Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson.

At first, it is hard to get past the title as it is with all of Christopher Citro’s titles. They are so good in the way that they trip you up and shine back on you.

Take the title of If We Had A Lemon We’d Throw It and Call That The Sun. Lemon points to Citro’s name and its meaning, a citrus category of fruit. He also points to exuberance. The word sun points to son or to Citro as a son. It points to survival. This scene is also dismal, it is dark. If a lemon shines brightly as the sun, then this is a sunless place. Maybe a dark cedar forest. This title is desperate and makes me think of immigration or refugees who have nothing, no vitamin C.

Am I making too much of the title? Probably. It is hard to ignore its shiny reflection. I wonder where I am and wonder which side of the shadow I will go to next. I am tempted to list all his titles here, you would get lost in their stark imagery and artful sound. Teasers:  “Dear Diary Where Is Everybody” and “In Small Significant Ways We’re Horses.”

Continue reading “Citro’s Shining Reflection”

Guest Post by Karina Borowicz.

In tension there is energy, and the energy in My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree is released in fistfuls, waves, gusts, and flames. It is an energy that bursts forth from confrontations: between wild and tame, individual and universal, being and oblivion, exuberance and despair. And with these collisions and collusions it becomes clear that the lines we draw, the walls we build, and the boundaries we dare not cross are, despite their seeming solidity, in truth quite tenuous. They are maintained by belief, and we are free to escape. The poet declares, “I don’t believe in walls. May walls / Cease this very moment to exist. / I’m boundless.”

These poems are voracious for boundlessness, an unhooking of the self from the anchor of obedience to norms that emphasize divisions. The voices in these poems speak with revolutionary fervor about such acts of disobedience. “I am composing an explosion,” the poet says in “Besieged,” a poem in which the vertigo of broken bonds is at first frightening, then thrilling.   Throughout the book, a blissful freedom and expansiveness is found in surrender to nature and the sensual world, in merging the self with the other, and in artistic expression. Overstepping boundaries, however, is not without cost. To expand, one must break. The thrill in these poems is also a kind of searing pain.

Co-translator Tracy K. Smith says she tried to capture the original’s “rhythmic and emotional insistence.” Sound play and patterning give these poems muscle and a heartbeat: “Weary, wary, watching you / Watch me. Your gale-force gaze / Wants to topple me. I give.” One can’t help but feel windblown after reading this book. It’s a force of nature.

My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree by Yi Lei, translated from the Chinese by Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi. Graywolf Press, November 2020.

Reviewer bio: Karina Borowicz is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Rosetta, which won the Ex Ophidia Prize. She writes about the craft of poetry at karinaborowicz.com/blog/.

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Guest Post by Lannie Stabile.

A Black girl can be a dog, a rat, a gadget, a myth, a ghost, a mermaid, origami, or livestock. A Black girl can be a scavenger, a caged bird metaphor, a “perfect little alien,” or unwelcomed roots. A Black girl can be a black cloud, but she cannot be the white sky. A Black girl can be any imaginable thing, but she is not allowed to be a person. Not in the eyes of a white crowd, anyway. This is the trap, the endless, disparaging loop, that Khalisa Rae describes in her debut book of poetry Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat.

The collection is broken into three sections titled: “Fire,” “Wind and Water,” and “Earth and Spirit,” and it’s easy to see why this is an important designation. Rae writes, “You will be asked, where are you from? more than you are asked, how are you doing?” As if white people don’t know Black girls are elemental, powerful, and from the very core of this earth.

But, still, the expertly-crafted poems are mournful and simmering with unexpressed rage. They illustrate quiet resignation (“You’re left to break and mend, stitch your wounds to not spill the secrets, sober your sorrows and be back before Monday’s 8:00 a.m. exam.”), peaceful protest (“Sometimes, I go to white spaces, plant myself. I know my roots aren’t welcome there.”), and grave desperation (“We gamble with our obituaries like we don’t have a thousand other ways to die.”).

When white people feel entitled to every space, what is a Black girl to do? The advancement is made in excruciating inches, but it comes at the expense of her raw throat and heart.

Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat by Khalisa Rae. Red Hen Press, 2021.

Reviewer bio: Lannie Stabile (she/her) is the winner of OutWrite’s 2020 Chapbook Competition in Poetry; the winning chapbook, “Strange Furniture,” is out with Neon Hemlock Press. She is also a back-to-back finalist for the 2019/2020 and 2020/2021 Glass Chapbook Series and back-to-back semifinalist for the Button Poetry 2018 and 2019 Chapbook Contests.

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Guest Post by M. A. Dubbs.

As I’ve turned more to e-books and my Kindle through this COVID-19 winter, I have fallen in love with some beautiful indie poetry. 207th Bone is one of these books and showcases translated prose from China. Written by Zhou Li, a Chinese doctor and caretaker of one hundred tortoises, it explores themes of slice of life China, sensuality, depression, and the stress of practicing medicine.

