August 31, 2014

Art Inspiring Poetry

There’s a long tradition of poetry responding to visual art (and vice versa), and we thought it would be fun to post a challenge. For the first, Judy Keown, cover artist from issue #45, donated a photograph of an argiope spider. We gave poets a month to respond to this photograph in verse, and received 266 entries. Judy Keown and Rattle’s Timothy Green each selected their favorite poem from the submissions and published them online at Rattle.com.

Given how many people seemed to enjoy the Ekphrastic Challenge, we’ve decided to make it a monthly series, using open submissions of artwork when necessary. Visual artists who would like to participate can submit work now through the end of December, by going here.

If you’re a poet, come back to this page every month to find a new piece of art to inspire your poetry. You’ll have one month to write and submit your poems. Each month, two winners—one chosen by the artist and the other by Rattle’s editor—will receive online publication and $100 each.

For the month of November, our image is the piece below by Morgan Reed. Find more of the artist’s work on his website, but only write your poems about the image below.

Submission Deadline:
November 30th


submit

__________

Previous Winners

 

September 2024 – Barbara Gordon’s “Have you ever eaten breakfast here before?”

Artist’s Choice:
Tanks [construction cones]
Cindy Guentherman

Editor’s Choice:
Reverie Work Ahead
Zeid

 

August 2024 – Tammy Nara’s “Forage”

Artist’s Choice:
Brushscape
Samuel Ertelt

Editor’s Choice:
August Thistle
Sonya Schneider

 

July 2024 – Faizan Adil’s “Lahore”

Series Editor’s Choice:
Song of a Masjid’s Floor
Ammara Younas

Editor’s Choice:
Haiku
Almila Dükel

 

June 2024 – Kim Beckham’s “Terry’s Keys”

Artist’s Choice:
Bigger Than Us
Emily Walker

Editor’s Choice:
What You Thought You Lost
Wendy Videlock

 

May 2024 – Barbara Hageman Sarvis’s “Bird Ascending the Fire”

Artist’s Choice:
Wildfire Dreams
Linda Vandlac Smith

Editor’s Choice:
An Early Autumn Light That Unburies You
Steven Pan

 

April 2024 – Gerrie Paino’s “Night Train”

Artist’s Choice:
Of California, the Wild
Breonne Stiglitz

Editor’s Choice:
Tracks
Matthew Murrey

 

March 2024 – John Paul Caponigro’s “Alignment II”

Artist’s Choice:
The Space Between
Amelie Flagler

Editor’s Choice:
Synapses and Stardust
Brandy Norrbom

 

February 2024 – Christine Crockett’s “Graphing Uncertainty V”

Artist’s Choice:
Things That Collapse
Jonathan Harris

Editor’s Choice:
Shoulder MRI
Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

 

January 2024 – G.J. Gillespie’s “Desperado”

Artist’s Choice:
Emergence
Chris Kaiser

Editor’s Choice:
Portrait of My Father as the Count of Monte Cristo
Joanna Preston

 

December 2023 – Jeanne Wilkinson’s “Cold Sun”

Artist’s Choice:
Curriculum Vitae
Dante Di Stefano

Editor’s Choice:
Watch This!
Tristan Roth

 

November 2023 – Scott Wiggerman’s “Aerial II”

Artist’s Choice:
Flying Back to England That First Time
Rose Lennard

Editor’s Choice:
(Sub)Division
Christine Crockett

 

October 2023 – Arthur Lawrence’s “Shadowland”

Artist’s Choice:
The Addiction Bird
Agnes Hanying Ong

Editor’s Choice:
Pilgrims of the Mound
Conal Abatangelo

 

September 2023 – Carla Paton’s “Yellow Flowers”

Artist’s Choice:
For a Robot
Alison Bailey

Editor’s Choice:
The Rote Stuff
Gary Glauber

 

August 2023 – Lily Prigioniero’s “Seamstress”

Artist’s Choice:
My Wife, Sewing at a Window
Eithne Longstaff

Editor’s Choice:
To the Child Watching His Grandmother Sew
Bradford Kimball

 

July 2023 – Elizabeth Hlookoff’s “Here I Go”

Artist’s Choice:
Fighting the Wind
Teresa Breeden

Editor’s Choice:
Aphorisms Thrown into the Eye of the Blizzard
Tamara Raidt

 

June 2023 – Judith Fox’s “Untold Stories”

Artist’s Choice:
Girl Is Glued to Door
William Ross

Editor’s Choice:
Image of a Woman Along a Sidewalk
Jason Brunner

 

May 2023 – Carmella Dolmer’s “A Lonesome Border”

Editor’s Choice:
What the Astrologer Failed to See in Our Stars
Dick Westheimer

Associate Editor’s Choice:
You Don’t Have to Choose
Beth Copeland

 

April 2023 – Lou Storey’s “All of Us”

Artist’s Choice:
Sestina
Amanda Quaid

Editor’s Choice:
The World Beneath
Devon Balwit

 

March 2023 – G.G. Silverman’s “Lighthouse at the Edge of the World”

Artist’s Choice:
I Asked the Chatbot to Write about a Lighthouse, but It Generated Lies
Pamela Lucinda Moss

Editor’s Choice:
Selah
Kristene Kaye Brown

 

February 2023 – JoAnne Tucker’s “The Kitchen Goddess”

Artist’s Choice:
The Rebirth of Venus
Luisa Giulianetti

Editor’s Choice:
Joy
Melissa Madenski

 

