Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson.

From Bock’s poem, “My Father’s Paintbox” grief could bite, then, could devour, even with the greys and mixed silvers of a wolf pelt, its coat.

The color of grief is wolf

There is a lot of snow and ice and coldness in this book, too, though, so the title could refer to something smooth and frozen, liquid which was once flowing and now locked. Tears?

The color of grief is wolf

A small, squarish book that fits well in the hand. Yes, the title caught my eye, too, fairytale talk but larger, with a cover depicting the night sky, so instantly we are transported to the realm of Star Trek and other space ports, like Duncan Jones’ Moon movie. Plus, I love prose poems and these make up most of Glass Bikini. I also love sadness and sad writing. Endlessly interesting and endless like space (we think).

Never, ever, fall in love
with a bird. I’ve come to know the difference

between sadness and grief. Sadness
is the knell of a bell on a buoy at night
                (from “The Island Of Zerrissenheit”)

This poem could definitely rip you in two. This whole book could but it is glassed over; it is smooth in appearance because of the prose poems and a few poems which are in lines. Things are smooth until something comes out and grabs you because

The color of grief is wolf

In “Field Trip To The White House,” a school excursion turns nightmarish as the Gingerbread Man hides in “dim corridors” waiting to catch children with its “dripping red mouth.”

It is hard to stay away from this book. I know I should . . . yet . . . maybe the horrific breaks up the sadness? This could be.

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Glass Bikini by Kristin Bock. Tupelo Press, December 2021.

Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson’s books are Mezzanine and Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast. Her poems are in recent issues of Heron Tree and forthcoming in Barrow Street, Interim, and Wild Roof Journal.

Guest Post by Brooke M. Smith.

Poet and essayist Jessica Sabo explores the depths of the voice within her collection of poems. A Body of Impulse offers a magnifying lens into a woman’s life reflections. An Adelaide Literary Award in Poetry finalist (2020), Sabo lays bare a rawness leaving the reader to feel commiseration with her protagonist.

In “What I Should Have Said Instead of ‘Nothing,'” Sabo’s use of metaphors and imagery detail the pain and process of wanting to be understood:

It is a cancer, mom
eating me alive from the inside like a plague
and I am so raw I can’t feel the pain anymore. I can’t feel anymore. I can’t anymore. This hollowing is the only time I feel whole
and I know–I know! I could fight back if I really tried
and if I really wanted it
but I don’t want it, mom. I get so tired of being the outsider. Tired of living in this body that has
never been a home. I am homesick, mom. I am sick, mom.

Reading these last stanzas of her poem provoked a question most humans ask in life: Who am I? Am I happy with who I am . . . who I’ve become?  Self-acceptance is a process, and a painful one at times. The ending of her poem “Requital“ spotlights our imperfections as women and being human.  Acceptance of our choices, learning to accept ourselves as whole and worthy, no matter the condition we are in.

Now, it is my naked body in front of a mirror
a road map of
razor scars and stretch marks, faded tattoos
piercings that refuse to close. It is here I am
learning how to say mine without stutter
refusing to apologize for taking up (too               much) sidewalk. Learning to fill the space
reserved for all my apologies.

Jessica Sabo’s beautifully threaded lines leave readers pondering these questions in her three-part poetry collection.

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A Body of Impulse by Jessica Sabo. Dancing Girl Press & Studio, 2021.

Reviewer bio: Brooke M. Smith is a librarian who loves cats, coffee, cozy mysteries, camping, and many other things that don’t begin with the letter C.  She also is a poetry editor for 805 Lit + Art Magazine.

Guest Post by Chloe Yelena Miller.

DeMisty D. Bellinger’s Peculiar Heritage opens with the title poem. She invites us—at times challenges us—to look with that first line of the title poem, “if you look at her eyes.” The collective heritage of poems moves through slavery, different regions of the US, the African diaspora in Paris, as well as more contemporary violence in America.

The collection is divided into four parts, including a break in part three with protest poems. This almost aside of protest poems, as Part III continues again with a page break, draws attention to the fact that many, if not all of these poems, are already protest poems. Continue reading “‘Peculiar Heritage’”

Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson.

The Space Poet is written in well-researched prose-like stanzas so it appears scientific, logical. There are some list poems. The premise for this book is so super intriguing, that’s why I am writing something here so more people know about it!

A poet is sent to a space station to do research on what it is like (space) and write poems. This book could have been sparked by more recent projects about space (besides 2001: A Space Odyssey) Laurie Anderson’s Moon project, and Duncan Jones’ movie, Moon, but there are lots of space inspired books of poems, it seems (by looking around this book at the endorsements and epigraphs and such). I like this book because the idea of it is so strange and reading it does put one into the mood of the weirdness of space. The language of science is so weird. It can be. Enter advertising language of hype and sell.

From “Planet Hop from Trappist-1f!”

