Review of the book "Hortensia: in winter" by Megan Merchant

Megan Merchant, Hortensia, in winter (New American Press, 2024) 66 pages, poetry, not released yet at the time of this review. Preorder info here.

Hortensia: another name for the hydrangea flower. It's also the poet's ancestor who was a follower of Joseph Smith. After Smith's death, and when that Church accepted polygamy, Hortensia broke with Brigham Young and followed Joseph Smith's widow. That belief system ended with Hortensia, it seems. Merchant is a non-practicing Catholic. In this collection, Merchant explores the connection of generations through time.

In profound, lilting lines that feel as though they ought to appear on glossy photo paper surrounded by peonies - cozy like a coffee shop but trendy like an interior design magazine - Merchant seeks to tie the mundane motions of her everyday life back to Hortensia to empathize with her. How do the tiny details of living repeat across generations? How can ancestors we never knew bring comfort when we learn significant news? Merchant asks these questions of Hortensia. Although the book is composed of prose-poem meditations that are mostly inward-focused, the overall effect feels like an attempted conversation. Where Hortensia fails to speak in return, the poems tend to read as letters to Hortensia, rather than as mere thoughts.

This is one of the best collections of poetry I've read this year. 

Lines that stood out:

"I want to ask the hard questions, but they sharpen back to god." - "Invocation"

"Were you given the smallest room in the house of your own life? I am gifted a single window." - "Helpmeet"

"A woman's work, I was taught, was to endure. ... A woman must remain pure." - "Applying to Sainthood"

"Now no daughter will seed. I will be scraped clean." - "Merciful"

"I am learning the landscape of my lineage now... I'd like to find more than a name to hang in the rearview mirror." - "Picking Wild Berries"

"What notes still play in my blood? What warnings?" - "Score"

"I take your silence as permission to continue." - "Famine"

"Hymn" - the whole poem

"To sink into the earth is a gift ... a kind of holiness ruptured." - "Have You Branded an Animal that You Did Not Know to Be Your Own?"

"Salvation" - the whole poem

"This year I am hungered down to bones." - "How to Describe Winter"

"Regret is a scratch of light between trees." - "Watching the Praire Fires as Pastime" 

"The abyss I feel in my bones." - "Portraiture: Dark Room, Self in the Mirror"

"My interior is unchurched. ... the way the wind is tongue-tied at the mountain base." - "Love"

"The testimony of wreckage, beautiful." - "Harmonies"

"The only thing that matters is what comes after the last word." - "Invocation" and "Revision" 

Disclosure notice: I received an Advance Review Copy of the book to read and write this review. No money was exchanged.

Is(sue) 15 and New Schedule - AvantAppal(achia)

Dear Kinfolk,

Is(sue) 15 is live! There are 7 countries total and 10 states within the US represented. This includes our first contributions from Egypt and Peru.

The work chosen to be arch(ived) from Is(sue) 14 is JWM Morgan's story, Volodymyr Bilyk's art, and Joshua Martin's poem. Read it on the Arch(ive) page.

Check the Sub(missions) page. We have made our longstanding policy regarding how we arch(ive) past is(sues) even clearer so that there can be no confusion that you as the author of your work bear responsibility for keeping records of publication and not us. Also, the date of deadline for each is(sue) has changed.

Deadline for Is(sue) 16 is October 31, 2024. So send us your avant-garde and experimental poetry, art, and short stories! You make this ezine the foremost home of the Avant in Appalachia. We are special and weird because of you. Thank you!

www.avantappalachia.com

Sincerely,

Sabne Raznik
Poetry/Art Ed(itor)

 

Review of "Word Troubadours" by PJ Swift and Ellyn Maybe

PJ Swift and Ellyn Maybe, Word Troubadours (2024) 32 pages, poetry, $10.00 PDF; $15.00 Physical book. Order here.

Ellyn Maybe is a spoken word artist I first came across when she was in the Los Angeles area about 15 years ago working in a creative group centered more or less around Beyond Baroque that included the likes of Yvonne de la Vega, Ray Manzarek (formerly of the Doors), and Michael C. Ford who took Beat concepts, wrapped them in a confessional flare with a punk rock graffiti edge, and rapped them - sometimes whimsically, sometimes cooly, sometimes sing-songy - over jazzy soundtracks. This is the first of her works I have encountered as a purely on-the-page experience. This is also a collaboration with PJ Swift.