January 2023 – Susan MacMurdy’s “Dream House, Later”

Artist’s Choice:
Devotion
Brianna Locke

Editor’s Choice:
Cut Out
Sandra Nelson

 

December 2022 – J. Stormer’s “Unsatisfied Externals”

Artist’s Choice:
The Room as We See It
Andrew Payton

Editor’s Choice:
Resolution of Memory
Sara Dallmayr

 

November 2022 – Joshua Eric Williams’ “Humid”

Artist’s Choice:
Old Testament Family Tree
Kid Kassidy

Editor’s Choice:
In a Moment
J. A. Lagana

 

October 2022 – René Bohnen’s “Ballet Above the Bay”

Artist’s Choice:
Fault Lines
Margaret Malochleb

Editor’s Choice:
Wingspan
Christopher Shipman

 

September 2022 – Bonnie Riedinger’s “Take Heart”

Artist’s Choice:
Morning Glory
Dion O’Reilly

Editor’s Choice:
Fibers
Ashley Caspermeyer

 

August 2022 – Enne Tess’s “Worm”

Artist’s Choice:
Identity Politics
Drea

Editor’s Choice:
Haute Buttons
Kenton K. Yee

 

July 2022 – Jaundré van Breda’s “Blueprint of a Dream”

Artist’s Choice:
Balancing Act
Ajay Kumar

Editor’s Choice:
Driving in the Rain
Christopher Shipman

 

June 2022 – M-A Murphy’s “Kennedy Lake”

Artist’s Choice:
June 24, 2022
Sarah Russell

Editor’s Choice:
Poem with a Cloud and Frank Ocean Lyrics
José Felipe Ozuna

 

May 2022 – Danelle Rivas’s “El Camino de Esmeralda”

Artist’s Choice:
Camouflage
Katie Kemple

Editor’s Choice:
Laparoscopy, or a Half-Birth
Gabriella Graceffo

 

April 2022 – Greg Clary’s “Truck Stop Shell”

Artist’s Choice:
The Next Time
Byron Hoot

Editor’s Choice:
Broken Places by Daylight
Sandra Kasturi

 

March 2022 – Natascha Graham’s “Anonymous Was a Woman”

Assistant Editor’s Choice:
Her Vanity
Marc Alan Di Martino

Editor’s Choice:
Angular Bones
Jeanie Tomasko

 

February 2022 – Sarah-Jane Crowson’s “Diaphona”

Artist’s Choice:
Homemaker
Mary Meriam

Editor’s Choice:
My Animal Understudy Replaced Me in the School Production of The Tempest
Luigi Coppola

 

January 2022 – Matthew King’s “Dark Figures”

Artist’s Choice:
Emotional Self-Regulation with Birds and Gifted Child
Sean Kelbley

Editor’s Choice:
Why I Love That We’re Not Gods
Sean Keck

 

December 2021 – Bruce McClain’s “Nature People #8”

Artist’s Choice:
Last Reach
Wendell Smith

Editor’s Choice:
The Widower
Nick Bertelson

 

November 2021 – Shannon Jackson’s “Easy Like Sunday Morning”

Artist’s Choice:
This Room
Devon Balwit

Editor’s Choice:
Study Abroad
Cassie Burkhardt

 

October 2021 – Gouri Prakash’s “Family”

Artist’s Choice:
Grief
Susan Carroll Jewell

Editor’s Choice:
On Getting Your Ducks in a Row
Matthew King

 

September 2021 – Rachel Slotnick’s “The Blood in the Veins”

Artist’s Choice:
Revelations
Sean Wang

Editor’s Choice:
Like Dust
Ian Opolski

 

August 2021 – Emily Rankin’s “Rosetta Stone”

Artist’s Choice:
Oracle
Robert E. Ray

Editor’s Choice:
Griefsong Heard at Sea
Shannon Mann

 

July 2021 – Lynn Tait’s “Waste”

Artist’s Choice:
Self-Doubt
Tamara Raidt

Editor’s Choice:
Aloft
Heidi Williamson

 

June 2021 – Annie Kuhn’s “Sunline”

Artist’s Choice:
Color / Off-Color
Emily Pease

Editor’s Choice:
Learning to Swim
C.J. Farnsworth

 

May 2021 – Neena Sethia’s “Contradictions of Being”

Artist’s Choice:
Gods, Monsters, and Complex PTSD
Elizabeth Train-Brown

Editor’s Choice:
What It Is Is What It Is Not and What It Is Not Is What It Is
Karan Kapoor

 

April 2021 – Jojo’s “While Thinking About Snow and Ice”

Artist’s Choice:
A Short Poem About Many Things
Lynn Robertson

Editor’s Choice:
White Spots
Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

 

March 2021 – Susy Kamber’s “Into Thee”

Artist’s Choice:
Supernatural
Laura Theis

Editor’s Choice:
Darling
Jonathan Langley

 

February 2021 – Claire Ibarra’s “Cloud Dance”

Artist’s Choice:
Faces in the Clouds
Devon Balwit

Editor’s Choice:
Telling It Through a Broken Lens
Bola Opaleke

 

January 2021 – Danny Masks’s “Bucket”

Artist’s Choice:
Call Me Boy on Saturdays
Jackson Jesse Nash

Editor’s Choice:
Bound for Glory
Melissa McKinstry

 

December 2020 – Dominique Dève’s “A Horizon Is Vague at a Distance”

Artist’s Choice:
Wilhelmina
Kyle Potvin

Editor’s Choice:
A Horizon Is Vague at a Distance
Martin Willitts Jr.

