Mad Poet of the Year - Lisa DeVuono

The Mad Poet of the Year blog posts share the poetry of a long-time Mad Poet. This year-long appointment provides readers with a deep dive of the writer’s work and thoughts on poetry. We are thrilled to have Lisa DeVuono serve as the Mad Poet of the Year for 2024.


 
 

Full Moon

Decorating the garden
with lights
small but bold

I wish to avoid the inevitable
darkness that will be upon us
as we head to the shortest days of the year

This year when we had to choose
between loneliness and well-being
sitting solo in chairs made for the company of others

What is the process of hope?
to emerge from all the fearful hiding
tattered but intact

Darkness is a wakeup call
that when we work together
we have no reasons to fail

Still when I am done stringing
the luminescent globes
that will turn on at dusk, and fade by dawn

I make sure I whisper to the moon
“Please, do not think my lamp lighting
is an invitation to stop shining.”


Heading into wintertime, it’s always a mixed blessing. I’m not a big fan of cold dreary winter days and long for the warmth of summer but it does offer me the chance to hibernate and hope that slowing down might bring peace. While the camaraderie of the holidays serves as an opportunity to gather, it can also point out the loneliness of those who may not have family or friends.  

I wrote this poem during the first year of the pandemic when we were still in the place of uncertainty about the virus, unclear about the treatment, and in grief about lost moments and loved ones.

I was stringing up some lights in the garden so that we could see them from our window, to cheer us on. It was a full moon that night and I imagined that I was negotiating with it. “Hey Moon…I’m trying to lighten my life and make things look hopeful even when I don’t feel hopeful so I may need your help to carry on” or something equally vulnerable.

For me, this is ultimately a poem about connection and reliance on others. It’s about the communities that we lost, and the ones that we were trying to hold onto.

 I hope the lights in your life continue to shine and be a beacon for you when the darkness bears down and can be too much to handle.


Lisa DeVuono is the 2024 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County. She was one of the founders of It Ain’t Pretty, a women’s writing collective that performed locally. She produced multi-media shows incorporating song, music, poetry, and dance, including Rumi in Song at the Sedgwick Theater; and Whole Heart Home, and Breaking Open Breaking Free, part of the IceHouse Tonight series in Bethlehem.   

She led creativity and poetry workshops and has worked with teens in recovery and cancer patients. She wrote a peer-based curriculum Poetry as a Tool for Recovery: An Easy-to-Use Guide in Eight Sessions for facilitators working with persons living with mental health challenges.

In addition to the full-length manuscript This Time Roots, Next Time Wings, her poetry has appeared in the Mad Poets Review, Paterson Literary Review and the anthology Grit Gravity & Grace: New Poems about Medicine and Healthcare. She is the author of the chapbook Poems from the Playground of Risk published by Pudding House Press and was the recipient of an honorable mention in Passaic County Community College’s annual Allen Ginsberg Contest.

Recently retired, she has worked as an administrator, librarian, and lay chaplain.

Review of Expecting Hands by John Sozanski

Expecting Hands

Moonstone Press

$19.99

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by guest blogger, Anthony Palma


When I first picked up John Sozanski’s debut collection Expecting Hands, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. Sozanski has had a wide range of experiences: he has traveled; he has been involved in painting and visual art; he is well-read and articulate, and I was excited to see how all of these things came together in a poetry collection. What I found in these pages were carefully crafted poems that tell fascinating tales big and small. They exist in a world where poetry is the language, currency, and creed.

From page one, the thing that stood out to me was the meticulous craft with which these poems were composed. The line breaks are crisp and appropriate, drawing us through the worlds of the poems, holding our hands gently as a guide, not a pedant. A careful editing and revision process has ensured that there is never a word that feels out of place or unnecessary. Poems like “two for one” and “ricochets” perfectly embody the tight free verse that Sozanski employs.

In regards to Sozanski’s background, I was pleasantly pleased to see that a number of the poems in this collection reference his connections to other types of art. “Weeds” is for the author Frank McCourt, and there are references to Rumi, Shakespeare, Jerry Garcia, and more. The part of the book where this is most evident, though, is the section entitled “My Friends” that includes a series of ekphrastic poems dealing with El Greco, Pablo Picasso, and the conceptual work 50 Days at Ilium by Cy Twombly that takes up an entire room at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. These are true works of ekphrasis, emphasizing the conversation between author and painter, painting and poem. How are we to respond to art? How does it impact us? John Sozanski might just have that answer.

However, all of this is not, in this reviewer’s opinion, the strongest part of this collection. That distinction goes to the sense of reality in these poems. Through all of the artistic and philosophical musings, not once do these poems come across as pretentious or self-important. Poems like “stille nacht” and “even birthdays” call out the violence and moral cost of hatred, while “the indifferent wave” muses on the first Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and the ignored warning signs of the current conflict. All of this comes together in “on the road to Harlem,” a poem that tells the story of traveling to Harlem for art through a montage of social inequity, conversations, and culture told with a matter-of-fact style that would make Frank O’Hara proud. This poem perfectly captures what seems to be the main project of this collection – elevating the mundane and filing down the extraordinary onto an even plane of insight accessibility, and meaning.

In reading this book, it is clear what John Sozanski loves. After all, this book is a love story. It is written out of love of art, of words, and of expression. It tells a love story about places, faces, and even pets. Most importantly, it is a love letter to humanity, to us, in all of our joy, tragedy, and despair. And just like a love letter it offers us the hope of a better day tomorrow. 


Anthony Palma’s work attempts to bridge the gap between poetry and other forms while addressing issues of social justice, identity, and existence. His work has appeared in publications such as Rue Scribe, Oddball Magazine, and the Show Us Your Papers Anthology. His debut collection of poetry, flashes of light from the deep (Parnilis Media), and Horror, a chapbook, are available on Amazon.

Review of May Day by Jackie Kay

May Day

Pan Macmillan

$19.15

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Jennifer Schneider


In May Day, Jackie Kay, a much-loved poet, novelist, and short story writer, once again delivers a collection that will surely move both readers new to the author and long-time fans of her work.

The former Makar (national poet) of Scotland, Kay offers readers a poignant series of elegies, ones capable of transporting readers across time while inspiring engagement and activism for the present. Recounting a life of activism, from Kay’s childhood in Glasgow (A Life in Protest– “1974: when Madame Allende comes to Glasgow, after Pinochet’s coup and Allende’s murder,” 3) and protest marches (“1984: marching with Pride through London! Lesbians and gay men dressed to impress. Me with my double-headed axe, yes,” 4) to a global pandemic (Still, Mother’s Day 2020– “So still, so still, still, still55) to Black Lives Matter protests, Kay seamlessly weaves personal memoir with associated political upheaval, period events, and the human condition in its many forms.

As Kay guides readers through lived experiences and associated recollections, the relationship of daughter-to-mother and mother-to-daughter is a constant presence. Kay’s mother features prominently throughout the entirety of the collection (with a sequence of three Mother’s Day poems a powerful testament to the thunder of silence whether or not living, while living or dead.

The influence of a mother, Kay’s mother, is explored repeatedly in poems such as Mother’s Day, 2021 (56)--

You are still my mother. I am still your daughter.
Though there is nothing now between me and the sky,
I will still be saying hello and you say goodbye.

 and more, including “Blue Boat Mother”, “My Mum is a Robin”,

and “Three Little Birds”--

 That day in the ambulance, heading for the mortuary
with my newly dead mum on the trolley beside me,
so herself still it didn’t seem possible
that she could be dead at all,
the first responder’s ringtone went off.

I would have thought she’d have chosen
‘Non, je ne regrette rien’, by Edith Plaf
or Nat King Cole’s ‘Almost Like Being in Love’,
the song she took to singing every day

of her last few years. What a day this has been.

Kay’s gorgeous text pulses with a palpable life story interwoven with layers of longing and love for layers of living. Kay writes in ways that make the past a part of the present and a powerful tribute to poetry as a tool for both documentary and autobiography.

Kay repeatedly, consistently, and expertly teaches how to write poetry that is as powerful as it is poignant and as therapeutic as it is thought-provoking. May Day is a work of quiet strength and compelling story. The poems repeatedly and powerfully weave active reflection with activism inspired by a love for nation, family, intentionality, and solidarity while fighting for social change.

Of natural beauty, Kay’s words– line by line, stanza by stanza, poem by poem, string a love letter to family and a map of familial history. The work not only showcases the potential for poetry to document with a historical lens but also to move readers to ponder and revisit lesser-known pockets of history. Within those pockets rest a goldmine of endless story- story Kay captures so well in May Day.

The autobiographical collection chronicles Kay’s life, as written in the aftermath of the passing of her adoptive parents, Helen and John Kay. Subjects include both mother and father as well as unexpected yet likely familiar names such as Paul Robeson, Picasso, Harry Belafonte, Louise Gluck, Joan Baez, and more. The pieces infuse and sustain new life in figures both of family and familiar names.

From page to page, poem to poem, Kay moves seamlessly through time and era, offering readers a gorgeous blend of vivid imagery and memorable story while mourning and celebrating lives gone. The poet turns distress into dances with beauty, and distance into daring queries of life’s most important meanings.

From “Daughters, Neighbours (for Elaine)”

 And then came sorrow,

your mammy’s hearse pushed uphill in the snow.
My mum following ten days later.
The snow still thick in our street.

 walking grief’s long corridor
to the open window, the open door,
knowing we could not have given more.

We could not have given more.

to

 “Oh my oh my oh my”

 Further than the sky now, you and I,
as far apart as the moon and the earth

 and yet not. Not at all. Not apart.

You, you, you who orbit my heart.

May Day is warmth wrapped in a humanist perspective and a poet’s prowess. The collection is a deeply delightful, deep read from an ever-more-delightful poet. If I may, I encourage anyone looking for their next collection to find space for this phenomenal work– one that will prompt a wealth of emotion and reflection in and off your reading queue. It’s a sure tonic to any day’s call for fresh words and a collection of protest songs that channel grief into forward movement.


Jen Schneider is an educator who lives, writes, and works in small spaces throughout Pennsylvania. She loves words, experimental poetry, and the change of seasons. She’s also a fan of late nights, crossword puzzles, and compelling underdogs. She has authored several chapbooks and full-length poetry collections, with stories, poems, and essays published in a variety of literary and scholarly journals. Sample works include Invisible Ink, On Habits & Habitats, On Daily Puzzles: (Un)locking Invisibility, A Collection of Recollections, and Blindfolds, Bruises, and Breakups. She is currently working on her first series, which (not surprisingly) includes a novel in verse. She is the 2022-2023 Montgomery County PA Poet Laureate.

Local Lyrics - Featuring Sarah Fertsch

Mountain in Another Life 
by Sarah Fertsch 

Pebbles don’t render people speechless. 

Echoes ripple through canyons 
Trees stretch their arms toward the sun 

Waves slurp sand with every bite 
Ocean, so vast it could never be measured 

Yet beach bodies condense with Stubborn efficiency 

Galaxies house thousands of stars 
The universe won’t stop expanding 

So Why Shrink? 

Because plane seats choke your hips 
And doctors diagnose you as lazy Because shame is the primary theme 
Of your every nightmare |Every flirtation 
Every takeout order 
Every dressing room 
Every breathy climb up a staircase 

Because survival of fittest really 
Means the fittest 

The world is allowed to get bigger, 
But not you. You must wilt 
Like an overgrown 
Flower, desperate for water. 

God, make me a mountain in my next life 
Every inch of me photographed 
and explored 
And Beloved. 

 

What draws you to writing as an art form? What are your muses?
I found poetry to be a comfort whenever I was feeling strong emotions. I studied communication and philosophy and politics in college, which I think really shows my interests and my influences. I'm fascinated by the concept of justice - exploring what's fair and what is right. I've used poetry to write my own story and explore it through the lens of philosophical concepts like beauty and equality. Life is too often ignored or glossed over, and I think that wrestling with how our experiences matches our values empowers us to live lives we are proud of.

In the end, I'm just a woman who overthinks her life, and seeks to find art in the chaos. I write almost exclusively about semi-autobiographical matters and how I feel about them.  

I’ve seen you rock and knock socks off with slam performances. How do you write for story/poetry slams or turn existing work into a piece ready to be performed.
Thank you! Public speaking and storytelling has always been my first love. In fact, I think that my work is the strongest when it's read aloud because I can use tone and expressions to communicate meaning beyond just words. I will usually practice where I want to pause and where I want to speed up in a piece, and consider what kinds of emotions I want to draw from the audience. 

