RECOMMENDED

Alice Friman’s “Vinculum” embraces the internal, the deep inside, the emotional interior as it interacts with our biological makeup. A “vinculum,” the horizontal line that appears between two numbers that are being divided, or to indicate repeating digits in a decimal, can also be translated as a “bond” or “tie” between two ideas. Friman’s attempt at creating a connective tissue between her poems is so successful that often individual poems fold back into themselves, each moment relating and recreating another.

“Vinculum” seems to work with three major concepts: the body, the location, the emotional moment or instance. In almost all of the poems there is an interaction between these that gives the reader a strong, multidimensional experience. Read the rest of this entry »

Marc Smith

By Mike Gillis

If slam poetry is still the religion it once was, then the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge is its cathedral. Of course, like the best of lounges, the Green Mill is the opposite of a church. Rather than natural light and sanctity, it conjures sea grottos, manmade dimness, embellished curves.

On a recent Saturday in Wrigleyville, the rock club Metro served as a surrogate to slam poetry founder Marc Smith’s traditional pulpit. It served quite well. If a little less cavernous, the Metro was no less ornate and grotesquely organic than the Green Mill. Should the low-key ambiance have suggested slam has lost its edge, though, the pantheon assembled for the twenty-fifth anniversary of slam poetry immediately extinguished such doubts. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

In a sweeping 200-plus poem collection, G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher tackle an undeniably complicated, expansive subject: this American life. Written collaboratively between a year of back-and-forth emails, “Your Father on the Train of Ghosts” slips fluidly from topic to topic, from the interior of a house (“…and what do we have to show for it / around the dinner table, or the sound like a dinner table”), to the exterior: parkways and botanical gardens, chapels and hospitals.

The book begins with “Automated Town,” a poem which lists a number of familiar situations, people and places suddenly made new by their interactions with each other, and with the determined voice writing them into the poetic landscape. It is this voice, among the mass of American voices it represents, that was most consistent and illuminating.

It’s a room of people dressed
in bright clothes. It’s a room of hanging doors.
Of cell phones and one is ringing. Of people having sex.
Rows of bottles of vodka. Rows of
sparklers. We could go on like this for some time,
so we do. Bugs are flying in and out of the open
windows. All the TVs are on. Read the rest of this entry »

The Poetry Foundation has a mission to celebrate poetry and present it to the largest possible audience. Almost a hundred years since its inception in 1912 as Poetry magazine, the foundation carries on these principles by providing poetry a new home when its new public building opens this month.

“Designing a building from the ground up just for poetry was a huge opportunity,” says Poetry Foundation president John Barr. The two-story building, a 22,000-square-foot structure, is one of only three public spaces in the nation built for the advancement of poetry. The location will include the offices of the foundation and magazine, along with a multipurpose performance space acoustically designed for the spoken word, a public garden, a library holding a collection of 30,000 volumes, and an exhibition gallery. The structure’s aesthetics were an important part of the design. Local architect John Ronan, Barr says, “took one art form, poetry, and translated it into another one, architecture.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

As the title suggests, Polish poet Adam Zagajewski’s new book “Unseen Hand” is a book of hidden things. By this, we mean the poems move in and out of revealing and concealing, each poem an elegant exploration of history, both personal and global.

Splitting his time between Chicago and Krakow, Zagajewski’s poetry reflects on the unseen impressions we leave on each other and the physical world around us, the indirect intimacy of human interaction. In his poem, “Joseph Street,” he writes:

Years pass, I remain, memory is uncertain,
unheard prayers lie underfoot,
sparrows are eternity’s frail emblem,
the rain is only recollection, the silhouettes
of unknown persons walk without casting shadows.

This kind of quiet observation of “remembering,” the actual act of, allows readers  to insert themselves emotionally into the international but often familiar landscapes that Zagajewski carefully details. His engagement with simplicity, with unnoticed or overlooked beauty, seems to be at the root of “Unseen Hand.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

We all know the story of the boy who could fly. He came late one night looking for his shadow, then took the girl Wendy, the boy John and the baby Michael with help from pixie dust and happy thoughts to a world of adventure where they’d never grow old.

