSweeney and basically anything else written by them as one or all, etc. 

I am a prophet with zero thoughts. This book was written before my memory kicked in. It builds collapse. All my words toward it will move away. I think it's right that things disappear. Right as rain that falls on one whose language lets me have mine. I don't believe I can scratch this off, even if I do. It's a lottery ticket that hell gave to apocalypse. It's a trap. Thirst escapes me. I cut up magazines about self-harm. I am trying to respond to these rejected sober closures of dead attractions. Arrogant, but belonging is an exile I abandon forward. In the reading, it is strange that I heard things advertised that no buying would solve. What dares violate the secret americana. Who. There is so much blood in the work that I can't tell whose blood is the silent alarm. I might have died for the laughing of the resurrected. Caught sex from a diseased script description of the exterior. In the reading also I felt like I was impressing god more with each spider I removed from my picturing of spiders. I unpeople. My suicide has no entry point, only penetration. Don't die, omg. This work is a love story, and I am glad I waited. It made me read it too quickly. I don't feel like I reached the end.

/

Gaze Back
poems, Marylyn Tan
University of Georgia Press, 2018

In Gaze Back, poet Marylyn Tan is a vandal of ache and etch whose verse erases plainness, whose voice knows to radio itself, whose vision evicts and eventually encodes. Ah the automated shrug of a shoulder, ah this constant state of notification. Tan’s is a prayerful anger of dismantling and differentiating, one that reimagines the student of injury into a wounded anti-weakness that tenderizes evasion might the promise of invisible scrutiny trick the microscope into seeing. Somewhere between documentary and dream, the body has its fun with pain and its cake with god. The whole work is a safe word sounding its de-worship of password. In the reading, I wanted to be resurrected, but was found alive. Wanted to look back, but the future of Gaze Back mattered. Matters. 

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ON THE LONG BLUE NIGHT
poems, Eliot Cardinaux
Dos Madres Press, 2023

In some nearby deepness, language has forgotten how to understand the conversations between thunder and mirror. That nearby deepness could be singlehandedly so many that it might as well be predestined to be what belongs to poet Eliot Cardinaux in the precisely given away On The Long Blue Night. I question what nearby means and have to pick the echo that replies. But oh the echo that doesn't. If, of late, discovery is in a constant state of rehabilitation, Cardinaux gives us a verse embedded in what it recovers. Gives us a natural melancholy that separates moon and footprint might time pick different days to touch the earth. Gives us shrugged vulgarities of stonestruck awe might language learn eventually how madness cuts us short. This is a work and a voice afflicted with a great noticing, a hidden showmanship, a doomed unpredictability. A joy this tactile is frightening and freeing. I wrote the following note to myself in the reading, and then misread it, and then combined both, which are here: Your poem is in the room writing about the room I'm in. Many things are impossible. 

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The Long Run & other true stories
Mishka Shubaly
2022

I circle this fucking thing and circle it later like a different fucking thing. I read half of it from my first copy, and the second half of it from my signed, second, copy. Mishka Shubaly seems a descendant of that writer one has probably read wrongly but that one has let go thinking correctly subconsciously that there’s another about to do it, not necessarily rightly, but separately with sadder madder swag. I made this a competition and oh well. My better angels are visiting family. Speaking of god, his ruining of the selfie is historic but not legendary. This thing reports, but drugs reportage, is direct, but overtaken and possessed. Shubaly is both an avoidant jokester and self-harmed other. He writes as one believing that the resurrected have been reincarnated as character actors. How unfair, how perfect. Read this book. It goes far enough, and it comes back. Pages 225 to 349, for me and my recency bias, seemingly recreate for the first time the how and the how of how the soundtrack kills the playlist. I felt like I ought to feel desire, writes Shubaly. Look, I don’t have a word to take, but the witness, here, proves proof. It won’t change you but changes itself. Thank hell.