It's been nerve-wracking to step into the spotlight because I'm nervous that my story won't resonate, and I've leaned heavily on comedy in the past to justify my space at slams. But I am learning into being more vulnerable and raw, and the audience has responded so warmly to it. 

What is your process like? Any rituals you use to tap into the creative flow?
I usually go through seasons where I'm really inspired and write like eight poems a week, or weeks where I can't write anything. I'm a proposal writer in the tech industry by day, so writing out contracts sometimes drains me. One of the main ways I find creativity is by reading other writers' work! I'm obsessed with Mary Oliver and Chen Chen. Sitting outside at the cafe and reading poetry, then writing poetry, - that's how I want to live out the rest of my days. 

Also, I listen to good music! I hate to admit it, but Taylor Swift can be quite the wordsmith, and her storytelling inspires me to mess around with the pen. After all, she also writes about her own experiences! 

You are the Poet Laureate of Somers Point, NJ. Tell us a little about being the head poet of a cool working-class shore town.
I've lived down the shore my whole life, and there's is something so special about Somers Point. It's locals and their devotion to the marsh and the ocean that inspire me. As a child, I've always fantasized about running away through Kennedy Park into the bay and live in the wetlands amongst the herons and crabs. I'm honored to represent our little town and the creativity that flows from our home by the sea. 

These days, you can find me wrangling two dogs down Dog Beach (or Sunset Beach officially), doing yoga at Grace and Glory in Northfield, or grabbing a drink at Josie Kelly's.  

Community is so important for any artist. How do you engage with or create community as a writer?
 The writing community is so vibrant in South Jersey! I'm really loving the Murphy Writing Center affiliated with Stockton University. They offer great writing classes and retreats for all kinds of writers. 

As the Poet Laureate, I have the opportunity to teach a poetry class for 8th graders at Jordan Road School in Somers Point. I've organized the class around preparing for an in-class poetry slam, and we watch Moth stories on YouTube. It's great to empower the students to find their voice. By the end of the semester, they went from whispering to sharing their story without shame! 

Where can readers find more of your work? Follow your creative endeavors?
Follow me on Instagram @sarah-a-fertsch! And check me out every first Tuesday at the Moth Slam in Philadelphia! 


Bio: Sarah Fertsch is a poet and storyteller from South Jersey. She is the 2024 Poet Laureate of Somers Point (NJ), Moth Story Slam champion, and staff writer with Shore Local Newsmagazine. She's an active member of the Greater Philadelphia arts community and seeks to find creativity in the everyday. 


John Wojtowicz grew up working on his family’s azalea and rhododendron nursery in the backwoods of what Ginsberg dubbed “nowhere Zen New Jersey.” Currently, he works as a licensed clinical social worker and adjunct professor. He has been featured on Rowan University’s Writer’s Roundtable on 89.7 WGLS-FM and several of his poems were chosen to be exhibited in Princeton University's 2021 Unique Minds: Creative Voices art show at the Lewis Center for the Arts. He has been nominated 3x for a Pushcart Prize and serves as the Local Lyrics contributor for The Mad Poets Society Blog. His debut chapbook Roadside Oddities: A Poetic Guide to American Oddities was released in early 2022 and can be purchased at www.johnwojtowicz.com. John lives with his wife and two children in Upper Deerfield, NJ.

Review of SWARM by Noah David Roberts

Photo by Lindsay Hargrave

SWARM

Kith Books

$15.00

You can purchase your copy here.

Reviewed by Sean Hanrahan

Relatively new to Philadelphia, Noah David Roberts has already firmly rooted themself into the cultural and literary hive of the city through founding a monthly reading series (Scribes on South), co-founding a journal (Graphic Violence Lit), and hosting and performing at other various events. In other words, they have created a buzz. Their latest work, SWARM, as the title suggests swarms with intensity and startling metaphors. The book can feel as sharp as a hornet’s sting and offer the salve for the sting in alternating measure.

SWARM revels in a celebration of the narrator’s bio-mythography. The narrator is nonbinary, and their individual bio-myth begins when they step on a hornet’s nest, a papery yet ultraviolent construction. The hornet’s nest being as what Roberts writes in the artist statement/afterword, “the violence of what has become the gender binary.” One poem among several where the origin story of the bio-myth is richly explored is the poem, “Drifting Through False Front Architecture.” The poem begins with haunting, cinematic lines:

The thing about a ghost town is that
the inhabitants are translucent
which means, I can see trueness
in capillary skin. Chain railings &
chicken wire rust in early summer,
the shade of the sun, nothing can evade.

The poem opens like an old Western and entices the reader with how this metaphor will reveal itself and what presuppositions about gender will dissolve: “Ghost stories/ are a little played out, don’t you think?” The narrator’s body metamorphoses into water, arsenic, a viper until this crackling poem ends with

A page left blank
like entire spaces of time. When I
was a kid I stepped on a hornet’s nest,
& now the grass is seeded differently.

Earlier in the collection, “Wasp Affirmation,” divebombs into the wasp/hornet metaphor and serves as a sort of tagline for this collection with the opening lines: “I have one mission & one mission only: feed & kill.” The rhythm of the language intimates an angry wasp in flight:

I see
nothing but prey stranded & paralyzed
in sight of our numbers, my swarm
of genderfucked anger, buzzing.

This poem stings, rears back, and stings again with its heightened and precise diction, perhaps nowhere more so than the penultimate sentence: “I pray to queen to save my carvedout exo,/ maybe that is what it takes/ to turn a boy girl.”

The cinematic universe depicted in “Drifting Through False Front Architecture” is also reflected in “Clockwork Monkey.” The most famous and perhaps the most unsettling image of eyes being propped open is alluded to

There is violence in my manhood
that intrepidly spins the spectrum
& dilates my memory. Lysergic eye
-drops & ketamine couldn’t save
those condemned eternity
moths around a low love.

A reader may wonder how a poet that starts so vividly, so violently would end. “Clockwork Monkey” ends with what I feel is the most lyrical image in the collection:

I find the pit of my horror wealths
of knowledge, a passion
lived in a cloud against a feminize
azure sky.

Towards the end of the collection, the narrator calls back to their origin story. In “Wrath,” the narrator explains

Something
happened to me when
I stepped on that nest &
now I am different

This book is shaped as a metamorphosis, a butterfly coming out of its cocoon, or more germanely, a wasp outs of its easily destructible, yet dangerous, nest. An unnamed person tells the narrator, presumably trying to sway who they will become, “ur welts will melt to/ dissipation & ur memory/ of this time will fade.” This collection is proof that the narrator formed their identity without fear of ultraviolence. Instead, they

sweep
wasp carcasses from under
 the table, seeing that they are
my manhood. Decrepit
& crusted to the floor
like I used to be. A wasp
will survive anything but
my own feminine wrath.

With SWARM, Roberts and their narrator explore a world hostile to the nonbinary, in thrall to the patriarchy. Literally, nonbinary folks have to push their way out of a flimsily constructed world and, in a way, rebirth themselves. This poetry beauty is a necessary addition to transgender literature. One that uses a sustained and compelling metaphor to relay that experience to any reader attuned enough to hear the buzz. Believe the buzz; give into the buzz; read this book!

Sean Hanrahan is a Philadelphian poet originally hailing from Dale City, Virginia. He is the author of the full-length collection Safer Behind Popcorn (2019 Cajun Mutt Press) and the chapbooks Hardened Eyes on the Scan (2018 Moonstone Press) and Gay Cake (2020 Toho). His work has also been included in several anthologies, including Moonstone Featured Poets, Queer Around the World, and Stonewall’s Legacy, and several journals, including Impossible Archetype, Mobius, Peculiar, Poetica Review, and Voicemail Poems. He has taught classes titled A Chapbook in 49 Days and Ekphrastic Poetry and hosted poetry events throughout Philadelphia.

Ekphrasis: Poems and Art

Ekphrasis: Poems and Art

Image Credit: Cathleen Cohen

Welcome to a new Mad Poets blog, to be offered quarterly.  

It’s a pleasure to write about the relationship between poetry and other art forms, to examine ways that a various creative arts relate to each other.

The term ekphrasis can be defined narrowly as writing that describes a work of art in another medium-- paintings, music, photography sculpture and the like.  It can also refer more broadly to the alchemy that happens when one medium tries to define and relate to another. This could refer to poems inspired by the visual arts or music -- and also the reverse! To my mind, ekphrasis can also encompass hybrid works, like artists’ books, author/illustrator collaborations and graphic poems.

Many scholars have written about ekphrasis and there are great resources online. Though not scholar of the topic, I have had a practice of writing poetry and painting for many years. Both are essential to my creative life. These art forms interact, challenge each other and open up many questions and tensions.

My aim in this blog is to feature the work of various poets and artists, to let you know of interesting viewing opportunities and to provide some angles that might prompt your own writing.


Our Senses Grow Sharper: Jeff Thomsen and Maria DeMauro


Thank you, Mad Poets, for the opportunity to explore ekphrasis through the work of many talented writers and painters. I’ve learned much about their various ways of connecting different art forms. This month’s blog is my last (for a time) and highlights two wonderful, local painters, Jeff Thomsen and Maria DiMauro, both of whom are connected to Philadelphia’s Cerulean Arts Gallery.

In Jeff Thomsen’s sumptuous oil paintings, stories simmer below the surface. A lover of music and poetry, Jeff draws on both to inform his works, many of which have inspired others to write poems, (including myself !) He articulates his approach in an artist’s statement for his upcoming January 2025 exhibition (https://ceruleanarts.com/pages/jeff-thomsen) and in a lovely, short video by John Thornton (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YncA9CJRUBI ).

Jeff quotes W.B.Yeats, “The world  is full of magical things patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” Jeff continues, “My own work is a humble attempt to hone these senses and discover and show as best I can the magic I see in the world. I paint representationally because, for me, such magic resides in the particular expression of particular things, a unique face or gesture, the unfolding of a specific landscape, the ongoing play of light and shade and its revelation of some eternal truth.

 I enjoy the adherence to form amidst the pulsating sensation of light and color in nature that I am often overwhelmed by.” 

Keeper, Jeff Thomsen

In Jeff’s poem about his painting, Keeper, he invites us into his process while showing humility about the nature of his (masterful) artwork.

Keeper

What is this about?
I don’t know, and I painted it.
A young woman walks
with a jug and gray bucket
through an outdoor space hemmed in by dark woods

She’s not repelled by the darkness,
but walks toward it
regarding, briefly, the small lemur that has just
bolted past her.

And just above and to the right awaits
another lemur by the edge of the wood,
its body and ring-tailed banner
bathed in dark shadow

These must be her charges.  She shows no alarm —
she regards the bolting lemur as if it were a passing bird.
And they know her, obviously anticipating
the gastronomical delights hidden in the bucket and
the thirst-quenching liquid in the jug.

Together they enter a future
of which we might join, but for the static of weeds
that must first be surmounted

and the distance
they have already travelled together.

- Jeff Thomsen

This year Jeff created a large scale series of five paintings based on Ravel’s evocative five movement piano suite, Miroirs,  (https://music.apple.com/gb/album/ravel-miroirs-gaspard-de-la-nuit-pavane/519118441). After observing him work on these paintings, it seems that Jeff’s senses have grown sharper and more attuned to the imagery evoked by performances of Ravel’s magical score to create his own ‘reflections’ of the imagery suggested by titles of each movement.  I think that when poets engage with other art forms, this sharpens our senses and our writing.

Here is one poem I wrote about one of Jeff’s early renditions of Miroir’s first movement:

Noctuelles
They wink/ just to illuminate -Léon-Paul Fargue

My friend renders a garden
from sketch to small canvas
to one more spacious,
expanding the image.

He’s inspired by Ravel,
whose music entices
the rising of moths over grasses
tangled like unruly lyrics.

Insects dart and wink
in the walled city garden
where night enters, kindled
by dreams—but whose?

Ravel composed for a friend, Léon-Paul,
whose poems flared like fireflies,
plentiful then, not endangered.
I picture them strolling, souls expanding.

My friend deepens the color
in each version, revealing its creatures --
leashed dog, passersby, squirrels, bounding fox
and I, longing to enter.