This creation is titled Word Troubadours and music is therefore an important theme throughout. Music, singing, performing, visual art - this collection is the space where poetry intersects with most other forms of artistic expression. PJ Swift presents the metaphor of poem as a Rave and Ellyn suggests that life is a Musical. I personally would argue against both concepts as being either misconceived or over-romanticised, but each to his/her own. Still, that gives you an idea of the highly unconventional, almost dreamscape of these poems. And I'm always excited by hyper-imagined, nonconventional mentalscapes in poetry.

Ellyn Maybe includes a kind of personal Odyssey with "Ellyn Maybe's Dream" where she travels to Prague - whether only in dream or also in waking life, I'm not sure - and has a transformative experience that involves a gargoyle. 

Some phrases I wrote down that stand out:

"We resist the temptation to crawl into the world/ and pull our psyches over our heads./... We need our exuberance more than our math." - "Cinema Dance" - Ellyn Maybe

"I know how men make women wear armor of all kinds" - "I Heard What Sounded Like A Song", Ellyn Maybe

"Perhaps life is like a multiple choice question my friend/ The answer's in a circle dance with no beginning or end." - "Somewhere in the Sky", Ellyn Maybe

"an era whose burdens/ have granted no choice" - "Creation of Myths" - PJ Swift

"avalanche in the bones of the land" - "Train", Ellyn Maybe

May these Word Troubadours keep on soothing our souls with their songs and stories of our time for the ages to come.

Review of "Fill Me With Birds" by Scott Ferry and Daniel McGinn

Scott Ferry and Daniel McGinn, Fill Me With Birds (Meat for Tea Press, 2024) 104 pages, poetry, $16.95. Order here.

 

Those nights when you stay up past midnight and the conversations go silly and then profoundly deep, that's what this is.

 

Two mature men muse on everything from aging parents to children, to marriage, to health issues, to overcoming addiction, to God, to the changing of seasons, to resentment and forgiveness. The poems are written as if letters or emails going back and forth. But in my head cannon, they are sitting in a late-night living room in front of a fire passing a (legal) smoke between them.

 

At times, it can feel almost too intimate and honest for the reader to eavesdrop on politely. This is good stuff. 

 

Most of the lines I made note of were Scott Ferry's, I think, though I didn't track who wrote which line. If you want to know that, you can read it. But here are some of the lines that stood out to me:

 

"I know now it is too late for/ bargaining// the best I can manage/ is obsolescence"

 

"the face of god: is the inside of longing when there is no waiting left"

 

"Nerves are like brains,/ remember how we used to be? The body knows/ what is and isn't there."

 

"I lost the easy talk/ I did not want to impress anyone anymore"

 

"solve/ hate like a controlled burn/ near a freeway"

 

"I still have a fire a fire a fire"

 

On meditation, some of these poems are darker and heavier than they appear. The request to "fill me with birds" seems to be a wish for a lightening of the soul from the burdens voiced through these conversations. 

 

Review of David B. Prather's "Shouting at an Empty House"

David B. Prather, Shouting at an Empty House (Sheila-na-Gig Editions, 2023) 96 pages, poetry, $16.00. Order here.

David B. Prather is an accomplished Appalachian poet from Parkersburg, WV. This collection started reasonably well. It has some familiar and comfortable themes and images. 

But it wasn't long before I realised my mind had largely disengaged. These poems are too familiar and comfortable. They have that expected MFA/Workshopped/I've-read-this-all-before-a-million-times feel. They also leave no room for the imagination. There is nothing left unsaid for the reader to interact with. And some stereotypical plays of manufactured empathy are clearly meant to elicit gasps of awe from the audience at a poetry reading without having any real emotional depth.

Therefore, when the occasional sparkling phrase manages to stand out from the page, it isn't enough to carry the entire collection. 

If the current fashion of MFA/Workshop-approved poetry is your thing, this is your book. It is exactly everything that has been published in the last 20 years. Prather's author's bio reflects that. Call it PopPoetry. Clearly, a lot of people do appreciate it; particularly the people who decide what gets printed. 

Personally, I'm bored with it. 

 

Watch Sabne Raznik at the Wadza International Festival (Digitally) on Facebook

 

Watch Sabne Raznik read her poem "Of a Refugee" from the book "Linger to Look" (2015) at the Wadza International Festival in Morocco (digitally) at this link on Facebook.  

www.sabneraznik.com

Is(sue) 14 is live!

