Grist

The Journal for Writers

Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity | Review by Ryo Yamaguchi

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originalWhen I finished reading Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity, edited by Fox Frazier-Foley and Erin Elizabeth Smith, I was waiting for my partner in Daley Plaza in Chicago under its famed Picasso sculpture. I could hear a din in the distance, and before I knew it, thousands upon thousands of Black Lives Matter protestors were roaring in the adjacent streets, banking south down Clark like an effulgent flood water caught in a hard ravine of steel and glass. The protestors were young and old; some carried enormous banners, some walked bikes, and many looked like they had just gotten off of work. They were white, black, Latino, Asian, South Asian, and Muslim, but they were unified in phrase: hands up, don’t shoot. All beneath Picasso’s elegantly deformed visage, that face that could belong to anyone.

What to make of the protestors’ powerful spondees and that modernist masterpiece (from a tradition often considered indifferent to politics) looming over one of the city’s central public spaces? Amy King, in her incisive introduction to the anthology, puts art—poetry—and politics like this:

Poetry carries and confirms the messy aspects of the body politic, implicating concepts beyond an observable reality by recognizing, interrogating, and at times even celebrating humanity’s spiritual and emotional heft. That is, just as a person is the existence of many conditions and states of being, so can poetry enact the political, convey the personal, and implicate the public simultaneously.

The project as it is set forth is most certainly characterized by such a balance of the personal, political, and public. And it certainly offers a diverse range of voices, though it is important to recognize the boundaries of that range: these are voices of the historically marginalized—including ethnic and racial minorities, the GLBTQ community, those with disabilities, and the disenfranchised working class—and, most often, these are American voices.

But within this range we encounter extraordinarily diverse accounts of the human experience and the striving against silence and systemic violence that have been central features of so many communities’ stories. There are several motivations that inform the rendering of these experiences. The most outright is simply the inscription of name, brilliantly executed in Chen Chen’s “Chen [No Middle Name] Chen],” which limits itself to the letters in its title:

called Chad      called mini

called homo        and ma’am

called no man     called Chinaman

           am I a man?”

But quickly we see such naming exercises as compressions of various forms of heritage, which open up resplendently in other poems. In “Lorca is Green,” Emma Trelles uses a vivid meditation on the iconic poet to arrive at a deeply savored remembrance of her mother:

Yellow is Pinar del Rio—heat and flat valleys and where my mother’s people are from. When I was a girl, yellow was the braid she wore long and down the middle of her back; yellow was the garden of succulents she grew, their branches circuitous and each leaf’s shape a surprise: a paddle, a button, a dagger, a heart.

That Trelles buries a dagger amid the beautiful items of her reminiscence is no accident. Violence is a critical element in the vast majority of these pieces, and it is often their explicit charge to engage it through witness and attestation. Raena Shirali is overwhelmed in “Stasis,” which begins:

From my tucked-knee coil I hear the news:

women are interviewed concerning kidnapping

& forgiveness, a girl hacks off her father’s head

with a kitchen knife after a weekend

in his room, a young woman is found

            with her intestines ripped out—raped

with a crowbar—I cannot listen anymore.

It’s an intensely focused and yet coldly spoken newsreel, intimate traumas delivered in an abstract public form to an intimate listener—in tucked-knee coil—who cannot take it. From witness quickly follows the response—protest—such as CA Conrad puts forth, pulling no punches in “act like a polka dot on minnie mouse’s skirt:”

i am not a

family friendly

faggot i tell

your children

about war

about their tedious future careers

all the taxes bankrolling a

racist tyrannical military.

These brief examples highlight distinct features of the terrain of this anthology—name, heritage, witness, and protest—but many of the poems here navigate that terrain with more exploratory approaches, working through the thicket-like complexities of personal and public identity and the possibilities that arise from their intersection. The result, often, is exquisitely nuanced, sometimes buried in deep image, sometimes playful in tone, sometimes innovative in conceit. In her excerpt from “Post-Identity,” Carmen Gimenez Smith assumes an invisible bureaucratic position and interrogates us with this fusillade of questions:

what are three positive strains in you                        does discontent

drive you into the market       does blunder drive you into the capital

when can you start with selective memorial   is this firm what you had planned

was this a natal force  are you an open boomtown    or a crafted urn

or what animal rules the roost                        does that animal work as aphorism

pure revelation            or dispatch you from the front lines of       aesthetic warring

Have you made anything good with your outrage

Karen Skolfield, in “Arms Race,” fantasizes about punching an inconsiderate stranger—who has stretched her power cord across a busy aisle—in the face, and it quickly becomes an oddly humorous meditation on the escalation of violence:

When I walk over, she will look up, knowing she is about to be punched. In fact, she will welcome it. She will say that the very root of feminism is about everyone punching each other equally. In an air of solidarity, she will also curl her hand into a fist. We’ll stand this way for some time, openly admiring each other’s fist. . . . Eventually, one of us will raise her second fist into the air.