- Cathleen Cohen

Summer Night, Jeff Thomsen

Cat on a Fence, Jeff Thomsen

 One of Jeff’s watercolors of a cat sparked another poem for me, alongside a silverpoint drawing by Maria DiMauro. Maria, a talented mixed-media artist who has been a professor of art and design at Arcadia University, documented (with sensitive, gorgeously rendered drawings) some of the 1,500 birds who perished in a short time span (many flying into buildings) in a small area of Center City. Learn of this recent exhibit in her words:

From her artist’s statement:

 “A light rain was falling on Friday morning, October 2, 2020, while fog shrouded the city. During a short time, an estimated 1,500 native migratory birds were killed within a three-and-a-half block radius of Center City Philadelphia. Earlier that night, the cloud cover was low, and the moon was full, at peak migration. Birds use the moon and stars to migrate and are attracted to lights within buildings but have little experience with glass. Seeking a safe place, they fly into windows, confused by the artificial light and reflective glass. Many of these deaths are preventable, but require using bird-friendly materials and enacting building standards designed to reduce the use of reflective glass.

The source imagery for these bird drawings is courtesy of Stephen Maciejewski, a former social worker and tireless Audubon volunteer, who rescues injured birds and collects and catalogues bird fatalities in Philadelphia. Stephen’s work and photographs galvanized members of the birding community to create “Bird Safe Philly” which soon established “Lights Out Philly,” a voluntary program that encourages turning off or blocking as much light as possible during peak migration times in spring and fall.” https://ceruleanarts.com/pages/maria-dimauro?_pos=1&_sid=4271f79c2&_ss=r

To learn more about Maria’s work:    https://www.mariadimauro.com/

1500 Birds: Yellow Belly, Maria DiMauro

 

Here is my poem about both works, which I couldn’t resist purchasing.

 Cat and Warbler

On impulse I buy two works
with earnings from my own
sparce sales. I should save
for future costs, for brushes,
paints and frames

but strap into the car
a tawny watercolor cat
and silverpoint warbler.
We coast home
to avoid jarring bumps.

Once unwrapped, they sit
propped on a sideboard
apart then together.
They look queasy against a green wall
but calm near a gray one.

Balanced on a fence, the cat
seems perpetually tensed
for sirens and fire trucks.
More likely he’s tracking
the bird’s bright body.

her pulse, her shivering
feathers. I picture the artist
gripping a fragment of silver
to sketch fine lines,
which will tarnish.

- Cathleen Cohen (from Murmurations, Moonstone Press, 2024)

Night Moths, Jeff Thomsen

 






Cathleen Cohen was the 2019 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, PA. A painter and teacher, she founded the We the Poets program at ArtWell, an arts education non-profit in Philadelphia (www.theartwell.org). Her poems appear in journals such as Apiary, Baltimore Review, Cagibi, East Coast Ink, 6ix, North of Oxford, One Art, Passager, Philadelphia Stories, Rockvale Review and Rogue Agent. Camera Obscura (chapbook, Moonstone Press), appeared in 2017 and Etching the Ghost (Atmosphere Press), was published in 2021. She received the Interfaith Relations Award from the Montgomery County PA Human Rights Commission and the Public Service Award from National Association of Poetry Therapy. Her paintings are on view at Cerulean Arts Gallery. To learn more about her work, visit www.cathleencohenart.com.

Valley of the Bells, Jeff Thomsen

These two images are from Jeff’s Miroir series (which you can view at Cerulean Arts in January), followed by links about his work.

 

https://jeffthomsenart.com/

 

https://ceruleanarts.com/pages/jeff-thomsen?srsltid=AfmBOoqIh5HF_N3TJwi66s72ZvLw_WX50WImpM3uqVBxEKkBkWTRja0W

 

 

I’ll conclude with thanks and an invitation to an ekphrasis workshop I’ll offer to accompany my exhibit of watercolors this November- December.

 https://ceruleanarts.com/products/painting-and-poetry-workshop-with-cathleen-cohen?_pos=23&_sid=8cd4c939e&_ss=r

Mad Poet of the Year - Lisa DeVuono

The Mad Poet of the Year blog posts share the poetry of a long-time Mad Poet. This year-long appointment provides readers with a deep dive of the writer’s work and thoughts on poetry. We are thrilled to have Lisa DeVuono serve as the Mad Poet of the Year for 2024.


 
 

Ten Lies We Told Ourselves Out Loud and One We Didn’t

The planet is not on fire
That was a lie

He’s harmless
That was a lie

He’ll never get elected
That was a lie

It will be fine
That was a lie

They started it
That was a lie

I’m not a racist
That was a lie

They’re all murderers
That was a lie

It’s a hoax
That was a lie

I’m not afraid
That was a lie

Your vote won’t matter
That was a lie

It can’t happen here


Well… it happened.  Again.

Like others who didn’t vote for Trump, I woke up on November 6th with a sinking feeling in my gut, telling myself several of the lies in this poem, “I’m not afraid. It will be fine.” 

I wrote this poem several years ago thinking that the threat of a second Trump presidency was behind us and that somehow this poem would remain just a rant. Sadly, I feel like it’s become an anthem for his biggest fans who allow their feelings of frustration, fear and anxiety to be usurped. They choose to be un-informed. They follow a con man and a bully who uses the language of promise to tap into their feelings of hopelessness. They believe his lies to be truth.  They want something easy; to relish in the story of blame and misery buying into simple slogans for complex problems.  

Listening to some analyses of this past election, pundits argue that the reason voters turned out for Trump was they felt they hadn’t been heard, that he spoke for them.  Really?  When did lying, cheating, breaking the law and inciting violence and hatred become the mouthpiece that many think they want and need? How did basic decency and care for others get replaced with selfishness?

Trump has too often portrayed himself as the Messiah, a savior for these broken times. In our darkest days, it makes sense to look for a bright light but selling my soul to a real devil in the real world is not my idea of salvation.

As for the print above, it’s aptly called “Blood on Our Hands.”


Lisa DeVuono is the 2024 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County. She was one of the founders of It Ain’t Pretty, a women’s writing collective that performed locally. She produced multi-media shows incorporating song, music, poetry, and dance, including Rumi in Song at the Sedgwick Theater; and Whole Heart Home, and Breaking Open Breaking Free, part of the IceHouse Tonight series in Bethlehem.   

She led creativity and poetry workshops and has worked with teens in recovery and cancer patients. She wrote a peer-based curriculum Poetry as a Tool for Recovery: An Easy-to-Use Guide in Eight Sessions for facilitators working with persons living with mental health challenges.

In addition to the full-length manuscript This Time Roots, Next Time Wings, her poetry has appeared in the Mad Poets Review, Paterson Literary Review and the anthology Grit Gravity & Grace: New Poems about Medicine and Healthcare. She is the author of the chapbook Poems from the Playground of Risk published by Pudding House Press and was the recipient of an honorable mention in Passaic County Community College’s annual Allen Ginsberg Contest.

Recently retired, she has worked as an administrator, librarian, and lay chaplain.

Local Lyrics - Featuring Courtney Bambrick

…from World Without 
by Courtney Bambrick

In the world without numbers,  
our height and weight are determined 
in relation to other things:  
as tall as an upended bicycle 
as short as an average daffodil stem 
as heavy as an empty bookcase 
as light as a dry kitchen sponge. 
We paint our houses elaborately.  
The wealthy commission portraits  
of themselves on their front doors. 
"Early" and "late" are charges  
that are brought before judges.  
Money becomes fuel. 
Sports teams no longer 
win or lose.  

*** 

In the world without paper, mail carriers  
take much longer on their routes. Some days  
they just sit on our porches, waiting  
until we get home to deliver messages.  

*** 

In the world without ink, we use pencils  
and remember how fragile our words become after handling. We return our hands to chisels  
and our minds strengthen, snatching and 
gripping facts and details. Pieces not caught 
are lost. Numbers and names for people  
and things hover until we cut or burn them  
into wood or stone that is hewn or quarried just to bear our memories. 

 

What is your poetic aesthetic? What calls you to write poetry?
I am not sure exactly how to answer this -- I feel like I am the last person able to identify an aesthetic in my own work! But I aim for some feeling of complicating strangeness and familiarity. Awkwardly timed humor.

Ever walk into a dark room and swear that you see an intruder or a ghost or demon, but then your eyes adjust and it is just a vacuum cleaner or a jacket thrown over the couch? And you laugh out loud with relief, but also maybe a little bit of disappointment? Relief, because you don’t have the immediately accessible power to fight a demon or an intruder. Maybe bliss because you survived an imagined threat and your emotions don’t know it isn’t really real. But you also feel a sense of disappointment because there was briefly something mysterious and dangerous happening in this otherwise predictable space.

I am “called to write” because a phrase or an idea sticks in my brain for long enough that it gets in the way of other work or other ideas. Like, I sit down to grade papers or write an email and this other idea for a poem just inserts itself and I struggle to focus on anything else until it is safely dumped in a notebook. I might ignore it for a while, but it is somewhere outside my skull and I will get to it when I get to it!

What is your process like? Do you have any strategies for getting from all possible blank page to polished poem?
I don’t know a blank page. I will blabber or doodle without shame. A piece of advice that I have taken and give is to get into it before you have a chance to back out. John, we were in a workshop at Murphy Writers a year or two ago with poet Nancy Reddy who had us mark a big X on a notepage before starting to write -- to “mess up” or mark up the page so that it was no longer blank! That we wouldn’t be so precious about what we put on the page -- it already had a big X on it! I like that idea a lot. I am also a “fake it till you make it” writer -- I will discuss ideas or plans for projects before they are fully realized so that I build in some accountability for myself!

I love notebook writing which feels malleable and open -- drafty! Once I type a thing up, it feels more settled. Revisiting and revising typed up work demands an extra boldness! I rely a lot on readers to help me see what the printed words hide!

Achieving “polish” is hard! I am not great at knowing when a thing is “finished” and I do love to tinker with older work as I consider sending it out for consideration. Polish feels a bit suspicious to me. When a poem feel “finished” to me, I might rough it up or change something small to switch up the energy. This trick may be just the spark to turn the engine over, and it may not survive further revision, but it starts the process up again.

I send out submissions all the time that are not quite finished because I feel like I can never reach 100% doneness on a poem! If it feels like its parts mostly fit together, I am pretty happy! And I will revise it after a round of rejections and see what that does. A poem is a site of experimentation for me. I know how it feels to write, but I have no idea how something will land with an audience until I read or share it!

You were the longtime poetry editor for Philadelphia Stories. Has being a poetry editor influenced your work? What was your favorite part of being in this role? Anything particularly difficult?

The most difficult thing usually was convincing the managing editor to give me enough pages for all the work I wanted to include! I learned that not everything that goes into the journal had to be my favorite poem of all time -- that there is a big wide range of work that I think belongs in our pages. I had the privilege of working with a really dependable and helpful board of poets who offered their opinions on the work and shaped the decisions I made.

My relationship with editors as a poet has been affected by my relationship with poets as an editor! I take less of the administrative stuff less personally. I have declined very beautiful, accomplished poems because they were too similar in tone or style or content to other work we were considering, so I know that those decisions can be difficult! And I have praised poems that I have declined in language that might have come across as patronizing! And I have neglected to praise poems that I loved because I was pressed for time and unable to cobble together the email I wanted to write that threaded the needle between “I love this poem” and “I won’t publish this poem.”

Relationships are the reason I love poets and poetry. I have had opportunities to meet many writers through this role! When we ran contests or conferences, I was able to reach out to area writers who we might fold into the Philadelphia Stories tapestry -- and I might add as friends on social media!

I know you also have a passion for theater! Tell us a little about it! Do you find overlap between these two artistic mediums?
As a middle school and high school kid, and even into college, I felt that these worlds of writing and performing had to be separate and distinct. I would go through “writing seasons” and “acting seasons.” I felt like my creativity was finite and I could only use it for one thing at a time. I think energy is finite, but creativity or inspiration really doesn’t have to be. In college, we read Aristotle’s Poetics and I realized that both theater and writing are modes of storytelling that rely on specific unities -- the rules that the creators set out for the audiences. All of the events of this play relate to this central plot! The images in this poem reflect a central question!

Also, poetry to me, is about the pleasure derived from speech. There are words that feel good in the mouth! I refer to Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” when I talk about this in classes! “A little old lady got mutilated late last night” is pure joy in the mouth! I ask students about the parts of songs that they memorize first and why it is fun to sing along to some songs and not others. At the community theater where I am a member, Old Academy Players in East Falls, I have performed in a one act play by George Bernard Shaw which was verbally exhausting! It required incredible stamina and extensive warmups! In the end, when the language worked, the jokes worked, so then the ideas worked.

