LETTER OF MARQUE: ARTICLE THE FORTIETH

A Quiet Learning Curve | Aleathia Drehmer & Dan Provost

Poetry
56 pages
5 ¼” x 8 ¼” perfect-bound trade paperback
ISBN: 978-1-59948-269-9
First Edition
Main Street Rag Publishing Company
Rank Stranger Press
Mount Olive, NC, USA
Available here
$10, plus shipping

This book is split into two sections, one for Aleathia Drehmer and one for Dan Provost. They don't have poems written together here, they are just sharing a cover and binding. So let's tackle Ms. Drehmer first.

Drehmer covers the world of love and loss, domestic life and hardships, the tragedy of divorce in the act of dividing belongings

I fold the laundry
in between loads of dishes
as you make lists in the air
ticking off items collected over the years.

You place them in neat piles,
short and haphazard,
realizing most everything
is mine by default.

[ ... ]

You notice the clock given to us
at our wedding and how it stopped
telling proper time and mention
the Swedish Love Knot
that unraveled years ago.

[ ... ] (from “Whispers Something about Irony”),

motherhood

[ ... ]
The door clicks open and my progeny

eases in to deliver rapid fire cartoon fantasies
about the time she was a cat trainer
living in the circus and didn't I remember that?
Or was I just too old to imagine it?  (from “Sparking the Fire”),

growing older (yet wiser)

[ ... ]

We are the pain
creeping into joints without remorse,
   the pulling of muscles flexed
beyond intension, the subtle tightening
a warning to us all.

[ ... ] (from “Hollow”),

and a recurring theme of love, loss, departure, and human qualities in relation to science and math

[ ... ]

We dance back and forth
until you and I are nothing
more than a closed system
that finds the tiny existence
of our relationship isolated
and unchanged — a perpetual
                                      momentum.

Never falling backward,
never moving forward. (from “(critical) mass”).

Drehmer writes on reflections of love found and lost, emptiness felt with an elephant's weight, and the childish laughter that fills otherwise quiet spaces. And she writes of these things with intelligence, refreshing personal openness, and the experience of someone who's been there.

Dan Provost, meanwhile, is nearly the opposite. He is not quiet and does not reside in his pain or place quietly. Yet, he still speaks of tragedies and isolation with personal experience. He ventures into less-domestic arenas with his blunt discussions of politics, gun ownership/violence, anarchy, war, death

Wrong Charles,
Death,
Man is never ready for ...
Simple things might send him to the madhouse,
But you can leave eventually,
[ ... ]
Death, there is no turning back ...
[ ... ] (from “Wrong Charlie”),

even Indian affairs

[ ... ]

It only became visible when scholars, who had nothing
else to put on their Minority Literature syllabus,
decided to put Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee on the
mandatory reading list. (from “Half-Breeds and Scholars”).

Provost is not as approachable as Drehmer, his words harsher and looser, more violent and free-flowing, jarring, abrupt, abrasive. Where Drehmer's words quietly reflect on the living, Provost's unapologetically proclaim the dying. Through it all, there is a need to fit in, to be remembered, to lay rest to the pain, the weariness, the wandering ... to be forgiven by the self, as well as by others. His emotions are complex and sporadic, his words are curt, and his tone is unabashedly in-your-face. Oh yeah, and of course, there's a healthy jolt of that New England that I so distinctly remember:

She told me that “If I didn't
know you personally, I would
never approach you ... you're very blue
collar and always have a sneer on your face.”

Well, baby, I wear that persona like
a battle scar ... never wanting to
wear my poetic side on my sleeve.

[ ... ] (from “Blue Collar, White Heat”).

•This book was sent to me from Aleathia Drehmer; I have corresponded with both authors and have met Dan Provost briefly in person.•
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Galley-On

LETTER OF MARQUE: ARTICLE THE THIRTY-NINTH

Teaching Metaphors | Nathan Graziano

Poetry, brief prose
76 pages
5” x 8” perfect-bound trade paperback
ISBN: 978-0-9769857-9-2
First Edition
Sunnyoutside
Buffalo, NY, USA
Available here and on Amazon
$15

Mr. Graziano is the teacher you want teaching your kids. He's smart, witty, and aware of what's going on in the public school system today. What he's not is a

[...] glorified babysitter, zookeeper, or sick sexual predator [...] (from the introduction),

and these pages exist to debunk the myth that public-school teachers aren't interesting, professional, hard-working, intelligent, important, or necessary individuals.

As the daughter of several generations of public-school teachers, I can tell you that they are, indeed, interesting and necessary individuals. My poor mother spent over thirty years teaching in an underprivileged, underfunded, middle school/high school conglomerate, where she taught sixth-through-twelfth graders in the same classes. You can't tell me that what she did on a daily basis was anything less than astounding; to find something of interest and understanding equally between a sixth grader and a twelfth grader on the same subject in the same class is nothing short of a miracle. But even if I hadn't had this background of experience going into this book, these words would still have touched me.

