Guest Post by Christopher Woods

This year, perhaps like no year before, we are thinking about the concept of home. During the pandemic, most of us are spending much more time at home—in home offices, involved in remote teaching or learning, or simply in quarantine. Sadly, because of the economic collapse, many people are now homeless, and there will be more to follow. This year, more than ever, we are both consciously and subs-consciously considering the meaning and importance of home. We are thinking of safety and shelter. We have always been this way, but now it seems much more immediate and crucial, and even life-saving.

Dwelling by Scott Edward Anderson, delves deeply into this subject in the form of a book-length eco-poem. It began as a reaction to Martin Heidegger’s essay “Building Dwelling Thinking” and, in Anderson’s lyrical writing, took on a book-length life of its own. He asks questions such as “Do we carry home within?” Anderson’s poetic probing explores our place, not only inside a home, but in the larger world that is home to us all.

Ironically, many of us now have more time than ever to consider the concept of home, of refuge. Reading this book, I often stopped to look around the room, then out the window, considering the essential nature of everything. Readers might well find themselves doing the very same thing.

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Dwelling: an ecopoem by Scott Edward Anderson. Shanti Arts Publishing, 2018.

Reviewer bio: Christopher Woods is a writer and photographer who lives in Texas. His photography book for writers, FROM VISION TO TEXT, is forthcoming from Propertius Press. https://www.instagram.com/dreamwood77019/

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Guest Post by Chana Kraus-Friedberg

The current political climate is difficult to write about because so much of it seems to be its own satire. Imagine the most child-like, ludicrous system of logic possible, apply it to world events, and you have government policy in the US. Yet real damage is being done to the United States and the world, and that is certainly not funny. In her recent chapbook, Flatman: and Other Poems of Protest in the Trump Era, Cheryl Caesar brilliantly negotiates the line between satire and anxiety or grief, painting a sinister picture of how childish tendencies become destructive when combined with very adult power.

In the title poem, Caesar starts by imagining the president as a truly flat man in a way that reminds me of the popular kids’ character, Flat Stanley.  She describes the physical consequences of this flatness the way a picture book might. The president’s hair, we are told, is “rolled out in weird shapes, like a child’s / misshapen gingerbread man.” His head is square: “He could set his Diet Coke on it.” Later in the book, a spoof on Kipling’s If describes what happens if one can “fake a 4-F due to “bone spurs,”[ . . . ]  /And never go to war and win your own spurs, /But boast of dodging STDs instead[.]” It’s witty and easy to laugh at, but the laughter is uncomfortable. You read in the way that I think a lot of us are currently living, carrying the knowledge that the underlying joke is dark and uncontrolled and future-consuming. In a real world context, even fantastical flatness has consequences, Caesar reminds us: “[The president] can never cross the dimensional border. / And so he hates us (hate being / the flattening emotion), hates us all. Hates the round world.”

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Flatman: and Other Poems of Protest in the Trump Era by Cheryl Caesar. Thurston Howl Publications, 2020.

Reviewer’s Bio: Chana Kraus-Friedberg is the winner of the 2020 Ritzenhein Award for Emerging Poets. Her first chapbook, Grammars of Hope, will be published in February 2021 (Finishing Line Press). Instagram: @chanakf2020

Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson

Brian Matta’s superbly inventive Stuck, Stutter, Persist is like stepping into a room only to have a secret door open, revealing an entity who will communicate with you, maybe bonding with you forever and ever. This entity is expressed as a stutter, but is the inexplicable making itself known. What is signified by a glitch, a pause, a repetition, or an echo is really something very different. But what?

In the poem, “Check out that breech” the main character is the stutter (sound) “—ch” and it is heard throughout in a list of material items; “chest . . . brunch . . . chapel” which seem ordinary and unsuspecting but invoke a stutter near the end of the poem. The stutter asserts itself here and in each poem in this marvelous and tantalizing book, not as “—ch” but as a different stutter sound in each poem.

These stutters (these poems) slowly become fodder for existential contemplation. Much like the world Gregor in Kafka’s novella, The Metamorphosis, experiences, we see that this world also needs no introduction once you start reading. The stutter does persist to draw out and slow down the experience of dramatic life events and serves to underscore and even lead the poems away from simple explanation.

When I first began reading Stuck, Stutter, Persist, I was intrigued because it seemed weird and a sort of strange homage to anger or patience or both. But it is much different because it is masterfully poetic in its unblinking regard of the parts of life which fly by so fast that only a stutter can catch bits of them before they are lost.

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Stuck, Stutter, Persist by Brian Matta. Black Centipede Press, 2019.

Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson’s first book of poems is Mezzanine. Anderson was the poetry editor of Big Talk, a free publication in the early 1980s featuring Pacific Northwest punk bands. She has a poem forthcoming in Sleet Magazine’s Winter Issue, “The Inside Edition II” and Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast, Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, will be published by Finishing Line Press in 2021. Her recent work can be found in Calibanonline, Gnashing Teeth, Lily Poetry Review, Mojave River Review, NewPages What Am I Reading?, Panoply, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Porter Gulch Review.

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