Review of Mystic Orchards by Jonathan Koven

March 20, 2024 Anthony Palma

Mystic Orchards

Kelsay Books

$20.00

You can purchase your copy here.

Reviewed by Sean Hanrahan

Jonathan Koven’s Mystic Orchards is dreamy bildungsroman overflowing with luscious language celebrating family, memory, and love. This work is divided into five sections: 1. Spirit of Growth, 2. A Dark Horizon, 3. Sylvan Memory, 4. Deepest Blue, and 5. Awoken in a Field of Light. Through this review, I will explore a poem from each section, which is a challenge of sorts since all the poems in this collection are so gorgeously and meaningfully interwoven, it is hard to pick apart its illuminating, gossamer strands. But, dear reader, I will try.

Koven’s adept use of language is evident from the first titled poem, “Stilled Wings,” in Spirit of Growth. It brings to mind a child’s first brush with disappointment, even morality with the evocative lines: “Past the farthest knoll I drag/ sacks of dead fireflies/ No longer do their strobes glow.” His language is so visceral, so visual that the reader can imaginatively walk the scenescape. After tossing the dead fireflies into a wishing well, he ends the poem with the haunting stanza: “In the cold black water/ moonlight envisions gardens/ their stilled wings will soar.”

“Oftentimes the Still Sad Music” is my favorite poem from the A Dark Horizon section. In this poem there is faint, yet palpable, backdrop of political unease:

The bell tolls. Mad clown’s diatribe warps high
over the trackless nation, across the soot
sully, through gunpowder plume, home;
wrapped in a hideous blanket of ineloquence.

What intrigues me here is the sonic energy carried in this stanza: the plosive “p”s mixing with the sibilant “s” and the overall consonance throughout. This stanza is alive and creates an uneasy and powerful effect. The political context and intriguing soundscape continue in the following stanza:

Defer to the turnstile regarding ennui
to sadness more sublime; candles for teeth,
suburban cinemas over indigenous graves,
lovers’ hands and not antennae mad for power,
thieving tomorrows, one after the next.

Sylvan Memory contains the surreal, sexy poem “I Read a Name in the Sun.” The aforementioned soundscape mixes with some deliciously idiosyncratic images from Koven:

through timeless gullies
those august glints ever dashing
high with gnats loud on peaches
sexing under crackling suppressed sky
relapses to summer psychedelia
to spite the very choice
in daily resurrection

This poem blurs by like a quick yet endless summer afternoon. When I read this poem, I imagine myself under dappling leaves dreaming about then eventually discovering love. Koven’s Edenic garden brings all sort of fond memories to mind. This section spoke to me the most—a tour de force.

Full disclosure: I am a sucker for prose poems, so for the Deepest Blue section I would like to spotlight “Writing on the Wall.” This poem uses the paragraph to maintain its impressive momentum with lines such as “You believed, heaven is a fast/ car flooded in music, an exposed spine, dry heaving, a goodbye/ said tomorrow afternoon,” or “Love slipped over suburbia—arguments/ of bored siblings, first wanderlust, pale rooves juggling stars, bulbs/ chirring like rain,” and last example (it’s hard to pick only three) “Gazed at the ceiling washing ashore your canvas, listening/ carefully to tremors in arrested white, a heart’s thrum became/ voice’s muted falsetto.” This prose poem contains an epic writ on the speaker’s childhood bedroom wall—great stuff that formed this formidable poet.

Another full disclosure: I am a sucker for film, Hollywood, all that jazz. In “Man Is the Intelligence of His Soil” in the final Awoken in a Field of Light section, Koven makes a wry reference to it:

Eye threads coiling,
loosened yarn balls,
firedrake fingers, breathing
sweetness, laughing at dirt,
my slow tongue circles, to dowse
in summer wash.
Cinematic.
Hollywood’s gray, after all.

For the Wallace Stevens fans among you, Koven acknowledges that this poem is titled after his poem “The Comedian as the Letter C.”

Sometimes, reviews just write themselves, and that certainly was the case with this review. I just took a backseat to Koven’s supple writing and enjoyed letting him drive me to his Mystic Orchards. This is the most cohesive and lush collection of poetry I have read in a long time. I would happily climb the tallest tree and proclaim to the world: “Get a copy of Mystic Orchards!” Have I sold you yet? I’ll answer my own question: Happy Reading!

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.

Review of Four Crescents by Norm Mattox

January 24, 2024 Anthony Palma

Four Crescents

Collapse Press

$20.00

You can purchase your copy here.

Reviewed by Sean Hanrahan

Since the 1960s (thank you Wikipedia), the phrase “the personal is political” has been oft-quoted in national discourse. Poets have certainly, and before the 1960s, incorporated that ethos into their work. Few poets today intertwine the two as economically, skillfully, and powerfully as Norm Mattox in his debut full-length collection, Four Crescents, from Collapse Press. Collapse Press, according to their website, “is a small literary publisher specializing in poetry and prose…whose work addresses the current social atmosphere of a society in turmoil and on the verge of transformation.”

It can be argued that the dawning of the current era, admittedly from an American perspective, began with 9/11. In Mattox’s taut poem “A Personal Dilemma,” he writes of a sadly all-too-common experience of being “one of most/‘randomly selected’ passengers/in the whole airport” for extra screening since according to a “sista from another mista” he “looked like an angry Black man/of dubious cultural background.” He tries desperately to comply with the new security state expectations:

i made a conscious effort
to avoid provocative
cultural artifacts,
like necklaces, pendants
hanging earrings,
kufi hats, no berets.

In this listing of effectively banned accessories, Mattox employs metonymy to a staggering and heartbreaking effect.

The poem continues exploring how extra airport security is just a continuation of racism in American society:

xenophobia continues to be
a tightly wound pitch
that americans
fear any nonwhite member
of the community
not being ‘true’ American
determined by some
double blind,
double biased,
double standard
survey.

The short lines in this poem help to convey the anger and the tension of continuously being a suspect while going about your daily life. They exemplify the struggle to

Resist
burning a bridge
at both ends
while the bridge
is my back.

Mattox shows his strength as a poet and human being for suggesting ways of combatting the pernicious evil of racism in “A War on Racism”. In this poem, he deploys a provocative series of questions that sound as a clarion call:

would a leader dare
to declare a war on racism?
where are the volunteers?|
will there need to be a draft?

He enlists the Constitution into his argument as well.

who will be the patriots
in the war against racism?
are we the ones
they’ve been hoarding
their ‘right to bear’ arms for?

Continuing the journey into the post-911 landscape, he utilizes politically charged words including “insurgents,” “refugees,” “rebels,” and “terrorists.” He concludes not with a question, but rather an elegant statement:

it will come down
to a war on racism
not between,|
Black or white,
but between
the human race and
an inhuman race.

As a gay writer, I know how easy it is to point out the cruelties and the injustices of America and modern life. It is more difficult to suggest a way to resist or exist in such a time and place. Fortunately for the reader, Maddox also comes up with answers to probing questions in “Ancestral Diatribe.” He acknowledges

no one said it was simple
to put your hand on the doorknob
scroll through the masks you wear
so you can return home alive

His astute observation continues in what is my favorite stanza of the collection:

revolution is not          a spin through
your life cycle              a stationary bike
going the speed of breathing
                                    last breaths

The answer to surviving, resisting, building a true and permanent revolution is, perhaps simple, but nevertheless true and the only answer, love.

love is a journey          we take to find
                                    our authentic selves
a reflection                  an echo
                        of a love that resounds
                                    at humanity’s core

As I write this review on Martin Luther King Day, Norm Mattox’s Four Crescents has done for me what all great art does—causes me to reflect, to transform in some way. Love to others, kindness to others, standing up to those in power who seek to destroy are ways we can build a better America. This book will break your heart, but then repair it. Mattox’s words and wisdom are a must to keep on your bookshelves. In other words, I won’t be loaning this book out, so please get your own copy. Supporting poets is a worthwhile act, and in 2024, it is more important than ever to support words that are honest and profound. I can think of no better poetry collection to purchase this year than Four Crescents.