The beautiful paperback book (Everything Sunnyoutside creates looks ungodly perfect.) is split into two categories — The Student Body and The Faculty — that encompass the stereotypes of the two, as Graziano's introduction says, for good or bad:

[ ... ] because [the sterotypes] speak to a human need to categorize[.] [ ... ] [T]he labels slapped on us often reveal some core truths about ourselves, both as individuals and as a society.  [ ... ]

The truths you'll find here will be at once familiar and startling. You'll remember the hallways of your yesterdays vividly, but you'll also see them in a whole new light and through a whole new perspective, a different set of eyes. Graziano will make you remember it all new, unlearn it, then relearn it again, all differently. The words are not just caricatures or stereotypes of people he's met or taught along the way, but studies of people as a whole, of what makes us human as we grow and learn and interact, what makes us do the things we do, and what that is going to inspire in us in the future. A reader can almost see the way these figures on these pages will become over time, how they will stretch into each one of us, how these personalities become ours, become we as grown adults. This is a portrait of the American school as people, not as a thing — as the living soul behind it that makes up its body and churns out those living spawns that become we.

The book starts right out with this beautiful thing that shows us so perfectly the two sides of our narrator:

[ ... ]
   In your more serious moods, you stand outside your classroom in your shirt and tie and fail to see yourself.
   Other times, you can see your own face through the steam, wearing that dizzy gaze that has always belonged to you.

We learn our narrator so completely in these pages. He teaches us ourselves, and he teaches us him. We learn to trust him, to want to learn from him, to let him be our guide down these hallways as he introduces us to ghosts and necessity. He's wary and cautious, and he's careful and accurate, a quiet observer who then keenly interacts like a stranger next to you, joining into your overheard conversation and leaving you with a new piece of knowledge. He doesn't offer you solutions or answers — sometimes, he even hands you more questions — but he offers you a glimpse of something new and the spirits who inhabit that something new. He offers you something broken, but doesn't plead with you to fix it, only to understand it.

And that's the tour we take through the broken public school system, with a very able navigator at our helm. But not just through the school, also outside the school, in the real world, where we see these teachers and students as humans or as animals and what this system, this life, this world has made of them:

[ ... ]

embarrassed because this former student sees me
outside of the classroom without the natty necktie
that frames me in a portrait of adult asexuality,

embarrassed because I see him standing alone
in the winter mist with his baseball hat crooked
while his mother's frail hand clings to a phone.  (from “At a Red Light in the Winter Mist”).

It's in this education we learn our animalistic behavior, how we exist on the inside and how different that is from the outside, how we carry ourselves, then bury ourselves. And underneath and over the top of all of this, is the running knowledge that this narrator, this teacher, is a figure who cares. Compassion threads through his words. He views brokenhearted students with unjudging empathy, and the proud with a quiet understanding of the downfall to come, and yet, like a rock, he stands there for all of them equally, unwavering in the knowledge that he cannot require them to learn anything, he can only hope to teach it. Sometimes he's a spectator, doing nothing; sometimes the guardian. In this he is both teacher and student, and his students are also both. So unbelievably human and flawed.

Throughout The Student Body, we meet the same characters again and again — Yesterday's Princess, The Slick-Talking Senior, The Man-Boys — and we watch their slow progression or deterioration with new eyes. When we get to The Faculty, we get a new cast of repeating characters — Head Case, The Ex-Hippie, The Stress Bomb — and where The Student Body section shimmered, The Faculty section fair glows in fluorescence. Graziano is no longer the observer, but the player. We see his element, the dysfunction, the smooth machine, the chaos, the serenity. From this second section, comes my favorite poem, “The Man Who Whistles at the Copy Machine” (in part):

I see him like the naked eye sees comets:
on rare occasions. It's always at the copy machine.
He teaches in a classroom eons from the English wing,
in the black hole known as the industrial arts.
Today he's pirating a how-to leaflet on drywall,
an inch-thick packet that reads like Sanskrit to me.

I'm waiting, fidgety, with a W. C. Williams poem
dog-eared in a fat anthology, a piece
I neglected to photocopy before class.

The Industrial Arts Teacher [ ... ]
stands hunched [ ... ]
[ ... ] whistling a song
I recognize [ ... ].
He whistles in perfect pitch, merrier
than Wordsworth's daffodils dancing ten pages ahead
in the anthology growing heavy in my hands.

There's no reason to expect him to allow me
to step in front, make a quick photocopy
and get back to my creative writing students.
So I lean against the wall and listen to him whistle,
enjoying this impromptu concert by a man
whose own students are too smart to study poetry.

There is laughter here

[ ... ]

We never made it past
the giggling after I wrote
“assonance” on the board.  (from “A Deeper Appreciation for Sound”)

and plenty of moody seriousness laced with casual humility and self-awareness. But above all there is a connection, a portal to a world that is real and exists for all of us, a composite of what will fold into the American Dream from a steady stream of paradoxical dysfunction and serenity. There is humility, and there is humanity. This book touches on everything from state testing to student apathy to financial budgets to Homecoming dances to faculty-meeting doughnuts, finally unfolding into an Epilogue that is to die for, one of the best pieces I've read to date, and I'm not going to share a word of its awesomeness with you. You need to buy the book solely for the punctuation of the Epilogue to the ending of this tale. It will make you feel for teachers everywhere, maybe get out your notebook and pen a thank-you note while you watch the boats leave the harbor.

