Guest Post by Linda Bullock.

Elda Pappadà‘s book of poems, Freedom is divided into three parts: love, loss, and understanding. Pappadà invites her readers to crawl inside and look outside her window. They will find her inner tapestry, an amazing although sometimes painful place to be, and experience the joy of her love, sensual delights, confusion, sadness, anger, and abject despair.

Pappadà‘s facility with poetic devices and her ability to use words that immediately trigger a surprising visual image can be seen in the poem “My Man“: “He gives four hands / before being asked, / speaks transparent truth / inside, cotton softness, / outside, skin tougher / than tree bark”.

Elda’s decision to include the age-old nature vs. nurture question in considering her relationships is a brilliant addition to the uniqueness of the piece, as we can see in “Built In”: “Patterned from childhood, / our personalities fated / to be incompatible; / crossing path, / we find ourselves / curious, intrigued, / and filled with longing.”

The poet’s truths act as a catalyst for self-discovery. The artwork on the cover of Freedom also displays this—a dream-like female image seems to be moving away from a red chair but we don’t get the feeling she is trying to escape. She seems to be observing/living into her journey and patiently waiting for the fog to lift. Readers will return again and again to Pappadà‘s poems and understand that self-knowledge, and personal integrity gained through remaining present and examining one’s life experiences are what freedom is all about.

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Freedom by Elda Pappadà. FriesenPress, 2020.                                                                                                                                                            

Reviewer bio: Linda Bullock is a published poet and a painter. She worked for 45 years in the mental health sector of the health care system and her art often reflects her experiences and focuses on the human condition.

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Guest Post by Padmaja Reddy.

There seems to be a connection between poetry and pain. Kendra Allen’s “The Collection Plate” is no exception. Her poetry is surely driven with pain and ache.

Poems carved with passion, agony, and anguish reveal the experiences and emotions of Black lives. Her bold and demanding tone emerges powerful with apt phrases and genuine craft.

Sentimental expressions like: “A family name can mean something; that way we can share the same death bed, that way I work for cheap . . . and request to forget mornings . . . ,” “digging her dynasty out of me so she can save it . . . ,” and “Yet I still don’t know the difference between pleasure and penetration” certainly leave a solid impact on the reader.

My favorite poems are “Solace by Earl,” “I am the note Held Towards the End,” “Gifting back Barn and Bread,” and “I come to You as Humbly as I Know.”

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The Collection Plate by Kendra Allen. Ecco Press, July 2021.

Reviewer bio: Padmaja Reddy, originally from India, lives in Connecticut. She received an MA in English Literature from SK University. Former journalist and she published poetry and book reviews in various publications like Yale Review of Books, Amazon.

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Guest Post by by J. Guaner.

I enjoy reading poetry collections by poets whose names are new to me. Many times you smell something fresh when a book opens its pages to give you delightful surprises. Swep Lovitt’s This Fierce Afterglow is such a book. Continue reading “The Joy of Simplicity”

Guest Post by Michael Hettich.

John Balaban is one of the finest poets of his generation, and indeed one of the best poets at work today. When I say “fine,” I mean just that: his poetry communicates a discernment of eye and ear attuned to nuance, subtle variation, and the truths embedded therein. These qualities, coupled with a rare intelligence, a deeply-informed worldview, and a resistance to navel-gazing or rhetorical pomposity, combine to invest his work with a Classical tenor that has the clarity of good prose and the heft of well-made poetry. As with all of his previous books of poetry and prose, his new book, Empires, is an engaging, invigorating, expertly-crafted collection that manages to speak simultaneously to and of our time as well as of the great span of history that has brought us to this moment. Continue reading “The World at Large”

Guest Post by Chloe Yelena Miller.

Naomi Thiers splits her poetry book, Made of Air, into two sections, Ordinary Women and Made of Air. The first half of the poems are dedicated to specific women, but a feminine presence is strong in the second half, through the narrator or, often, “she.” The poem, “Old People Waking,” ends with the lines, “And if everything hurts, it means / the current’s flowing; we hiss inside: / Life. Live.” This is the book’s message in a stanza: feel and acknowledge the pain and keep living.

The female narrator’s awareness of age centers on her own years lived, as she remains every age she has been. She ends the poem, “The Pearl” with the line, “For I feel my own 16-year-old inside, humming / eager, terrified—real as the slow / rain of wild and gentle losses.” Aging women aren’t often seen, but here, the narrator centers them in the poem’s scenes.

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Made of Air by Naomi Thiers. Kelsay Books, October 2020.

Reviewer bio: Chloe Yelena Miller is a writer and teacher living in Washington, D.C.

Guest Post by Michael Hettich.