I also like to read my poems in front of audiences because I can hear where they land and where the language knots up. I like to try them out a few times before I send them out.

You have a chapbook coming out with Bottlecap Press. Tell us a little about World Without!
World Without is a long poem or a sequence of poems that each offer new worlds marked by specific absences:  a world without mirrors or a world without water, etc. They started as light musings, but as the collection developed, some of the concepts that occurred to me felt heavier.

I saw the Canadian movie Last Night when it came out in the late 1990s when I was in college. It was an apocalypse movie that focused really tightly on how individuals prepared for the end of the world. It tells a gigantic story in this fine, fine personal detail. It really stuck with me, clearly.

Now, several years after many of us lived for a year or more in isolation, some of these ideas feel more present.  But I like the idea of these small questions or seemingly small questions of what might we do if none of us had hands! I don’t think scientifically, but more about the smaller ways I use hands: greetings would have to change. Funny now to think of the move away from a handshake during early Covid. I imagined that shoulders and chins would be more expressive.

I wrote “In a world without sisters” during a time when I saw very little of my sister and was seriously thinking that I could lose her. She is now much healthier and I see her pretty regularly, thank goodness. In thinking of a world without sisters, I considered where I would be without my two brothers -- who are sarcastic and funny and goofy and who seem to occasionally surprise themselves with their own emotions. So, what started as a sort of general “what if” developed into something much more personal and surprising to me.

Where can readers read more of your work? Keep up with you on social media? Buy your book?
My poems appear or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Mom Egg Review, Landlocked, Clockhouse, Pinhole, Thimble, SWWIM Everyday, New York Quarterly, Invisible City, and more. My poem “Flesh & Fat & the Universe” was on Healing Verse: Philly Poetry Line, a really special project of former Philadelphia poet laureate Trapeta Mayson. My chapbook Rape Baby, a runner up in the 2013 Pavement Saw competition, was published as “Caring for Your Rape” at The Fanzine. My chapbook Gargoyle was a semifinalist in Iron Horse Literary Review’s competition. World Without is now available from Bottlecap Press.

I use @courtneybamboo or @courtneykbamboo on most social media platforms -- but I am pretty inconsistent. I try to highlight Philadelphia artists and events as I become aware of them! There are oodles of worthwhile events going on all the time. Philadelphia area poetry is an embarrassment of riches. I am so grateful to all the writers who share their work and their enthusiasm in this area. And right now, I am particularly grateful to you for these questions, John!


Courtney Bambrick teaches writing at Thomas Jefferson University’s East Falls campus in Philadelphia. She was poetry editor at Philadelphia Stories until 2024.  Her poems appear or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Spotlong, Mom Egg Review, Landlocked, Clockhouse, Pinhole, Thimble, SWWIM Everyday, New York Quarterly, Invisible City, and more. Her poem "Flesh & Fat & the Universe" was on Healing Verse: Philly Poetry Line. Her chapbook Rape Baby, a runner up in the 2013 Pavement Saw competition, was published as “Caring for Your Rape” at The Fanzine. Her chapbook Gargoyle  was a semifinalist in Iron Horse Literary Review’s competition. Her chapbook World Without is now available from Bottlecap Press.


John Wojtowicz grew up working on his family’s azalea and rhododendron nursery in the backwoods of what Ginsberg dubbed “nowhere Zen New Jersey.” Currently, he works as a licensed clinical social worker and adjunct professor. He has been featured on Rowan University’s Writer’s Roundtable on 89.7 WGLS-FM and several of his poems were chosen to be exhibited in Princeton University's 2021 Unique Minds: Creative Voices art show at the Lewis Center for the Arts. He has been nominated 3x for a Pushcart Prize and serves as the Local Lyrics contributor for The Mad Poets Society Blog. His debut chapbook Roadside Oddities: A Poetic Guide to American Oddities was released in early 2022 and can be purchased at www.johnwojtowicz.com. John lives with his wife and two children in Upper Deerfield, NJ.

Review of The Cabin at the End Of The World by Douglas Cole

The Cabin at the End of the World

Unsolicited Press

$16.95

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Jennifer Schneider


The Cabin at the End Of the World, poems by Douglas Cole is a collection worthy of multiple walks through woods and worlds and even more readings. It’s both camera and image, working tool and work product, storm and rainbow. It’s all those things, in their precision as well as their ambiguity, and more.

Opening with a distinctly fitting epigraph –

“A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm…”
- Wallace Stevens

the collection is both song and shelter ensconced in words that embrace the unknowns of flight amidst surreal imagery as well as the satisfying familiarity of clear and direct prose. Cole masterfully weaves rich, evocative imagery alongside simple wants, needs, and longings. Emerging themes embrace and cross the natural world, origins, gritty realities, and unknown tomorrows.

The collection offers an experience layered atop experiences. The poems are crisp, visual, and memorable. Cole relies heavily on imagery that evokes a universe of emotions. Both relatable and deeply responsive to life in its many mountains, hills, and valleys, the poems in The Cabin at the End Of the World offer both shelter and sustenance. The collection curates memories while evoking memorable experiences. It’s a work in which one can disappear and stay for extended periods. It is, indeed, reminiscent of a walk around the lake –

 “Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.”
- Wallace Stevens

― Wallace Stevens

Perhaps. Perhaps as well, truths are found in walks through books and collections like The Cabin at the End of the World

The collection is divided into four sections: Block 23, American Dharma, The Talking Stone, and The Windows of the Sea with fifteen poems in each of the first three sections and two poems in the final section. This is a cabin fully stocked– of soul-nourishing prose poetry in a variety of themes, sizes, flavors, and takes on the intersection of moments where the present meets the future. Themes, which extend across coming of age, exploratory travels, lands unknown, and bonds of childhood, morph like limbs that grow as they crystallize on the page and form threads that grow stronger throughout the collection.

 From trains in “A Game of Chicken”, dirt roads in “Revisiting Erskine Way”, city streets in “Mind Blank as a Room”, and “pigeons huddled in an alcove off Broadway” (“Pigeon Man”), Cole builds Block 23 and the collection’s extended building blocks with prose that is simultaneously surreal, lyrical, and unforgettable in its eclectic blend of imaginative imagery and relatable realities. From open to close, Cole never ceases to delight with language and layers of meaning. Reading the world (and fresh words) as expressed in the collection is as much a journey across physical landscapes as it is an emotional arc and trasformative reading experience.

Work and the work of actors in all phases and spaces of life come to life in Cole’s pages. Highway patrolmen (“Patrolman” ), shredder trucks (“Tuesday’s Purge” ), butchers (“Boethius Said” ), and people in “smocks and masks” (“Into the Zone” ) share pages with secret doors (“Dear Reader”), abandoned weather stations (“The Desert Motel”), and “old tomes stacked high and rare collectibles in the back rooms I haven’t the lives to explore” (“Dark Carnival”). The work of the day meets the work of the mind in extraordinary writing that captures the layered complexity of daily life.

Cole never shies away from experimenting and tackling tough topics with poignant prose that is, page after page in this 89-page collection published by Unsolicited Press, delightfully surprising.  The collection is fitting for anyone seeking truths, solace wrapped in evocative vignettes and lived experiences, and satisfying walks through gorgeous language amidst the ever-changing complexity of present-day society. Whether seeking comfort while “walking home from Charlie and Yumi’s house after one” (“Getting Yourself Home”) or contemplating the brightness of the end of a dream (“The End of the World”), I encourage all readers to explore Cole’s work. You won’t be disappointed by all that welcomes you in the cabin and the world– both beginnings and endings, in which the work lingers.


Jen Schneider is an educator who lives, writes, and works in small spaces throughout Pennsylvania. She loves words, experimental poetry, and the change of seasons. She’s also a fan of late nights, crossword puzzles, and compelling underdogs. She has authored several chapbooks and full-length poetry collections, with stories, poems, and essays published in a variety of literary and scholarly journals. Sample works include Invisible Ink, On Habits & Habitats, On Daily Puzzles: (Un)locking Invisibility, A Collection of Recollections, and Blindfolds, Bruises, and Breakups. She is currently working on her first series, which (not surprisingly) includes a novel in verse. She is the 2022-2023 Montgomery County PA Poet Laureate.

Mad Poet of the Year - Lisa DeVuono

The Mad Poet of the Year blog posts share the poetry of a long-time Mad Poet. This year-long appointment provides readers with a deep dive of the writer’s work and thoughts on poetry. We are thrilled to have Lisa DeVuono serve as the Mad Poet of the Year for 2024.


 
 

Season’s End

This is not a poem about baseball.
How the game has been cliched as America’s favorite pastime
or played as elegance - a choreography of grace.

It’s not about how the team won the World Series in the last moment
crack of a bat like thunder splitting the stadium’s sky.
Nor is it about overzealous fans fair-weathering their hometown players.

It’s not even about the eight-year-old who collects cards and stats
who mugs for the camera after reaching for the foul ball
that pirouetted into his grandfather’s glove.

It is a poem about hot summer nights
when just about everyone in Northeast Philly
was listening to the game,

some on tiny transistor radios,
others while fidgeting with the dial in Dad’s old Dodge Dart
on the way to picking up pizza and beer on Saturday night.

It’s about the time we hung out in your bedroom on St. Vincent’s Street
with a window fan blowing over our hot bodies
your dog Beethoven lying down between us like an old chaperone

howling whenever your dad shouted “oh jeez” or “c’mon” at the tv
or your mom calling up to ask if we wanted the last slice of pie
before you had to drive me home.

It’s not really a poem about baseball
but about everything happening around it.
How we fell in love and dropped the ball that summer

when both of us took off our mitts as we collided yelling “Bail out.”
Like any seasoned player, we did our very best
knowing we weren’t going to win the game this time around.


This poem came to me via a simple prompt “write a poem using the word baseball.”  

I must confess I am one of those fair-weather fans who tunes into the local teams just at the end of the season.  The only exception was when I was a teenager and a rabid fan ofhockey, especially the Philadelphia Flyers.  I used to cut articles out of three newspapers; wrote songs or traded player cards; begged my father to drive me to team appearances. And if I was lucky enough, attended a live game.  Otherwise, I was glued to the television wearing my handmade tie-dyed t-shirt with a black Flyers emblem sewn on the front. (see the fuzzy photo above)

I have since hung up my fanaticism, so when this prompt was suggested, I wasn’t sure I could write a poem about baseball.  I had only been to a handful of games but I had strong memories of hanging out with my college boyfriend and his family and their exuberance about the home team. This poem emerged through recounting those youthful details and focusing on everything but the game specifics.

I remembered that isn’t really about baseball or hockey at all but the feelings we have, and the stories and connections we make around cheering for the home team.

Sometimes we make it to the Super Bowl or the World Series but like all good aphorisms, it’s not about winning or losing but about how we play the game.


Lisa DeVuono is the 2024 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County. She was one of the founders of It Ain’t Pretty, a women’s writing collective that performed locally. She produced multi-media shows incorporating song, music, poetry, and dance, including Rumi in Song at the Sedgwick Theater; and Whole Heart Home, and Breaking Open Breaking Free, part of the IceHouse Tonight series in Bethlehem.   

She led creativity and poetry workshops and has worked with teens in recovery and cancer patients. She wrote a peer-based curriculum Poetry as a Tool for Recovery: An Easy-to-Use Guide in Eight Sessions for facilitators working with persons living with mental health challenges.

In addition to the full-length manuscript This Time Roots, Next Time Wings, her poetry has appeared in the Mad Poets Review, Paterson Literary Review and the anthology Grit Gravity & Grace: New Poems about Medicine and Healthcare. She is the author of the chapbook Poems from the Playground of Risk published by Pudding House Press and was the recipient of an honorable mention in Passaic County Community College’s annual Allen Ginsberg Contest.

Recently retired, she has worked as an administrator, librarian, and lay chaplain.

Review of Built by Storms by Miriam Kramer

Built by Storms

Write Bloody Publishing

$18.00

You can purchase your copy here.