Review of Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers by Kelly McQuain

November 15, 2023 Anthony Palma

Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers

Texas A&M University Press

$21.95

You can purchase your copy here.

Reviewed by Sean Hanrahan

The language in Kelly McQuain’s Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers is layered, evocative, rich, and, at times, either velvet-soft or bone-hard. It is no wonder that this outstanding collection was selected as part of the TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series, which “highlights a debut full-length collection by emerging authors from each state in the southern United States.” Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers represents the state of West Virginia. It is a well-deserved accolade for this powerful book that explores themes such as the sui generic construction of a queer identity, family relationships, the power of language itself, love, and memory in four sections.

The first section titled Ex Nihilo (Latin for out of nothing) explores the speaker’s creation of a queer identity in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia. One of the standout poems in this first section is the title poem where the speaker describes himself using some of the fauna found nearby:

You are Joe-Pye weed and yarrow root,
resolute with purpose, pinioned for sky?
Why then is your skin nothing but cockleburs?
Who fiddled with you—rewired deference
into difference? What if you never meet
the person you are meant to be?

The poem’s tonal shift from an uplifting skyward exuberance to a down-to-earth and painful contemplation is the breathtaking work of an immensely skilled poet. In the final stanza, the speaker wonders where he will be able to find his “authentic self.” The answer is eloquently “Not on this hill, not in that house./ Something calls you somewhere else.”

“Uncle,” a tripartite poem in the second section The Grieving Bone, casts a penetrating light on the speaker’s complex relationship with his family, in this case, his brother. “My brother phones to ask a favor/…So I was wondering, if you’d like, maybe,/ donate some sperm—an idea he tosses out/ like bathwater.” This request leads the speaker to consider procreation: “Is it right to create something/ that can be taken away”? and in the second part of the poem, sperm itself:

I looked at my spunk under a microscope once…
I felt as close to that roommate as a brother,
told him what a Catholic schoolgirl once said,
how each time a boy masturbates “he spews death
on countless millions” and we laughed at all the times
we’d pleasured ourselves through mass genocide.

In the final part of “Uncle,” after the speaker has visualized being both father and uncle to a potential child, he is informed by his brother: “False alarm./ He switched to boxers.” Their relationship goes back to what it was “ghosting through each other’s lives.” McQuain ends this powerful meditation with the lines

Sometimes I see children—
older brothers. The way they wrestle,
bodies sweaty, getting knotted,
steeped in tensions and smells
—armpits, peanut butter, sour milk—
until, with a twist, one gets the upper hand:
stronger pins weaker, makes him cry uncle.

“Mechanical Bull” in the third section Bite and Balm is love drunk with the sounds and meanings of language itself. It is a whimsical and humorous poem that successfully sustains an insect metaphor throughout.

Tonight he feels the need for a strange word
in his head: lepidopterist perhaps…
This queer honky-tonk he’s come to
verges on colony collapse disorder
and he is wingless, friendless
whiskeyed thoughts abuzz

While riding a mechanical bull, the speaker’s thoughts and observations on words grow more frenzied in time to the buckling:

Somewhere a lone moth slo-mo struggles
beneath a chloroform cloth, while our rider
puffs his spirit, holds on, clings to strange airs;
he crams his brain with ten-dollar words;
oleaginous (covered in grease),
batrachophagous (eater of frogs).

This poem is a tour de force and evidence of McQuain’s use of line breaks, meter, and diction to create a comic and melancholic effect.

For the final section of the book Tin Hearts, I decided to highlight the gorgeous poem, “Memory Is a Taste that Lingers on the Tongue.” The speaker and a presumed lover visit St. John in the US Virgin Islands, and he recalls

Down to town we drove: the docks
of Cruz Bay beleaguered by tourists; the streets
bottlenecked with cars from the ferry
spilling past whitewashed shops and houses
drowning in late sun and the purples and pinks
of frangipani, bougainvillea, hibiscus.

On the docks, they meet a “bare-chested fisherman” who is gutting a red snapper while another one’s gills were still “fishing against the world’s air.” They both the fish and had a romantic dinner as the poem ends “Even now I can taste that red snapper in my mouth.”

Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers is a magnificent debut full-length collection from Kelly McQuain, who previously has written chapbooks entitled Velvet Rodeo and Antlers. I highly recommend you check the work of this lyrical, insightful, and clever poet out. Buy a copy for yourself, but a copy for a friend. You will not regret the time spent in McQuain’s company.

Review of Every Living Day by Adam Gianforcaro

September 20, 2023 Anthony Palma

Every Living Day

Thirty West Publishing House

$16.99

You can purchase your copy here.

Reviewed by Sean Hanrahan

Some poetry collections distill the everyday into a potent elixir or essence, and Adam Gianforcaro with his astounding full-length collection, Every Living Day, does exactly that. Whether he describes mowing the lawn, sitting poolside with contemporary fiction, or receiving a deep tissue massage, Gianforcaro writes with such crystalline precision, all the reader can do is gasp at the power of his diction and a moment of self-realization. His weighty themes include the environment, and the huge metaphysical obsession, time.

In the title poem, Gianforcaro hauntingly writes about the terrified (and terrifying) apathy we can often experience while pondering climate change:

When I can no longer kneel, I will wade myself
towards repentance—beg forgiveness
for folding banana peels in tin foil
for drinking coffee from a Keurig.
Every living day I fuck the earth with negligence.

Power in poetry often comes from a narrator’s complicity as Gianforcaro is well aware. He mentions other examples of how he “fucks the earth” by mowing over a mouse with his lawnmower, and “fall[ing] victim to fast fashion and Amazon Prime.” This poem ends with a rare perfect couplet: “And to give up that convenience, to do no harm/I’ll pretend to not know the answer when I ask, but how”?

In “Human History as Deep Tissue Massage,” Gianforcaro obliquely references the climate by way of an extended poem-length metaphor comparing human history, or perception of time itself, to a deep tissue massage. This brief, psychologically loaded poem explores the exquisite “relief between bursts of pointed pain./And before you know it time runs out…The smell of lavender fields and burning.” As a reader, I have had read few lines that drive home the real, menacing, slow-but-fast, existential dread of climate change. In his own way, Gianforcaro is an eco-warrior, looking at the danger our planet is facing without flinching.

Carrying on with the political themes that course through his poems, Gianforcaro examines modern queerness in “Queer Love Story.” As a queer poet myself, I always cheer when I come across an explicitly queer poem in a collection. In this complex poem, both religion and pop culture are brought into the mix. Across several couplets, the reader is led from “discrete everymen with harps” to “prophets picnicking with gasoline” to “dogma dangles us from the balcony/like the King of Pop.” The metaphors in Every Living Day are rich, surprising, and varied. “Queer Love Story” is both satirical and polemic in all the best ways. It ends with the strident lines:

Queer kids
spell trauma for every camera
they see. Anchors ask, What is it like
to kiss with the forked tongue of a sinner?
Like heaven, we say. Like a burning.

Some of my favorite poets are prophets: Whitman, Ginsburg, Dickinson. I have a new name to add to that list: Gianforcaro. Since the event had been saturated with a climatically anomalous rain (and media coverage), the poem “Not Everyone Thinks of the Festival When Hearing About Burning Man” leapt out at me. It also contains one of my favorite sequences in the collection:

Homos, heretics: human
bodies as woodpile,
as Sunday matinee.
Twigs piled and pressed
like lovers in heat
But I am afraid of fire
so I dress it in drag.

Those lines pull in so much of queer experience that I am dizzied and dazzled. Few things mean more to me as a poetry reader than an illumination into the queer past and future. I think this poem captures the apocalyptic vibes that occur throughout the book. As a reader, the poem “Poolside with a Paperback” called to me. But to be honest, so many of these poems called to me. In this poem, the narrator is tackling DeLillo:

Soon a chemical cloud
will enter the novel. I think, Yes of course. And I consider
the sun, count the willful ways it harms and heals.
Like a kind of lover, and entire government.

