Guest Post by Courtney B. Jenkins

As I read Samantha Kolber’s poetry debut, I thought of all the mothers I know and hold dear—close friends, my sister, my own mother; I want to give them this book, share with them this gift of understanding.

I paused as I read to absorb moments of “Whoa,” as Kolber’s words reveal what it meant to her to become Mother. I re-read to assimilate every nuance before passing on to the next vignette. Each feeling evoked felt important. Kolber’s words are powerful draws into her world and, somehow, although I am not a mother—a birth-mother, anyhow—I know these feelings. I suddenly understand the patience I see in the mothers around me—browbeaten and screamed at by tiny versions of themselves—who are somehow able to smile in response and reply with patience and logic to the demands of their offspring. And, I realize, through this breadth of written, recorded emotion: this is love. My eyes teared with the fullness of it. And although I have no literal means of comparison in my own life, I understand. Continue reading “This is Love”

Guest Post by Guinotte Wise

I see where the bookmark is in the closed pages of Ted Kooser’s Red Stilts and realize I’ve been reading faster than I meant to; it’s a new Kooser book and I like to savor the first read. It’s like a dish of something especially good and you want it to last longer than it does. Each poem is a pleasure. Even the epigraph at the start is Kooserian, though it’s a Tolstoy quote from “Father Sergius”: “After he’d walked away, she stood in the yard in starlight, listening to dogs bark, each more faintly as he passed the farms along the road.”

I can see it, hear it, feel it. That’s a summation of Ted Kooser’s poetry. The cover of this newest gem from Copper Canyon Press is a rather entrancing painting of an alley by Don Williams, an oil titled Nebraska City Alley and it, too, echoes Kooser charm and clarity.

Once finished with this, I’ll never be finished; I’ll return to it often. I have a shelf of Ted Kooser poetry and whichever book I pull from it, it takes me quietly away from whatever dissonance the outside world is shoveling at me, and into a gently masterful poem that seems so simple, so connected to everyday things we miss in our confusion.

Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Kooser, for this kid you had in 1939. And thank the world for carving his genius. Simply awesome.

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Red Stilts by Ted Kooser. Copper Canyon Press, 2020.

Reviewer bio: 5-time Pushcart nominee and author of seven books, Guinotte Wise’s poetry and prose have appeared in numerous journals. Some work is at http://www.wisesculpture.com.

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Guest Post by Amber Thompson

I discovered Graeme Gibson’s The Bedside Book of Birds while watching Margaret Atwood: A Word After a Word After a Word is Power. The day after I watched the documentary, my husband and I rescued a pair of near-fledgling doves. This, coupled with the fact that I found Atwood and Gibson’s relationship moving and relatable, convinced me I had to get this work for my husband, a lover of both books and birds.

Online it was selling for much more than the original list price, but at a bookstore a week and a half later, I watched my husband pick up a more reasonably priced copy. I told him a little about the book: that Atwood’s late husband had compiled it and that it was a collection of works on the relationship between birds and humans—in a sense, the awe the former has long inspired in the latter. I also told him I’d been hoping to get it for him and that if he liked the look of it, I still wanted to.

As we drove home, he cracked open the book. I peeked over to see the title of the first piece, a poem: “Night Crow” by Theodore Roethke. When he read it to me, I had the sudden realization that it was a poem I’d been searching for for years. These miraculous-feeling events coalesced into an experience of serendipity that we had not felt in a long time. When we curled into bed that night, he read more of the book aloud to me and we looked together at the beautifully included reproductions of sketches, paintings, and scientific drawings of birds. We rested quietly in the knowledge that we, through our friend Carol, the surviving fledgling, had been touched deeply by the avian world as well.

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The Bedside Book of Birds: An Avian Miscellany by Graeme Gibson. Penguin Random House.

Reviewer bio: Amber Thompson is a Pushcart Prize nominee who recently published her debut poetry chapbook. She can be found at www.amberthompsonwrites.wordpress.com.