Denusha Laméris’s Bonfire Opera, a book of surprising, deeply moving personal lyrics, is a stellar example of what’s best in contemporary mainstream American poetry. Published in the ever-more-impressive and various Pitt Poetry Series, the poems in this book are masterfully crafted, emotionally challenging, and accessible—capable of speaking powerfully to both poets and general readers alike. While her poems break no new ground, the news Laméris brings us is intimate, timely, and often profoundly revelatory. Continue reading “Of Love and Revelation”

Guest Post by Scudder H. Parker.

Opening Eva Zimet’s first book of poetry The Lost Grip makes the reader feel drawn unexpectedly into a Tango lesson offered by a skilled instructor who is also a Zen master.

You can’t stand back and watch. Your hand has been taken; an arm touches your back lightly; you are drawn onto the floor. You feel the pain the writer has known, but you are not allowed to step back and offer comfort. You must feel and share it in the dance.

This delicate, piercing volume sometimes confides, sometimes spins you around, sometimes tugs you back in close, sometimes pauses and stands there with you waiting.

In “A Dreamspace For All of Us,” Zimet writes: “I dreamed of a space for us / any of us, all of us.” But instead of some comfortable, welcoming home, she concludes:

The floor is wide-planked and smooth.
The space is otherwise empty.
I sleep against the wall.
Daniel also slept by the wall in a studio, and he survived.
We are the most intimate, in that.

The book is haunted by violence and the struggle to recover trust and intimacy.  Sometimes it is brusque and almost protective in tone. In “Risk,” Zimet writes: “I wanted to share the freefall of intimacy / with you. Didn’t happen.”

The poems reveal again and again a guarded strength that will not be overwhelmed by loss. In “Three Jewls: A Commentary,” Zimet concludes:

I am still with the contents of this emptiness,
no relic, no recognizable thing.
There was nothing there after all,
but my gift.

This book is not for the faint of heart, but when you stick with it, it sticks with you, and in its own spare, powerful way offers unexpected comfort.

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The Lost Grip by Eva Zimet, Rootstock Publishing, December 15, 2020.

Reviewer bio: Scudder H. Parker lives in Vermont and is a poet and author of Safe as Lightning.

Guest Post by Chris L. Butler.

2020 was filled with many twists and turns, but one thing that stayed consistent was Reggie Johnson’s commitment to poetry. One of my favorite books I’ve read this year is Cuarentena, Johnson’s ninth poetry collection in five years. Cuarentena is a melodic full-length collection reflecting on Johnson’s experiences of the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic. This book is broken into several sections, beginning with “Life Before Quarantine,” and culminating with “The New Normal.” Johnson reminds us of how carefree life once was with lines like “Saturday’s used to be the night to unwind,” in “Saturday Shenanigans.”

As the book progresses, the reader gets to engage a section titled “Unrest.” Here, Johnson draws the audience into his interpretation of race relations in America. This section features pieces like “Divided,” Johnson’s viral poem, which was featured on WLWT 5 NBC Cincinnati in June. As a Black American, I personally connected with this book. Johnson lays it all on the table for me with lines like “No matter the time period, I am more than a statistic . . . a stereotype,” featured in the poem “Look at Me.”

Cuarentena hits home for the reader, in a timely collection where Johnson dives into the political. I would recommend this book to anyone, but especially those experiencing the duality of living in the pandemic as an oppressed person.

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Cuarentena by Reggie Johnson. Rad Press Publishing, September 2020.

Reviewer bio: Chris L. Butler is an African American and Dutch, Pushcart nominated poet, and essayist. Chris was selected as a 2020 HUES Scholar. He was a participant in the 2020 Palette Poetry BIPOC Chapbook Workshop. His work can be found in The Daily Drunk Mag, Rejection Letters, and others.

Guest Post by Michael Hettich.

In this disjunct time, when cynicism and lies swarm the air like gnats, it’s a great solace to find a poet whose work is suffused with what can only be called love, a poet whose vision, though fully engaged with the fractures and griefs of this moment, is imbued with a sense of wonder, humor and compassion for all, including himself. Richard Jones has been writing such poems for many years. His numerous books published by Copper Canyon Press as well as stellar chapbooks from Adastra Press and other small publishers, to say nothing of his translations or of his work editing Poetry East, have distinguished him as one of our most valuable poets. His new book, Avalon, from Green Linden Press, is as strong as anything he has previously written, a work of great tenderness and vision.