Gianforcaro weaves in some of DeLillo’s own prophetic words. I think one of the best things a writer can do is call out the inspiration of other writers. I have my own collegiate beef with DeLillo, but in light of this poem, I will give him another chance. Thank you, Adam, for this gift.

Talking about gifts, I think Every Living Day is one. It is deep, metaphysical, yet accessible and compulsively readable. Best of all, to me at least, it’s unabashedly queer. Of all the reviews I have written, this one was one of the easiest and hardest to write. Easiest since I found so much to love; hardest because there were too many poems to chose for in a review. I commend Adam Gianforcaro on a masterpiece. I think the least any reader of this review can do is drink from his enchanted well.

Review of The Recovering Catholic Collection by Eileen D'Angelo

July 19, 2023 Anthony Palma

The Recovering Catholic’s Collection

Moonstone Press

$10.00

You can purchase your copy HERE

Reviewed by Sean Hanrahan

Being a fan of Eileen D’Angelo as well as a Catholic school (we’ll call it) survivor myself, I was intrigued by her latest chapbook, The Recovering Catholic’s Collection. As Catholic school graduates know, the preferred Catholic method of instruction often skews close to indoctrination. You do not just learn traditional subjects such as English, history, and math; or parochial ones such as the Old Testament, New Testament, and catechism; you also learn you will go to hell if you commit a moral sin and do not confess it, blind obedience, and that Catholicism is the only true religion. Freedom of thought is not encouraged in Catholic grade-school education. Unfortunately, for the nuns who taught her, D’Angelo is and, as a precocious child, was a free thinker.

In the opening salvo “Miranda Rights for Catholics,” D’Angelo deploys her keen wit and probing legalistic mind to Catholic school morality: “we need lawyers/ for the morally challenged. Experts in Sinner’s Law.” Imaginatively, she constructs a court case with a sinner lawyer who will “find the legal loopholes, hammer out/ plea bargains to avoid length trials/ on judgment day.” Humorously, this hypothetical lawyer would defend their client to the judging priest:

“You need intent to make that sin stick”
“How long will this remain on my client’s record?”…

“My client has suffered enough! She is a mere mortal
and your client is the All-Powerful and Loving God.”

An imperious nun (“penguin”) calls our young Eileen “brazen” after being found “in the church basement/ tempted by the fire of French kissing” in the poem, “Lines to Sister Consolata.” The penguin also mentioned she was “bound for hell.” Our young Eileen’s brazen inner voice “wanted to say: On the Brazen Scale of one to ten,/ I am only a five. I dared not ask: If God made me—/ then why did he make me brazen.” D’Angelo realizes that her former tormentor has “earned [her] eternal/ reward and rightful place at the right hand of God,/ because you were one year older than God/ when I was in the tenth grade.” Our young Eileen has grown up to be brazen slow dancing with electric hips, leaving “no room for the Holy Spirit,” and “making faces” behind Sister Consolota’s back. She ends the poem with the powerful line, “Even the word brazen feels good on my lips—/ this dangerous word marking a lost soul/ on the express train to Hell.”

D’Angelo recalls in the haunting poem, “The Gift,” that after sharing many of the poems contained in this collection an audience member approaches her with a pocket Bible “concerned for my immortal soul. You have a need to save/ a lost lamb.” The audience member also tells her that they will pray for her, and she wants “to believe it matters if you do.” After being told “God always has a plan,” D’Angelo wants to believe in a God that differs from the one she was offered in childhood by Consolata and the rest:

I want to find the compassionate God,
the one I’ve seen in paintings with kind, fatherly eyes.
I want to know if he is the same God who hurls
fires and floods to destroy his wayward children,

his children, who are lost like lambs.

D’Angelo probes all she had been taught to recite by rote: I know the seven levels of angels./ I know Heaven, Hell, Limbo and Purgatory to arrive at a hell of a conclusion: “I want to know what kind of sin/ does God commit when he allows the screaming/ to continue through my row-house thin walls?”

In this book, D’Angelo poignantly explores thanatopsis as evidenced in the poem, “Requiem for My Brother, Joseph.” The narrator performs her own funeral mass for her brother who died far away.

Tonight, I let myself wallow in it. Your photograph, propped up
by a paperweight, my mini-memorial of you. A lit candle
on my desk, a glass of sweet vermouth & a twist—

And it’s just you, me the keyboard—and a long night ahead.

The magic of this poem lies in its catharsis, through its near exorcism of pain. “This poem howls like the pipes in the Irish tunes you loved,/ wails like the banshee…Angels follow your purified soul/ (and I don’t need to see them to know they’re there.)”

Witty, feisty, contemplative, questing, and heartfelt, The Recovering Catholic’s Collection takes the reader on a journey through faith, life, and basic humanity. D’Angelo is a generous poet giving us words to ponder and words to heal, images to provoke laughter and images to generate empathy. Plus, a few tears. A true Irish writer in the best sense, the reader rests in D’Angelo’s palm enthralled by the tale she has to tell.

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.

Local Lyrics - Featuring Neti Neti

November 23, 2020 Anthony Palma

Absolutions from Shark Fin Cove
By Neti Neti

Crashing —
awash with purple passion
first flow then howling
scowling at the blissful sun

Blazing —
dried up with your eyes cupped
I'm spilling and I'm sorry
enough of you evaporates

Laughing —
and I'm supposed to enjoy this?
When the foam felt like home
and your body was a mountain?

Shadows —
cascading on the gallows
I'm as salty as a seaman
I'm as holy as a harlot

Sweet siren
I don't have much time left
please whisper how I ought to try
pranayama in the ocean

It's deeper and
I get it now
It's and
deeper
I get it now
Blue bubbles
rise up
sanctity anoints my house
eyes up

I open my mouth
This is helping
This is healing

How would you describe your poetic aesthetic? What draws you to poetry?
My aesthetic is one of authenticity, sincere reflection, and manifestation brought forth. It pays homage to my identity as a raw artist not afraid to be vulnerable, be a risk-taker, or make mistakes. I strive to bring mental health into the fold through my writing style itself, which incorporates elements of my anxiety and dissociation into every aspect of my writing, from content to form. My hope is to normalize the conversations we have around mental health and around each other. I guess that’s what makes poetry so appealing; it is an apparatus through which we generate sparks of dialogue and change. It is an opportunity to alchemize my consciousness into a form that I can weave and have total autonomy over. That may be the other draw to poetry for myself—it is also a potent medicine. Having a feeling or sense of control over your surroundings and circumstances is something sparsely felt by those who cope with depression, anxiety, dissociation, or PTSD, so to put myself in a situation where I can feel my own vibrations and, in effect, make others resonate with them is art and community in its purest form.

What’s is it like being a poet in Philadelphia during this tumultuous time?
I wish not to be overly simplistic or dismissive here, but I do feel a strong need to attune myself to the world’s call of change in this age of transition, and that can look different for many people. The truth lies somewhere deeper in a series of oppressive systems that have long been felt more harshly by many communities, from black and latinx to womxn and LGBTQIA+. Coronavirus became politically weaponized which only brought the crimes of racist, patriarchal, capitalist systems further into the light, and what should have never been a political endeavor had the average American choose between science/health and bills/economics. As the virus now surges beyond a point of control, there are days where I weep, and it is important that we experience these feelings fully. After all, we are going through a time of shared trauma. But it is also a time to stand up arm and arm and fight for justice and change for people like Walter Wallace Jr.; being an artist allows a certain type of strategy to share and heal and fight as one, and we should use that strategy politically, socially, and economically anywhere we can until all people recognize healthcare (and mental healthcare) as a universal right (for starters). We have a unique opportunity to engage in a renaissance of the soul and leave this Earth in a better state than our ancestors and it will require a conscious reflection of self and intersectional engagement in our communities.

