No Farther Than the End of the Street neighborhood poems by Benjamin Niespodziany Okay Donkey Press, 2022 ~ How just recently undiscovered the poems feel in Benjamin Niespodziany's No Farther Than the End of the Street, and how secretly they demand distraction. I've been ill of late, and in this lateness have come to believe that revelation does not come, after all, to those who wait. So I waited, and held, then read, this inescapably freed book. I am weak and want to say things simply. I strain to recall whole silences. I write that love is made of two people telling each other that they have a room at the hotel when neither of them do. Niespodziany takes the nameless and the familiar at face value and lets one mask disguise another. I am weak, I strain, there is joy here. In this verse, a neighborly, twinning joy...and a sadness brought to earth both by the alien mediocrity of grief and by those few doubled things that go through absurd shortages to single out loneliness. ~ reflection by Barton Smock ~ book is HERE
Tag: prose
Summer – Johannes Göransson
Summer Johannes Göransson Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2022 ~ I think it might be too early for me to be putting words toward Johannes Göransson's Summer as I've only just finished its fourth and final section called The World and the fire as a whole is still trying to figure out which parts it still needs to set. But, I also worry some season will end, and I'll be in it and have to lie about how I moved forward. Göransson writes the under out from under. Beauty, death, the after. The after-art of living as something uncreated. If a ceiling fan falls on a trapdoor...ah, I have no then. I paint my kidnapper to look like my kidnapper, lose blue like a hand, let children make me sad, think maybe invention has always known where it's imagined itself from, and am poor but less poor for work like Summer and the care it takes of the false elsewhere. ~ reflection by Barton Smock ~ book is HERE
a child walks in the dark – poems – Darren C. Demaree
a child walks in the dark / poems, Darren C. Demaree / Small Harbor, 2021
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Holy with intention, Darren C. Demaree’s a child walks in the dark is a non-performative piece of displayed belief and an unbroken speaking of the telling world. Poems here are remnant doings, and each month is a faith. Demaree tells a son, tells a daughter, tells them both, and in the saying, another thing is built inside the thing built to fall. Memory has to start somewhere, myth is a myth, and the children are long. The verse here is gentle, protected by wonder and worry and wager, but it is not safe. In one breath, there is blueprint, and in that same breath, there is something unsold from the museum of cold weather that must be described correctly in order to be seen by both the young and by the architect of their forgetting.
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reflection by Barton Smock
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book info is HERE
Eye, Apocalypse – poems – Erik Fuhrer
Eye, Apocalypse / poems, Erik Fuhrer / Spuyten Duyvil 2021
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These last few years have had, for me, many endings. I have lost beginnings to both second and third comings. Verse has been something I can’t see, unless placed in front of me. And of late I feel I may have overstayed, with others, our finale. But whatever witness may have passed, I have been blessed with the chance to sightsee within the without of Erik Fuhrer’s Eye, Apocalypse. I don’t know how much time any apocalypse has left, but am glad for the brave worrying that Fuhrer does over each. The missing, the coded, the unbidden. The apocalypse that can’t be in two places at once. The apocalypse with too long of a name. Prophecy itself is an erasure, and Fuhrer is a poet whose lyric narrates the longings of the foreseen and embeds repetition in a singular song of ecclesiastic mutations both soundlessly dense and locally clear. Through the affair, the adoration, the becoming, and the memorial, this work finds nest eggs in the lowercase book of revelation, allows distance to be terrified of its next self, and words the world into something said.
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reflection by Barton Smock
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book is HERE
OUTGOING VESSEL ~ Ursula Andkjær Olsen, translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen
OUTGOING VESSEL, by Ursula Andkjær Olsen / translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen / Action Books, 2021
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Proof, hosanna, proof. Oh, my discarded bits of avoidance. Is ghost still held as a breath in a being that cannot materialize until it’s misplaced by our up and coming carrier? I think it’s all there, all here, in the anti-instructional humbleharm and worldless afterlife of Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s Outgoing Vessel. So bare and terrifying, so saturated and self-afflicted. I can’t say what the verse here is cleaning, nor what the competing repetitions are being fed by, but it moves me to condone guilt and permit that I’m the youngest thing about myself. These are poetics that reject the reimagining of the under-imagined and instead chant themselves through songdoors might they create origins to be upheld by the pregnant deceivers of elevation. I might not have it right. What if renewal came first? Is there a machine built by grief that manufactures alienation? Crossed-over and crossed-out, this is scarily disappeared and necessary stuff.