•This book was sent to me from the author because I'd previously admired his work, and I have since corresponded with both the publisher and the author.•
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LETTER OF MARQUE: ARTICLE THE THIRTY-SEVENTH

It is Winter | Jeff Fleming

Poetry
34 pages
5 ½” x 8 ½” photocopied chapbook
Nibble Press
nibblepoems[at]gmail[dot]com

This poetry chapbook is a short read, more of a novelty of one story arc than a full-on chapbook collection. The story is uncertain, intentionally vague, as if we are getting the same glimpses of the pieces as the characters, themselves. It's set up to read as a continuous piece, with each poem labeled in order as prologue, chapter one, chapter two, and so on down to epilogue. To read a poem out of order here would not do justice to the full body of work.

The story is written in third person with a “she,” whose viewpoint is most followed, and a “he,” whose viewpoint is more vague. The prologue and epilogue, however, are written in the first person, seemingly from the male perspective, and seem to tie in as endnotes in the here and now, like a voyeur harking back on a bygone tale or watching it unfold in a film that he is lost within. He might be the man on the pages sandwiched between the bookends, or he might just be a spectator; we'll never fully know, but he seems to know far more of the story than he's letting on. What we do know is that there is constant tension from the onset,

[ ... ]
you said later

you forgot throwing me out
couldn't hear the pounding

my fists on the door
but i know

when the fury comes
you hear everything  (from “merry goddamn christmas”)

everything is wintry,

[ ... ]
the moon was cracked ice

[ ... ]  (from “merry goddamn christmas”)

[ ... ] winter
clouds make
their way
across his vision

[ ... ]  (from “calling out”)

[ ... ]
through a fog
of falling snow
flakes like bullets

[ ... ]  (from “small drifts”)

and the woman has clearly pulled the trigger on the man. He is believed to be dead, although we never actually see him die on the pages. But through the pages, we watch her fade with the torment, the guilt, and the freedom. She is mysterious. The gunshot is mysterious. We don't know what happened, what triggered it, if you will. But like a succulent piece of flash fiction that gives a reader only a snippet of the full story, we take the journey and accept the torment.

I'll leave you with my favorite piece in its entirety, “her mouth a line”:

she thinks
of him
every year
when the first
heavy snow
covers the fields
and strong
impulses drive
birds south

she believes
they are both
better off

•This book was sent to me from the author because I have corresponded with him.•
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LETTER OF MARQUE: ARTICLE THE THIRTY-SIXTH

Marymark Press Give-Out Sheet Series: February 2013 | Various Authors

Experimental poetry, artwork, photography, interviews
5 pages
8 ½” x 11” loose sheets
Marymark Press
45-08 Old Millstone Drive
East Windsor, NJ 08520 USA
Free

These give-out sheets come to me roughly monthly, and have for years. The man behind the press, author/editor/publisher Mark Sonnenfeld, is one of the hardest workers in experimental poetry. I have to warn you, though, this is experimental poetry in every facet of the definition. That's what Marymark Press promotes: an independent, free-flowing style that mixes coherency with the absurd with the near non-sensical.

This is a lot of people's thing, and if it's yours, then this is the best of the best for finding experimental poetry that reads more like mail art or word art. This particular set of give-out sheets contains an interview with poet and mail artist, Teresinka Pereira (although no actual poetry or mail art by her, so out of context, it doesn't mean as much to read the interview); poetry by Mark Sonnenfeld and Arnold Skemer; artwork by Austria's Erich Sündermann; and photography by Germany's Andrew Maximilian Niss. I have to admit that I love how globally spread Sonnenfeld's projects are; there always seems to be at least one piece by an artist from a different country, so this is a great representation of experimental work the world over.

Some snippets, so you can see just how experimental this stuff goes (I picked the most coherent ones for samples, too.):

[ ... ]
to visit the haphazard roundness,
the merger of disparate plans
blending into each other
with odd cartographical logic
that evolves to acceptance
of the seeming ordinariness
of the mundane.  (from “The Complexity of the Grid” by Arnold Skemer)

[ ... ]
Rewriting in a studio
(funeral) procession      trades
the electric guitar rails real
together                    or
before
something very
vernacular
“big space” prototype.  “It
would
not be   me
though.”  (by Mark Sonnenfeld)

•This pamphlet was sent to me from the publisher because I have corresponded with him.•
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LETTER OF MARQUE: ARTICLE THE THIRTY-FIFTH

ZYX #63 | Various Authors

ZYX is an old school, zine-style literary rag, photocopied and corner stapled, compiled by hand, and featuring editorials, reviews, and poetry from the small press. It comes out every couple of months and showcases some of the best (and some of the most underappreciated) poetic talent in the indie press. Many of the poets are older and not from the digital generation, so this is an outlet to find a lot of awesome, rare work that you can’t find plastered all over the Internet. This little zine is a paper-only, snail-mail publication. And that makes me smile.

The issues always start off with an editorial, journalistic-style rant, or story by editor Arnold Skemer, and they’re usually quite profound (although often laced with tension). Then we segue into reviews of other small-press books, and then into the poetic submissions by others. In this issue, we have: Normal, Alan Catlin, Nathan Whiting, David Stone, J. J. Campbell, B. Z. Niditch, Guy R. Beining, Jean Esteve, Richard Kostelanetz, Simon Perchik, The Poet Spiel, and David Chorlton, with several pieces by each. There is some of the absurd here, as this zine is not afraid to take on experimental work. Excellent outlet to see a sampling of all kinds of work, seriously. And the poem, “softly and tenderly home: a trilogy” by The Poet Spiel is so painfully good that it is worth every red cent this journal costs. (Not that the cost will bleed you, just sayin’.)

