Co-editor Barrett Warner reviews Mary Ellen Redmond's The Ocean Effect

If you wanted to send Mary Ellen Redmond a love note you would be wise to time its arrival for midmorning. The other hours—the darker ones and the brighter ones—are already taken. In almost all of these, the speaker, or the subject, is lying down or trying to lie down, tormented by an almost imperceptible and sinister yoga between the word and the world. In her first poem “Dangerous Angel,” the speaker has a panic of nightmares. She’s grateful. The bad dreams wrought by the dangerous angel wake her “from this slumber of illusion.” In “Unlikely Valentine,” eleven moths “lay flat against my window pane.” Again, she is thankful: “Their delicate wings are shaped / like hearts, edged in a soft brown fringe.” In this poem, the moths represent the eleven hours on a clock face. The speaker is the twelfth hour: “they will not live the night, but now / they are lovely, unexpected, and so / still (not a single flutter from them).”

Co-editor Barrett Warner reviews Jesse Prado's "I've Been on Tumblr"

Photo courtesy of  beaboutitpress.tumblr.com.

A chapbook is a piece of paper folded eight times. Nothing romantic about that. The beauty lies in its simplicity. Sometimes there are staples. Or stitching. The magic is its impermanence. The contents not intended to last forever. At best, a season. Or better, a few weeks, like strawberries. It’s a way of saying, here’s what I’ve been working on lately—I thought you might be interested. Like a dispatch, a smattering of poems or stories from a small journey. Not the haunted house, but only the haphazard stone walk leading to it, or just a window where a brown recluse nestles one corner awaiting a fly.

Review of Mike Krutel's "Best Poems," by Barrett Warner

Some are dreamers and some are architects. Mike Krutel’s debut chapbook Best Poems puts him squarely in the dreamer camp. I wish he had more company to keep the bed warm. Instead he has insomnia. “Tonight is the night of no sleep” he asserts in the first poem, “Best,” before using images to draw us inside: “Cannonballs over the playground. / The cat rubs a glass frame off the mantle.” We know the glass shatters, but Krutel doesn’t let us hear it. The insomnia is not about the noises.

The key moment in the poem is a release of information, rather than action: “I am holding these individually wrapped letters,” and what emerges is two people, one wanting to know and feel without “authorization,” and the other wanting to disassociate from a moment she’s nonetheless in charge of. As the speaker says, “I make swift turns in an ocean I am always made / to ride beneath.” He is in control of his own out-of-control state and usually that’s enough, but not if he wants to sleep.

Review of Rachel Adams' chapbook "What Is Heard," by Barrett Warner

Rachel Adams writes poems with her tongue, not a pencil or a keypad. Her hands are always too busy—driving a truck from Arizona to the Berkshires, or renovating a house by performing hundreds of exquisite demolitions to its insides. In “Catoctin Mountain Traversal” Adams—the speaker—picks up “items usually stepped upon— // the pine cones, sharp, pockmarked with catacombs, / the fallen bark, pressed hard into dirt, / and wet, embedded leaves, spread out and crushed.”

Adams’ debut collection What Is Heard is another beautiful chapbook produced by Red Bird Press whose editors have been eating lots of spinach since January. After six years of a book here or there, they’ve added fifteen to their muscle catalog through August.

The chapbook’s pace is so unhurried that Adams’ first poem doesn’t appear until page eleven. Back when poets only spoke and breathed their words, line breaks were where the air rushed into you, swelling your ribs. Adams does this well in “What You Bring Along,” only departing from pentameter when the stanzas crescendo and climax and the reader suddenly wants more air: 

Review of Adam Tavel's chapbook "Red Flag Up," by Barrett Warner

If Eastern Shore poet Adam Tavel writes like a drunk Irishman, then I wish every poet were Irish.

Tavel’s new chapbook Red Flag Up consists of epistolary poems written in smoke, fumes, screams, and Sharpies, on the insides of t-shirts, soup can labels, a crumpled installation guide for a Chicco car seat, and many other objects bound to daily life.

Who even writes letters anymore? Who even writes poetry? The inner and outer surfaces of Tavel’s day to day artifacts are the ideal tablets to record his zealous, romantic, exhilarating pathos. The result is both quotidian and other-worldly. Songs as letters? Tavel is perhaps the love child of Blake and Whitman, as if he were writing letters to poetry, to the impossibility of it in our hectic lives, which is exactly why the wanting of it hurts so good.

"Reply," a chapbook by Elizabeth Robinson: Review by Barrett Warner

Reply, By Elizabeth Robinson (Pavement Saw Press, 2011, 32 pages, $7, ISBN: 978-1-886350-21-2)

My Hall of Fame bookcase is filled with consolation prizes. These are appreciative tokens sent to me by small presses whose contests I haven’t won. Recently, Pavement Saw Press (Ohio) sent me a package of previous chapbook contest winners. It was the editor’s way of suggesting I take a little time away from my own suffering succotash and read someone else’s corn. Soon as I bent back the cover of Elizabeth Robinson’s Reply I was hooked, and thrilled. Robinson, a seasoned poet with three collections at large, can write the leg off a dead mule while most of us—me included—are still trying to feed it a carrot.