 

November 2020 – Kim Sosin’s “Leaping Crane”

Artist’s Choice:
Crane Possibly Walking on Water
Erin Newton Wells

Editor’s Choice:
Birdwoman
Lexi Pelle

 

October 2020 – Christopher Whitney’s “Dream Spirit”

Artist’s Choice:
One for Sorrow
Carmel Buckingham

Editor’s Choice:
Four Loaves of Stone, Ascending
Joel Vega

 

September 2020 – Pat Singer’s “Pool Head”

Artist’s Choice:
Visiting the Gardens at DePugh Nursing Center, Winter Park Florida
Vivian Shipley

Editor’s Choice:
In the Dream-Pool
Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

August 2020 – Liz Magee’s “Blue Bowl”

Artist’s Choice:
Mantra
Michael Harty

Editor’s Choice:
A Duty to Look Beautiful
Patty Holloway

July 2020 – Aurore Uwase Munyabera’s “Conflict Resolution”

Artist’s Choice:
Stepfather
Anna Cianciolo

Editor’s Choice:
Circles
Nikita Parik

June 2020 – Denise Sedor’s “The Old Paper Mill”

Artist’s Choice:
Eulogy
Brenda Lee Ranta

Editor’s Choice:
Upstate
Marc Alan Di Martino

May 2020 – Megan Merchant’s “Shadowplay”

Artist’s Choice:
Copulations
Marjorie Thomsen

Editor’s Choice:
There Are Two of Us
Vasvi Kejriwal

April 2020 – Laura R. McCullough’s “Mund”

Artist’s Choice:
The Larger Half
Eric Kilpatrick

Editor’s Choice:
Presidential Fitness Test
Bill Hollands

March 2020 – Kenneth Borg’s “Cour des Voraces”

Artist’s Choice:
Vast Silence
Sally Cobau

Editor’s Choice:
Rain” (haiku)
Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

February 2020 – Marc Alan Di Martino’s “Indietro”

Artist’s Choice:
They Tried to Cover Her Up
Stephanie Shlachtman

Editor’s Choice:
When Peeled Back
Mary Ann Honaker

January 2020 – Kate Peper’s “Open All Night”

Artist’s Choice:
An Index of Visitors
Ajay Kumar

Editor’s Choice:
Cheer
Sean Kelbley

December 2019 – Natalie Seabold’s “Bound”

Artist’s Choice:
Greetings Unanswered
Joshua Martin

Editor’s Choice:
Seeking Purpose
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

November 2019 – Alice Pettway’s “Dog Walking”

Artist’s Choice:
The Anatomy of Endings
Anoushka Subbaiah

Editor’s Choice:
A Caricature
Bola Opaleke

October 2019 – Dana St. Mary’s “Brainyo”

Artist’s Choice:
The Metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa
Jaime Mera

Editor’s Choice:
After the Extinction
Susan Carroll Jewell

September 2019 – Asher ReTech’s “Loss for Words”

Artist’s Choice:
Artifacts from the Buffalo Trunk Mfg. Co. (Defunct)
Rachel Welton

Editor’s Choice:
Budget Cuts
Danny Eisenberg

August 2019 – Kim Tedrow’s “Thai Bees”

Artist’s Choice:
Misinterpreting a Collage During Trump’s Presidency
Jaime Mera

Editor’s Choice:
Bee Sting in the Eye
James Valvis

July 2019 – B.A. Van Sise’s “Restricted | U.S. Air Force”

Artist’s Choice:
Time Travel
Alida Rol

Editor’s Choice:
Naming the Beasts
Elizabeth Morton

June 2019 – Nikki Zarate’s “Blue Whale”

Artist’s Choice:
Ink Blots
Matt Quinn

Editor’s Choice:
Kenai
Katherine Fallon

May 2019 – Ellen McCarthy’s “Desert Road”

Artist’s Choice:
The Years We Lived in the Desert
Megan Merchant

Editor’s Choice:
The Optimist
Emily Sperber

April 2019 – Denise Zygadlo’s “Kandinsky’s Slippers”

Artist’s Choice:
In the Nostalgia Chair
Matthew Murrey

Editor’s Choice:
Art Therapy
Aaric Tan Xiang Yeow

March 2019 – Betsy Mars’s “Floating”

Artist’s Choice:
Trompe L’oeil
Juliet Latham

Editor’s Choice:
Living in Space After a Break-Up
Jaime Mera

February 2019 – Justin Hamm’s “Work Gloves”

Artist’s Choice:
Tan Hides and Hard Stuff
Lisha Nasipak

Editor’s Choice:
Sometimes a Man Has to Get His Hands Dirty
Alexandre Mikano

January 2019 – Vasu Tolia’s “Belle of the Ball”

Artist’s Choice:
Self-Portrait
Rodrigo Dela Pena

Editor’s Choice:
My Mother Was a Dancer and She Never Looked Back
Luigi Coppola

December 2018 – Kari Gunter-Seymour’s “Untitled”

Artist’s Choice:
Substance
Peg Duthie

Editor’s Choice:
Shell Thick and Her Own Planet
Angie Mason

November 2018 – Nicolette Daskalakis’s “Eat Me”

Artist’s Choice:
Placebo
Jill M. Talbot

Editor’s Choice:
The Happy Game
Sean Kelbley

October 2018 – Courtney Carroll’s “Hanging Collage”