Dear Kinfolk,

Dave Sykes and I are proud to announce that Is(sue) 14 of AvantAppal(achia) went live on December 15, 2023! It is one of our best is(sues). There is a lot of work from South Korea this time. But we also have poetry, art, and fiction from several U.S. states, Ukraine, and Siberia. 

We have made several changes to the submission guidelines so be sure to read those on the Sub(missions) page. These include a how-to guide to ensure photos and videos taken with an Apple device save and send as JPG files. 

The deadline for Is(sue) 15 is May 31, 2024. www.avantappalachia.com

Thank you for making this ezine the premiere home for the experimental and weird of literature in Appalachia and supporting its outreach to the world!

Sincerely,

Sabne Raznik

Poetry/Art Ed(itor)

Book Review of Sacha Archer's "Cellsea"

Sacha Archer, Cellsea (Timglaset Editions, 2023) 80 pages, poetry, $12.00. Order here.

 This is a book of avant-garde poetry that is the genre "vispo": visual poetry. This is where poetry and visual art become one. It's a fascinating genre.

But how to write a review on it? That is the challenge I agreed to take on.

Sacha Archer and Timglaset Editions give us a fun, quirky little book with two covers. It can be read in two different directions, in colour and in black and white. Just like the ocean, it swirls and ebbs and pulses and envelopes and washes us around. And we get to play in its mysterious depths and moods and turns. And there is plenty of room for personal interpretation. The idea seems to be that as we swim about in the immense sea, we also swim inward into the single cell of our origin.

And since this is vispo, I thought the best way to go about about this would be include a few images of the poems inside. It was difficult to get good quality, shadowless images in my living room, but here is a very small sampling of the suprising, fun profundity of this volume:

This is one book I am proud to add to my personal library.

2023 Wadza International Festival (Morocco) Digitally

In December, I'll be participating in the 2023 Wadza International Festival in Taourirt, Morocco, digitally. I am honoured and excited to be invited to share a poem. Watch their Facebook page for more info as to exact date, time, and place to see the reading. 

Review of john compton's "blacked out borderline from an exponential crisis"

 john compton, blacked out borderline from an exponential crisis (Ethel Press, 2023) 54 pages, poetry, limited run of 60 copies, $10.00. Order here.

On the whole, I'm a big fan of john compton's poetry, having read most of his oeuvre to date. There is something delightful and irresistible in the music of his phrases and the dagger-focus evident in each individual word. Each poem is crisp against the teeth and tart on the tongue like a green apple with a whisky after-bite in the throat. These aren't the kind of poems to cuddle up with in the winter with a cup of tea and a blanket. They do not comfort; they jar and jostle. Not as extreme as a rollercoaster. More like slight turbulence in a cross-country flight. And they are deeply autobiographical, like confessional poetry modernised. As compton here says, a kind of manifesto of his poetry as I have experienced it so far: "my house is a/documentary untelevised unwritten/a secret it grows ...the empty only a symptom."

compton's work is not the place to go if you are a woman seeking refuge from the male preoccupation with penises and sex. He is proudly gay and many of the poems go there explicitly. Since I am not interested in sex no matter who is doing it, at least not explicitly, I tend to skip those. You won't find a lot of it in my own work, to be sure, unless you are determined or it is in the context of abuse. It simply isn't a big presence in my mental life. 

There are blocks of poems here about compton losing several beloved dogs and puppies to a Parvo outbreak. These aren't sentimental in the traditional sense, however. More like love poetry with a lot of blood. And some of them can be read as metaphors for the experience of living through the COVID pandemic, and now learning to live with it as a constant background threat. He writes: "our aggression eats us." There is also a block of poems written about and to several historic poets, each one a projection of compton onto that poet in ways that are insightful.

Lest we should forget that he is, in fact, an Appalachian poet, he reminds us with his closing poem, which is a vague reminder of the ballad "Barbara Allen".

For me, the best poem in this particular collection is an ode to womanhood that has wizened and I will close this review with it: 

she pauses in wading the lake waist

high the water touching parts she

forgot had existed she slips her

hand into the murkiness wondering

if her hair ever felt like this she

knew she used to be beautiful

before age broke her body across

the floor like a chair she rocks

herself her feet moving between

the silt the ducks revolve around

her like moons before settling in

their landing they search her she

understands she is not a tree but

could she just raise her arms like

branches & feel love for a moment

a foot farther an inch deeper she

remembers how to heal a wound

with a band aid before the children

were too old to not need her she

breathes she breathes she breathes

while everyone else has finished

letting her exist