With a completely different approach, Oliver de la Paz haunts with high-saturation imagery in his superb address cycle, “Dear Empire (I)”:

These are your battlefields. There are monuments here, the dead atop stone horses with their eyes towards the heavens. Under shadow, the scrawl of graffiti and the hardscape of granite pathways guide foot traffic to the raised hoof of one of your dead generals mounted aloft.

What we see here and in so many other of these poems is not so much the direct events of suppression and expression but the haunting evidence of them, the trace—the statues and graffiti—that remind us that politics is, inevitably, a historical force, and that identity is always caught between the defining events of the past and the raw possibilities of the future.

There are far too many riches found in this anthology to be sufficiently captured in this brief review. No reader will like everything here, but this book, expertly compiled as it is, paints a detailed composite snapshot of both the cultural and poetic (from both emerging and established poets) diversities that should make us—despite the extraordinary hardships we endure—feel grateful. Perhaps Philip Metres, in his cycle “Homefront/Removes,” offers us something of an abiding epigraph for this collection, so let’s close with that: “Identity isn’t an end—it’s a portal, a deportation from the country of mirrors, an inflection within a question, punctuation in the sentence between birth and birth.”

 

POLITICAL PUNCH: CONTEMPORARY POEMS ON THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY
Edited by Fox Frazier-Foley and Erin Elizabeth Smith
Sundress Press, March 2016
Paperback, 236 pp, $20.00

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Ryo Yamaguchi is the author of The Refusal of Suitors, published by Noemi Press. His poetry has appeared in journals such as Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Journal, and Gulf Coast, among others. He also regularly reviews books for outlets such as Michigan Quarterly Review and NewPages. He lives in Chicago where he works at the University of Chicago Press. You can visit him at plotsandoaths.com.

To Take Note of Where We Are: Adam Clay’s Stranger | Review by Jeremy Michael Reed

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strangerAdam Clay’s third book, Stranger, examines the ways we can be estranged from each other and the places we live, as well as the philosophical questions that arise from our attenuated relationships. Throughout the book, Clay uses colloquial phrases to convey abstract ideas in a way that leaves his poems approachable and yet distanced enough from his subjects to allow pause, consideration, and contemplation. In this book, one can be sure, behind every simple phrase exist multitudes of meaning.

As Clay’s narrator explains in “Exhibit A,” “I’d like to be stranger than I’ve been.” The purpose of this strangeness is to recognize the patterns of “numbness and carelessness” we so easily fall into. As he says in “This Is a Frame,” “without a pause, we notice nothing,” and so these poems pause over quotidian objects and relationships (furniture, houses, landscape, parenthood) time and again in order to invest thought in them anew. In these poems, all we think we understand is up in the air, nothing is definite, and all is possible. Clay’s language remains open to signifying newly, allowing the narrative voice to travel outside the normal boundaries of identity to take in world events, notions of self and others, and understandings of place, and to shape them into an attempt at meaning by “[taking] the words apart.”

Clay sets his poems in the liminal space between identities, existing in the inside and outside, included and excluded, all at once. Each of these poems could be read alone as associative experiments with knowledge. Yet, read as a whole, Stranger pulls into relation the wide-ranging thinking in these poems toward an aesthetics of openness to new perceptions, or, as Clay words it, the ability to say “perhaps” rather than always to define. As he says in “Start This Record Over,” the pauses he’s created in the narrative and language of the poems speak a kind of possibility: “Perhaps is a new and sudden way of being.”

In defamiliarizing the quotidian, Clay takes moments of daily living and examines, meditates, turns them over and inspects them again. He takes on the title of “stranger” for his narrator and uses it to find a liminal space to pronounce our current lives as worthy of unceasing questions. In these poems, constructing sentences, attempting meaning, creates a conversation that requires two interlocutors, an I and a you, and, even as that I and you might change across our lives, that “From / one thought to another, I’m calling out to you, // I’m calling out to you, // as if we’re building a nest, one word at a time.” By the end of the book, Clay reminds us that these acts of living and of poetry are tenuous in frightful and freeing ways all at once.