Artist’s Choice:
What Is Not Lost
Sharon Cote

Editor’s Choice:
Locked Brakes on Blacktop
Guinotte Wise

September 2018 – Karen Kraco’s “Back of the Beach”

Artist’s Choice:
Beer, Buoy, Boat, Board
Devon Balwit

Editor’s Choice:
The Happy Meditator
Katherine Huang

August 2018 – Alexis Rhone Fancher’s “Waiting”

Artist’s Choice:
That Bit Me
Matthew Murrey

Editor’s Choice:
Sonnet for the Night Shift
Kim Harvey

July 2018 – Bryan DeLae’s “What Once Was”

Artist’s Choice:
Relic
Ginny Lowe Connors

Editor’s Choice:
Grave of a Tourist’s Trap
Hannah V. Norman

June 2018 – Gretchen Rockwell’s “The Sound of Wings”

Artist’s Choice:
The Shape of Your Elbow
Jack McGavick

Editor’s Choice:
Love Poem to My Wife, with Pigeons
James Valvis

May 2018 – Jen Ninnis’s “Message in a Bottle”

Artist’s Choice:
Starfish
Michael Strand

Editor’s Choice:
Dispatch from an Inland University
Jen Jabaily-Blackburn

April 2018 – Melody Carr’s “Through the Looking Glass”

Artist’s Choice:
Facial Recognition
Janice Zerfas

Editor’s Choice:
Your Favorite Writer Is Not Your Mother
Jill M. Talbot

March 2018 – Marion Clarke’s “Chickens!”

Artist’s Choice:
Wildflowers
Paul T. Corrigan

Editor’s Choice:
The Visitant
Marietta McGregor

February 2018 – Jeff Doleman’s “Nine Lives”

Artist’s Choice:
Cobalt Blue
Christine Michel

Editor’s Choice:
Bright Blue Muscle Car
Mike Good

January 2018 – Laura Christensen’s “Muse”

Artist’s Choice:
Half of Everything
James Valvis

Editor’s Choice:
Getting Sober
James Croal Jackson

December 2017 – Barbara Graff’s “Cinderella Doesn’t Live Here Anymore”

Artist’s Choice:
Cinderella Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
Devon Balwit

Editor’s Choice:
Here, She Said
Chris Ransick

November 2017 – Phyllis Meredith’s “Wind-Blown Meadow”

Artist’s Choice:
Young Medusa in the Fall
J.P. Dancing Bear

Editor’s Choice:
Surf Days
Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

October 2017 – Robb Shaffer’s “Biltmore Backyard”

Artist’s Choice:
You Moved Your Whole Town
Paul T. Corrigan

Editor’s Choice:
A Season of Bricks
Simon Costello

September 2017 – Jody Kennedy’s “Agnes Was Here”

Artist’s Choice:
Saved or Spared
Devon Balwit

Editor’s Choice:
Sonnet for the Hole in the Glass
Zoë Brigley Thompson

August 2017 – Jennifer O’Neill Pickering’s “Street Folks”

Artist’s Choice:
Trajectory
Ann Giard-Chase

Editor’s Choice:
Mint in Pots
Ann Wuehler

July 2017 – Samantha Gee’s “Portrait of a Kitchen”

Artist’s Choice:
My First Body Is Beautiful Until
Reese Conner

Editor’s Choice:
After Cleaning the Kitchen Again, He Realizes
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

June 2017 – Ryan Schaufler’s “No Name #2”

Artist’s Choice:
Blue Rain Clouds, Reddish Ground, and Tall Crosses
Jose Rizal Reyes

Editor’s Choice:
A Thousand Possible Clouds
Valentina Gnup

May 2017 – Soren James’ “Pink Bird Corridor”

Artist’s Choice:
Birds of a Feather
Lianne Kamp

Editor’s Choice:
She Tells Him of Her Fears
Priyam Goswami Choudhury

April 2017 – Laura Jensen’s “And the Wolf”

Artist’s Choice:
The Woman and the Wolf
Melissa Fite Johnson

Editor’s Choice:
Coyote
Suzanne Langlois

March 2017 – Lisa Ortega’s “La Familia”

Artist’s Choice:
Chanclas, Find Our Ground
Gloria Amescua

Editor’s Choice:
Modern American Gothic
Stephen Harvey

February 2017 – Debbie McAfee’s “Hwy 41”

Artist’s Choice:
Tanka (Lonely Highway)
Tracy Davidson

Editor’s Choice:
Threading North and South
Matthew Murrey

January 2017 – Harry Wilson’s “Days in San Francisco #1, 1984”

Artist’s Choice:
A Town of Mirrors and Quaking Forty-Fours
Richard Manly Heiman

Editor’s Choice:
An Accounting
Joanna Preston

December 2016 – Chelsea Welsh’s “Caught in the Days Unraveling”

Artist’s Choice:
Menarche
Melina Papadopoulos

Editor’s Choice:
Haiku
Elizabeth McMunn-Tetango

November 2016 – Arushi Raj’s “Light”

Artist’s Choice:
The Surface of Light
Martin Willitts Jr.