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reflection by Barton Smock
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BONE HOUSE – stories – K-Ming Chang
BONE HOUSE / stories, K-Ming Chang, Bull City Press 2021
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K-Ming Chang’s Bone House is a thing set down and a thing lifted, a thing out of place yet also the thing that is already an only belonging, that pulls a room from another room. If one feels named after the name they were given, this is why. Chang’s language seems both imbued and evacuated, ghosted and gathered. The story itself, the stories themselves: is and are. I don’t know. As for the story in these, our imperceptible ask: it is worded the way we’ve wished it told. The survived unshareable, the return that gives longing an end date, the romance that pearls possession from a cloned twin. And still this all becomes the first we’ve heard of it, a retelling of the offhandedly internal.
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reflection by Barton Smock
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book is here
LIGHT-UP SWAN – poems – Tom Snarsky
LIGHT-UP SWAN poems, Tom Snarsky Ornithopter Press, 2021 ~ Oh, here we are. So far from our own writing. Here, again, thinking there is little left beyond yesterday's afterglow, beneath tomorrow's aftermath. I always believe I'm done with it, of course. And then, oh. Here. We. Are. Tipsy, and weeks into listening to a soundtrack no one wrote for a nightlight while opening and re-opening Tom Snarsky's collection Light-Up Swan. And there is hope in the hope that fate might finally volunteer. That going missing will go missing not as ordered by absence but instead as a goodwill gesture given to a presence that needs nothing in return yet desires a return on our nothing. And is it ours? I don't know. What I can speak to is how quickly this reflection of mine reappeared but only because it believed it had vanished. I'm here for that kind of belief, for the kind of work that starts sometimes, as Snarsky does, with the line This poem happens in an actual lake. I'm here to feel...far. Something factual: The first poem here is called The Star-Field Paintings and it is very beautiful and hard to move on, or to be away, from. How are there poems after it? There might not be, yet I could speak on them, and have been, and haven't heard a thing for weeks. ~ reflection by Barton Smock ~ book is here
soft-focus slaughterhouse – poems – Dylan Krieger
soft-focus slaughterhouse
poems, Dylan Krieger
11:11 Press, 2021
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With a punk patience for the previously prophetic, poet Dylan Krieger, in soft-focus slaughterhouse, predicts with the grey comedy of deep presence what pain is losing to our collectively photographic memory of being invasively untouched. This is a verse the closes distance with the body actual, a verse that does not suffer suffering, a verse somewhat for the uncrucified astronaut indebted to imagery but really and wholly for those who can remain nostalgic for prognosis while knowing how sick it is to leave one’s affliction to another. This is a poetry of essential saying, of wordplay and wordwork, and language needs to catch up.
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reflection by Barton Smock
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book is here
through a small ghost – poems – Chelsea Dingman
through a small ghost
poems, Chelsea Dingman
The University of Georgia Press, 2020
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Chelsea Dingman is a poet who makes you feel as if you’ve entered the dream a little early. Otherness is something that happens to others, and pain hurts in two places at once. In through a small ghost, it is this meditative displacement that allows the work to both worship and curse the prolonged destiny of its sudden and devastating inheritance. Be it a projected disappearance or a vanishing root, Dingman identifies first the caller of the form that keeps us from so many shapes, and then the unreal form itself. As any breathing in this held verse might poke a hole in the haunting and send a smoke ring to show the fog how its wheels have come off, the poems keep their witness on the made from and made by, achieving not only something to be seen, but also something protected from watching. And in this protection are many spiritually assertive mercies, elegant and ruinous, gifts from reversal of which the most healing might be that when a thing goes, loss doesn’t always get there first.
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reflection by Barton Smock
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book is here
Toxicon And Arachne – poems – Joyelle McSweeney
Toxicon And Arachne
poems, Joyelle McSweeney
Nightboat Books, 2020
Of course, being a weak writer, I want to say rare. I want to say rare in as few words as possible in the direction of Joyelle McSweeney’s Toxicon And Arachne. Somewhere two toothaches are perhaps reunited. Somewhere one is unpinned from the world while feeling in the dark for a donkey born without a tail. I also want to say playful, but no. Sadness loses all its money to sorrow and there is a jovial genius to the trauma of wordplay. I think what McSweeney does is done with what I’ll call, in my lack, the endangered available. Mouth of a gift hearse. Erasure’s only prediction. From such given, McSweeney recreates addendum without precedent. Think of what one hasn’t read, that is being written, and how briefly it will exist unwitnessed. And how fast the work of de-witness. And how suddenly we’re having the dream that just recently we lied about having. I love this work for its slowness, for the uninfluenced offhand of its disruptive healing. Here is a line from McSweeney’s poem PT Cruiser: ‘That’s like, harmonic. Monstrous.’ I am injected, I guess, to vaccinate the new you. Loss has two syllables: loss, comma, loss. The verse of Toxicon and Arachne lives in the present and in the present it took.
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reflection by Barton Smock
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book is here
ISACOUSTIC* 