My favorite snippets from this issue:

[ ... ]
Somewhere the ghost of Johnny Appleseed is being
Sodomized by the ghost of Walt Whitman unnoticed
In the fields of Gettysburg
Somewhere a hummingbird has taught a madman how to
Forget himself
[ ... ]  (from “The Other Side of Each Hour” by Normal)

[ ... ] Wandering leads to quarry’s
edge, derelict chalk mines, earth moved to make
cement, acres of residual dust, empty huts,
communal centers, workers’ itinerant shacks
left empty when work stopped, equipment was
left to rust, the holes filled with a pasty
accumulation of rain, squalid breeding grounds
for insect larvae skimmed by oils, residues,
a legacy left by thieving landlords, robber barons,
for those unable to move on, those cursed to have
contracted a post-industrial disease of seeing;
where a match strikes water, it burns.  (from “D. H. Lawrence and The Man Who Died” by Alan Catlin)

[ ... ]
Do you collect injuries?
Gems are easier to inherit,
not that we care if our heirs wear
our injuries or our gems.  (from “Health” by Nathan Whiting)

[ ... ]

god’s away on
business and all
the good soldiers
are busy with
virgins

[ ... ]  (from “the letters to santa” by J. J. Campbell)

[ ... ]

how the troops return minus one
sometimes two or more somehow they return
each tour of duty he’s made it back home
     respiring through his tongue like a spent dog

he gets smacked with wet cheers and balloons
but he cannot recall those who greet him
and he does not trust hands that grope him
and the blare of the band spooks him
how eyes in the back of his head
     weigh each twitch in the ruckus
but he doesn’t know which way is home

[ ... ]  (from “softly and tenderly home: a trilogy; the homecoming” by The Poet Spiel)

Now, aren’t you convinced? If you want to see what the independent press is all about, this is the real deal. There’s no price listed, but if you send $2, or maybe just $1 and a #10 SASE with a Forever stamp if $2 breaks you, to the address above, I’m sure you can get a copy.



•This book was sent to me from the publisher because I have corresponded with him.•
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LETTER OF MARQUE: ARTICLE THE THIRTY-FOURTH

More than the Alley | Doug Draime

Poetry
5½” x 8½” trade paperback
144 pages
$15.00
Interior Noise Press; Austin, TX
ISBN-10: 0981660665
ISBN-13: 978-0981660660
Available at interiornoisepress.com and on Amazon

Ah, Doug Draime. What to say about the man? He is a gem of the small press and his poems are bursts of fresh air among too many other gulps of same ol’, same ol’. This book — this beautiful, robust, necessary book — will not disappoint even the toughest of small press critics … a category I generally find myself gracing. So take it from a source who’s been around the indie press block a few times: Draime’s the real deal.

Interior Noise Press puts a lot of work and passion into their creations, and this collection is no exception. Cover to cover, it’s laid out beautifully, decently edited, and bound in sturdy trade paperback. Worth every cent for the words, of course, but definitely just for the packaging and (insane!) quantity of poems alone, if nothing else convinces you.

Mr. Draime weaves tales of bygone days with the best of ’em, from rock ‘n’ roll jukebox bars to back alleyways to memories of ’Nam, in poems that read almost as prose, short vignettes and stories broken into lines as sporadically as the man appears to be broken himself. He is the master of real, dingy, gory tales of life’s darkness and vivid, harrowing images, from men in factories sliced to death by sheet glass, to hookers and wasted women he simply cannot save from themselves,

            [ … ]

            Her 5-year-old daughter

            came out from

            the back bedroom

            and stood behind

            her mother

            in the doorway

            wide-eyed,

            terrified from all our

            yelling

            [ … ]

            I [ … ] touched her on the arm,

            telling her

            I wouldn’t leave

            till her mother felt

            better in the morning.

            She just pulled away from me gently, smiling,

            and said it was OK,

            that the other

            men had just left her sleeping on

            the couch, or sometimes the floor.

            [ … ]     (from “On a Dark Night Across from the Hollywood Cemetery”)

to the horny, lowdown, and downright crass nature of sex-driven men

            [ … ]

            it didn’t

            take

            long

            to dawn

            on me

            that I’d

            stuck my

            dick in the

            wrong

            go-go

            dancer.     (from “How He Met His First Wife”).

Draime doesn’t mince words or cower behind pretty flowers and puffs of silly steam. This is not poetry for the faint of heart and not a man you want to give a hug, although he probably needs one. These are the words of a man who has lived hard and fast, has had run-ins with cops,

            [ … ]

            “Well, kiss my ass,”

            I joked with one of the cops.

            “The last thing I remember,

            I was smoking a joint

            at a friend’s house in Silverlake.”

            [ … ]

            That’s when I had to re-learn

            that you don’t joke

            with the cops.  [ … ]     (from “Routine Stop”)

jail cells, brawling,

            [ … ]

            I told him I had just kicked

            the ass of Jerry from over

            on 13^th Street.  He laughed

            and said it was

            about time someone

            cleaned that bastard’s plow.

            [ … ]     (from “Jerry from 13^th Street”)

booze, and drugs of the unfrilly kind. He gives easy and experienced voice to the wasted and tormented lives of society’s underbelly: the drunks, the dirty cops, the corrupt politicians, the suicidal, the disillusioned, the dead-eyed,

            [ … ]

            I was watching the

            dead eyes of

            the waitress, arguing

            with the dead eyes

            of the cook.