Reviewed by Sean Hanrahan

In the local poetry circle of Philadelphia, I have never heard a debut collection garner as much buzz as Miriam Kramer’s Built by Storms. I am here to tell you that the buzz for this hard-hitting, pull-no-punches, devastatingly beautiful collection is richly merited. This book is not for the faint of heart, but it will tug at the heartstrings. This book will go further—it will gift you a new and awakened heart.

One of the many standout poems in Built by Storms is “A Poem in Which He Is Alive Because You Sent Him to Prison.” The narrator in this book is candid and confessional about her battle with drug addiction and the people she met and lost in the struggle, including Phill. “Your Honor, did you see his skin was grey?/ I didn’t. I don’t know if I ever saw Phill/as he was.” She later describes him as “my best friend/and he is the worst thing to ever happen to me.” With the pulsating power of a strict, exacting pentameter, Kramer aims a well-directed arrow to the heart. In particular these near final lines are gutting, heart-wrenching, and expertly controlled:

Your honor,
you don’t know this, and I don’t know this,
but I will dream about his death six months before
it happens and I will miss him
the way I miss drugs, in a way that aches
like nothing else aches.

Phill and other friends who lost their lives are memorialized in the haunting poem, “To the God of Gas Station Bathrooms.” The tercets along with the title create a holiness that you see in LGBTQ poets who wrote odes to their friends lost to AIDS. The narrator refers directly to her survivor’s guilt in the lines:

There are days my body is heavy
with shovelfuls of guilt. It’s called Survivor’s Guilt
for a reason. Why not Phill, who taught me
to be a sneakerhead, why not Diane, why not Sean?
Why not Debbie, who told me my hair
looked like cotton candy, why not Mike,
why not Matthew? Or Sam, or Joe, or Angela?

Each name in this incantatory poem becomes memorialized, spiritualized. This poem exemplifies the act of remembrance as holy rite. This is a sacred wellspring Kramer is drawing from, and it is an extremely powerful catharsis for the poet as well as the reader.

The narrator also directly and powerfully refers to her addiction in the poem in which the title of the collection is taken “Upon Learning Jupiter, Along With Its Great Red Spot, Is Made of Hurricanes.” The poem begins, “I think, same. If I am built by anything,/surely, it’s storms.” The poem takes shape as a destructive hurricane, a swirling wind of recriminations:

I think of how many times I tore
my parents to shreds, seeking my own
Devastation. My father’s question mark voice
gets lost in the wind as he repeats,
possession of heroin, when I call him for a ride home
from the police station. My mother’s weather-worn
hands clench the courtroom bench
as I stand before a judge, call myself an addict,
watch her foundation crumble.

Through expanding the weather metaphor through the course of this poem, Kramer vivifies the devastating aftermath addiction can cause. She ends the poem with a potentially hopeful realization:

That I could get clean is miraculous,
like a solar system exploding into existence.
My fingernails slice valleys into my palms,
my knuckles are storm white, as I realize I, too,
have fought to be here, fought to take up space.

The poem, “Reason 47 to Live Through the Apocalypse,” reaffirms the narrator’s commitment to surviving the storm and whatever else the world throws at her, including the apocalypse: “To see what regrows from the rubble/because I have regrown from the rubble.” Through her experiences, the narrator has blossomed into a profoundly empathetic being. Kramer concludes this book, this journey (perhaps an overused word but certainly relevant here) with the shimmering lines:

After the end, when the grass starts
its resurgence, I want to offer the sprouts
and shoots tenderness after
a feat of resilience, whisper to them
as they grow, thank you,
you are here. Thank you, you made it.
You didn’t have to make it.

To say this book is a transforming experience, or a growth experience, is highly accurate. The perfect word to sum up Built by Storms is gratitude. Thank you for being here, Miriam, thank you for your wisdom, thank you for your words. I am grateful for this collection and this poet.

Sean Hanrahan is a Philadelphian poet originally hailing from Dale City, Virginia. He is the author of the full-length collection Safer Behind Popcorn (2019 Cajun Mutt Press) and the chapbooks Hardened Eyes on the Scan (2018 Moonstone Press) and Gay Cake (2020 Toho). His work has also been included in several anthologies, including Moonstone Featured Poets, Queer Around the World, and Stonewall’s Legacy, and several journals, including Impossible Archetype, Mobius, Peculiar, Poetica Review, and Voicemail Poems. He has taught classes titled A Chapbook in 49 Days and Ekphrastic Poetry and hosted poetry events throughout Philadelphia.

Mad Poet of the Year - Lisa DeVuono

The Mad Poet of the Year blog posts share the poetry of a long-time Mad Poet. This year-long appointment provides readers with a deep dive of the writer’s work and thoughts on poetry. We are thrilled to have Lisa DeVuono serve as the Mad Poet of the Year for 2024.


 
 

September 11: A Transubstantiation

Today I cut myself on a tin can.
I was distracted.
Had this wound been one inch over,
one more deep, I would have lost the ability

to live life with my hands,
to get around by crawling,
claw-like through this life.
It would have left me depending

on my least dominant hand,
writing from the brain less loud.
Instead I am saved by six stitches
and the laughing doctor on-call

who pronounces me lucky,
not to worry, nothing damaged.
Ten days later Suzanne clips
the tied thin shrouded filaments

that keep me from spilling out
and other things from getting in.
I am told this is a good thing
no scar tissue, should heal nicely.

Daily I touch the pink skin and the twelve-holed stigmata.
This new geography changes
minute by minute, separate holes blend together.
From the sky, an airplane view,

it looks like a table set for twelve.
The heads of my apostles
sitting down to supper
watching Jesus transubstantiate before them.


There are certain personal dates in our lives that are unforgettable.  Anniversaries, births, deaths, awards, retirement.  But there are also historical dates seared into our collective consciousness where each of us recalls where we were and what we were doing on that day.  And often they overlap. For me, the roll call of dates goes like this:  1963 (assassination of JFK), 1969 (landing on the moon), 1974 (Nixon resigns) , 1989 (Berlin Wall collapses), 1999 (Columbine shooting), 2001 (9/11 terrorist attacks), and many more.

This poem recounts where I was on September 11.  Like so many people, I had been watching the news in between phone calls to loved ones. To distract myself, I decided to clean the house and tossed our household recycling into an outside bin, pushing it down with my hand to make room for more. A few minutes later, I noticed a cut in my palm, cleaned it off, and gauzed it tightly.  Quickly, it was drenched. Wrapping my hand in a bloodied towel, I went to a neighbor and in a stupor asked if she thought I should go to the emergency room. She calmly said in her best motherly voice, “maybe that’s a good idea, let me take you.”

What I wouldn’t imagine then is that this date and all it memorializes, would come to signify two other dates way into the future:  the death of my cousin John in 2014, and a few hours after his passing, the birth of Theo, my great-nephew.

Dates that seemed to be reserved for one kind of marking morph into something else, more complex.  

For me, life is always about holding birth and death in the same palm. I have lived with the scar at the base of my index finger for nearly twenty-three years. And while it has healed, I often find myself rubbing it like some sort of talisman and still look down at it imagining what this poem suggests…that something miraculous might happen. 


Lisa DeVuono is the 2024 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County. She was one of the founders of It Ain’t Pretty, a women’s writing collective that performed locally. She produced multi-media shows incorporating song, music, poetry, and dance, including Rumi in Song at the Sedgwick Theater; and Whole Heart Home, and Breaking Open Breaking Free, part of the IceHouse Tonight series in Bethlehem.   

She led creativity and poetry workshops and has worked with teens in recovery and cancer patients. She wrote a peer-based curriculum Poetry as a Tool for Recovery: An Easy-to-Use Guide in Eight Sessions for facilitators working with persons living with mental health challenges.

In addition to the full-length manuscript This Time Roots, Next Time Wings, her poetry has appeared in the Mad Poets Review, Paterson Literary Review and the anthology Grit Gravity & Grace: New Poems about Medicine and Healthcare. She is the author of the chapbook Poems from the Playground of Risk published by Pudding House Press and was the recipient of an honorable mention in Passaic County Community College’s annual Allen Ginsberg Contest.

Recently retired, she has worked as an administrator, librarian, and lay chaplain.

Review of It Skips a Generation by Alison Lubar

It Skips a Generation

Stanchion Books

$13.00

You can purchase your copy here.

Reviewed by Sean Hanrahan

It Skips a Generation, the latest powerful chapbook from prolific poet, Alison Lubar, explores the legacy of intergenerational trauma. The trauma being caused in large part by their ancestors being interred at Tule Lake Relocation Center during World War II. As defined by the website, https://www.verywellhealth.com/, intergenerational trauma is a theory that posits trauma can be inherited due to epigenetic changes in an individual’s DNA. Epigenetic changes refer to how a body decodes a DNA sequence. Lubar, as narrator, takes their reader on a journey spanning nearly a century (1930-2022) to get at the root of their own DNA sequencing. While reading this profound work, my proverbial jaw often dropped to the pressurized wood floor. I hope to relay a few of those poetic sequences for you.

The title poem lays bare the throughline of this book as the narrator sifts through photographs of their grandfather (“Oji” named “Jack”.)

I still want to call him Oji but showing
that I know he’s in me and in my own cruelty
is a cruelty I can’t show to my mother, who
suffered the most under him.

Lubar hears from their relatives that Oji was handsome, although “Handsome is never harmless.” It is only towards the bottom of the photograph stack that an intergenerational epiphany arises: “And then I see, second to last, my mother’s four-year-old face/ frozen in terror in her backward glance at Jack. I shouldn’t want/ anyone to look at me like that. But I know I inherit it all.”

It Skips a Generation confronts the obscene inequity of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II in “For the No-Nos.”   The brief lines and rapid-fire staccato precision fully illustrate the losses of their family and all citizens wrongfully interned at Tule Lake. “Sterno/ distributed monthly, each inferno/ rekindles what’s lost: grannie’s kimono,/ the house, a hundred pounds.” In this poem, Lubar sustains an assonant “o” that is an aural echo of loss, for merciless fate, trauma, the void, the body as site of political attack, and, finally, the hydrogen bombs dropped in 1945:

Each body is a composite of amino
acids, chemicals. Atomic eternity. No-
thing else persists. No-
minal freedom. No
destiny manifest. No-
where. Hydrogen. No
body. Bomb. No
more.

An antidote to both intimate and large-scale cruelty is love. With a generous poetic spirit, Lubar includes “Love can look like” that lists the objects that have meant love to them and their family:

painted irises
on a silk scarf
from the museum
giftshop, Irish wool
berets, three cards
on my birthday, the other two
from the grandmothers
when they couldn’t write anymore.

This poem concludes the chapbook on a note of hope and a way to push past the trauma.

William Faulkner famously once said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” This quote is applicable to “Nothing Skips a Generation,” the poetic counterpoint to “It Skips a Generation.” This poem that Lubar refers to as a temporal-diptych has one part with its metrical feet planted in 1945, and the other in 2015. Bracketed lines offer poetic, nay theatrical, asides and commentary. In part 1,

When the war was over,
[on paper] it wasn’t over.
There, we [became dust.
Here, we] returned to dust—
America was [a home
that held no home]
left.

The return home is contrasted to how Lubar feels about California and America as home

This still
isn’t the place for me. [Neither is the town
where I went to school.] When I say,
""I’m going home.” I mean to a person
 We return to Auntie’s…

Lubar’s Auntie was interred with their grandfather and is a guiding light presence throughout. I mentioned the bracketed asides were theatrical earlier and that was quite deliberate. This assertive, aware, and stand tall poem ends with the lines:

when Auntie says, “You look like Jack,”
I don’t take it as an insult. I respond
[with the Scottish play], “What’s done
cannot be undone.”

Lubar’s chapbook can be compared to a river, or indeed a strand of DNA. It twists and winds its way though your eyes, your mouth (if you read poetry aloud), your mind, and your soul. Lubar’s ever present and ever-increasing talent will stun and surprise you with startling metaphors, sterling diction, and, quite simply, large heart. I cannot recommend It Skips a Generation highly enough. You will not forget it.

Sean Hanrahan is a Philadelphian poet originally hailing from Dale City, Virginia. He is the author of the full-length collection Safer Behind Popcorn (2019 Cajun Mutt Press) and the chapbooks Hardened Eyes on the Scan (2018 Moonstone Press) and Gay Cake (2020 Toho). His work has also been included in several anthologies, including Moonstone Featured Poets, Queer Around the World, and Stonewall’s Legacy, and several journals, including Impossible Archetype, Mobius, Peculiar, Poetica Review, and Voicemail Poems. He has taught classes titled A Chapbook in 49 Days and Ekphrastic Poetry and hosted poetry events throughout Philadelphia.