Many of the poems in Avalon take the reader on spiritual journeys through realms of confusion and sorrow leading toward a sense that, somehow, amidst our existential bewilderment, the wonder of our very being holds transcendent truths we’ve yet to plumb, truths that might enthrall us were we to embrace them. A citizen of our time, Jones is nevertheless a kind of visionary, a poet who risks vulnerability to achieve the kind of innocence that makes revelation possible. His poems often start in the particulars of his own life to seamlessly move into fable-like narratives in which the ineffable is glimpsed, the unsayable (almost) whispered. And though what’s glimpsed eludes the speaker’s full grasp, nevertheless he knows it’s there, that moment out of time when the truth of each moment is revealed. In short, these poems simultaneously enact and document instances of grace, blessings in the midst of confusion.

Though never “confessional” in the conventional sense of that word, all of Jones’s poems are deeply personal, exploring not regrets and losses but rather yearnings—for the deepest connections to his family, to the world, to himself and, finally, to his God: “a praying mantis / lands on my left forearm, / turns his head, and studies me. / The spiritual way he folds / his long green wings / makes me believe he’s here / on a heavenly mission . . . .” Our blessings, for Jones, are located exactly where our confusions and griefs most pain us as feeling, yearning, tender-hearted humans. Such poetry as this is always nutritious food, but it is particularly so in these ravaged, profoundly confusing times. For those that read them carefully and with an open heart, the poems of Avalon will provide not just aesthetic pleasure but a kind of solace as well.

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Avalon by Richard Jones. Green Linden Press, June 2020.

Reviewer bio: Michael Hettich has published a dozen books of poetry, most recently To Start an Orchard, which was published in 2019. A new book, The Mica Mine, is forthcoming. His website is michaelhettich.com.

Guest Post by J. Guaner.

Margo Taft Stever, founder of the Hudson Valley Writers Center, has published her second poetry collection, Cracked Piano, which invites the reader to ponder human existence issues.

“Idiot’s Guide to Counting,” the opening poem, interprets the sane and insane with rhetorical questions comprising the first two stanzas and the first half of the third stanza: “How do you become one / with the horse, riding and becoming / the act of riding, / and the horse becoming the self / and the other at exactly / the same second, counting strides, / counting muscle movement, / counting fences, hurtling over / them with the horse, counting /the everything / of one?” These questions function as an apostrophe articulated to a grandfather figure in the past, an alter ego, or a contemporary everyman “counting strides, / counting muscle movement, / counting fences . . . ” Yet, there is no solution to everything counted or to the person who counts, as the hyperbole of “idiot” in the title suggests.

The poet also looks deep into the misery, monotony, and aloneness of human life. The person who counts suggests either an alter ego or a contemporary everyman. Sadness stays with everything counted, the existence, or the family tree, as questioned in the third stanza—“How to become one with / the branches of a tree, a grandfather / tree in an apple orchard / that no longer exists?” We count our time, but we are not able to find the meaning of life. In the end, counting becomes meaningless, and the speaker sighs, “counting / everything as no longer / existing, counting / trees as one with the everything / that no longer exists.” Stylistically, even the monotonous voice reveals the plain sameness of life confined to the person himself.

In a sense, this poem sets the tone of Stever’s Cracked Piano, a tone of loss and disconnection.

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Cracked Piano by Margo Taft Stever. CavanKerry Press, 2019.

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Guest Post by Chloe Yelena Miller.

After months at home during the coronavirus epidemic, I found Miriam O’Neal’s poetry collection The Body Dialogues a respite. Through a focus on the body, personal history, religion, travel, and literature, I could both leave myself and remember who I used to be. The postcard poems, in particular, reminded me of our human capacity to inhabit the past and faraway places regardless of where we are.

As we plug into our devices, we need to connect with others and ourselves. O’Neal feeds the readers with her poems and places us wherever we are. “Field” ends with, “She gives the grownups bread and tea, / the children milk and bread. / This is what it takes to tell the body, / You are here.”

That which is seemingly forgotten is etched into the poet’s experiences and appears in these poems. Sometimes, we forget who we have been. Throughout this three-part collection of poetry, O’Neal’s “I” grows and shifts into an experienced adult. In “The Sister Doesn’t Say,” O’Neal writes, “Only she will know what she can’t remember.”

Writers love their building blocks, words and grammar, and O’Neal is no different. My favorite poem, “Homesick,” has the speaker looking towards Italian grammar. The poem ends with, “and you in the present form; / always in the familiar.” Even when the reader is transported into the past, the past becomes a vivid present.

The writer can train the reader’s eyes on something to see it more clearly in order to see something else. O’Neal writes her own ars poetica within the poem “Felucca,” “Because she cannot photograph the sky / or the darkness hiding her hand, / she’ll photography my boat and say, / See? This is a Felucca.”

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The Body Dialogues by Miriam O’Neal. Lily Poetry Review, January 2020.

Reviewer bio: Chloe Yelena Miller is a writer and teacher living in Washington, D.C.