            [ … ]     (from “The First Hooker (or Dead Eyes in Chicago)”)

the ugly,

            [ … ]

            He [ … ] pulled his t-shirt

            up to the back of his neck

            revealing a large, imbedded

            nasty looking gash

            in the middle of his back

            clear down to

            the cheeks of his fat ass.

            [ … ]     (from “Red’s Tavern”)

and he makes no apologies for knowing their pain well enough to comment on it. He’s clearly been there … more than once.

I say with no criticism but with earnest truth that this is not a lighthearted read, not an enjoyable patio selection with the book club. Some of the scenes are downright hard to stomach and will make even the most galvanized of men grimace. The poems are best served with a side of rocks and the knowledge that the journey you are about to take through the pages will not be flowery, but will be lasting and necessary.

I leave you with my selected favorite lines from the book. If they grab you, well … you know what to do — support the independent press:

            [ … ] Memory

            replaces everything lost

            in memory.  [ … ]     (from “Into the Bleak Abyss of Night”)

            [ … ]

            sometimes it burns and burns

            the trees we can’t see the

            forest for.  [ … ]     (from “Sometimes”)

            [ … ]  The middle was not

            in the middle, but off

            to the right side, positioned

            like an open grave.  [ … ]     (from “Trip to Nowhere”)

            [ … ] you

            called me a pet name

            you used to use when we

            were pretending a life

            together [ … ]

            [ … ] your heart

            is the same old heart    bleeds

            like an ulcer and I

            can’t stop the bleeding

            and I never could     (from “Colors and Other Things”)

•This book was sent to me from the publisher because I have corresponded with the author.•
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LETTER OF MARQUE: ARTICLE THE THIRTY-THIRD

Café Rosetta | T. Kilgore Splake

T. Kilgore Splake is a creature of habit, drinking his coffee every single morning in a café and penning poems about the café's patrons. A fellow Michigander (Props to my home state!), he lives in the Upper Peninsula, where time moves slower, coffee is still meaningful and lends to prolificacy, and the winter sucks the life from a younger soul but caters to a slower life perfectly. These are the poems and full-color photographs, wrapped tightly in a nicely packaged trade paperback, that were inspired by the other visitors in the stubborn winter of Northern Michigan at a little espresso and vegetarian hole in the wall called Café Rosetta.

Most of the poems deal with the goings on of the café:

[ ... ]
early morning gossip
dishes washed
sinks cleaned
carpets vacuumed
wondering how to spend
rest of friday's hours
[ ... ].

Like the hustle and bustle of the café, these poems continue to flow seamlessly: no titles, no capitalization, no punctuation, just the ol' graybearded bard's signature style of short bursts of centered lines flowing from one page to the next like continuous sips on a familiar mug — yet choppy in places, like sips that are too hot against the roof of the mouth, so one must pause for a moment to ease the sting.

And some of the scenes do sting, too (If you are a plumpish person, this is not the book I would recommend for you.);

[ ... ]
obese rolling fat
small backpack
riding backbone flab
ordering rich pastries
feeding chubby face
like old ore train
car topped high
copper load to
tamarack smelter

some are rather sad,

[ ... ]
too early
for memorial day tourist
not a local regular
greyhound lost child
riding to highway's finish
seeing end of the world
escaping mother
ghost of distant stepfather
drinking rosetta coffee
[ ... ]

[ ... ]
home alone pause
before rosetta coffee
looking for a friend
older children grown
loose wedding ring
[ ... ]

and some, though seldom, are sweet:

late march
sun shining
winter sparrows singing
pretty young girl
[ ... ].

There are some repeated scenes, visuals, and lines in here — Ethiopian coffee, TV Weather Channel, the cliffs, Point Betsy, the poet tree, early morning — that could probably be condensed, but overall, the repetition gives the feeling and appearance of routine, of a daily journey and ritual that begins with coffee and ends at the cliffs. Be prepared to take that journey, and grab a warm cup of joe while you're at it.

The book is available from Music Shoe Press here.

•This book was sent to me from the author because I have corresponded with him.•
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It's Grrrrrrr ... illa!

The latest and final Guerilla Pamphlets issue is ready for your imbibing.  It’s only been two years!  Where are you going, Mr. Guerilla?  So sad.  But do enjoy the last issue.

LETTER OF MARQUE: ARTICLE THE TWENTY-EIGHTH

Suicide Porn | J. J. Campbell

Poetry

44 pages

5 ½” x 8 ½” chapbook

Interior Noise Press

Available at interiornoisepress.com

$8.00

Even though the polished, glossy cover with trimmed page edges on laid paper makes this collection of poetry look like a pretty package, the title alone should let you know what to expect from Campbell: raw, gritty, truthful poems from the estranged underbelly of healthy and happy society. This book is not to be read by the flower girls and lovely poetesses of the soft, functioning world, nor by the sick at heart with razors resting nearby, but it should be devoured by those who crave a dark truth.