Ekphrasis: Poems and Art

Ekphrasis: Poems and Art

Image Credit: Cathleen Cohen

Welcome to a new Mad Poets blog, to be offered quarterly.  

It’s a pleasure to write about the relationship between poetry and other art forms, to examine ways that a various creative arts relate to each other.

The term ekphrasis can be defined narrowly as writing that describes a work of art in another medium-- paintings, music, photography sculpture and the like.  It can also refer more broadly to the alchemy that happens when one medium tries to define and relate to another. This could refer to poems inspired by the visual arts or music -- and also the reverse! To my mind, ekphrasis can also encompass hybrid works, like artists’ books, author/illustrator collaborations and graphic poems.

Many scholars have written about ekphrasis and there are great resources online. Though not scholar of the topic, I have had a practice of writing poetry and painting for many years. Both are essential to my creative life. These art forms interact, challenge each other and open up many questions and tensions.

My aim in this blog is to feature the work of various poets and artists, to let you know of interesting viewing opportunities and to provide some angles that might prompt your own writing.


Songs of Winter; Songs of Summer: John Sevcik and Lynne Campbell


Last spring Cerulean Arts Gallery presented Songs of Winter; Songs of Summer, an exquisite series of paintings by Lynne Campbell and John Sevcik. These landscapes offer a sense of intimacy and stillness. Narratives vibrate beneath. This beautiful exhibition was particularly poignant since John died near the time of its opening.

A brilliant writer, painter and teacher, John was a beloved and important presence in the Philadelphia art community. To learn more about his achievements: https://fleisher.org/celebrating-the-life-of-john-sevcik/.

Lynne and John met as students at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA). Mutual devotion nurtured this talented couple through their marriage and creative partnership. Both painter and writers, Lynne composed prose poems and John focused on plays, essays and free verse. Lynne has graciously shared memories with me of being in John’s historic barn studio in Valley Forge, reading to each other from Dickinson, Wordsworth and Frost.

Lynne Campbell, In the Meadow, acrylic on paper


Lynne said, “For John, poetry and painting was about meaning. He was devoted to art and felt it one of the most potent forces we had as human beings. It held us to the humane, to our intrinsic value as human beings. This was something we both felt — it was an important part of our great bond.”

Lynne’s work is exhibited in many public and private collections, including the Woodmere Art Museum. She has been awarded several prizes and travel scholarships, studying archaic and classical sculpture in Greece. Author of four books of poetry, Lynne is an artist with deep ties to myth and to the natural world.

John has exhibited widely in the U.S. and in South Korea. He was a published poet, and his plays were produced by The Philadelphia Theatre Company, and other companies. A popular lecturer, he taught at The Fleisher Art Memorial, the Delaware Art Museum, the Delaware College of Art and Design, the Cheltenham Center for the Arts, and Immaculata University. 

Delving into John’s writings, I found myself highlighting numerous aphorisms: If time stops in a picture, is that moment infinite?... Why does it stun us to see certain paintings? Why have we woken up? Why were we sleeping before?

About Henry Ossawa Tanner’s works in a 2012 PAFA exhibition, John wrote, “Paintings like these make us feel the truth for which sermons are written. There is no difference between a miracle and a painting, and when we were children and felt these things were true about paintings, we knew a truth before we were ever taught why it is true.”

John Sevcik, I-76 and Evening Star, oil on canvas

 In his introduction to John and Lynne’s recent Cerulean Arts show, he shared:

Both artists experience loneliness in different ways, and that is the song of the seasons, if anything is. This is not a personal loneliness, for they are happily married. They instead share a feeling for nature that puts their feelings in a mutual state of mystery, reverie, and wonder. Though together, they are also on separate itineraries. Work varies from plein air to work from memory, imagination and dream.

Lynne Campbell, Almost Night, acrylic on paper

How To Become

How to become part of the tracking grey sky? By loving it? Cars below have begun to put on their lights. The sky moves apace, indifferent. It is busy ferrying clouds. There are dark trees. And no birds. 

 Apparently, the mere anticipation of music causes us to produce dopamine. Imagine what the anticipation of a loved voice does.

The sky, dull all day, is losing what little luster it had left. What hopes might you map against it? What diagrams of private constellations, myths? These are sketched out in the heart, and projected easily tonight, for lack of stars. 

- Lynne Campbell

John said, “I have become convinced that the place apart of the poet or painter…is to explore the world at the edge of knowledge and bring something back from there. It is this withdrawal that I have come to understand may constitute the most important part of our consciousness. And it is because artists have left us their meditations on the life they observed that audiences also experience a place apart.”

A PAINTING IS A PAINTING

A painting is a painting
It’s not like you or me
Nobody gets older  
No one ever sleeps. 

It’s a stillness made of life
With meaning in its air
You feel it as you watch it,
Even as you stare:

At those forever praying
Or lying nude aware
Not of us but God
And the artist never there.

We travel time to then
And then to us appears;
Time becomes transparent
And what is far comes near. 

Who gave their life to painting
That we can know life more?
The artist in his garret?
The model in her maze?

We think of things self-evident
When we observe those lives
Frozen in the minerals
Of pigments and the mind

But what of art’s intention?
Does it think or know the way?
The artist isn’t talking;
There’s nothing more to say. 

Who made a painting matter
Then vanished long ago?
Who gave their life to painting
So we enjoy life more?

- John Sevick

John Sevcik, Field of Goldenrod (Orland, Maine), oil on canvas

I often ask: What are my own motivations to paint? What are my underlying subjects?

Certainly they are idiosyncratic. But it is helpful to read Lynne’s and John’s eloquent writings.

John shared, “This is to some extent the challenge of painting to me – how to excite the mind in a still reflection. In painting we consider the world as a long moment, with little movement…”

What an apt description of the work in their most recent exhibit at Cerulean Arts. It’s inspiring to consider the world as a long moment and how it does excite the mind. How lucky to encounter the wisdom and generosity of this talented couple.

This upcoming September, Cheltenham Center for the Arts will display a retrospective of John’s work:

Painter and Poet: The Work of John Sevcik
Opening reception: Saturday, September 14 from 2:00 to 4:00
Show dates: September 14 to October 13

https://www.cheltenhamarts.org/

For more about John and Lynne:

 https://fleisher.org/celebrating-the-life-of-john-sevcik/
https://mandismag.wordpress.com/2013/02/17/featured-artist-john-sevcik-2/
https://www.blogger.com/profile/01771570848659431520
https://ceruleanarts.com/pages/songs-of-winter-songs-of-a-summer
http://Johnsevcikpainting.blogspot.com
http://Instagram.com/john_sevcik
http://Instagram.com/lynnecampbell8
http://viewfromthestudio.blogspot.com
http://poemsforanewcentury.blogspot.com
https://lynnecampbellpainting.blogspot.com/
http://tothestudio.com

 


Cathleen Cohen was the 2019 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, PA. A painter and teacher, she founded the We the Poets program at ArtWell, an arts education non-profit in Philadelphia (www.theartwell.org). Her poems appear in journals such as Apiary, Baltimore Review, Cagibi, East Coast Ink, 6ix, North of Oxford, One Art, Passager, Philadelphia Stories, Rockvale Review and Rogue Agent. Camera Obscura (chapbook, Moonstone Press), appeared in 2017 and Etching the Ghost (Atmosphere Press), was published in 2021. She received the Interfaith Relations Award from the Montgomery County PA Human Rights Commission and the Public Service Award from National Association of Poetry Therapy. Her paintings are on view at Cerulean Arts Gallery. To learn more about her work, visit www.cathleencohenart.com.


Mad Poet of the Year - Lisa DeVuono

The Mad Poet of the Year blog posts share the poetry of a long-time Mad Poet. This year-long appointment provides readers with a deep dive of the writer’s work and thoughts on poetry. We are thrilled to have Lisa DeVuono serve as the Mad Poet of the Year for 2024.


 
 

Lone Tulip

for Phillip

Today those tulips your wife brought from Holland,
that I planted after you died,
burst into early Spring.

Rich red velvet robes, a yellow sun in a cup
and one that has yet to show its face,
to be delivered into this world.

She went away under a dark mantle of grief,
trying to escape the scent of you lingering in your home.
I can only imagine what is the still smell of someone no longer alive?

I watch from my window, a sentinel at the ready:
hurricane season, floods, blizzards,
tree down, mowed grass.  She survived it all without you.

Earth turning over, everything aching
to push through the heavy weight of winter.
I sort debris from last year’s beds: twigs, leaves, plastic bag, a snakeskin.

My gaze returns to the lone tulip.
It has begun to unfurl its tight fist of resistance,
and I imagine it winks and bows to me.

I take a picture, send it to your wife with the caption:
“Your tulips are blooming, look at this one…I think it has his blue eyes.”

But I am looking for a sign that you have returned
to finish our last conversation at the mailbox
to smell the smoke of one of your cigars smoldering on the porch ashtray

or hear you sing through the open window,
Sinatra spinning on the upstairs turntable.


This August I am commemorating three specific events: my 25th wedding anniversary; the 20th anniversary of my father’s passing; and the one-year death anniversary of my dear neighbor Phillip to which this poem is dedicated.

When my husband, Michael, and I married in our backyard, the day was marked with the ending of a summer drought, then a torrential storm, a beautiful rainbow, and a house full of guests that had hoped to be eating outside under a big tent, and not on our living room floor. Five years later, during our 5th anniversary, when we were vacationing in Canada, my father passed away. It took two days to get home. And last year, I watched my neighbor’s wife frantically perform CPR to try to save her husband.

These anniversaries all come within days of each other and mark the mixed emotions of beginning a new life while honoring the end of another.

This poem is about how we try to live our lives within the loss of our loved ones. I say              “within” and yet everything about the loss is “without.”  I decided to compose this poem as if writing a letter to my friend Philip to let him know what is happening with us since he died. The poem attempts to highlight both ways of being: the fracturing by grief, and the wholeness from living in the present moment and what we notice as we move between them.

What details do we remember, what do we choose to believe about the departure of our loved ones? How do we cope with daily life? How do we celebrate our lives? And how might the presence of a solitary tulip planted in winter become a beacon of hope in early Spring?


Lisa DeVuono is the 2024 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County. She was one of the founders of It Ain’t Pretty, a women’s writing collective that performed locally. She produced multi-media shows incorporating song, music, poetry, and dance, including Rumi in Song at the Sedgwick Theater; and Whole Heart Home, and Breaking Open Breaking Free, part of the IceHouse Tonight series in Bethlehem.   

She led creativity and poetry workshops and has worked with teens in recovery and cancer patients. She wrote a peer-based curriculum Poetry as a Tool for Recovery: An Easy-to-Use Guide in Eight Sessions for facilitators working with persons living with mental health challenges.

In addition to the full-length manuscript This Time Roots, Next Time Wings, her poetry has appeared in the Mad Poets Review, Paterson Literary Review and the anthology Grit Gravity & Grace: New Poems about Medicine and Healthcare. She is the author of the chapbook Poems from the Playground of Risk published by Pudding House Press and was the recipient of an honorable mention in Passaic County Community College’s annual Allen Ginsberg Contest.

Recently retired, she has worked as an administrator, librarian, and lay chaplain.

Review of I cannot be good until you say it by Sanah Ahsan

I cannot be good until you say so

Bloomsbury Publishing

$16.95

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Jennifer Schneider


Sanah Ahsan’s I cannot be good until you say it is as masterful as it is moving, and as inspiring as it is an exercise in reflective thinking. Presented in four parts, the collection is expertly curated. rich in emotion, and ripe of liberation that expands and extends far beyond the collection’s opening and closing pages.

The collection’s fifty poems (and LISTENING ROOM) are heartfelt and full of love– love for self, for community, and for possibility. The pieces weave tenderness and musicality with a tone as warm and as penetrating as echoes of the lives of which the poems speak. The Outspoken Performance Poetry Prize winner is gorgeous in ways that escape simple description and inspire deep admiration. The collection, and its takes on queerness, Islam, Quranic verse, family, nourishment, and more, offers lessons on how to live, question, and write with intention. Whether in community with strangers or at a table with familial and/or familiar faces, the poems breathe, in part, generational traditions, harms, and healing. The result– a buffet replete with “Ancestral recipes” in their many forms, queries of family, and questions as worthy of extended reflection as answers.