You have a chapbook coming out. Tell us about it.
Exodus is, in many ways, a love letter. It serves to navigate the stages of grief over the loss of a child, the destruction of a relationship, the dismantling of self. It asks the fervent question, ‘Where do I go from here?’ when the call of l’appel du vide brings us to the precipice. It is, of course, a commentary on mental health and of spiritual identity, exploring what is truth and what is fallacy, or relative truths that we cling to in comfort to distract or hide us from the shadows of our own ego. In many ways, Exodus is seeing my true self for the first time in a raw and vulnerable form, and I want nothing more than for people to realize that there is true freedom and comfort in that. We can dismantle our egos, we can overcome generational trauma, we are not defined by our mistakes, and every day we are discovering ourselves further and we have the opportunity to show up for ourselves deeper. What we decide to call our attention and breathe our intention into will ultimately release us, and I hope there is a soul out there who may experience my book and find comfort and community in that isolation and in that healing. For a first edition creator copy (comes with goodies!) Please feel free to DM me on Instagram (@_neti.neti_) to reserve yours. You can also pre-order a copy direct from Toho Publishing at https://www.tohopub.com/product-page/exodus-neti-neti

How do you start writing? What does your process look like when that all-possible-blank-page is in front of you?
I need my words to bleed. It needs to be an organic and fluid process, and this is not always an easy endeavor when dealing with a constant state of dissociation. I find that what works best for me is finding a way to stimulate my senses and emotions, either through an immersive experience through sound or smell. Sometimes, I am captured by small phrases or soundbites while walking in the wilderness that I’ll compile into my notes, and other times I can regurgitate an entire limerick in a state of lyrical flow. I also tend to use that anxiety and dissociation in my writing process to reclaim that power and identity for myself, and the silver lining can oftentimes yield a very nuanced yet unique voice to my writing. There are days when I feel empty, and it is important to extend yourself grace in these moments so you can return, ready to write, with a fuller cup. There is beauty and joy in rest, but engaging your mind with writing prompts can also help.

As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal. Why?
What a fun question! Of course, I have interpretations as to what my spirit animal is as a person, but as a writer I would have to say a corvid (Crow, Raven family) but not for the reasons you may think! Of course, I’m an Edgar Allan Poe fan, but the spiritual connection may lie somewhere closer to the crow’s ‘trolling’ behavior! These birds tend to stalk and hop behind larger predators and peck at their backsides! The thought process here is an evaluation of larger predators or a means to steal food, but oftentimes they do this with no gain other than a social curiosity or commentary. For me, I’m able to view this behavior from a more light-hearted capacity to suggest that we can take on our own ‘predators’, namely the overarching thought processes and negative coping mechanisms that inhibit our ability to flourish. Not only can we peck away at these creatures to show that they hold no true power over our minds and bodies, but we can do so confidently, and God forbid, maybe with a little humor.

Where can readers find more of your work?
For now, I encourage others to share space with me through my instagram, @_neti.neti_ . I do encourage everyone to stay tuned as I produce more published content, I should have a website of my own up and running shortly I am also working on relaunching my Creator Series, which seeks to highlight and promote artists of all kinds in the local area while supporting Philly nonprofits. I am reevaluating the impact and efficacy of this program and would like to bring it back as a more powerful space than it was before! As this is the last question of the interview I would like to thank you again, John, for honoring me with this opportunity to interview in a space like Mad Poets that houses and highlights some truly talented and inspirational voices; it was an absolute pleasure!

Neti Neti is a Philadelphia-based poet focused on processing trauma and communal healing through allegory, symbolism, and imagery. He uses his dissociation and anxiety as a writing technique—evident in his sudden shifts in meter and airy subject matter—to empower identity rather than suppress it. He has a debut chapbook, Exodus, and has been featured in Toho Publishing as well as Yes Poetry. He is a spiritual pilgrim and a harbinger of endtimes.

Catfish” 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 social worker and adjunct professor. He has been featured in the Philadelphia based Moonstone Poetry series, West-Chester based Livin’ on Luck, Mad Poets Society, and Rowan University’s Writer’s Roundtable on 89.7 WGLS-FM. Find out more at: www.catfishjohnpoetry.com

POeT SHOTS - 'THE PESSIMIST PREPARES FOR WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN NEXT' by ANDY MACERAS

October 5, 2020 Anthony Palma

POeT SHOTS is a monthly series published on the first Monday of the month. It features work by established writers followed by commentary and insight by Ray Greenblatt.

POeT SHOTS #12, Series C

THE PESSIMIST PREPARES FOR WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN NEXT

He already knows what will happen,
staring into the misty crystal ball of his mind.
The last shot spinning off the rim.
The winning field goal drifting wide to the right.
A grounder rolling between the first baseman’s legs.
Why ask an attractive woman at a party?
She’ll just deliver no on the grenade of a giggle,
the warhead of a loud laugh.
He’s not fooled by the weatherman’s patter.
Maps. Pressure. Radar.
The sleight of hand sunshine.
There’s a tornado in his tie. A hurricane in his hat.
Every numbered door conceals
a goat, a donkey, a junk car.
The wheel of fortune manipulates its momentum
until the flipper finds the black wedge of
BANKRUPT.
Most days he doesn’t bother to get out of bed.
The TV on.
Children crying. Angry adults demanding answers.
They never saw it coming.
They want to scream, This should be happening to someone else.
To you or you or you.
The stars just stare, shrugging their bright shoulders.
Watching the widescreen he feels as if he is floating above.
A young boy leaning over a promenade window
on the Hindenburg, marveling
at the sight of Manhattan. The enormous
Empire State Building.
The world calm and smooth.
Turning quietly.
Holding a cold glass of cola like a promise,
sweaty and half-empty.

Each unique image modifies the title: “She’ll just deliver no on the grenade of a giggle,/the warhead of a loud laugh.” “The sleight of hand sunshine.” “There’s a tornado in his tie. A hurricane in his hat.” “The stars just stare, shrugging their bright shoulders.” “A young boy leaning over a promenade window/on the Hindenburg, marveling.”

Ray Greenblatt has been a poet for forty years and an English teacher longer than that. He was an editor of General Eclectic, a board member of the Philadelphia Writers Conference, and is presently on the staff of the Schuylkill Valley Journal. He has won the Full Moon Poetry Contest, the Mad Poets Annual Contest, and twice won the Anthony Byrne Annual Contest for Irish Poetry sponsored by The Irish Edition. His poetry has been translated into Gaelic, Polish, Greek and Japanese.

POeT SHOTS - 'NOVEMBER SURF' by ROBINSON JEFFERS

September 7, 2020 Anthony Palma

POeT SHOTS is a monthly series published on the first Monday of the month. It features work by established writers followed by commentary and insight by Ray Greenblatt.

POeT SHOTS #11, Series C

NOVEMBER SURF

Some lucky day each November great waves awake and are drawn
Like smoking mountains bright from the west
And come and cover the cliff with white violent cleanness: then suddenly
The old granite forgets half a year’s filth:
The orange-peel, eggshells, pieces of clothing, the clots
Of dung in the corners of the rock, and used
Sheaths that make light love safe in the evenings: all the droppings of the summer
Idlers washed off in a winter ecstasy:
I think this cumbered continent envies its cliff then . . . But all seasons
The earth, in her childlike prophetic sleep,
Keeps dreaming of the bath of a storm that prepares up the long coast
Of the future to scour more than her sea-lines:
The cities gone down, the people fewer and the hawks more numerous,
The rivers mouth to source pure; when the two-footed
Mammal, being someways one of the nobler animals, regains

California coast, early 20th century. High surf washes the sea cliffs. “great waves awake and are drawn like smoking mountains”…”cover the cliff with white violent cleanness”…”old granite forgets half a year’s filth”…Idlers washed off in a winter ecstasy”…”this cumbered continent envies its cliff.”