The poems are fairly dismal, dealing with a lack of direction in life,

“mission accomplished”:

[ ... ]

i remember when

i was 13 i never

wanted to grow

up

now in my mid

30's

mission

accomplished

physical pain, talk of death, questioning of faith, music therapy, being overweight, and other unpleasant dark topics, yet interspersing them with talk of finding love and maintaining quite a bit of wicked humor throughout the hard times. There are many juxtapositions that show the complexity of this often-sad man, such as his apparent sadistic pleasure in not caring about the happiness of his own family, yet caring very deeply with heavy remorse and understanding for a fellow peer who is in distress and also suicidal, as if the mirrored understood pain almost makes it more real and sympathetic to him than his own family's feelings.  

He often uses winter and nature's harshness as a metaphor for his own cold pain and constant struggle, as in

“seven kittens”:

[ ... ]

i'm refusing to

name them until

they make it

through a winter

outdoors

[ ... ]

i figure whoever

makes it to march

will be blessed

with a name they'll

never understand

anyway

[ ... ]

and

“like it nearly had a meaning”:

[ ... ]

those deep dark pools

of regret

remorse

unrequited love

winter was settling in

the winds bringing the

harsh chill of death to

your door

[ ... ]

and uses death in nature and the failing of crops due to unforeseen natural conditions as a symbolism of his own slow decay and human failings in his own surroundings, as in

“lost on the other side of the horizon”:

[ ... ]

i've watched a

potentially good

crop of corn and

soybeans turn to

dust right before

my eyes

[ ... ].

This book also touches on love, sex, women, finding the right partner, the ups

“like a fading kiss”:

[ ... ]

she had the eyes

of the ancient

dead greeks

[ ... ]

and the downs

“your wall of regret”:

[ ... ]

all the while i still

believe my love for

you exists for a reason

but anytime i try to

express that you run

off to swim with the

shallow end of the

gene pool

[ ... ]

and the spaces in between where love is concerned. But J. J.'s love and emotions run deep and inconsistent, more human than most poets who write even the greatest words of true love. While many of the topics and words of this book deal with dark, quiet, obstinate pain, you would do yourself a misdeed to mistake the darkness for utter brutality. Because out of that darkness comes a perverse and savage sense of humor that makes the wicked, uncouth mind laugh right out loud in unexpected delight. And that's where Campbell becomes a genius; he has the ability to take agonizing situations and make them realistically, yet inhumanely, funny and charming. I'll end this review with a few of my favorite humorous, if sadistic, passages:

“within fives minutes of entering the supermarket”:

standing in the beer

aisle wondering if the

imported shit is really

worth four extra dollars

when this attractive

black woman fell to

the floor

my first inclination

was to laugh

[ ... ]

i settled for domestic

[ ... ]

and

“up by the big barn”:

[ ... ]

do you wanna see it?

the yankees just got swept

i've got a stack of rejection

letters and my fantasy baseball

teams have gone to shit

of course i want to see it

[ ... ]

and

“deer makes a nice stew”:

every time i mow the

grass out here on the

farm the deer that lives

in the front woods pokes

its head out and stares

at me

the kind of stare that

comes off to me as he's

asking just who the fuck

am i to disrupt his day

[ ... ].

Do yourself a favor and buy this book. You might just save J. J.'s life and keep him alive to write another.

•This book was purchased from the author because I have corresponded with him.•
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LETTER OF MARQUE: ARTICLE THE TWENTY-FOURTH

Finding Solace in the Wind | Stephanie Hiteshew

Poetry
52 pages
5 ½” x 8 ½” chapbook
BoneWorld Publishing
3700 County Route 24
Russell NY 13684
Order #MHC-46
Available here
$5.00

Stephanie Hiteshew has got to be one of the wittiest characters in the small press, and this collection of snappy short poems sums up her staying power perfectly. She's got guts; no one's blushing away from this one, and she's not afraid to make a stand ... and man, is it beautiful. Right from the get-go, this book is a study in the short poem, a journey through short bursts of thought and emotion, and it's not just “some poems" — it's an insanely intricate craft that I can't even begin to touch, but that Hiteshew has mastered with the best of them, even her stated “mentor," the late Dave Church, one of the small press' finest short poem writers.

The book is broken into three distinct sections: Muse, Hobo, and Sextets.  Muse takes us on a journey that seems to deal mostly with nature, leaving the reader wondering if that is, indeed, Hiteshew's muse, or if her muse lies more in the form of harking after her elders, such as the images that bring to mind the spirit of Carl Sandburg in Hiteshew's poem, “Fingerprints”:

Fog

left its

fingerprints

clear across

the water

Stephanie's true inner self is revealed in these monumental bursts of thought, and some of them shine a lantern on a the insecurity tucked away inside her, such as “Tunnel,”

To trust a dark

tunnel

to not have

a brick wall

in the middle of it

is just something

I can't do.

which gives away so much of Stephanie's inner questioning, her distrust in what others say/think/do without being challenged. From the words of this book, it is clear that Stephanie is not going to believe that someone didn't put a brick wall smack dab in the middle of all of her dark tunnels, literal or metaphorical, and she is going to proceed with caution until she's sure there isn't one. This caution makes her notice more than the average bear: she's got a million pair of eyes catching each detail

“Shadows”

A mass 

of clouds

freed shadows

from their people

for one, glorious

moment.

and squeezing them into the moment with just a few words, as many words as are needed to describe just one second in time, just one look in one direction on one item or one person, and then summed up with a quick-witted poet's first and fleeting thoughts. This first section deals with a perception of nature, moments of sunshine, clouds, rivers, rocks, scrawled out almost as an obituary for the passing of beautiful days, as

Some days,

despite what

the math says,

are longer

than others.

