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.

Mauch's is a new poetry, is a theory of mine: Review of Matt Mauch's "If You're Lucky Is A Theory of Mine," by Stacia M. Fleegal

If You’re Lucky Is a Theory of Mine is Matt Mauch’s second full-length collection of poetry, and it just slays me. Mauch has the delivery of a comedian—not Dane Cook, but an actual comedic genius (sorry Cook fans...sort of). The hyper-specificity, the virtuosic phrasing, the ability to relate to nearly anyone on a universal level—it’s all working for him, and doing the quiet work of his poems, which is to say, showing off verbally.

But where there would be ego in the conversational acrobatics of others, Mauch has inserted humility, a thoughtfulness about and for his subjects that doesn’t let up even in poems about, I presume, himself and his experiences. So in a completely different way, he slays me again, with his generosity and big old heart.

His reflections aren’t always cozy. There are funerals, there are “awful years,” there is a keen awareness of mortality. In “From the owner’s manual,” there is fear of becoming “some nobody who believed it when they said / (girls) you were a princess, or that you could grow up // (boys) to be the President of the USA” (p. 43). A poem ending that way can make me so angry with its truth, but then, I flip around and read a title like “Every view is oceanic if you focus on the sky” and think, I can handle that truth from this poet. Mauch is the kind, gracious bearer of bad news who will emotionally clobber you, then take you to a dive bar to fund your co-commiseration.

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.

Review of "The Inhabitants," a chapbook by Jason Bradford

When we accepted Jason Bradford’s poem “They’re Hypnotic, But…” for BL #21, it was because of a sense of connection we felt with the speaker, through his own sense of connection to, of all things, jellyfish.

That same sense of connection is what makes Bradford’s first collection of poetry, a chapbook called The Inhabitants (Final Thursday Press 2013), which includes that poem, so appealing.

No. Wait.

Not connection alone. It’s a disconnect, really, that comes to light as you move through these taut, prosy poems.

"Captive," by Martin Ott--a review by Stacia M. Fleegal

Martin Ott's "Captive" won the 2011 De Novo
Poetry Prize by C&R Press and was published
in 2012. Order it here.

The word “captive” is multi-dimensional in Martin Ott’s first full-length collection of poetry.

A former U.S. Army interrogator, Ott organizes his musings on military life in tight, efficient lines and stanzas. “The interrogator’s notebook is more frightening / when closed. That means the questions / have ended,” (p. 14) he intimates matter-of-factly, but with a hint of shame (he knows he’s frightened people in his life). In “Breathless,” he tells us the hierarchical protocol for the gas mask drill: “When it is time to take off the masks / the lowest ranking soldier tests the air” (p. 6). Such lines appear to be straightforward glimpses into military life, until aha lines like “The lesson was: masks work” (p. 6).

Because Ott, we are to presume, has had these often dark and complicated experiences--which he tells of compassionately, with a strong grasp of craft, and with no goal toward shock value—we trust his observations about, say, magic tricks. We are glad the person speaking is seeing lighter, happier scenes, like his daughter in a sandbox.

The poet and her poet-publisher: A double review of Feng Sun Chen's Butcher's Tree and Janaka Stucky's The World Will Deny It For You, by Stacia M. Fleegal

I discovered Black Ocean at AWP Chicago in 2009 and I adore their books. Well, BL #18 contributor Feng Sun Chen recently published Butcher’s Tree with Black Ocean, and it might be my favorite yet. When I received my copy, publisher Janaka Stucky had tucked in a copy of his Ahsahta Press contest-winning chapbook, The World Will Deny It For You.

Books in the mail. The joy that will never wane.

Maybe it’s because the two came in the same envelope, or because I read them back to back, but I became very interested in not really comparing them, but just observing them together.