In Their Words - an Interview with Mike Cohen

August 13, 2020 Anthony Palma

A few months back, we featured the interview where Mike Cohen interviewed his co-host, Steve Delia. Today, we feature the time where Steve returns the favor and interviews Mike. in a heartfelt interview, they discuss poetry and what it means to be a poet, as well as many other things!

Click the picture to view the interview.

For the full interview, as well as others, go to Mike Cohen’s Youtube Channel.

Steve Delia and Mike Cohen have worked collaboratively and independently as poets and supporters of the arts in the Greater Philadelphia area. Mike Cohen helps to run the Poetry Aloud and Alive series at the Big Blue Marble Bookstore, and has had his fingers in many poetic ventures over the years. Steve Delia is the author of 6 chapbooks of poetry, and has read in a variety of venues, including the Philadelphia Writers Conference and on WXPN. Steve and Mike have also appeared throughout the Philadelphia area as the Dueling Poets.

POeT SHOTS - 'THE THOUGHT-FOX' by TED HUGHES

August 3, 2020 Anthony Palma

POeT SHOTS is a monthly series published on the first Monday of the month. It features work by established writers followed by commentary and insight by Ray Greenblatt.

POeT SHOTS #10, Series C

THE THOUGHT-FOX

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Set neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

Getting an idea is like a fox approaching. “Warily a lame/Shadow lags by stump and in hollow/Of a body.”… “Coming about its own business.”… “It enters the dark hole of the head.” Adorned in brilliant poetic language.

In Their Words - an Interview with Bill Van Buskirk

July 9, 2020 Anthony Palma

Back in 2017, Steve and Mike sat down with Bill Van Buskirk. He presents a few poems, and they discuss writer’s block, Zen, and why we write.

Click the picture to see this part of the interview. For the complete interview, go to Mike Cohen’s Youtube channel by clicking HERE.

Bill Van Buskirk lives in Bryn Mawr Pennsylvania. His poems have appeared in The Comstock Review, The Paterson Literary Review, LIPS, The Schuykill Valley Journal, Parting Gifts,The Mad Poets’ Review and many others. His chapbook, Everything that’s Fragile is Important, received an honorable mention in the Jesse Bryce Niles Chapbook contest (2007). His book, This Wild Joy that Thrills Outside the Law, won the Joie de vivre contest sponsored by the Mad Poets’ Review (2010).

POeT SHOTS - 'MIRRORS AT 4 A.M.' by Charles Simic

July 6, 2020 Anthony Palma

POeT SHOTS is a monthly series published on the first Monday of the month. It features work by established writers followed by commentary and insight by Ray Greenblatt.

POeT SHOTS #9, Series C

MIRRORS AT 4 A.M.

You must come to them sideways
In rooms webbed in shadow,
Sneak a view of their emptiness
Without them catching
A glimpse of you in return.

The secret is,
Even the empty bed is a burden to them,
A pretense.
They are more themselves keeping
The company of a blank wall,
The company of time and eternity

Which, begging your pardon,
Cast no image
As they admire themselves in the mirror,
While you stand to the side
Pulling a hanky out
To wipe your brow surreptitiously.

This poem is full of mystery. Is there any place in the world for humankind? Inanimate things—mirrors, walls, time, eternity—thrive. They do not want to put up with even “an empty bed” or hanky, let alone our image in the glass. Sarcastically, they do not “beg our pardon.”

Review of Francesco Pasqualino's Red Bicycle Dreams

June 17, 2020 Anthony Palma

Red Bicycle Dreams by Francesco Pasqualino

Main Street Rag

$13.00

Click Here to buy!

Reviewed by Brooke Palma

Francesco Pasqualino’s Red Bicycle Dreams takes its reader on a journey of the poet’s thoughts as he travels the roads of his native Pittsburgh and beyond. Many reviews of this enjoyable book focus on the trip the book takes us on and its ruminations on growing older and the conclusions one arrives at along the way. While Pasqualino writes masterfully about these subjects, what impressed me more were the explorations about the creative process itself that Pasqualino invites the reader to join him in.

What I found most compelling about the collection of poems is Pasqualino’s conversational style and lyrical images. The opening poem, “I’m Getting Old,” is a powerful ars poetica that finds the poet coming to terms with “hard varicose branches so still, against winter’s soft, silver skies.” He views the scene before him and sees “river banks remembered, as not quite so tall.” In pondering the landscape before him, he harkens back to William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow” and reminds us how much power inanimate objects hold when viewed through the lens of poetic imagery. He writes,

From a window upstairs,
I see my father’s old, rusted wheelbarrow
leaning
against a tired, gray shed.

The poem ends here, leaving us with this view that encapsulates the emotion conjured up by a tired shed and the rust on an old wheelbarrow. By using simple language and an everyday landscape, Pasqualino gives emotion to these tired and quotidian objects.

Throughout Red Bicycle Dreams, Pasqualino’s lyrical poems show us a poet in his prime reflecting on the art of creating poems. In “Best Seller,” he is at his best, as he describes the “pouting, angry look” of a female writer pictured on the cover of Poets and Writers the reader finds him perusing. Using a conversational tone (as if this is an intimate conversation just between himself and the reader over the pages of the open magazine), he explains that if he were to be found on the cover of such a magazine, he’d “smile like a roadside stand of flowers on an Easter Sunday.” He goes on to explain that he would

Not waste the photographer’s time
trying to find in me
that just right sulking look of an author,
the “Here I am, and I know your pain” look.

Because who would want to read a poet?
whose brooding eyes were not willing to pull a trigger

for their creative blood to stain the pages red.

“Best Seller” continues the conversation we’ve been engaging in with Pasqualino throughout the pages of Red Bicycle Dreams that focuses on the bond between writer and reader. In this poem, he asks who would read a writer “who did not seem so anguished as to climb a bridge, and threaten to jump before losing you as a reader.” These final lines give us the crux of the poem’s meaning. In violent language, Pasqualino refutes the idea of a writer’s fame or self-importance and reminds us once again of the vital relationship between writer and eventual reader. In contrast to the simple, everyday language of “I’m Getting Old,” in this poem, Pasqualino engages in creative hyperbole to drive home the importance of the relationship between writer and reader.

One of my favorite poems in this collection is “Poetry Workshop with Ted Kooser,” where Pasqualino shares the writing lessons he learned from Kooser, who sat in a chair, “made in a much simpler era…of a well-lived life, worn, comfortable cushions, with an inviting read.” He shares with the reader the skills he learned from Kooser, who

…taught us to look for life
in the tiniest cracks of the earth.

And tell of it in soft, unassuming tones,
spiked with brightly chosen words.

I’m sure that Kooser would approve of Pasqualino’s use of the unassuming tones and well-chosen words that make up this collection. Kooser’s advice encapsulates Pasqualino’s style throughout this book, where the poems hold the reader’s attention, “like the posts of an old fence, peeking out, of a snow-covered Nebraska field.” In describing Kooser’s lyrical advice, Pasqualino is most himself in using simple language to great effect to draw the reader into an ongoing conversation. What strikes me most about this poem is Pasqualino’s ability to use such precise and specific language to describe abstract concepts. Writing about writing is not easy work, but Pasqualino makes his points succinctly while still drawing the reader into yet another inviting conversation about poetry.

Reading Red Bicycle Dreams felt like having a great conversation with a friend about art over a perfect cup of espresso. Francesco Pasqualino left me with a wonderful experience of thinking about the writing process and the eventual product of that process as a reader. Using his conversational style, he invites us into his exploration of poetry and the writing process. This conversational style reminds me of the conclusion of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem, “Pathways, where a writer pursues their solitary craft with one dream: “You come too.” Pasqualino asks us to come, too and we are lucky to be invited along for the ride.