STRANGER
By Adam Clay
Milkweed Editions, February 2016
Paperback, 96pp. $16.

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Jeremy Michael Reed is a doctoral candidate in poetry at the University of Tennessee. His poems and essays are published or forthcoming in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Still, The Rumpus, The Cresset, and elsewhere.

The Words Will Keep Us Connected to Each Other: A Review of Grace Bauer’s Nowhere All At Once

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Nowhere All at Once: poems by Grace Bauer

Nowhere All At Once
by Grace Bauer
Stephen F. Austin State University Press

The Words Will Keep Us Connected to Each Other: A Review of Grace Bauer’s Nowhere All At Once

by Darius Stewart

What is it about Grace Bauer that compels us so much to her work? How many lines defining poetry does she write that enable us to identify our own lives so viscerally because her words, with enormous empathy, eventually translate into poems of sympathy?  It’s as if she has intended to speak for us all with her namesake: grace.

What else about Bauer do we seek from her but truth and understanding? Her latest collection, Nowhere All At Once, is committed to poems of the ethereal; they are suffused with the heart of the human spirit pulsing as if it were a celestial being seeking so ardently to be one with the universe. These poems seem to have been written as if to galvanize us to forgive ourselves for what can be understandably conveyed as a failure to be fully present in the most grievous moments of life. These poems do not accuse; they trumpet a spirit of hope we can all use to reconcile our personal losses with a strident voice—one might even call it relaxation.

Whether through poems of actual death, or simply through journaling how the speaker “gets through the days” as a woman circumventing life in search of love, of healing from loss, and most importantly, of finding solace in the face of these conflated afflictions, Bauer navigates the bends in life still knowing there are many more roads to turn. She does so with a masterful orchestration of words one might feel compelled to read aloud (or record, even) just to hear the musicality possessing her poems—the syncopations, the Dickinsonian slant rhymes—but what is also remarkable is how she uses the ghazal’s form to create couplets resulting in endless possibilities of meaning.

Bauer can be considered an auteur: our lives are directed by her words if we settle ourselves into understanding how it is to feel dislocated. She takes her cue from luminaries such as Adrienne Rich, John Berryman, William Wordsworth, A. R. Ammons—and this is to name just a few mentioned epigraphically in this particular collection. Her words, too, suggest an existential crisis we have all felt. How do we navigate our lives even if we fail to understand what we can’t control? Do we reject the possibility that we ever can? Through sublimation, Bauer enlists her speakers to exhibit a sense of self-discovery—asking how we might “elicit the appropriate response” to life’s great mysteries—and with great aplomb, she proposes through her verse that emotional attachment and detachment aren’t always mutually exclusive. When she writes “we keep / the small talk going, hoping it will grow large, / become a song we’ll remember the words to, and that / the words will keep us connected to each other…” Bauer indeed does just that. The “small talk” is the individual poems that become the larger conversation, culminating into a book linking us all to the ubiquitous question: what is it we can do to reconcile the feeling of being present with the feeling of being also “nowhere all at once”?

Our Lives Happen Between the Memorable: A Review of Dexter L. Booth’s Scratching the Ghost

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Cover of Scratching the Ghost: Poems by Dexter L. Booth

Scratching the Ghost: Poems by Dexter L. Booth
Graywolf Press

Our Lives Happen Between the Memorable: A Review of Dexter L. Booth’s Scratching the Ghost

by Darius Stewart

Too often I’ve been asked, “what exactly is poetry?”

The people who ask this question tend to be intelligent professionals—which bewilders me—and some of them, understandably, ask because they are so young; they ask because they haven’t (yet) been exposed to poetry in their compulsory curricula—at least not enough—and even if they have been exposed, the majority of them don’t know enough about poetry except that it should rhyme. I attempt to explain to all of them that poetry is about language, how it becomes an exegesis of what it means to live with our perceptions of the world around us: a world withholding a vault of experiences that conjures memories of the past, present, and future that may take us days, months, or years to comprehend—or what the poet Jack Gilbert called the “highlights and interstices,” or otherwise that “our lives happen between the memorable.” That is what poetry does. Also, it makes us think too hard, some may say, not realizing that poetry is a tool that enables us to reduce our experiences to their most salient kernels of truth and understanding, an exit from a vacuum within which we are often held hostage without a vehicle to escort us to at least a minor comprehension of the meaning “why.”