The debut collection embodies love, prayer, and spirituality through exquisite use of language and intentional use of space. The pieces are complex and layered in ways that mirror the human condition, the human body, and the politics of life and suffering. The collection takes on, in part, the body’s complexity with words that of piercing precision that also soothe like chamomile alongside wounded wombs and complex cycles of love, life, and (mis)understanding. 

With an epigraph– “for the Divine in you”, the collection exists at the intersection of poetry and prayer and invokes and invites continued contemplation. The collection is a beginning rather than an end. The individual poems stand stronger together, with each simultaneously a breath of blessing and prayer, rumination and education, celebration and caution, grief and joy. Together, I cannot be good until you say it, is a gift of a gorgeous and sublime tapestry of questions fueled by curiosity and questions grounded in rich, descriptive detail.

For example, PASSPORT opens with –

“Veiled by tablecloth, my girlfriend swats
my hand, a fly on her knee. The teaspoons
are touching in public. Her grandmother
offers me a salami stick to start. Sorry I
don’t eat pork….”

and closes –

“...I reach for relief in the rainbow when her
grandmother asks do you have a British
passport?
The burgundy-red stamped with

a golden crest moves more than my limp
tongue. I muster up the lion’s courage to ask
are we going somewhere?

 Reading the collection is a journey– one where time stands still, while always going somewhere, and the water, depth unknown, is welcoming and deeply moving, while also surprising. Beyond expert craft, the collection is much a story of kin, becoming, and conflict as a spiritual guide and reckoning. With themes of god and “good” revealing and repeating throughout the collection, Ahsan writes fearlessly and with a piercing insight that compels as it conspires to create both heightened awareness and a deeper understanding of what it means to love and be loved, to be liberated and to liberate, and to revel in the joy, music, and sadness of the written and spoken word and its many graces as well as offenses.

Stitched of love and yearning, the work is an exquisite and tender example of how poetry can be prayer and prayer can be blessing. The experience of reading this work is spiritual and spirited. Beyond its emotional qualities the work instructs in elements of craft and form. The collection is as varied as it is remarkable.

From powerful erasure —

See                

to inventive lists and couplets (see, for example, FUGITIVE ARRANGEMENTS and PINK MURMURATIONS),

to inventive use of space (see, for example, IN THE MAN OF MIND and GREY IS PROPHETIC COMPLICATION),

and poignant photographs (see, for example, pages 11, 51, and 72), the work is a tapestry as much as a reflection of life and its complexity. The work is also a master class on how and where devotion meets daring inquiry with a result that grips as it reminds one of the extraordinary power of poetic inquiry to transform and to touch in ways simultaneously new and reminiscent of past and ongoing harms.

A delicate waltz, an electric tango, a surprising twist of hip hop – if a collection of poems could dance one’s way into the heart and soul of eternity, this work would. I end the work where I began– eager to read more and to continue to learn. Much like the cycles of ancestors and conflict that have come before, the work itself balances retrospection with introspection. I won’t forget this work, and I hope, dear reader, you enjoy the collection as much as I have.  


Jen Schneider is an educator who lives, writes, and works in small spaces throughout Pennsylvania. She loves words, experimental poetry, and the change of seasons. She’s also a fan of late nights, crossword puzzles, and compelling underdogs. She has authored several chapbooks and full-length poetry collections, with stories, poems, and essays published in a variety of literary and scholarly journals. Sample works include Invisible Ink, On Habits & Habitats, On Daily Puzzles: (Un)locking Invisibility, A Collection of Recollections, and Blindfolds, Bruises, and Breakups. She is currently working on her first series, which (not surprisingly) includes a novel in verse. She is the 2022-2023 Montgomery County PA Poet Laureate.

Local Lyrics - Featuring Alfred Encarnacion

At the Tattoo Studio
(Bakunawa, mythical dragon of the Philippines)

by Alfred Encarnacion

The bearded tattooist assures me
there’s no discomfort even though
I haven’t asked. He begins on my calf,
a smooth tracing of form

that slowly assumes shape & color:
slithering blue underbelly purpling
to the back’s black shimmering scales,
festooned body armed with fangs, claws,

folded wings about to spring open
while I sit watching his needle extract
a dragon as if trapped beneath my skin.
Released, the beast emblazons a lost

mythology my dead father
never thought to share:
Cebu in the ancient time when
seven moons, one for each night

 of the week, lit the sky & brought
forth good fortune. But Bakunawa
the serpent dragon, craved
the lovely moons, sweet

as mangoes, and gobbled them
one by one until only a single moon
survived. Islanders prayed to Bathala
to punish the moon-eater that rose

each night from a sea cave to climb
the wind in search of prey. The pagan
god banished the dragon from sky, land
and sea until he learned repentance…

I close my eyes, breathe in the scent
of dragon blood that soothing
incense which fills this room,
slide back on the black recliner

and remember Bakunawa crawling my
father’s leg, emblem of his otherness,
remember the shame I felt when
a schoolmate blurted, “Your dad’s

a gook?” during Parent Teacher Night.
Bowing my head, I slunk away pretending
not to know the man who followed. But now
I wear the dragon, almost believing Bakunawa

vanished into the hearts of men who
betray, repent, and seek forgiveness,
lurks there to this day, rising only
in the tribal tattoo that bears his name.

 

How did you come to poetry? What role does it play in your life?
I became interested in poetry through the “folk rock” music of the 1960s, especially the poetic lyrics of songwriters such as Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Buffy Sainte Marie, and Joni Mitchell. However, Leonard Cohen was the first lyricist whose published literary poetry (as well as the extraordinary postmodernist novel Beautiful Losers) I went out and bought. After reading, nay, experiencing his first few volumes of poetry I knew I had to try my hand at it as well. Once I was seduced by the power of the written word, writing became an extension of myself like breathing, eating, talking, walking, sleeping, dreaming…

Your poems are often very located. How does place influence your writing?
Even early on I was attracted to “place” in the work of poets I admired. I traveled to Montreal just to walk down St. Catherine Street because Cohen referred to it so much in Let Us Compare Mythologies, his debut collection. I later became obsessed with James Dickey and Richard Hugo; both of whom utilized “place” as an integral part of their poems. Think of the former’s “Hunting Civil War Relics at Nimblewill Creek,” and “Cherrylog Road, or the latter’s “West Marginal Way” and “"Degrees of Gray in Philipsburgh". Likewise, I found the work of Lisel Mueller strewn with place names that lent an authenticity that would not be available to the poems otherwise. I’m still obsessed with naming places in my past in order to memorialize those moments when I inhabited those places in real time.

 You are the Director of the Stratford Public Library. Have you always known you wanted to be a librarian? In what ways has being a librarian influenced your writing or shaped the way you view the arts?
I never had any intention of becoming a librarian until I read a biography of Philip Larken, the poet librarian of Hull University’s Brynmor Jones Library. Suddenly a light came on: I always delighted in browsing through stacks upon stacks of books in the literature departments of public and academic libraries in Philadelphia where I lived at the time, but I never thought about a career in librarianship until the Larkin bio. I had finished up graduate school and most of my classmates were going on to their doctorate studies in the English Department at Temple or other universities. I had taught at Temple as an adjunct instructor, but I was more interested in writing as a vocation than teaching as a career. Instead of pursuing a Ph.D, I decided on a MLS and applied to Clarion University’s Library Science Department. 

Before being appointed to a director’s position, I also worked both as a reference librarian as well as a children’s librarian. But most of my time was spent as a cataloger, which is becoming something of a lost art. Still, the seven years I spent assigning locations to new material and deleting weeded material sharpened my eye for clarity and consistency, and my cataloging skills I believe carry over to my poetry: I never attempted “a systematic derangement of the senses” as described by Rambaud (a dysfunctional childhood was derangement enough for me); instead; I pursued a consistent clarity in the anecdotal narratives that are at the heart of my poems. There’s such a strong narrative impulse in my work I sometimes think of myself as a recovering novelist (ha, ha).

 I think libraries and poetry get shortchanged in their conceptualization (by larger society) as exclusively quiet, reserved, and introspective spaces. In your chapbook, Library Suite, you  describe libraries as energetic and interactive places steeped in connection. How did this chapbook come together? What do you think the future looks like for libraries?
I’ve always believed that libraries were more than mere depositories for books, and I’ve labored to make Stratford Public Library—as is the case with most other 21st century libraries—an active resource of the community. This strategy allows for a diversity of programming: we offer culinary workshops, literary readings, classes in embroidery, presentations from representatives of State agencies, as well as ongoing programs such as Story Time and Lego for our younger patrons and Book Club, Book Café, and Crafter’s Corner for our adult patrons. We also make it a point to reach out to our senior patron population, often an underserved community, by offering senior-friendly high teas and chair-yoga sessions. 

My chapbook is an attempt to document some of my experiences (some factual, some imagined, some a hybrid of the two) in Library Land these last couple of decades. Some poets don’t care to write about their professions, but I’ve always been drawn to writing about the various hats I’ve worn as waiter, teacher, librarian—once I even sold lightbulbs as a telephonic vendor! I’ve been often able to utilize my diverse working background in my career as a librarian.

Some predicted the end of libraries with the advent of the digital world: why go to a library when all the texts and information you desire is as close as your computer’s keyboard? We can all appreciate the instantaneous gratification that comes from access to the Internet: Ah, you found that new book by your favorite author and you can download it right there in your living room at 3am without having to wait until morning when the bookstores or libraries open. Who can resist such expediency? Still, there are those who prefer browsing the stacks at Barnes & Noble and/or their own local libraries for the undeniable tactile pleasure of holding the physical properties—weight, texture, smell—of a book in one’s own hand. We’ve already moved into a hybrid age for libraries where eBooks can be downloaded from their virtual website but hardcopies of books are still housed in physical buildings for patrons who prefer to choose their reading material by hand rather than keyboard. Rather than offering only bibliographical service, library staffs will also serve as informational brokers for patrons in need of guidance.

In your recently released collected poems, Precincts of the Passion-Dragon, many of the poems celebrate and illuminate the struggles of working class and immigrant families. How does your upbringing influence your poetic perspective?
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My childhood has everything to do with my “poetic perspective,” as you call it. I grew up in a predominately working class Polish and Irish community in the Port Richmond neighborhood of Philadelphia, where there were few Asian or immigrant families to speak of in the mid-1950s. I became painfully aware at an early age that I was not welcome there as a mestizo child (half Filipino, half White) with such a strange surname and such odd looks. I grew up feeling both ugly and alien and apart from the people around me. Many of my poems begin in a place of shame and move to a place of redemption or at least a place where toxic shame isn’t paralyzing the narrator. My mission in poetry has always been to find a strategy by which all that is toxic in memory can be revisited and transformed via art into something positive, maybe even something of service to others.

Where can readers keep up with your writing? Buy your books? 
You will encounter my work in literary journals, such as the Paterson Review or Chautauqua Review, or in the Moonstone Art anthologies, or at readings in Philly or local Jersey readings like the one I’ll be doing in September at the Whitman Stafford House in Laurel Springs (date & time TBA). I’ll also be reading at the Poetry Center in Paterson, NJ on April 5, 2025 as one of the finalists for the Paterson Poetry Prize for Precincts of the Passion-Dragon: Poems 2000-2020. Much more information about my activities can be found on the Stratford Public Library’s website: https:www.stratfordlibrarynj.org 

My books can be found/ordered in local bookshops such as Barnes & Noble, on Amazon.com or kelsaybooks.com. But, remember that for those readers with limited resources, you may read all the poetry, fiction, and nonfiction for free by visiting your neighborhood library and checking out books or requesting interlibrary loans. All you need is a library card and the dazzling Kingdom of Literature is yours!


Alfred Encarnacion has taught writing at Temple University, published in Florida Review, Indiana Review, North American Review, and the Paterson Literary Review. His books are The Outskirts of Karma, Ambassadors of the Silenced, Library Suite, and Precincts of the Passion-Dragon. He’s received five nominations for a Pushcart Prize; Library Suite was published via the Annual Moonstone Chapbook Contest, and Precincts of the Passion-Dragon has been chosen as a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize 2025. He’s the director of the Stratford Public Library in South Jersey, and he coordinates the Annual Poetry Reading at the Whitman Stafford House in celebration of National Poetry Month each April.