Brooke Palma grew up in Philadelphia and currently lives in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Many of her poems focus on the connections between culture and identity and finding beauty in the everyday. Her work has been published in The Mad Poets’ Review, Moonstone Arts, Toho Journal, and online at E-Verse Radio. Her chapbook, Conversations Unfinished, was published by Moonstone Press in August 2019. She hosts the Livin’ on Luck Poetry Series at Barnaby’s West Chester.

Local Lyrics - Featuring R.G. Evans

June 15, 2020 Anthony Palma

Local Lyrics hosted by John Wojtowicz appears on the 3rd Monday of each month. In it, John features the work and musings of a local poet.

“I find that most people are hungrier for poems than they know. It’s like having a vitamin deficiency. Your stomach may be full, but your body isn’t being nourished.”

MOON AT DAY

Pulling down the rotten boards
of a swing set no longer loved,
I feel you up there over my shoulder.
I built these swings myself
a dozen years ago. The tilt,
the lurch, my work for sure.
Now I pull it down and you pull too,
eye that couldn’t wait for the night.
The tide in me rises to think
of those unborn children
who might have made me keep
these posts from falling apart.
A little paint. A little patch.
Maybe you’re one of them,
looking down on me now
as I go about my best work:
destruction. Only one of you there,
precocious, ignoring bedtime.
Where’s the other?
Maybe Halley’s Comet, silver sibling,
running wild across the heavens,
not to return till I’m most surely gone.
These boards are full of rusty nails.
My knees creak like the gallows.
My daughter is sealed away in her room
writing stories that don’t include me.
Only you can see me wipe my eyes
that burn in the lowering sun.
Only you have the grace to linger
as sky gives way to sky, empty blue
to a black freckled with impossible light.

Q and A:

How would you describe your poetic aesthetic?

I would say my poetic aesthetic is as broad as the range of poets who have influenced me. Sometimes my poems resemble the philosophical “mindscapes” of Stephen Dunn. Sometimes they are weirdly surrealistic like the work of Russell Edson or James Tate. Sometimes humorously bewildered like the prose poems of Louis Jenkins.

In your award-winning book Overtipping the Ferryman, you’ve collected poems that cover experiences over a breadth of (seemingly) lived experience. What was your process in selecting/organizing these poems?

That book is essentially every poem that I had written over the course of maybe ten years that I deemed worthy of being included in a book. One of my poetry mentors, Renee Ashley, always writes poems with the end goal of a book in mind, but I had never written poems before with the intention of publishing a book. Once I chose the poems I thought were good enough to collect, I looked for links between them—themes, images—and then ordered them accordingly.

You are retiring this month after 34 years of teaching high school English. How have your thoughts about the place of poetry in America changed during your tenure working with youth?

I find that most people are hungrier for poems than they know. It’s like having a vitamin deficiency. Your stomach may be full, but your body isn’t being nourished. I’ve seen young people come alive not only from being given permission and the time to write poems, but also in the interpretation of poems in non-creative writing classes. Poetry is often neglected in the American high school, and everyone is much worse off for that fact. Many times, young people have introduced me to poets they are passionate about as well, so I would say the place of poetry in America is a still a very narrow street but very much a two-way street.

Is there anything unique about your process? Do you have any advice for writers struggling to find their voice?

Usually if I’m not reading poetry, I’m not writing it either. There something about reading good poems that primes the pump and makes me want to pick up a pen and make something of my own. For my second book, The Holy Both, I typed up aphoristic passages from Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave, cut them into strips and used one strip a day as a springboard for writing. Although it worked out for me, I do not recommend this process. As for voice, my own voice seems to change from poem to poem. I don’t know that writers need worry about finding their voice. They should let each poem’s voice find them.

You are a songwriter as well as a poet. Your new single “Could’ve Been the Stars” has gotten a lot of play at least on my stereo system. What is your experience with the differences/similarities of writing a song verses versus a poem?

Stephen Dunn has remarked that if a line in your poem sounds like it belongs in a country and western song, take it out. What I do is take all those deleted lines and voila!--instant country songs! Seriously, when I write poems, I generally write in free verse. My songs conform much more to rhyme and fixed rhythms. I find that structure comforting when writing songs, like following a road map to an unknown destination. Whether writing poems or songs, though, I try to heed my own advice that I give my students: it’s your job to write something that has never been written before, not something familiar.

Where can readers find more of your work? Where can we buy your books? Listen to your music?

Overtipping the Ferryman is available on Amazon and The Holy Both is available on Main Street Rag’s website www.mainstreetrag.com My CD is available on Amazon and is also on most streaming services.

R.G. Evans’s books include Overtipping the Ferryman (Aldrich Press Poetry Prize, 2013), The Holy Both, and the forthcoming Imagine Sisyphus Happy. His original music has been featured in the poetry documentaries All That Lies Between Us and Unburying Malcolm Miller. His debut CD of original songs, Sweet Old Life, was released in 2018. Evans is retiring this summer after thirty-four years teaching high school English. He teaches Creative Writing part-time at Rowan University. www.rgevanswriter.com.

Catfish” 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 serves his community as a licensed social worker and adjunct professor. He has been featured in the Philadelphia based Moonstone Poetry series, West-Chester based Livin’ on Luck series, and Rowan University’s Writer’s Roundtable on 89.7 WGLS-FM. Catfish John has been nominated 3x for the Pushcart Prize. He has been a workshop facilitator for Stockton University’s Tour of Poetry at the Otto Bruyns Public Library of Northfield and will be facilitating a haiku workshop at Beardfest Arts & Music Festival at the end of August. Recent publications include: Jelly Bucket, Tule Review, The Patterson Literary Review, Glassworks, Driftwood, Constellations, The Poeming Pigeon, and Schuylkill Valley Journal. Find out more at: www.catfishjohnpoetry.com

In Their Words - An Interview with Ray Greenblatt

June 11, 2020 Anthony Palma

in 2018, Steve and Mike sat down to talk with poet, educator, and long-time Mad Poet collaborator Ray Greenblatt. In this segment of the interview, Ray talks about his experiences with the Overbrook Poets, what inspires him to write poems, and more!

Click on the image to see this segment of the interview. For the full interview, as well as interviews with other local poets, click HERE to go to Mike Cohen’s Youtube channel.

POeT SHOTS - 'THE THIN EDGE OF YOUR PRIDE' by Kenneth Rexroth

June 1, 2020 Anthony Palma

POeT SHOTS is a monthly series published on the first Monday of the month. It features work by established writers followed by commentary and insight by Ray Greenblatt.

POeT SHOTS #8, Series C

from The Thin Edge of Your Pride

Out of the westborne snow shall come a memory
Floated upon it by my hands,
By my lips that remember your kisses.
It shall caress your hands, your lips,
Your breasts, your thighs, with kisses,
As real as flesh, as real as memory of flesh.
I shall come to you with the spring,
Spring’s flesh in the world,
Translucent narcissus, dogwood like a vision,
And phallic crocus,
Spring’s flesh in my hands.

The Father of the Beats, mostly a political poet, but his love poems were exquisite. Losing his beloved wife Andrée at an early age, he never forgot her nor their transcending love. Her spirit is alive in nature.

Review of John Wall Barger's The Mean Game

May 27, 2020 Anthony Palma

The Mean Game by John Wall Barger

Palimpsest Press

$18.95

Click HERE to buy.

Reviewed by Chris Kaiser

In The Mean Game, John Wall Barger holds up a courageous mirror to nature. We don’t get a Disney-fied version of life. Rather we get the requisite amount of joy and sadness, of humor and violence. Barger has a deft touch with language, using it to produce an array of emotional responses. That’s not to say his poems lack intellectual heft. They don’t. But he leaves it up to the reader to decide how much the poems will be interpreted as intellectual exercises and how much they will be regarded as emotional journeys.

While he seems intent on making the reader go though something in the theater of their mind, he also seems resolved not to want to generate any particular meaning or lesson. For this reason, readers should be aware of sudden shifts in the poetic narrative.