I believe poetry is mining the vast terrain of “why,” and this is what Dexter L. Booth achieves in Scratching the Ghost. Constantly, Booth is implying “why.” Given the central theme of death and loss, it seems appropriate, though Booth eschews all moments of sentimentality when writing of such moments of pathos, instead engendering the harsh realities of existing within a world of hurt and longing for answers. He wants to know “why” and thus invites you on a journey of discovery that should compel you to stop and breathe and hold the book against your chest because, as I did, you’ll feel you’ve just been thrust into Booth’s world, as if you’d been dropped down the rabbit hole and must find your way out. And this journey of self-discovery should behoove you to exact all the resilience you may possess to exorcise the ghosts in your own lives because these poems so quietly strive to do just that. In fact, many of these poems imply: haven’t we all struggled to find solace? Haven’t we all, in potent pain, and in the spirited hope for acceptance of this pain, made a way to find our way back to our former (if not happier) selves?

To understand what it means to “scratch the ghost,” let’s look to Booth’s poem, “In Favor of Company,” from the second section entitled “Little Myths Initiated by Rain.” He writes:

I barely knew her then. We sat on a bench sharing a Parliament

and an awful postcard view of rocks polka dotted with pigeon shit,

old train tracks like a monolithic machine left

to watch over the edge of the earth, water so dark beneath

its shadow that it hurt to look into. It was hot that day

and the ground was bare with the stubble of grass

hanging over the pathway like frat boys on balconies

puking out their guts before dawn.

What engages me about this particular poem is the feeling of distance masking as a feeling for want. The speaker wants company, but can only describe the atmosphere rather than the human connection the title “In Favor of Company” suggests. So what is it the speaker “favors?” If the speaker favored the woman, then why not describe her? Why not write of her attributes that attract him, or even those that don’t? But it’s not about her; rather, it’s about the distractions with which one becomes so consumed he can’t navigate between what is present and what is past. It would be too obvious a trope for Booth to make this poem about a ghost inhibiting the speaker’s ability to relate to a woman he seems to be at least smitten by. They share a Parliament, but then the “sharing ” becomes this view that, yes, they share, but the focus is in the speaker’s distraction by his surroundings, where his mind wanders, if you read between the lines; he’s imagining something else deeper—a small but curious glance into why the speaker is so self-involved and cannot be truly present. And who hasn’t had that experience? Booth is both a harbinger and a carrier of grief we all have shared, yet he wants to support hope within this grief—a sentiment he writes in so many of these poems that bear witness to our concerns of “what if this happened to me?” These are poems of redemption. These are poems of commiseration with those who share similar episodes of dealing with loss—looking back with a poet’s eye and a humanist’s heart. This is what Booth wants all of us to empathize with when he writes of a speaker who is “scratching the ghost.”

In the final section, “Long Letter to the 20th Century,” Booth writes in “Poem for My Body” a speaker that becomes almost self-elegiac, though the poem still contains the fibers of an ode—given the (subtle) passion with which the poem is written, though it is still a complicated poem to discern and categorize—which I take to be a wondrous feat when one considers the context of these poems of grieving through memory, of trying to reconcile grief, and finally of looking more inward in search for answers. Booth feels, in the end, it’s oneself that becomes the agent to one’s healing:

You are just a box. I knock against

you like a fly in a jar. When I am silly and crippled

you carry me like a penny in your pocket.

This is because you need me, maybe

for good luck or comfort. To have someone to talk to

when you are aching and alone. One day I will abandon you.

My name will be devoured by fog. You will rust

from the inside out, like a watch.

Time, in fact, will peel us apart,

sculpting your face with greasy fingers.

And I will be hair trimmed from the chin,

stolen by whatever can make use of what I become.

“[S]tolen by whatever can make use of what I become”—this, to me, echoes the anthem that readers will find so abundantly: a person grieving and, ultimately, refusing to have his life abducted by loss. And in these poems a book emerges fueled by so many moments that achieve subtle triumphs for their ability to parlay exuberance, so much that one comes away empathizing with those most human of conditions: feeling and surviving.