Editor’s Choice:
Illuminated
Sherry Barker Abaldo

October 2016 – Alexandra de Kempf’s “Family Matters”

Artist’s Choice:
PTSD
Bill Glose

Editor’s Choice:
Nuclear Family Warfare
Jane Noel Dabate

September 2016 – Ilenia Pezzaniti’s “They All Slept Here”

Artist’s Choice:
Calendario
Devon Balwit

Editor’s Choice:
HotelReview.com – Stay Where You Are, Which Is Here!
T.J. Peters

August 2016 – Heshani Sothiraj Eddleston’s “Clay Hands”

Artist’s Choice:
What We Keep in Clay
Hannah Siobhan

Editor’s Choice:
Throwback at the Art Show
Carol Kanter

July 2016 – Suzanne Simmons’ “Trespass”

Artist’s Choice:
Eco Echo: An Oldster’s Tale
Devon Balwit

Editor’s Choice:
Memoria
Merlin Ural Rivera

June 2016 – James Croal Jackson’s “Go Your Own Way”

Artist’s Choice:
I Don’t Understand Poetry
Jill M. Talbot

Editor’s Choice:
The Climb
Jeffrey Bean

May 2016 – Catherine Edmund’s “Castlerigg”

Artist’s Choice:
Underneath a Car on the Highroad …
Alexander James

Editor’s Choice:
Alone in Love
Mary Meriam

April 2016 – Robert Dash’s “Into the Mystic”

Artist’s Choice:
Invisible
Ann Giard-Chase

Editor’s Choice:
[Here, said the ocean]
Rodrigo Dela Peña, Jr.

March 2016 – Thomas Terceira’s “Metamorphosis 2”

Artist’s Choice:
To Lose and Catch the Trail
Claire Kruesel

Editor’s Choice:
The Balcony Collapses and I Become a Bird
Rebecca Valley

February 2016 – Dave Thewlis’s “Met”

Artist’s Choice:
There, in Folded Space, We Must Have Met
Rommel Chrisden Samarita

Editor’s Choice:
In the Museum of Cold Ideas
Ginny Lowe Connors

January 2016 – Ruth Bavetta’s “Chonicle”

Artist’s Choice:
It Won’t Make the News
Rosemerry Trommer

Editor’s Choice:
Anatomy of a Fustercluck
Stephanie L. Harper

December 2015 – Colleen McLaughlin’s “Contrail”

Artist’s Choice:
Untitled
Angela Johnson

Editor’s Choice:
Contrails
D.R. James

November 2015 – Megan Tutolo’s “City Night”

Artist’s Choice:
Map to the Moon
Matthew Murrey

Editor’s Choice:
Divining
Rosemerry Trommer

October 2015 – Ana Prundaru’s “Beach”

Artist’s Choice:
Kamakura Beach, 1333
Mary Kendall

Editor’s Choice:
The View from the Café
Matt Quinn

September 2015 – Sarah Oyetunde’s “Moon”

Artist’s Choice:
Sister Moon
Jane Williams

Editor’s Choice:
Things You Cannot Answer
Margaret Donsbach Tomlinson

August 2015 – Howard R. Debs’ “Ice House”

Artist’s Choice:
Ice House
Ann Giard-Chase

Editor’s Choice:
Offering
Arnold Perrin

July 2015 – Aparna Pathak’s “Goats”

Artist’s Choice:
Ram Tested at Mount Vert
Grant Quackenbush

Editor’s Choice:
Cruelest of All Are the Gods Who Never Frown
Michael Meyerhofer

June 2015 – Alisa Golden’s “Bench”

Artist’s Choice:
People of the Megabus
Justin Barisich

Editor’s Choice:
Route 9
Martin Willitts, Jr.

May 2015 – Åsa Antalffy Eriksson’s “Forest”

Artist’s Choice:
Teeny Tiny
Matthew Murrey

Editor’s Choice:
Abduction
Kate Gaskin

Spring 2015 – Gail Goepfert’s “Friendship Flowers”

Artist’s Choice:
Potpourri
Liz N. Clift

Editor’s Choice:
Location’s Everything
Steven Dondlinger

. . .

Winter 2014 – James Bernal’s “Mysterious Figure”

Artist’s Choice:
Clean White Sheets
M

Editor’s Choice:
Carelessness
Michael Hallock

. . .

Fall 2014 – Judy Keown’s “Argiope Spider”

Artist’s Choice:
The Writing Spider
Paula Schulz

Editor’s Choice:
The Writing Spider (Haiku)
Caroline Giles Banks

November 25, 2013

Review by Michael Meyerhofer

If I Falter at the Gallows by Edward Mullany
IF I FALTER AT THE GALLOWS
by Edward Mullany

Publishing Genius Press
2301 Avalon Avenue
Baltimore, MD 21217
ISBN: 978-0983170655
2011, 84 pp., $13.25
publishinggenius.com

As a poet, editor, and generally over-opinionated loudmouth, part of my soapbox issue is that many experimental poets seem to be experimental just for the sake of being unconventional and pseudo-provocative—in other words, their poetry is innovative but gutless. Not so with Mullany’s If I Falter at the Gallows. These poems are stylistically unique, mostly short (often just a few lines) with an obvious stream-of-consciousness vibe to them, but what really makes them leap off the page is their underlying tenderness, their unabashed examination of the human condition that reminds me of those famous Chinese poets, Li Po and Tu Fu. There are echoes of William Carlos Williams and James Wright here, too, especially in the following, short poem:

In Praise of Narrative Poetry

Into the bleak
lake on the estate

on which no
one resides, falls

the quiet
rain.