Take the poem “The Problem with Love,” in which a boy inherits his dead brother’s pet tarantula. His mother asks if he is “fucking man enough” to take care of the spider. The boy says he is. Barger teases us with normalcy, almost as if this poem is a meditation on adolescence, on growing up. The boy cares for his new pet, feeds it and tells it stories. But after a bad dream, he

woke in the dark, found Ma’s hair scissors,
reached into the spider’s house
& cut off a leg.

This sharp turn of events continues spiraling out of control, as the boy cuts off all the legs—twice—until they do not grow back. The spider

sat in her house,
gray, hissing like a punctured
basketball.

The reader may still be tempted to interpret this poem as a commentary on growing up, especially when the boy sacrifices the spider to ants, as if giving up his old self. But the reader has to be careful not to get too invested in having the poems be didactic. They may start out as if there is a lesson to be learned, but they then become something else, more thorny and complicated, like life.

In this particular poem, we may have to go back to the title—“The Problem with Love”— for a clue of Barger’s intent. A common theme in this book is how ineffectual love can be, how love on its own doesn’t necessarily solve problems. The boy’s mother spends her time watching TV, leaving him on his own. After the legless spider is devoured by ants, the boy

hosed down the fish tank.
It took ten minutes to scrub it
spotless, so the sun
really shone through the glass.

Is Barger hinting that the problem with love is that it kills, and what it kills can be scrubbed clean and forgotten in the glinting sun? It could be, but this is one of the defining characteristics of Barger’s poetry: We intuit there’s a lesson to be learned but we’re not quite sure what it is. Barger is a wonderful tightrope artist. He toes the line between darkness and light, between illusion and reality.

“The Bureaucrats” is an example of this tightrope act, and it also contains my favorite opening line: “We never should have crossbred the bureaucrats with office supplies.” At first, the crossbred bureaucrats are valued for their interesting feats, “With microchip eyes, they send emails by winking, With opposable big toes they operate four staplers at once.” But they are being held against their will and escape. In the wild, they undergo a transformation and surreptitiously return. Barger writes, “One day at the mall there was a bureaucrat chewing a cheeseburger.” No one knows how or when they came back or how they took control. He then writes, “And just like that, without fanfare, the bureaucrats were in charge.” The poem could be read as a modern-day cautionary tale. But instead of The Office meets The Lion King, we get Big Brother meets Hannibal Lector. As in all bureaucracies, there are forms to fill out and penalties for mistakes. But in Barger’s world, the bureaucrats “wear our scalps as purses. Our spleens, they say, are delicacies. In broad daylight, I come across three bureaucrats crouched over a body in the street, feasting on it like starving boars. Leaving no waste.”

And so ends the poem, balancing whimsy and atrocity. But Barger’s narrators rarely have use for such labels. No, Barger is a skilled linguist and the moralizing, if any, takes place within the mind of the reader.

There’s a wonderful imaginative freedom in reading Barger’s poems. The language, for example, is often archaic or antiquated, adding to the poems’ mystique. In the opening poem, “Urgent Message from the Captain of the Unicorn Hunters,” the narrator says of the unicorns, “Enough have they tholed.” Thole can be found in Beowulf. It is an Anglo-Saxon word meaning to suffer in silence, without complaint. It is the perfect word to use here because the narrator is asking his listeners to “release” the unicorns who have done no wrong,

Those sealed in your attics. Those chained in our barns. Those on the nightmare yokes.
Those heads on your walls. This is our fault.

Most of the language in The Mean Game is simple and straightforward, even if the ideas and images are complex and layered. On occasion, like with “thole”, Barger sends the reader to the dictionary. In the “Last Book of the Last Library on Earth,” the narrator recounts:

A heavy iron volume burst out
a stained glass window
to the stones at our feet
A scholar plunged after.
Our brothers of the light guns
& clear shields
spattlecocked him.

Spattlecock is an old Irish cooking term from the 1700s, which means to remove the backbone, generally of fowl, for easier grilling. The use of the word adds to the ancient feel of the poem, which also contains one of Barger’s many brilliant poetic descriptions: “I staggered away / in the kiln of dusk clutching it”.

Another poignant description is this one: “Her body held his thunder / the way language holds a flower.” This occurs in the poem “A Scornful Image or Monstrus Shape of a Wondrous Strange Fygure…” (the full title is much, much longer).

In “Tale of the Boy and the Horse Head,” one of the darker poems in the collection, Barger wonderfully captures the morning hue with this line: “Below, in the castiron dawn….”

Finally, in “The Fathers of Daisy Gertrude,” Barger’s deft poetic touch is on display when he tells us:

She slept
under a flowering tree
beside her scream
which remained quiet.

These are just a few of the many examples of how Barger can mesmerize us with his language. We are already in full throttle mode reading these works, a feat that the poet accomplishes, in part, by not using stanza breaks. Barger told me that while writing this book he was influenced by the poet James Tate who, in his later work, didn’t use stanza breaks. He says,

One reason for stanza breaks is to give the reader a little pause, a breather, to collect their thoughts. By not giving stanza breaks, Tate doesn’t allow the reader to rest and possibly break the spell. I was trying for a similar effect in these poems, to hold the reader, to grip them close for the time of the poem, so that there would be no break to the tension until the poem was over.

Barger was born in New York City but grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He’s lived in various places around the world including India, Finland, Greece, and Hong Kong, and now resides in West Philadelphia. He teaches at the University of the Arts and La Salle University. The Mean Game is his fourth full-length poetry book, and his artistic maturity shows.

The Mean Game is a book that embraces opposites: joy and sadness, humor and violence, animals and humans, myth and matter. Barger’s poetic muse gravitates towards myth. Myths aren’t afraid to tackle the difficult subjects, to use violence and death as teachers. We are under a certain illusion that our happiness—our marriages, our jobs, our friendships—will last forever. Barger’s poems do not harbor that illusion. They disrupt our normal expectation, and do so with exquisite poetic skills.

I’ll close with these lines from the last poem in the collection “This This is the End.” They portend new things to come, hopefully also from this author:

And when and when the last bird shuts its eyes
And the flesh of the last whale
Drifts like pollen in turquoise ink
And dust devils are lords of the squares
And trees reclaim the stairs
Still the stars glister like sparklers
Aloft in the hand of a girl
Still the earth our grave hurdles with grace in the dark

Chris Kaiser’s poetry was published in Eastern Iowa Review, Better Than Starbucks, and The Scriblerus. It appeared in Action Moves People United, a music and spoken word project partnered with the United Nations, as well as in the DaVinci Art Alliance’s Artist, Reader, Writer exhibit, which pairs visual art with the written word. He’s won awards for journalism and erotic writing, holds an MA in theatre, and lives in suburban Philadelphia.

Review of Brandon Blake's When All Is Lost

May 20, 2020 Anthony Palma

“Like a successful surgical procedure, Blake’s work may hurt at first, but it can also be a first step towards healing, a new state of emotional wellness.”

When All Is Lost by Brandon Blake

Self-published $5.00

Click Here to purchase a copy

Reviewed by Sean Hanrahan

Some poets find their voice in, and respond to, historic and cataclysmic times or events. Other poets find their voice in, and respond to, the precise, poetic details to be found in everyday life. Brandon Blake’s newest, self-published chapbook, When All Is Lost, offers the reader nuanced and insightful poems that speak to the specific details of the narrator’s post-breakup existence as well as gross injustices occurring in Philadelphia. It is a slim collection (13 pages), but this work contains multitudes and has lingered in my mind longer than its length may immediately suggest.

In his poem, “The Day After,” Blake’s narrator describes a first thought in the first morning after a breakup:

Switching the alarm off
Before it detonates &
Interrupts melancholy states.

He continues to expand upon the emptiness of daily rituals without his partner, without someone to snuggle or shower with—

The shower’s heat doesn’t hold so well
This morning.