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LETTERS TO APPLE-TOWN
Poems- Eliot Cardinaux
Bodily Press 2023

BE STILL: POEMS FOR KAY SAGE
Poems – Nadia Arioli
Kelsay Books, 2023

The poverty of presence. The precise unknown. Eliot Cardinaux is a poet of dual trinities asking to be made whole. In Letters To Apple-town, jazz makes nostalgia from a future it’s never been from. Whether it’s ‘the world against the world’ or ‘more memory than memory’, there is a finality to these restarted verses that makes the offhand feel instilled. 

In reading this book, I have also been moving through Nadia Arioli’s Be Still: Poems for Kay Sage and am taken, and very replaced, by the elegantly accurate mysteries herein that make now a poor substitute for the recent. Somehow past, somehow addressing a future that comes from the future, the poems here respond to what ransoms the eye with a vision that erases hindsight. I lost my place not because it was a dream, but because I was stopped in my tracks before I could hide my sleep. This is a deeply awake work about work undone and reworked. Use your best hands.

The crossover isn't theirs, of course, and only partially mine, but I like to think I drink and strangers carry me home or at least point me to the same car that knows only for a moment where it is I live. I am broken in all places in a way I worship too quickly and birds open their eyes with their eyes. Where Cardinaux says ‘psychosis of signage’, Arioli says ‘gory miracle’, and I suddenly know which angel is an angel and which angel stands for god, and which angel is the third and only. If that makes sense, both these books are for you. And then, for me. And then, again, for you. Seek them out. Their findings matter.

/

Men & Sleep
Jay Besemer
Meekling Press, 2023

chance animals
a man
a mania maintained

Jay Besemer’s Men & Sleep is a restlessly melodic verse of fractured energy and subtracted expedition. Ah, the maleness of my fake and tired knowing. A me-shaped forgetting. A you. I’m exhausted and can’t sleep. Sleep won’t die. I don’t know what my speaking touches. I don’t know where. Here is weather: The recency bias of the wounded latter. Here is a forest: The unbodied nearness of the hurt now. Besemer’s voice is pinpoint, but also un-surrounded. Bread and breadth. An underground melancholy, a pop-up tremor. The middle is the only beginning that can disprove origin. Tree, because tree. Ah, this formfitting imagery, squeezed through a scarred peephole. And these who-less creatures bathed far-off by the darkening of tomorrow’s remnant astonishment. It’s all here because it’s all there. One will feel partially found. Not by the all-ness of connection, nah. But by the mapped disconnection that holds things to the same legit remoteness.

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SUKUN
New and Selected Poems
Kazim Ali
Wesleyan University Press, 2023

Anxiety is the cure for anxiety. I want to worry on a corrected yesterday about the world. Belief, behave. The writing of Kazim Ali has always given my smallness a place to re-shadow the reshaped. But that’s the least of its giving. In Ali’s Sukun, the touched new and the pristine selected reveal themselves as differently chosen under the sameness of an art lit by the singularity of twinned inquiry. Such utterances are blessedly sick with a patience that approximates the space between god-distracted angels. Grave, ghost, gargoyle- by which clock does stillness begin to age? Longhand language and the would-be theft of silence. This is time’s early work.

I worry that in heaven I’ll think about heaven. No animal under a bomb has seen the churchbell of the missing earth. If there is a place you are looking for, I love you

there. Death doesn’t need god.

God’s least suicidal child crying like a fingernail over a record scratched by a mosquito. A family of bitemarks huddled in the heel of a footprint. The broken ankles of a lover’s last hunger pain. Look in this mouth. Ache has no echo. The mirrors that take my body starve.

In the note, I’m always dead. No one knows how to write. A kid who can’t read is passed out in the driver’s seat of a car that’s being towed. Part of our dream is the kid wanting to whistle. Sadness has ribs. Deer point god to the slow present.

God’s eye brings a glacier to a blood stain. I don’t drink with my children but listen as they say to each other that the bible is one long suicide note. What a small past. Dogs turn blue in ghosts that miss our pain.

I’ll give you
if you give me
let’s both
have nothing
more

One says god
when many
think none
are dead.

Many say god
when one
thinks god
is dead.

The message, again, reads kill
the messenger.

God says god.

The book was too blue for me to open. I slept and let my fingers touch seven places. I was a grey animal with a grey baby. I know that now.