book rec: confluence

If you'd like to send in your own rec, head on over to the submissions page.

It's really incredible how quickly the poems in Sandra Marchetti's Confluence enter and stay with you. When I read "Autumn Damask" for the first time, the lines "Roam the ground where you are / mapped, flat and free, beneath / this sky, this new sea" were with me a lot of a walk I took after. The language and lines themselves are just beautiful. 

These poems are rooted in nature and place. It's interesting when nature is established as a main motif so early in the book; poems that have no overt "nature" imagery take on a profoundly natural and earthy feel. 

I appreciate seeing the non-natural blended and molded into feeling. The overt sonic and formal attention these poems have lend to that feeling of everything bending towards the natural. Early in the book you hear the assonance and slant and end rhymes and associate them with the nature imagery; those same tropes leave some of the same after tastes later in different poems. Some poets might associate rhyming as being kind of kitsch, but other than one or two places here and there, these poems rhyme naturally. 

Normally I tend to associate lines heavy with figurative language with less overtly formal poetry, but, as a teacher I had at Iowa used to say, every poem that gets remembered is usually more for its sound and rhythm more than any heavily emotive line or avant-garde poetic "soul." Rhythm and sound are an important and inseparable and natural part of poetry; the sound of poetry is as much a part of poetry's soul as any raw and blunt emotion. 

I thought of Sharon Olds poem “Sex Without Love” while I was reading some of these. After reading The Dead and the Living, a collection I just loved, the line I kept repeating to myself over and over: "How do they come to the / come to the come to the," Marchetti really shows how important sound is to crafting great lines. 

Another thing I really appreciated about these poems was something I noticed in a collection I read a few weeks ago by Cyrus Cassells, which is a heavy presence of notes both as epigraphs and end-notes. This helps so, so much. The note on "Waters of Separation" make that particular poem come alive - I loved it the first time I read it but after reading the note it really takes on a new character - and I wouldn't have recognized the reference to The Last Romances without that final note, and with that, it puts the last several poems in perspective. To quote from my Shakespeare course in Iowa, "The possibility of second chances."

           

Frank Terry was born in Galesburg, IL in 1988. He graduated from The University of Iowa in 2013 with a bachelors degree in English literature. Frank’s poems have recently appeared in The Rio Grande Review and Rhino Poetry. Frank loves food and music and sports and many other things, too. 

book rec: interrobang

Donna Vorreyer, a Tinderbox Poetry Journal poet, has graciously written our first guest post for Friday's book recommendations. If you'd like to send in your own rec, head on over to the submissions page.

Donna Vorreyer is the author of A House of Many Windows (Sundress Publications, 2013) as well as six chapbooks, most recently Encantado, a collaboration with artist Matt Kish (Red Bird Chapbooks). She is a poetry editor for Extract(s), and her second collection is forthcoming from Sundress Publications in 2016.

I have a freakish love for the sonnet. Perhaps it stems from my equally freakish attachment to Shakespeare, but a well-written sonnet just does me in. My favorite gift from my husband is a silver mobius bracelet with Sonnet 116 engraved around its curves. Having said this, “modern” sonnets often leave me cold as they ignore many of the form’s time-honored rules, keeping only the squared-off look of fourteen lines or the idea of a volta. So I was particularly delighted to pick up Jessica Piazza’s Interrobang (Red Hen Press, 2013) at Prairie Lights while visiting Iowa City last summer. Named for the punctuation mark that is a combination of question and exclamation marks, the book earns the mystery and surprise that the mark entails. Since then, I have read it several times, most recently last week, as it is the best collection of sonnets I have seen in a very long time.

All the good ingredients are there: rhyme, meter, even CROWNS, people, well-written, clever crowns. But not one stilted obvious sonnet in the bunch. Not one. The organization of the book is unique, and it works - all poems but the three crowns are named for -philias and -phobias. The language is intelligent and fresh without being intellectualized, and I found myself starting to take notes on favorite lines and almost copying out entire poems. As an example, the first crown, entitled “People Like Us” uses brilliant reworkings of punctuation and enjambment to chronicle a difficult relationship and to make the repeated lines resonate in completely new ways when they reappear. For example:

End line “And now our love’s not whether, but how long until.” leads into first lines “It isn’t whether. No. Only: how long until/how bad it gets.”