At the same time, these poems are distinctly postmodern, almost always favoring brief, lyrical snapshots over richly textured storytelling. For instance, consider the following, two-line poem in which the title (“The Horse that Drew the Cart that Carried the Condemned Man to the Gallows”) serves as a de facto opening line: “lived for a while longer/ and then died.”

The risk of such a poem is obvious; however, for me, the brevity serves to do an end-run around my natural contempt for blanket statements about mortality by focusing not on the condemned man (referenced only in the title), but the equally mortal beast-of-burden whose survival was simply a stay of execution. In that, it somewhat reminds me of “By Their Works,” a Bob Hicok poem in which Hicok tells the story of the Last Supper by focusing not on the central characters, but on the perspective of a waitress.

While a potential criticism of such short poems is that their ambition is overshadowed by gimmick, that would be missing an additional element that adds tension to Mullany’s work: the element of surprise. Often, that surprise resonates with social commentary that, exactly because of his poems’ blindsiding brevity, has an additional haunting quality. Consider the following five-line poem, New Light:

The sun is hardly
up over

the fields at the edge of the city

when the city
itself explodes.

Usually in poetry workshops, I find myself telling my students over and over again to be specific. What beer did you drink? What movie were you watching? What city were you in when a lover broke up with you over text message? In the case of this poem, though, the lack of background detail—especially when coupled with the points earned by the gentle pacing and pastoral beauty of the opening lines—frees my mind to imagine everything from literal atrocities (such as the atomic bombings of World War II) to more generalized, post-Cuban-Missile-Crisis, Hollywood-inspired fears engraved in our collective subconscious.

As I said, though, Mullany’s poems aren’t simply clever; while his poems are far from confessional, what really drives them is their underlying humanity. Take this short example, “No Children”:

When I come back
as a ghost, and try
to tell you all the things
for which I’m sorry,
you will hear nothing
but the sounds of the dryer,
which doesn’t mean
you’re not listening.

This playful but distinctly metaphysical poem reminds me of Hemingway’s oft-referenced Iceberg Theory in that its sparse details hint at a rich and tragic backstory, despite the fact that the poem also has echoes of dark humor that help carve it into the subconscious for further analysis.

Put another way, many of these poems remind me of Zen koans in that they short-circuit the brain in the best possible way. For instance, I feel like I get the following poem, even though I couldn’t explain it to you for a million bucks (except maybe to say that it has something to do with opposites and contrasts and the tension created between life and death):

The Entombment of Christ

Assume a black
dot on a white

wall and a white
dot on a black

wall are facing
each other.

Probably my favorite poem from this whole book, though, is “The Not So Simple Truth,” which manages to be unabashedly philosophical precisely because it draws its energy not from rote philosophical statements, but tactile, gentle imagery culminating in a musical, final turn:

Potatoes. Dirt and
water. And a soft

towel left for us while
we shower. These

things are no
truer for their

plainness than peas
or pus or leprosy.

Despite the fact that virtually all the poems in this book are crafted with an extreme economy of language, the book itself still feels as broad in style as it does in subject matter. Again, these aren’t confessional poems, nor do they make much use of narrative, but their raw lyricism, twists, and humor speak to a deep intellect bolstered by innovation and, above all, a quiet sense of compassion.

__________

Michael Meyerhofer’s third book, Damnatio Memoriae, won the Brick Road Poetry Book Contest.  His previous books are Blue Collar Eulogies (Steel Toe Books) and Leaving Iowa (winner of the Liam Rector First Book Award). He has also published five chapbooks and is the Poetry Editor of Atticus Review. (troublewithhammers.com)

 

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September 15, 2013

Rattle is proud to announce the winner of the 2013 Rattle Poetry Prize:

Roberto Ascalon

“The Fire This Time”
by
Roberto Ascalon
Seattle, WA

__________

Finalists:

“A Poem for Women Who Don’t Want Children”
Chanel Brenner
Santa Monica, CA

“My Mother Told Us Not to Have Children”
Rebecca Gayle Howell
Lubbock, TX

“Baby Love”
Courtney Kampa
New York, NY

“What He Must Have Seen”
Stephen Kampa
Daytona Beach, FL

“Man on Mad Anthony”
Bea Opengart
Cincinatti, OH

“Laundry List”
Michelle Ornat
Elma, NY

“Man on the Floor”
Jack Powers
Fairfield, CT

“Basic Standards Test”
Danez Smith
St. Paul, MN

“Who Breathed in Binders”
Patricia Smith
Howell, NJ

“Of You”
Wendy Videlock
Grand Junction, CO

 

These eleven poems will be published in the Winter issue of Rattle this December. Each of the Finalists are also eligible for the $1,000 Readers’ Choice Award, to be selected by entrant and subscriber vote (the voting period is December 1, 2013 – February 15, 2014).

Another nine poems were selected for standard publication, and offered a space in the open section of a future issue. These poets will be notified individually about details, but they are: Jacqueline Berger, Daniel Bohnhorst, Jackleen Holton, Sharon Kessler-Farchi, Michael Meyerhofer, Kathleen Nolan, Charlotte Pence, Sam Sax, and Timothy Schirmer.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the competition, which would not have been a success without your diverse and inspiring poems. We received a record 2,105 entries and well over 8,000 poems, and it was an honor to read each of them.