Planet hop from Trappist-1 f, the terrestrial Earth-sized planet
smack-dab in the habitable zone of our galaxy’s newly
discovered solar system and your new home amongst the stars!

These poems are kind of sad. It is melancholy in space.

From “The Cupola”

[ . . . ] the space poet cannot work with this, out here where nothing
is what you think it ought to be, where there is no rage [ . . . ]

[ . . . ] student loans or credit card debt, nothing is late for work,
nothing misses someone, nothing is late for work,
nothing misses someone, nothing loves or lives or leaves—
and what’s poetic about that?

I don’t want to say it but I will: the Pandemic. Plus, going to space to get rid of debt is kind of cruel, but I can easily see millions doing so.

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The Space Poet by Samantha Edmonds. Split Lip Press, February 2020.

Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives at the headwaters of Sutherlin Creek in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua Basin. She is the author of Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (Finishing Line Press, 2021) Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir. Anderson is a poetry reader for Quarterly West and Lily Poetry Review. Her poems are forthcoming in Barrow Street Journal, Heron Tree, and Wild Roof Journal.

Buy this book from our affiliate Bookshop.org.

Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson.

Poet Kevin Ridgeway dishes it out in seemingly endless amounts of true grit in his poems of loss and despair in Too Young To Know. His poems are a cross between Richard Brautigan and Denis Johnson and we can read the pathos of “Kool Aid Mustache,” “The 1988 Sears Christmas Catalog,” “My Drug Dealer’s Girlfriend,” and “The Original Unsung Hometown Zero” because less is more, because we get pulled down and are entertained, because we fall in love with Ridgeway, and because we survive along with him no matter what.

These are short poems written in lawn mower narrative chunks like Dean Young’s. I have heard this style called “new narrative” or “street style.” What is new about Ridgeway’s work is that his white trash experiences and escapades are just the setting for heroics of living when everything else comes crashing down in the world of alcohol and drug dependence.

From “Two Dimensional Lovers”:

. . . my sweetheart
that I secretly called Sharlena, her never
ending smile making out with me when I
saw the shell shocked faces of other sons,
frightened refugees smoked out of their
cavernous mall video arcade hideouts

For all the depression and desperation here, Ridgeway lifts us up because he just barely escapes with his biggest weapon. His scraggly Nordic looks? His jolly underwear? His nine hundred lives? All these? What passes for pathos and gutter writing is none other than beauty and connection.

Ridgeway’s poems are on Facebook and he posts short videos of himself reading. You’ll find yourself seeking him out again and again, addicted and craving more. His new chapbook is called In His Own Little World (Stubborn Mule Press) out now.

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Too Young To Know by Kevin Ridgeway. Stubborn Mule Press, July 2019.

Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives at the headwaters of Sutherlin Creek in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua Basin. She is the author of Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (Finishing Line Press, 2021) Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir. Anderson is a poetry reader for Quarterly West and Lily Poetry Review. Her poems are forthcoming in Barrow Street Journal, Heron Tree, and Wild Roof Journal.

Buy this book from our affiliate Bookshop.org.

Guest Post by Stephanie Katz.

New-Hampshire-based poet Amanda Lou Doster’s first chapbook Everything Begins Somewhere is a gentle yet ambitious journey across the poet’s life. The first poem, “Actually,” sets in motion the idea of loss mixed with returning home, a theme which threads throughout the chapbook. Doster writes: 

here, have this poem which all my life I thought
would be big enough for the languages and the countries
and the drugs, but which is really just a basket
woven from hay. Fragile stuff from the farm
I never thought I’d live on, but where it turns out I do.

The poems that reference children or motherhood paint stark pictures of the experience. In “A mother dreams of more babies” Doster writes: 

In my friend’s belly grow tiny teeth,
perfect little knives. She says
they’re eating her alive.

One of the most vivid and raw poems in the collection is “You are expected to be more decorous than linoleum.” Doster writes: 

It is unseemly to wash your hair in snowmelt. Impolite to discuss
your lover with your husband, but since you asked
in sixty-four years we will dissolve. All of us.

The themes of loss and quiet self-destruction play heavily throughout the poems, but the last poem “Next time I’ll ask someone else” hints at self-acceptance with the final line “I can collect everything / inside that green trunk—some vintage clothes, / paisley, and other lapses in judgement.” 

This chapbook was published by Slate Roof Press, a unique member-run letterpress based in Massachusetts. New poets are selected through their annual contests and spend the next three years a member of the press learning and helping to produce their own title.  

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Everything Begins Somewhere by Amanda Lou Doster. Slate Roof Press, 2020.

Reviewer bio: Stephanie Katz is a librarian with the Manatee Libraries and editor in chief of award-winning litmag 805 Lit + Art. She was selected as a Library Journal 2020 Mover & Shaker and is the author of Libraries Publish: How to Start a Magazine, Small Press, Blog, and More. She blogs about creative library publishing at LiteraryLibraries.org.