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Guest Post by Chris L. Butler.

2020 was filled with many twists and turns, but one thing that stayed consistent was Reggie Johnson’s commitment to poetry. One of my favorite books I’ve read this year is Cuarentena, Johnson’s ninth poetry collection in five years. Cuarentena is a melodic full-length collection reflecting on Johnson’s experiences of the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic. This book is broken into several sections, beginning with “Life Before Quarantine,” and culminating with “The New Normal.” Johnson reminds us of how carefree life once was with lines like “Saturday’s used to be the night to unwind,” in “Saturday Shenanigans.”

As the book progresses, the reader gets to engage a section titled “Unrest.” Here, Johnson draws the audience into his interpretation of race relations in America. This section features pieces like “Divided,” Johnson’s viral poem, which was featured on WLWT 5 NBC Cincinnati in June. As a Black American, I personally connected with this book. Johnson lays it all on the table for me with lines like “No matter the time period, I am more than a statistic . . . a stereotype,” featured in the poem “Look at Me.”

Cuarentena hits home for the reader, in a timely collection where Johnson dives into the political. I would recommend this book to anyone, but especially those experiencing the duality of living in the pandemic as an oppressed person.

Cuarentena by Reggie Johnson. Rad Press Publishing, September 2020.

Reviewer bio: Chris L. Butler is an African American and Dutch, Pushcart nominated poet, and essayist. Chris was selected as a 2020 HUES Scholar. He was a participant in the 2020 Palette Poetry BIPOC Chapbook Workshop. His work can be found in The Daily Drunk Mag, Rejection Letters, and others.

Guest Post by Michael Hettich.

In this disjunct time, when cynicism and lies swarm the air like gnats, it’s a great solace to find a poet whose work is suffused with what can only be called love, a poet whose vision, though fully engaged with the fractures and griefs of this moment, is imbued with a sense of wonder, humor and compassion for all, including himself. Richard Jones has been writing such poems for many years. His numerous books published by Copper Canyon Press as well as stellar chapbooks from Adastra Press and other small publishers, to say nothing of his translations or of his work editing Poetry East, have distinguished him as one of our most valuable poets. His new book, Avalon, from Green Linden Press, is as strong as anything he has previously written, a work of great tenderness and vision.

Many of the poems in Avalon take the reader on spiritual journeys through realms of confusion and sorrow leading toward a sense that, somehow, amidst our existential bewilderment, the wonder of our very being holds transcendent truths we’ve yet to plumb, truths that might enthrall us were we to embrace them. A citizen of our time, Jones is nevertheless a kind of visionary, a poet who risks vulnerability to achieve the kind of innocence that makes revelation possible. His poems often start in the particulars of his own life to seamlessly move into fable-like narratives in which the ineffable is glimpsed, the unsayable (almost) whispered. And though what’s glimpsed eludes the speaker’s full grasp, nevertheless he knows it’s there, that moment out of time when the truth of each moment is revealed. In short, these poems simultaneously enact and document instances of grace, blessings in the midst of confusion.

Though never “confessional” in the conventional sense of that word, all of Jones’s poems are deeply personal, exploring not regrets and losses but rather yearnings—for the deepest connections to his family, to the world, to himself and, finally, to his God: “a praying mantis / lands on my left forearm, / turns his head, and studies me. / The spiritual way he folds / his long green wings / makes me believe he’s here / on a heavenly mission . . . .” Our blessings, for Jones, are located exactly where our confusions and griefs most pain us as feeling, yearning, tender-hearted humans. Such poetry as this is always nutritious food, but it is particularly so in these ravaged, profoundly confusing times. For those that read them carefully and with an open heart, the poems of Avalon will provide not just aesthetic pleasure but a kind of solace as well.

Avalon by Richard Jones. Green Linden Press, June 2020.

Reviewer bio: Michael Hettich has published a dozen books of poetry, most recently To Start an Orchard, which was published in 2019. A new book, The Mica Mine, is forthcoming. His website is michaelhettich.com.

Guest Post by J. Guaner.

Margo Taft Stever, founder of the Hudson Valley Writers Center, has published her second poetry collection, Cracked Piano, which invites the reader to ponder human existence issues.

“Idiot’s Guide to Counting,” the opening poem, interprets the sane and insane with rhetorical questions comprising the first two stanzas and the first half of the third stanza: “How do you become one / with the horse, riding and becoming / the act of riding, / and the horse becoming the self / and the other at exactly / the same second, counting strides, / counting muscle movement, / counting fences, hurtling over / them with the horse, counting /the everything / of one?” These questions function as an apostrophe articulated to a grandfather figure in the past, an alter ego, or a contemporary everyman “counting strides, / counting muscle movement, / counting fences . . . ” Yet, there is no solution to everything counted or to the person who counts, as the hyperbole of “idiot” in the title suggests.

The poet also looks deep into the misery, monotony, and aloneness of human life. The person who counts suggests either an alter ego or a contemporary everyman. Sadness stays with everything counted, the existence, or the family tree, as questioned in the third stanza—“How to become one with / the branches of a tree, a grandfather / tree in an apple orchard / that no longer exists?” We count our time, but we are not able to find the meaning of life. In the end, counting becomes meaningless, and the speaker sighs, “counting / everything as no longer / existing, counting / trees as one with the everything / that no longer exists.” Stylistically, even the monotonous voice reveals the plain sameness of life confined to the person himself.

In a sense, this poem sets the tone of Stever’s Cracked Piano, a tone of loss and disconnection.

Cracked Piano by Margo Taft Stever. CavanKerry Press, 2019.

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Guest Post by Chloe Yelena Miller.

After months at home during the coronavirus epidemic, I found Miriam O’Neal’s poetry collection The Body Dialogues a respite. Through a focus on the body, personal history, religion, travel, and literature, I could both leave myself and remember who I used to be. The postcard poems, in particular, reminded me of our human capacity to inhabit the past and faraway places regardless of where we are.

As we plug into our devices, we need to connect with others and ourselves. O’Neal feeds the readers with her poems and places us wherever we are. “Field” ends with, “She gives the grownups bread and tea, / the children milk and bread. / This is what it takes to tell the body, / You are here.”

That which is seemingly forgotten is etched into the poet’s experiences and appears in these poems. Sometimes, we forget who we have been. Throughout this three-part collection of poetry, O’Neal’s “I” grows and shifts into an experienced adult. In “The Sister Doesn’t Say,” O’Neal writes, “Only she will know what she can’t remember.”

Writers love their building blocks, words and grammar, and O’Neal is no different. My favorite poem, “Homesick,” has the speaker looking towards Italian grammar. The poem ends with, “and you in the present form; / always in the familiar.” Even when the reader is transported into the past, the past becomes a vivid present.

The writer can train the reader’s eyes on something to see it more clearly in order to see something else. O’Neal writes her own ars poetica within the poem “Felucca,” “Because she cannot photograph the sky / or the darkness hiding her hand, / she’ll photography my boat and say, / See? This is a Felucca.”

The Body Dialogues by Miriam O’Neal. Lily Poetry Review, January 2020.

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