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

Review of Kai Coggin's "Mining for Stardust"

 Kai Coggin, Mining for Stardust (FlowerSong Press, 2021) 99 pages, poetry, $18.00. At FlowerSong Press.

Kai Coggin's latest collection is modern confessional poetry. Here you will find no symbolism or imagery for its own sake. Every poem is straightforward, literal, and usually long. It leaves nothing to the imagination. These are COVID pandemic poems, a nearly chronological journal of the poet's experience of 2020. Some are optimism in extremis, others are angry, others almost despairing. All of them are starkly honest.

The best poems are introverted rather than extroverted, self-reflecting rather than social and political. These poems tend to be a little shorter and leave the reader with more breathing room for interaction by filling the little blanks that are less literal and more suggestive within them. As in "When the Stars Fall":

the rain falls 

hard heavy

on the white petals

of jasmine

that have entwined

their soft bodies to the steel 

that holds our house 

to the earth

swirling galaxy of stars

that affixes 

us to the ground

and to the heavens combined

in the morning

a universe is scattered

under our bare feet

Some of these poems are too much of their moment to remain relevant 10 or 20 years from now. Some are truly sublime. In that sense, it's a potluck seeking to be comfort food. Its strongest argument for itself is that it will continue to be an honest, individual chronicle of a year which will surely be of interest to history. 

In January 2020, I was completing an audiobook of Daniel Defoe's "A Journal of Plague Year", which - although being fiction - is the nearest thing we have today to an actual journal of an individual living during the last substantial outbreak of bubonic plague in London just a year before the Great London Fire. I did not then know, of course, that I would immediately begin to live through a modern plague of different cause. I have often had occasion to think back on that book in the 2 years since listening to it and make comparisons and to be grateful for the differences that modernism makes in how humanity weathers such an event. (How fortunate we are to have refrigerators so that we do not have to go to market literally everyday for food! How wonderful is having the internet so as to stay in touch!) I imagine books like "Mining for Stardust" will serve a similar purpose for future generations in helping them to understand the human stories of this time.