The words of “Despite” ring true to a poet's mind and pen, and are a firm segue into the next section: Hobo. These are truly hobo poems, nothing metaphorical here, as Stephanie details the streets, its inhabitants, its pain, its looming eyes, and her time there:

“Sharing”

The streets

all know

my name,

these two years

we've spent sharing.

There's real pain and grit in the words, a knowing that can only come from experience, a silence in between the short lines that can only be heard by being there. There is a need to change from the unknown, a want to keep the moments that matter and to cling to the familiarity,

“Keeper”

Days change

without stopping.

I beg

on my knees

to keep this one.

and then this beautiful release of hope that suddenly rises unexpectedly out of the gloom, keeping the thoughts from dipping too far into the dark side:

“All Things Found”

Of all things

found,

the world

before me

waiting,

was the least 

expected.

Thus taking us lucidly and high-spiritedly into the third section: Sextets, which are just that, poems of a more random nature held together by their common thread of containing six lines. This set of poems ranges anywhere from familial and parenting issues:

“Daughter You Know”

Every time I leave

the world takes on

new meaning.

Never do I come back

the daughter

that you know.

and

“Borders”

She drew

outside of the lines

confused by

her teacher's reasoning.

Her sight had been

borderless since birth.

to politics to nature to religion to sheer words of wisdom:

“Enough of Today”

Grasp enough 

of today

so that

tomorrow

will take you

seriously.

and ending with a bang that absolutely wraps up Stephanie's charming, witty, humble, sincere, and fragile paradoxical personality perfectly:

“Quotable”

My last words

will most likely

be ‘ouch.’

Not quite the

quotable person

I'd like to be.

The one problem a reader can hit upon with a collection of short poems is that it's easy to rush it.  But I urge you — don't rush it.  Hiteshew's poetry is worth savoring, so take each clump of perfect thought and let it roll around in your mind, paint the picture, make it last, and I promise you, her words will stay with you.

[And speaking of painting the picture, three cheers for the awesome, striking cover art by Sarah Walroth! Fits the “falling” and “windy” mood of the poems perfectly.]

•This book was sent to me from the publisher because I have corresponded with both the editor and the author.•
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LETTER OF MARQUE: ARTICLE THE TWENTY-SECOND

Facebook | T. Kilgore Splake

Poetry
36 pages
5 ½” x 8 ½” chapbook
Rusty Truck Press

I'm from Michigan, and I've seen what those cold, cold winters can do to you, up there in the U. P., where it's frozen for most the year. I've seen how it can freeze an old heart into believing there's no good in technology, but I disagree with this sentiment ... and not just because I'm an avid Facebook user ... and not just because one day T. Kilgore Splake was my Facebook friend, and then the next day he had vanished, profile and all.

No, not these trivial things, but I do find the things Mr. Splake says about our generation on these pages a tad bit insulting, with the recurring themes of “adult children,” “self-centered,” “nothing to say,” “no talent,” “look at me,” and “soap opera,” to name a few. But I digress. Let's first discuss the work before we get into the rebuttal of the work, shall we?

This current book, of the many, many books written prolifically by the man who never stops writing, is a comment on our society, a younger generation that communicates online, through the webbings of the Internets, tangled in this profile or that social scene, and keeping conversations going through text, rather than face to face. Perhaps Splake prefers everyone to sit and have a cup of coffee with him in his brisk Upper Peninsula local shop of choice, but as I have no taste for Upper Michigan (except to say that it is beautiful), and I reside quite far away in sunny California, where it is mild year-round and where I can't even afford a cup of coffee, that seems to be a bit impossible, especially constantly. Ergo, Facebook: a way that one can stay connected with friends s/he didn't even know s/he had.  Brilliant.

But Splake doesn't think so, in fact, really quite the opposite. There is so much negativity in this book, that I am quite disbelieving that he could find no good at all in the social device. He comments on it as one of a generation gone by, with talks of Kerouac and Ginsberg, as if my generation should automatically know who those people were, and quite disregarding that, while those authors are great, this is the now.  And we are the now generation that may or may not fit his lines:

adult children

that never ran away from home

circus long gone

That said: the poems. The poems are short, haiku-ish-style, although not following any rules, just following the whimsy of the moment, like they were all inspired by status updates that turned him off. As set in the series, they can read as one continuous poem or as separate tiny vignettes, like fragile sighs of discontentment. Most of them are clearly Facebook-inspired, commenting on people who've said too much or too little, who've given up information that he doesn't feel is appropriate or about which he thinks no one cares or should care, uninspired people who give every detail or who think they're great visionaries:

wannabe visions

narrow and provincial

talkers without frontiers

... Yet, I can't help finding some hypocrisy in these lines, as I think it may be just as narrow and provincial to criticize those who wish to make their visions known, whether those “visions” are awesomely mind-blowing or just untested conjectures. Just as I can't help thinking that, as an ex-Facebook friend of Splake's, these are directly or indirectly faced at me, as well. Not that I'm taking this personally. No, no, not at all, but I think he's missing the point of the importance of this communication — how we are connected now more than ever in this day and age, how writing a handful of letters or making a couple of phone calls doesn't compare on the smallest scale to the hundreds of people I can reach, to the hundreds of conversations I can have daily, with just a few keystrokes. It's true, the personal nature may be gone, it may be colder and less affectionate, but these are changing times, and this is communication, and it is important. All of it, even when we don't understand its importance at the moment.