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September 10, 2012

Review by Michael MeyerhoferMy Index of Slightly... by Paul Guest

MY INDEX OF SLIGHTLY HORRIFYING KNOWLEDGE
by Paul Guest

Ecco Press
HarperCollins Publishers
10 East 53rd Street
New York, NY 10022
ISBN: 978-0061685194
2010, 96 pp., $13.99
www.harpercollins.com

Rarely are we given a book that so elegantly marries intellectual and lyrical acrobatics with the emotional equivalent of matter spooned from a neutron star. My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge, Paul Guest’s third book of poems, affects the senses like an unexpectedly tender burlesque show held in the basement of a speakeasy that once upon a time used to be a church. (And just in case it isn’t clear, I mean that as a compliment.)

The first poem, “User’s Guide to Physical Debilitation,” confronts the author’s paralysis due to a childhood bike accident; and it does so with stunning deftness, blending elevated lyricism, gut-wrenching bluntness, and a surprising dose of gallows humor:

Should the painful condition of irreversible paralysis
last longer than forever or at least until
your death by bowling ball or illegal lawn dart

you, or your beleaguered caregiver
should turn to page seven where you can learn,
assuming higher cognitive functions
were not pureed by your selfish misfortune,
how to leave the house for the first time in two years.

Those already familiar with the poetry of Paul Guest know that in the Age of the MFA Program, he is still in a stylistic league of his own, confessional but not quite Confessional, reminiscent of the New York School but not exactly academic (or anti-academic, for that matter). And in the canon of poets with beautifully quotable lines, Guest is as good as anybody, living or dead. The Dallas Morning News (cited on the cover) rightly praises Guest’s first lines, their ability to “zigzag from one eye-opening image to another,” but it’s the final line of “Early in a New Year” that has been haunting me for days:

When I’m quiet and still,
when I stop speaking out
to the motion of the water ringing in the drain,
I listen like a child to the darkness
where monsters sing.

The sheer unexpectedness of this, a poignancy of grief and derision reminiscent of Catcher in the Rye, is just phenomenal. I don’t have a tattoo but if I did, I think those last two lines in particular would make a good addition.

These are extravagantly layered poems–something I normally take as a symptom of emotional distancing, but the layering of Guest’s poems is no mere hipster gimmick; rather, his poems are a textbook example of genuine function mirroring meticulously crafted form.

“Eulogy” reminds me of Tony Hoagland’s famous poem, “Suicide Song,” in that both are sarcastic condemnations of self-destruction counter-balanced with subtle self-indictment and acknowledgement of not only the existence but the sustaining nature of sorrow. In that sense, Guest is irreverently reverent, which I tend to think is exactly the place you want to be. He is also supremely clever with his line breaks:“Tell me where / you were when you heard / but tell me later, much later / the kind of later mathematicians get excited about.”

“One More Theory About Happiness” is another fascinating poem that compares happiness to “an accident / with a powder-actuated nail gun and a man whose arms dead-end / at the bulbs of his elbows / kicking a dog.” Despite tones of bitterness and sardonic humor, this is also a poem that resonates with survival, in which happiness multiplies “with the mythic, sexual frenzy of the rabbit” and the before-mentioned dog-kicking amputee understands, like the Buddha, that “desire is the cause / of all human suffering.” In other words, it’s a poem of duality, neither a defense nor condemnation but a celebration of human frailty and metaphysical contradictions. As the poem’s title also happens to be the title of Guest’s well-praised memoir, one is invited see the same topics explored through these different mediums and in so doing, develop an even greater appreciation for Guest’s distinctive, gutsy style.

It’s sometimes tough to place these poems on the slide rule between cynical and optimistic–precisely because Guest is indirectly pointing out the sheer absurdity of thinking of cynicism and optimism as inflexible polar opposites, rather than hopelessly/hopefully interwoven depending on the time of day. And interestingly enough, given that these poems often incorporate elevated language, there is a refreshing lack of filler; that is to say that reading this book with an editor’s eye, I notice an accessibility and economy of language in Guest’s poetry that one would normally associate with Deep Imagists. I can imagine Guest being unfairly lumped in with more esoteric poets who try to be hip just for the sake of being hip, but in Guest’s case, one gets the distinct feeling that his aesthetic is less a product of style than sheer necessity.

In other words, reading these poems, I can’t imagine them being written in any other way. Guest has effectively created his own form for the task at hand, and in that sense, he deserves as much praise as other luminaries like Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Ann Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, and James Wright who told their story the way they needed to tell it and in so doing, helped bolster and reshape the literary canon for generations to follow.

____________

Michael Meyerhofer’s third book, Damnatio Memoriae, won the Brick Road Poetry Book Contest. His previous books are Blue Collar Eulogies (Steel Toe Books) and Leaving Iowa (winner of the Liam Rector First Book Award). He has also won five chapbook prizes. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, Arts & Letters, River Styx, Quick Fiction and other journals, and can be read online at www.troublewithhammers.com.

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March 10, 2012

Review by Michael MeyerhoferThe Melancholy MBA

THE MELANCHOLY MBA
by Richard Donnelly

Brick Road Poetry Press
P. O. Box 751
Columbus, GA 31902-0751
ISBN 978-0984100569
2011, 116 pp., $16.00
http://www.brickroadpoetrypress.com/

The Melancholy MBA is the debut collection of Richard Donnelly, and in addition to being timely, it’s also pretty damn impressive. Donnelly’s style is unique in that he manages to break new ground (especially in how his frequent use of caesura forces the reader to take his/her time, really digest the language of these poems) while deftly sidestepping the pretension and unfriendliness all too often found in “experimental” poetry. Put another way, these poems are wonderfully fresh and original yet distinctly human in their accessibility.