His commute has even changed and “lost its vibrancy.” This poem provides the reader with commandingly specific details that the narrator’s heartache becomes palpable, corporeal. The reader, then, is led to recall the details, the rawness of their own dissolved relationships. It is a testament to Blake’s wordsmith skills that he grants himself poetic space to express an intensity of feeling and grants readers the space to work towards their own catharses. Like a successful surgical procedure, Blake’s work may hurt at first, but it can also be a first step towards healing, a new state of emotional wellness.

Blake’s narrator uses his hobbies, as we all do, to distract from his pain, explored in the complex and devastating poem, “My Addiction with Origami.”

I found my fix
deep within the folds as
paper cuts and calloused fingers
provided needed distraction

He finds a place “to tuck away pride and ego” in his folding. He cannot totally escape from his current emotional state as his origami attempts begin to resemble his relationship. This poem resounds with the truth that art can be a way to mitigate our pain, but it is also the place where we confront it. I have rarely found a poem that expresses this fact with as much clarity and beauty as I have found in this poem, my favorite in this collection.

Blake ends this powerful chapbook with poems that move beyond the personal and enter the Philadelphia political arena. With the poem, “Hey Yo, Adriane,” he invokes the cinematic Rocky legend to relay the experience of a woman with a

Scrawny handwritten sign announcing
“Too ugly to prostitute.”

Whether through astute observation, intuitive imagination, or both, Blake gives a voice to this “Adriane to anyone’s Rocky,” a woman that many city-dwellers would choose to ignore. If only this poem was as well-known as the Rocky statue, we could see real change in Philadelphian society.

As a native Philadelphian, Blake also calls for us to remember the MOVE bombing of 1985 in the powerful closing poem, “Attention MOVE…This is America.” Blake paints a clear picture of that morning of devastation with the lines:

Eastern light
accentuating adrenaline-fueled veins
dissipating
in sweat behind blue collars
barely restraining the hounds of justice.

The tension and the sorrow build as all local readers know how this poem must end, although in a better and more humane world the MOVE bombing would not have taken place. But in 1985 and in America, it unfortunately did. Blake closes this vital chapbook with the image of,

dreadlocked cherubs
breaking free from the licks of fiery shackles
escaping Puritan purgatory
vanishing in the Philly skyline.

No poet, or pugilist for that matter, packs a punch like Brandon Blake.

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). He is currently at work on several literary projects as well as teaching a chapbook class this spring. He currently serves on the Moonstone Press Editorial Board, as head poetry editor for Toho, and workshop instructor for Green Street Poetry.

In Their Words - An Interview with Steve Delia

May 14, 2020 Anthony Palma

This month, we go all the way back to 2017, when Mike Cohen interviewed his partner in crime, Steve Delia. In this section of the interview they talk about the importance of performance in poetry, as well as the importance of identifying yourself as a poet. Click the image for the interview.

For the full interview, along with others, click here to check out Mike Cohen’s YouTube channel.

Review of Ann E. Michael's Barefoot Girls

May 6, 2020 Anthony Palma

“The book is filled with long roads, small towns, big dreams, self doubt and intense desires.”

Barefoot Girls by Ann E. Michael

Prolific Press

$8.95

Click HERE to purchase a copy

Reviewed by Phil Dykhouse

“If you pay the price
she’ll let you deep inside
but there’s a secret garden she hides.”

Bruce Springsteen, “Secret Garden”

In the dedication that opens Ann E. Michael’s Barefoot Girls, she professes that her chapbook is “Indebted to the music of Bruce Springsteen',” and as you begin to delve into the 24 poems of the collection, it’s hard not to notice. The book is filled with long roads, small towns, big dreams, self doubt and intense desires. However, even with its poetry being so closely inspired by one music’s greatest storytellers, Barefoot Girls excels in carving its own unique path through it’s tales of being young and growing up in South Jersey.

With its first few poems, Barefoot Girls begins building both its physical and emotional landscape. The streets are empty and boredom is commonplace. Like most teenagers, the subjects in these poems are quite aware of their unfulfilling positions in life. There’s an angst here that comes across as completely natural.

“You sought somewhere sultry and new to you: winding, dense. Dangerous”
from “Coastal Plains”

The streets were dead ends mostly, as the tracks
followed the feeder creek, and there was nothing
to get to on the other side except
trouble…”
from “Dares”

A little further into the book the poems find the girls stepping out into the world beyond their monotonous surroundings. It’s here that they begin to search for who they are, who they want to be. You’ll find them discovering their love of music from a certain rock star and contending with puberty at the roller skating rink.

“Some boy from north Jersey strummed our stories on his guitar…I would never have seen how the music sustains them, those dancers and lovers carried off by the back beat…”
from “Rock Concerts”
“...me in my Keds with an extra 50 cents to rent the largest women’s size or a boys’ pair…you and I at fourteen, putting our whole selves in.”
from “Roller Rink”

As you progress further, in what seems so true to life, we find the girls suddenly coming face to face with self perception. Ann does an amazing job subtly introducing it into Barefoot Girls. When I arrived at this part of the book, it came back to me how quickly we as children are thrust in such a confusing time. Competition with each other begins to replace the more innocent relationships we’ve known. We begin to not only question others, but also ourselves.

“...she watches the boys elbow one another trying to pretend they’re not out to impress…”
from “Barefoot Girl”
“Something about them spoke of competition and staying tough. Something about them said the ones who stay benched lose.”
from “Bleacher Season”

After that, love and sex begin to play an important role in the book. For the first time in their lives, the girls are experiencing desire from within themselves, as well as boys. It’s in these poems they are confronted with the repercussions of lust, shame, confusion, and especially pregnancy.

“Love was desire mostly, we’d no other name for it, not at 15.”
from “Boys”
“She felt his heart beat in her ribs, a tunnel through her girlhood.”
from “Little Joanie”
“...your sister’s confession she was carrying the child of that boy she’d been caught screwing in
the high school auditorium back row…”
from “Normal Day”

Towards the end of the book, you’ll find that the poems have evolved into a slightly more reflective tone. The speaker is a little older. She’s experienced things that have changed her. She seems to be looking forward while still having one foot stuck in the past. It's quite similar to the angst that we come upon in the beginning of the book. It's as if she sees that after all her and her friends have been through, they’re still stuck where they were when it started.

“We were young and easily influenced, convinced the future was something constructed around us…”
from “Building for Us”
“She’s young but she’s sure she’s left girlhood behind on the swingset…”
from “Against Whatever Holds You Down-”

As I finished Barefoot Girls, I found that Ann’s ability to frame a story with a voice that isn’t at the center of it is one of the book’s highlights. It allows you to feel as though you are part of this group of friends. You feel as though you are with them in their intimate moments. Interestingly enough, I also came of age in South Jersey, so I am quite familiar with its trappings. I’ve experienced many of the same situations and feelings that are the focus of most of these poems. I must say that as a male I was a little intimidated to relive them through a female's perspective. I felt as if I was looking in on something that had been hidden from me my entire life. However, through its layers of honest and evolving poetry, Barefoot Girls reveals itself to be so encompassingly human that the differences in gender become only part of the story instead of its whole. It sings like a song you’re familiar with, even if you’re hearing it for the first time. A song you’ll want to listen to over and over again.

Philip Dykhouse lives in Philadelphia. His chapbook Bury Me Here was published and released by Toho Publishing in early 2020. His work has appeared in Toho Journal, Moonstone Press, everseradio.com, and Spiral Poetry. He was the featured reader for the Dead Bards of Philadelphia at the 2018 Philadelphia Poetry Festival.

Absolutions from Shark Fin CoveBy Neti Neti

Red Bicycle Dreams by Francesco Pasqualino

The Mean Game by John Wall Barger

When All Is Lost by Brandon Blake

Barefoot Girls by Ann E. Michael

Absolutions from Shark Fin Cove
By Neti Neti