Guest Post by Chris L. Butler.

In poetry, you often see the connections between people and animals in a way that demonstrates the humanity that can be found in animals. With Good Morning to Everyone Except Men Who Name Their Dog Zeus, Stabile explores the opposite: why men name their dogs Zeus and how that connects to the god’s often overlooked abusive legacy.

What I love about reading Lannie Stabile’s work is that I always learn something. This is absolutely the case with her debut full-length collection, published this month (June 2021). I was immediately drawn to the book because I truly believe the title itself is a poem. I also love dogs and reading mythology.

Stabile places toxic masculinity on trial by unearthing the havoc Zeus reigned among his fellow godly peers as well as humans; while connecting it to modern patriarchal society. With lines like “the beast will burrow himself into the gentlewoman,” Stabile shows many men have a tendency for god-complex thinking and believe that they can do whatever they wish, as Zeus did.

I believe this collection is important not only for the genre of poetry but also could be utilized in women’s and feminist literature courses. We are in a time when we look at art and society for the entire truth, and not the parts we favor most. Good Morning to Everyone Except Men Who Name Their Dog Zeus is a collection that pushes us in that direction by exposing Zeus and the impact he continues to have on the modern male.

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Good Morning to Everyone Except Men Who Name Their Dog Zeus by Lannie Stabile. Cephalo Press, June 2021.

Reviewer bio: Chris L. Butler is an African American and Dutch poet and essayist from Houston, Texas living in Canada. He is the author of the microchap BLERD: ’80s BABY, ’90s KID (Daily Drunk Press) which is set to be released on August 2, 2021.

Guest Post by Carla Sarett.

Just when you think that no one’s writing epic poetry, beat hero Larry Beckett comes to the rescue with his entertaining Wyatt Earp. Wyatt Earp is a legend and Larry Beckett has captured the lonely dusty trails, the saloons, the gunfights, all of it with verve and humor.

This collection is a sublime mash-up of legal records, histories of Tombstone and Earp, Western folklore, and oh those Western movies—Dodge City, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and my favorite, John Ford’s My Darling Clementine. Beckett is a songwriter as well as a poet, and it shows in the musicality of these poems, as well as in the wonderful “Ballad to Maddie.”

Kudos to the publisher for a beautifully designed edition.

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Wyatt Earp by Larry Beckett. Alternating Currents Press, March 2020.

Reviewer bio: Carla Sarett’s recent poems appear in Blue Unicorn, San Pedro River Review, The Remington Review and elsewhere.  She awaits publication of her chapbook woman on the run (Unsolicited Press) and her novella, The Looking Glass (Propertius) later this year. Carla lives in San Francisco.

Buy this book from our affiliate Bookshop.org.

Guest Post by Mandi Greenwood.

Doug Stanfield’s poetry is an unfurling of wings and a fanning out in every heartfelt direction, reaching all of life’s heights and depths. There is humility and there is enormous bravery. Within the pages of Lifting Stones there is no finite limit to Stanfield’s poetic skill, nor to his quality.

He owns the journey that is Lifting Stones. He owns it with “bare courage and risk”—his words—and to read this book is to step from one stone to the next in the sometimes calm, oftentimes tumultuous river that he has forged between its covers.

Upon one stone I behold the relatively fresh wound of “Love in the Time of Corona.” Atop another stone I discover the fierce elation of “Borrowed Dust.” I skip to yet another smooth muse of stone and I find “As It Was.” I pause at times, to wipe away the tears, but always I progress to the next verse with intrigue and joy.

It’s difficult to do justice to the raw tenderness of Lifting Stones without falling into cliché. Suffice to say it is a singular collection of clarity, warmth, grief, humor, agony, mortality, recollection, despair, and rebirth. It is an expedition, not a journey’s end. It is a unique work of life via poetry, a kaleidoscopic gallery of this poet’s genuine experience laid bare.

Stanfield writes with a dignity. He writes with a frank self-respect that is, to borrow his exquisite words, “eternally becoming.”

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Lifting Stones by Doug Stanfield. Rootstock Publishing, June 2021.

Reviewer bio: Mandi Greenwood is the author of Six Steps Down, Caught Inside, and The Silver Renoir.

Buy this book from our affiliate Bookshop.org.

Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson.

Enticing though it may be to dream of cold landscapes when summer days get a bit too warm (already) it does not exactly seem wonderful to imagine taking a sauna during the pandemic and sweating out life even more, getting exhausted even more. That’s not the point of the sauna, as Cheryl J. Fish seems to report in her book of poems/memoir/travel journal.  The sauna is the sacred space for contemplation and just plain bathing and, well, for everything under the sun in order to be close to the sun in the darkness.

Cheryl J. Fish’s The Sauna Is Full Of Maids is an adventure to Finland told with poems, photographs, and lines from the Kalevala, Finland’s origin story/epic/saga.

It is great to look through this book and daydream about journeys and berries and boggy lakes. These are prose poems and travelogues in poem form, told with the sparse flavor of the North. I am really attracted to the ancient lifeways in this book:

“His journey paralleled birds and reindeer. Spread his culture, migrating.”
from “Another Round Of Heat”

“In the Kalevala, birds lay eggs in a barren water-mother’s knee. The bottom half of a smashed egg becomes earth.”
from “Unreliable Snowpack”

It isn’t all ancient lore here. There are meetings with fellow artists and travelers, foragers, dreamers, and recent immigrants to Finland. It is amazing to realize (yet again) that we live on a tiny planet and its inhabitants have been following the flow of the elements forever and that during our lives we get glimpses of what is important, what helps us to be alive. Those things could include the sauna, the icy cold water, vasta birch sprigs, and the steam.

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The Sauna Is Full Of Maids by Cheryl J. Fish. Shanti Arts Publishing, June 2021.

Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives in Oregon’s Umpqua Basin, author of, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast, available from Finishing Line Press.