John Wojtowicz grew up working on his family’s azalea and rhododendron nursery in the backwoods of what Ginsberg dubbed “nowhere Zen New Jersey.” Currently, he works as a licensed clinical social worker and adjunct professor. He has been featured on Rowan University’s Writer’s Roundtable on 89.7 WGLS-FM and several of his poems were chosen to be exhibited in Princeton University's 2021 Unique Minds: Creative Voices art show at the Lewis Center for the Arts. He has been nominated 3x for a Pushcart Prize and serves as the Local Lyrics contributor for The Mad Poets Society Blog. His debut chapbook Roadside Oddities: A Poetic Guide to American Oddities was released in early 2022 and can be purchased at www.johnwojtowicz.com. John lives with his wife and two children in Upper Deerfield, NJ.

Mad Poet of the Year - Lisa DeVuono

The Mad Poet of the Year blog posts share the poetry of a long-time Mad Poet. This year-long appointment provides readers with a deep dive of the writer’s work and thoughts on poetry. We are thrilled to have Lisa DeVuono serve as the Mad Poet of the Year for 2024.


 
 

Cento: Refugees

from The Tiny Journalist by Naomi Shihab Nye

The moon sees us.

We are outdated shrines,
many orphans
from the pavement of neglect.

Forgotten perimeter
Around the edge of winter
in its camouflage of grief

Our voices pour out
through a hole in the floor.
Where is the door to our story? 

How will we sing our names?

From the solitude of bruises
to the tight throat of alert.
Where is our lucky number?

A word is brave --
we never know how far
a voice can travel.

Life has loveliness to sell,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,

Who will be left to enter the calligraphy of joy?


Nothing to give you
that you would want.

Nothing big enough
but freedom.

-- “Tiny Journalist Blues” by Naomi Shihab Nye

When I think of the month of July, I think of summer memories in Northeast Philly: BBQs, badminton, and block parties; vacation reading club at Bushrod library; tennis at Tarken playground, swimming at Max Myers; penny candy at Woolworths; weekends at my uncle’s bungalow near Tullytown; the annual shore trip to Rosalinda’s in North Wildwood. 

The 4th of July was always about family and neighbors coming together and celebrating our country’s ideals, our hopes to be better, do better. The day culminated in fireworks where we watched them at the elementary school where you could see them over the treetops by the Jewish Cemetery.

These were yearly adventures and daily freedoms we innocent children could count on and often took for granted. As adults, in today’s world, we can no longer rest comfortably in our nostalgia, waxing romantic about the good old days.

This month, I am posting my print and poem “Refugees.”  It’s a cento form in which lines are borrowed from other poems to construct something new.  These lines were collected from “The Tiny Journalist” (2019) by Naomi Shihab Nye whose poems draw on her experiences as a Palestinian-American living in the Middle East, her father, and from the Facebook postings of teenager Janna Jihad Ayyad who shared her personal journey of living under conflict. 

Shihab Nye is my favorite poet and I was so moved by this collection of truth telling.  While   I often flinched, these poems also softened my heart and helped me choose and arrange words that told the story of the impact on refugees; that created something from this witnessing -- a sense of urgency and expression for those whose voices are silenced or made to feel invisible. I chose lines with questions so that the reader might ponder their own lives in contrast with so many people who are still living in poverty and war, struggling to survive, let alone build childhood memories.

With the 250th anniversary of 1776 just two years away, I (like so many others) find myself worried and anxious about our freedom: who fought for it, for what reasons, who has it, who doesn’t.  Last month, my poem “Coming to America” highlighted my own family immigration story and the challenges of leaving one’s country to find a better life. America represented freedom and opportunity for many immigrants and refugees.                              

How many personal and collective sacrifices were made over the years, and what must happen to ensure the preservation of our rights, over and over again? This poem seeks to highlight the crisis of individuals, families, nations still fighting for their freedoms, still looking for a free and safe haven.

I can’t help but ask the same of us this July.    Is America still that place?


Lisa DeVuono is the 2024 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County. She was one of the founders of It Ain’t Pretty, a women’s writing collective that performed locally. She produced multi-media shows incorporating song, music, poetry, and dance, including Rumi in Song at the Sedgwick Theater; and Whole Heart Home, and Breaking Open Breaking Free, part of the IceHouse Tonight series in Bethlehem.   

She led creativity and poetry workshops and has worked with teens in recovery and cancer patients. She wrote a peer-based curriculum Poetry as a Tool for Recovery: An Easy-to-Use Guide in Eight Sessions for facilitators working with persons living with mental health challenges.

In addition to the full-length manuscript This Time Roots, Next Time Wings, her poetry has appeared in the Mad Poets Review, Paterson Literary Review and the anthology Grit Gravity & Grace: New Poems about Medicine and Healthcare. She is the author of the chapbook Poems from the Playground of Risk published by Pudding House Press and was the recipient of an honorable mention in Passaic County Community College’s annual Allen Ginsberg Contest.

Recently retired, she has worked as an administrator, librarian, and lay chaplain.

Mad Poet of the Year - Lisa DeVuono

The Mad Poet of the Year blog posts share the poetry of a long-time Mad Poet. This year-long appointment provides readers with a deep dive of the writer’s work and thoughts on poetry. We are thrilled to have Lisa DeVuono serve as the Mad Poet of the Year for 2024.


 
 

Coming to America

I

My grandfather left
half of himself home,
those other parts
still planting
one in a garden
two in a grave
three in grandmother’s womb.

He brought
a mound of dirt with him,
and every place he traveled
he scattered seeds.

II

From the railroad tracks of Utah,
sprang olive trees, twisted testimony
to broken bones. In the textile mills
in Frankford, spewed blood oranges,
hands dyed from lack of air and water.

And in the womb of la Nonna
birthed the legacy of poets:
Ariosto, Alfieri and Dante.

III

I found his wedding ring,
the golden calf
worshipped and melted down.
I wore it secretly
turning it over and over
like my grandmother must have done
to wish him back.


This poem pays homage to the immigrants who came to America to find a better life.  Many endured the Depression Era, and then, as in the case of my father, returned to their homeland as American soldiers fighting on their native soil.

The photo shows my paternal grandmother, and my father reflected in the mirror in the corner as a shadow.  When he was fighting the war in Italy, he took as chance to visit his mother whom he had not seen since he was fifteen years old.  It would be the last time as she passed away not long after the visit. 

Having never met my paternal grandfather, I relied on stories, and images to construct a narrative around men leaving their families behind, often never seeing them again.  For the “lucky” few, they returned to find mothers deceased, sisters married and with children of their own, and a country in ruins, hoping to rebuild and forge something better than the poverty they were born into.

Since I grew up in the 1960s and had the safety of our nuclear and extended Italian-American family,it was hard to imagine leaving behind all that to forge a new life.  And what of the women who were left behind?  And what is a marriage when couples are separated for years on end? And what legacy did our ancestors leave behind?  What contributions did they make?  This poem attempts to capture a snapshot of all that, as well as the longing that everyone feels to return to a home that they only remember but that has changed so much. 

This is the story I inherited. 

Today there are so many immigrant stories to be written, cultures from all over the world still affected by war and poverty, and environmental changes. I am trying to imagine something different for all our descendants, something where they are settling into some new configurations of home and no one is wishing their loved ones back.


Lisa DeVuono is the 2024 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County. She was one of the founders of It Ain’t Pretty, a women’s writing collective that performed locally. She produced multi-media shows incorporating song, music, poetry, and dance, including Rumi in Song at the Sedgwick Theater; and Whole Heart Home, and Breaking Open Breaking Free, part of the IceHouse Tonight series in Bethlehem.   

She led creativity and poetry workshops and has worked with teens in recovery and cancer patients. She wrote a peer-based curriculum Poetry as a Tool for Recovery: An Easy-to-Use Guide in Eight Sessions for facilitators working with persons living with mental health challenges.

In addition to the full-length manuscript This Time Roots, Next Time Wings, her poetry has appeared in the Mad Poets Review, Paterson Literary Review and the anthology Grit Gravity & Grace: New Poems about Medicine and Healthcare. She is the author of the chapbook Poems from the Playground of Risk published by Pudding House Press and was the recipient of an honorable mention in Passaic County Community College’s annual Allen Ginsberg Contest.

Recently retired, she has worked as an administrator, librarian, and lay chaplain.

Review of How to Do the Greased Wombat Slide by Pamela Miller

How to Do the Greased Wombat Slide

Unsolicited Press

$16.95

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Jennifer Schneider


It’s rare to find a work that inspires not only how to live (and write) more courageously, but also how to write (and live) more fully. It’s just as rare to stumble across a work that provokes spontaneous laughter in addition to serious and lengthy reflection. How to Do the Greased Wombat Slide is such a work. It accomplishes all of the above, as it inspires, intrigues, and delights.

The collection is a treasure chest of how-tos and answers to questions readers likely never knew they had. The work celebrates the wisdom often revealed through unexpected wordplay and the perennial power of penned imagination. It invites readers to engage with a collection of curious topics while inspiring engagement beyond the collection’s contents. Even clip art takes on several pages of creative forms.

The work’s language, vivid imagery, and revealed imagination are simultaneously unexpected and endearing. A how-to that extends and expands far beyond any single topic of instruction, the work’s three sections, How to Dance, How to Love, and How to Endure, include lessons on living and reminders of the fragility of life.

The work plucks inspiration from the mundane.

 Examples include:

I was bored with my click-clack factory job
stamping sunbursts on the heads of pins (“Ruthanne Replants Herself”)

A bird in the hand is worth a can of spray-on pants (from “Words to the Unwise “)

How to tie a tie
How to make it in America
How to get a girl to like you (from “How to Waste Time Looking Things Up on the Internet”)

 In its travels through common occupations and ways to occupy time, the collection makes magic through strands of whimsy and wonderment woven out of ordinary terminology.

Consider, for example, The Spaghetti Squash Comes to Visit --

We hadn’t had time to study up on spaghetti squash behavior.
We assumed a vegetable visitor would be fairly sedimentary, but it
kept hopping around like an electric flea.

The collection is equal parts surprising and contemplative, full of plays on words that leave readers to admire the eccentricity of the pen and embrace firm reminders of mortality.

Examples include –

When I die, I’ll carve Remember Me
on a tombstone made of vanishing breath. (from Autobiography Written in Disappearing Ink”)

Don’t you trust me?
Well, it’s no use. I don’t have to make bargains with you. (from “Love Letter to My Favorite Ghost”)

My grandfather’s ghost mows the lawn in tan pants.
A corpse reads the classified ads (from “Snapshots from My Nightmares”)

As Miller plays with phrases and pairs strangers on suddenly synchronous stages, Miller not only dazzles with the unexpected, she encourages readers to reimagine. The work is as much a source of humor as it is a solid contemplation on mortality, morality, and the many ways of making meaning in a world that often defies sensemaking.

The work is also a celebration of poetry, with pieces like What Poetry Is, What I Mean When I Talk About Poetry, and How Love Poems Get Written , and a reminder that, eventually (perhaps ultimately), poetry and mortality intersect :

Once upon a time, you consumed this book;
oblivion spat it back out. When you died,

someone rummaged through your ashes
and found a piece of me, sparking like an ember (from On Learning That One of My Books Was Found Among a Dead Poet’s Possessions)

With themes that span the spectrum of life and loss, the collection conspires as it inspires, and ultimately unites. The work straddles serious topics with playful perusal. It’s as celebratory as it is cerebral. It creates and curates a carnival-like atmosphere of wordplay amidst the seriousness of thought and topic.

No matter one’s mood, the work will surely meet if not exceed expectations. Whether consumed in isolation, sequence, or a series of random formations, as a collection, the pieces provoke reflection as much as they inspire delight in the ordinary. Enjoy!


Jen Schneider is an educator who lives, writes, and works in small spaces throughout Pennsylvania. She loves words, experimental poetry, and the change of seasons. She’s also a fan of late nights, crossword puzzles, and compelling underdogs. She has authored several chapbooks and full-length poetry collections, with stories, poems, and essays published in a variety of literary and scholarly journals. Sample works include Invisible Ink, On Habits & Habitats, On Daily Puzzles: (Un)locking Invisibility, A Collection of Recollections, and Blindfolds, Bruises, and Breakups. She is currently working on her first series, which (not surprisingly) includes a novel in verse. She is the 2022-2023 Montgomery County PA Poet Laureate.