Jenny Boully’s “Not Merely Because of the Unknown that was Stalking Toward Them” has been described as a dark re-envisioning of J.M. Barrie’s “Peter and Wendy,” “a ‘deliciously creepy’ swan song from Wendy Darling to Peter Pan” in which Boully seethes her text with feelings untouched upon by Barrie’s own prose. Did Peter thimble Tiger Lily, Wendy may wonder; when he loves as ferociously as he fights, is it for real or make-believe? Is Tinker Bell’s pining justly so because she will only live and die and be forgotten?

To delve into Boully’s work is to dive with faith from the plank—to jump, with hope and belief and a wish to see what the author has given us: a fresh, imaginative look at a tale as ageless as Peter himself. You must, when reading the work, “dispel every other thought,” as Calvino would say. You must find yourself in a locked room, perhaps on a couch, perhaps in the bath (to dream of mer-creatures), or perhaps almost prostrate in bed with wide and absorbing eyes. You must be willing to fly yourself. Read the rest of this entry »

The Snark! The Snark! an epic tale,
and utter and complete nonsense too:
Of a crew on a ship, seeking Snark not whale,
although there’s a Beaver, ’tis true.

A fabulous poem—hilarity and wit,
a balance of pleasure and peril,
was writ by none other, in piqué or in fit,
than the beloved Lewis Carroll.

A reproduction more lovingly made
has doubtful ever been seen.
Imprinted with gold of the highest grade,
Most households will need seventeen.

Within, oh, the drawings! Delectable drawings!
I’d expound on the Sendak-ian beauty,
Were it not for the call and the incessant gnawings
to capture the Snark—my duty! Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“What I cannot find in the morning is most myself.” Thus writes Matthew Henriksen in his new book, “Ordinary Sun,” a collection of poems that engage in self-exploration and the analysis of our internal existence in comparison to our outer world. With a violent delicacy, Henriksen writes the tactile, the vocal, the visual. He asks the reader to maintain a balance between the physical and metaphysical, to question the intensity of our lives and imagine our own agency in the afterlife: “We set our bodies in the grass. / Stones held our breath.”

The author of two chapbooks, “Another Word” (DoubleCross Press) and “Is Holy” (horse less press), Henriksen focuses on interaction and intimacy, the holiness of objects that create symbolic impressions on our minds from day-to-day. In “Afterlife on a Long, Shallow Hill,” he writes, “The soil opened its skin, hatching poppies.” Each image allows for multiple interpretations, each with a sensory reaction that evokes a personal memory, a moment of recognition. The fragile acknowledgment of the connection between an image and the reader’s experience with this image is something Henriksen seems to be particularly sensitive about. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Poetry that works to explain the complexities of maternity and the intricate landscape of childhood is not uncommon in our contemporary moment, but it is not often so delicately complicated by the idea of familial grief as a global affair.

In “Ghost in a Red Hat,” Rosanna Warren discovers the language of human histories, sewing them gently into her own understanding of pain and tragedy. Her fifth book of poetry approaches national events and the lives of others with a comfortable directness, writing of grief in frank, confident terms: “Death outpaces us.”

The book carefully examines the life and death of her mother, slipping headfirst into the wide void of what it means to be “alone.” Warren writes, “There was something I wanted to say, at the age of twelve, some question she hadn’t answered…” But while the poems are elegiac, they are not limited to just the lyrical exploration of her mother. Warren meditates on not only what is influential, but what is most sincerely human about our culture amidst nature, focusing some poems on the U.S. Civil War and Hurricane Katrina, while others span several pages and focus on one person (most notably Frederick Law Olmsted, architect of Central Park): “Olmsted and Vaux /loop tableland and meadow, hill, hollow, rock,/reservoir, lake and brook…” She reinterprets our bodies, emotions and actions (for better or for worse) as emotional thread being sewn in and out of our organic landscape. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

A poet of dark refusals. A naked, impure poet. A poet speaking from the margins. These things, writes Edward Hirsch in the foreword for “Sobbing Superpower,” make Tadeusz Rózewicz a poet brimming with uncertainties, a “bemused seer of nothingness.”

Lesser known by American audiences, Rózewicz is a Polish poetry heavyweight, his writings filled with postwar contemplation and breathless urgency, an escape from the constraints of formal poetic traditions prior to the Holocaust. World War II thematically blankets the beginning of ”Sobbing Superpower” as Rózewicz explores, reimagines and escapes death. In the opening poem, “Rose,” he writes:

Rose is the name of a flower
or a dead girl

You can place a rose in a warm palm
or in black soil

Blood drains from the pale petal
the girl’s dress hangs formless Read the rest of this entry »