End line “…a certain fade to black…Oh fuck it. Holler back.” leads into first lines “Drawn curtain: faded, black. We fucked. We hollered. Back-/tracked and let sunlight in.”

From the very first poem “Melophobia”, which gives us slant rhymes like flawed/wood, possible/steel, and slippery/sky, Piazza reveals herself as a poet with a gift for sound, a gift I could continue to praise, but I would end up retyping the entire book. After you read and love Interrobang, you could also become enamored with her newest chapbook This Is Not A Sky (2014, Black Lawrence Press). These poems also use her gift for sound in a series of ekphrastic poems based on artists from Raphael to Warhol. If you appreciate a poet who uses form and sound to write modern poems whose lines will follow you to bed and when you get up the next morning, these two books are a good place to start.

book rec: mothers by rachel zucker

Yesterday I was at the North American Review conference where I presented on motherhood and poetics, and of course, in those six hours of driving, I fretted over a to-do list, and this little something came floating to the top. I had been thinking about literary citizenship (Jessamyn Smyth of Tupelo Quarterly called me this in a recent supportive post about our Kickstarter, and I thought, oh! that's exactly it! that's the why!).

So this was one of my ideas: start a Friday posting, make it regular, draw in other writers, have them write a little bit about a book they recently read that made the tops of their heads come off. Starting with me.

This week I read Rachel Zucker's MOTHERs in an attempt to draw in more voices to the panel paper I wrote, which was called "Out of the Bodies of Babes: The Ethics of Using Children as Subjects in Art." I talked a bit about stories and who has rights to anyone else's narratives, and there is much of this in MOTHERs, which is a lyric essay exploration of being a mother, of mentorship, of nonbiological mothers and loss, about facing her own family history, her mother as storyteller and the ways in which she tells her own story.

Here's the piece I shared with the audience:

One story she does tell is of her Iowa Writers’ Workshop mentor Jorie Graham, a mother-poet who does not tend to use her children as subject in her work. Zucker writes, “Graham feared that having a child might herald the end of her writing life. In despair she went on a pilgrimage to Emily Dickinson’s grave. It was storming, and Graham sought shelter in Emily Dickinson’s home. The home (also a museum) had shut down for the evening. Soaking wet and largely pregnant, Graham pounded on the door. A caretaker opened it. Graham begged to be let inside to see Dickinson’s desk. The caretaker nodded, and Graham rushed past her to Dickinson’s study. There, where Dickinson’s desk usually stood, was a small cradle. The caretaker explained that Dickinson’s desk was on loan to Harvard, and because the room seemed so empty without the desk, someone had put the cradle (found in the basement) in its place” (6).

Another moment that struck me was a passage where Zucker describes sitting in the audience in Tennessee while her mother performs stories on stage. She is writing in a notebook and her son pesters her about what she's doing. She tells him, I'm taking notes; it's what I do.

I can't help but think YES she's so right YES this is it YES. so often while reading the book. Or any of her books. I was a Rachel Zucker fan before our paths began to cross, and eventually, I learned the story of MOTHERs before it became a book--the things she reveals in the epilogue, the curse she feared from her mother, the struggle of what to do when one's parent passes away half a globe away. I remember the emails. I remember wishing the world was a rug and I could shake it, stitch it together, closer, just for a little bit of time. I wish closure came like breathing, or were something that could be wrapped and sent in the mail.

I wish everyone could read this book who has had some kind of complexity in sussing out feelings about Mother could read this book. But mostly, read it for the style: I'm in love with this form that is growing in popularity. My own Nestuary is a bit like this, and I think of Claudia Rankine's most recent two, of Eula Biss's essays at times, Christine Hume's Ventifacts. I'm hungry for this style of writing--for the disconnected essay shards that overlap and tease and tangle and drop off, maybe, maybe not come back again. How each feels like a worried, ocean-smoothed stone.

If you'd like to join this exercise in literary citizenship and write your own book recommendation, I've made a Submittable account, which will be most robustly used during contest periods for the press, but for now, I'll always take a look at book recs.