Okay, so I don't agree with the message. The poems, however, are quite enjoyable, Splake-style in perfect form, loose and cryptic with repeating mantras and visuals in almost a Beat-style; and the book is put together beautifully with nice, thick, glossy paper, a full-color cover, vellum inlay, and saddle-stitching along the spine. If you're not a Facebook-fan, I recommend it as a tool to harden your beliefs; if you are a fan, then you may want to have the same conversation with the self-proclaimed “old grey-bearded bard” that I do.

•This book was sent to me from the author because I have corresponded with him.•
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LETTER OF MARQUE: ARTICLE THE TWENTY-FIRST

Two Torch Singers | Gerald Locklin

Single poem
Edition of 125 signed copies
20 pages
4” x 6” chapbook/greeting card
Kamini Press
Ringvagen 8, 4th Floor
SE-117 26 Stockholm
Sweden
Free for friends of the press

A New Year's greeting from Kamini Press in the form of a glorified card booklet, featuring one single poem by Gerald Locklin in a beautiful layout between laid cardstock and colored paper, with a full-color watercolor of two saggy-boobed torch singers by Henry Denander, the editor of Kamini Press, on the cover. The poem harks back to the days when two torch singers aided in the author's puberty and how they shaped his definition of real women. Very endearing poem by Locklin, and Denander definitely takes time with his works, lovingly crafting each word to make this the nicest “greeting card” I've ever received. Limited edition of 125, signed by both Denander and Locklin, free for friends of the press.

•This book was sent to me from the editor/publisher because I have corresponded with him.•
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LETTER OF MARQUE: ARTICLE THE TWENTIETH

I knew Bukowski like you knew a rare leaf | Harry Calhoun

Poetry
“Forty poems in three acts”
53 pages
ISBN 978-0-578-01634-4
6” x 9” trade perfect-bound paperback
Published by Trace Publications
Available at Amazon

This paperback is a journey in “three acts” about the passions and relations of human beings, surrounded by nature and questions and expectations, accepting things in the past that cannot be changed and looking ahead to a future that is not just owned, but shared. The title sums up two main “characters” in the book touched on repeatedly: Bukowski and nature, seemingly polar opposites, but obviously the cornerstones of two distinct sides making up Harry Calhoun.

The poems are definitely lavish with nature-speak, naming different flowers, giving them almost humanistic personification, describing the seasons of North Carolina with a fondness in which one can revel only when truly in love with his surroundings. On occasion, the reveling is a bit much, as the language becomes — pardon the pun — quite flowery at times, naming a few too many plants and comparing a few too many things to the taste of wine, but it is, nonetheless, pleasant, and certainly one can enjoy flowers and wine enough not to mind.

The book is divided into “three acts,” mostly with a set-up, confrontation, and resolution flow, although the divisions offer up a bit of gray area as to a clear distinction between the poems' placement within the acts. The main arc running through is that the book starts on a very depressing, negative note, dealing with past events — such as the death and subsequent painful forgiving of the author's mother — and ends up far happier, with the author finding a quite-significant significant other and turning a hopeful eye toward the future.

The poems deal with age, coming to terms with getting older (from “Baseball, behind the trees”):

[ ... ] if I had a mirror

it would tell me
summer is not the only season
that relentlessly rushes in[;]

the aforementioned dealings with the lonely death of the author's mother (from “Bad joke”):

[ ... ] finally got to see his mother

[leveled] by a stroke
and croaking like a seal
and unable to speak
and unrecognizing of her own son

[ ... ];

the author's correspondences with Bukowski, and the parallels this had to other parts of the author's life (from “I knew Bukowski”):

[ ... ]

Never met Bukowski
we just corresponded
I liked Bukowski
and I loved my mother

but I can't say I knew either one
better than the other

[ ... ];

the finding of true love that most definitely lit up the author's life (from “A guest in the house of winter”):

[ ... ]

I wonder why you have placed this fireplace
in the midst of my chilly unlit life,
made me a guest in the house of winter
[ ... ];

the necessity of beliefs, questioning, having the imagination to create what's around you, not just live in it (from “The superstition that sustains”):

I've heard that people in Bhutan
now live unbelieving that the yeti exists
[ ... ]

how I could live these many years
without my mythology
how I could live in barren grasses
and stuck in fields the prey of
owls and wolves and foxes

not knowing I had wings
[ ... ];

to the lessons learned from his beloved black Labrador (from “At four years old, I asked my mother: will I die?”):

my beautiful black Labrador
won't live nearly as long as me
and will give me
a microcosm
of what it will be for me
to age from boy to adolescent to man
to decrepitude

[ ... ].

The topics are universal, and the poems are bursting with personal emotion and the baring of one's soul, stripped down to the sadness and the joys in one equal breath, side by side, taken as the parts that make the man.

Overall, a very decent collection of quite pleasant poems. Nothing shocking, nothing crazy, but subtle stories of overcoming a painful past to find a brighter future that will make you want to go water a flower.

•This book was sent to me from the author because I have corresponded with him.•
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