The book starts with an introduction from Xi Nan who discusses the difficult translation process from Chinese to English. Next is an interview from Li as he explores his worldview of nihilism and how this has influenced his writing. The poems are untitled and separated by time periods of Li’s life. The tone shifts from bleak and visceral (“Go down the throat / Into my stomach / Don’t know which season is growing / In my body”) to political (“’China Dream’ is written / Under the billboard / A beggar is sleeping on the ground / I dare not toss a coin to him / I’m afraid the sound / would interrupt / His dream”).

207th Bone is a great read for anyone looking for modern Chinese poetry which is largely underrepresented in current literature.

207th Bone by Zhou Li. Simi Press, August 2020.

Reviewer bio: M. A. Dubbs is an award winning LBTQ Mexican-American poet from Indiana.

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Guest Post by Padmaja Reddy.

The Language We Were Never Taught to Speak debut poetry collection by Grace Lau, is an intensive attempt in discovering concealed elements of immigrant inheritances, queer yearnings, and multi-generational mysteries.

These poems valiantly exhibit the lonely corners and abandoned experiences of great pain. Readers explore the visible and invisible identities of immigrant life in poems like “Ginseng, winter melon, lotus root,” “My grandmother’s wallpaper,” “My grief is winter,” “Family Vacation,” “Going Home.”

Influences of church, technology, western culture, and ancestral customs among second-generation lives are revealed artfully in her poetry. A granddaughter wonders about her grandmother’s age as she believes the latter stole a few years to work early to feed her family in “The Lies That Bend.” “She said loneliness is better; than sin” summarizes how the Asian parents feel about unconventional/queer lives.

The emotional intensity of Lau’s work is shown in these compelling lines:

“She swung a sword as a man,
Wept as woman
Sang as both”

“How do you find yourself
When you don’t know your motherland”

“He has been mourning
The future
For the last twenty years”

“Loss that lives in a new-silence snow.”

I loved reading this very remarkable poetry collection.

The Language We Were Never Taught to Speak by Grace Lau. Guernica Editions, May 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, NewPages.

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Guest Post by Chloe Yelena Miller.

Ocean Currents by Hannah Rousselot offers the reader the narrator’s strength as she directly faces emotional and physical pain and struggles with mental illness. Rousselot does what a good teacher should do, as she writes in the poem “Guidance,” “Or, I should say, I do not teach them- / I provide the tools they need to live within themselves.” Rousselot gives the reader the tools to face and learn from such hard emotions.

The collection opens with the poem “Vacation” which immediately introduces suicide. The poem begins, “What if you could kill yourself, / but like, only for a day?” When I read the opening line, I paused. Could I handle reading this, I wondered? The conversational tone and turn in the poem with, “but like,” offered me a path into the poem and the collection.

Ocean Currents is rooted in the body. The narrator describes hurting herself, but also actively grounding herself. She writes in “Immersed,” “When I rise out of the pond, water drips down / my skin and sinks into the ground. The Earth is soft // between my toes. Standing there, wet and grounded, I can feel the rotation of my planet.” When the narrator’s hurt and relief are boldly and physically described, the reader knows she can trust the poems.

This is a book that instructs: face your truth while tending your needs to survive. In “Sleepwalking”, Rousselot writes, “It {Life} needs a reminder to wake up.” Ocean Currents grounds and wakes up the reader to know herself and others.

In “Leather Gloves” Rousselot writes, “& how can you be adult with so much / child inside of you?” But she has the superpower described in the same poem, “In college, I tell my friend about my / ‘world’ hurts and she tells me / that I have a superpower.”

Ocean Currents by Hannah Rousselot. Finishing Line Press, June 2021

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

Guest Post by Padmaja Reddy.

A beautiful collection of poems, How to Love the World is a true pleasure to read.

The poems seem to be written by the hearts that view the world through the lens of kindness. Poems that reflect on “Joy of Presence,” “Small Victories,” “Pieces of Heaven” and other modes of positive outlooks.

The love of a father and his desire to see his kid painted so vividly in such a short poem (“Bus Stop”). Another father appears “taking care [of his daughter] in full silence and secrecy.” He loves her even when she is lost in sleep. Such beautiful images of love and bonding.

Readers can see an optimistic parent believing in the goodness of the world in the words of January Gill O’Neil “and wonder who could mistake him for anything but good.” The speaker also fears “for his safety—the darkest child on our street in the empire of blocks.”

Rain sounds different and appears as remembered wisdom in “Praise of Darkness.” We imagine ourselves as immortal in bright summer nights and learn to love both ordinary and extra in “Perceptive Prayer.”

Poetic expressions like “Hope doesn’t know its destination”; “Tomorrow the world will begin again, another fresh start”; “A letting go of one thing, to fall into other”; “A girl of color is a light house”; “A day that began like a gift”; and “the decades of side-by-side, our great good luck” fill hearts with warm joy and bliss.

“My Daughter’s Singing,” “Fifteen Years Later, I See How It Went,” “Kindergarten Studies the Human Heart,” “Held Open,” and “The Lesson of the Falling Leaves” are among some of my favorite poems.

To sum up aptly, “Glad to be in this place, this life and to read this book” as in the poem of “Astral Chorus.”

How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope edited by James Crews. Storey Publishing, April 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, NewPages.

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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.

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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