The “quiet desperation” famously mentioned by Thoreau is everywhere in these poems, made palatable by wry wit blended with the seething frustration and guilt of Middle Management, America. In “Office Window,” the narrator remarks how he’s just been given “a new office with a window” and, nearing middle age, is finally able to see “Minneapolis sunshine.” One could point out the irony of this, suggesting he could just go outside if he wanted to see the sun, but then you have to wonder how visible the sun would be in the city—not to mention the American ridiculousness of having to choose between a paycheck and sunlight.

Another example is “Jelly Beans,” an early poem in which an unnamed character seems unfazed by the near loss of a “three hundred thousand dollar” account, but sternly questions whether the narrator is the one who has been stealing jelly beans from the jar on his desk. On first read, it’s a funny poem combining the frustration of trying to deal with an incompetent who cares more about safeguarding his sweets than keeping his job. On second glance, though, there’s something sad and familiar about that situation, a bit of human frailty staining the machinery gears. We see this again in “She Tricked,” where we read how an unattractive woman famous for tricking “a man into getting her pregnant” flirts with the narrator, who “[doesn’t] blame her,” perhaps because he recognizes something of his own loneliness and desperation in her actions.

Fans of films like Office Space or even the much darker He Was a Quiet Man will find much that is familiar here, to say nothing of those who themselves have actually worked in factories or offices and experienced firsthand the struggle to maintain individuality in a setting that, perhaps by necessity, wears down the creativity and complexity of the human experience in favor of mechanical productivity. For instance, in “Cabo,” the narrator overhears a group of salespeople being berated like disappointing children, warned that they may lose their “spiffs” if they don’t meet their quota. You can almost see the salespeople hanging their heads, shifting nervously, even though we (like the narrator) have no idea what a “spiff” means in this context.

Those themes continue in “Your Life,” which contains perhaps the book’s most striking scene. There, an obviously dissatisfied narrator contemplates an affair with a woman who claims his life is “so perfect,” but instead of taking decisive action one way or another, he hangs up, clears his schedule, then simply spends “half an hour… staring at the wall.” The poet need provide no further details for the reader to imagine the indecision, excitement, and self-loathing that may be going through the narrator’s mind, all being clear illustrations of the very mortality the narrator both fears and seeks to embrace on the deepest level possible.

However, these poems are not merely concerned with dissecting futility, posing the question of what constitutes a physical or a moral life worth living. Nor is The Melancholy MBA a two dimensional view into the mind of a modern businessman (stereotypically as foreign to most poets as, well, poetry to Wall Street). One of this book’s strengths is its unassuming ambition, plus its ability to maintain verisimilitude while illustrating the paranoia, classism and/or racism interwoven in the business community. “Poor People” is an excellent example (reposted here in its entirety):

there are some poor people
in the world
I see them at the Northland Park
Community Center or
Dell Foods in
Avery
they wear dirty sweatshirts
stained sweat pants old
broken tennis shoes
their hair hangs
around their faces
their oily hair
it’s almost like being crazy
is what it looks like to
me until one of their kids
kicks in your
door at two a.m. and says
crazy
I’ll show you crazy

Some of Donnelly’s best uses of tongue-in-cheek humor occur in poems about the opposite sex, many of which also have some underlying feminist commentary or critique of the human condition. For instance, the sectioned poem “Six Short Poems about Love” begins with a vignette about a woman who refuses to bring the narrator coffee, saying she’ll only do that for her husband, but in fact, “not even for / him.” The rebuke seems playful, though, whereas in “The Good Manager,” a frustrated narrator tries to distance himself from a female employee who seems to be asking for leniency, a raise, and a personal shoulder to cry on, though he finishes by telling her to “button / up the top / of that blouse.” While that poem could be read as a lighthearted critique of an inappropriate worker, an alternate view would be to read the poem’s title satirically, so that the rebuke is how the narrator feels he should respond, for whatever reason, but doesn’t. Perhaps my favorite example, though, not to mention my favorite line from the book, is the beginning of “Sex Poem,” which artfully blends eroticism with measured self-deprecation:

A woman’s body
is a foreign country
and you are not a native
you are a man with a stamped
passport.

Underneath these small, often funny tales of lust, ambition, and petty betrayals, the real strength of these poems is their obsession with mortality, coupled with the absurdity of our daily situation. Somehow, though, Donnelly manages to illustrate all this with the timing, charisma, and lyrical acrobatics of a stand-up comic. The end result is that we not only agree with him, nodding and sometimes laughing as we turn the page, but we feel better (and stronger) for it.

____________

Michael Meyerhofer’s third book, Damnatio Memoriae, won the Brick Road Poetry Book Contest. His previous books are Blue Collar Eulogies (Steel Toe Books) and Leaving Iowa (winner of the Liam Rector First Book Award). He has also won five chapbook prizes. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, Arts & Letters, River Styx, Quick Fiction and other journals, and can be read online at www.troublewithhammers.com.

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May 10, 2011

Review by Michael MeyerhoferOvertime by Joseph Millar

OVERTIME
by Joseph Millar

Eastern Washington University Press
Spokane, Washington
ISBN 0-910055-74-2
2001, 61 pp., $29.99
http://ewupress.ewu.edu

I have always had the deepest admiration for poets who know what to say and what not to say: wordsmiths who sense when it’s time to just shut up and let a scene describe itself, free of heavy-handed pretension. Joseph Millar is such a poet. With wit rivaling that of Tony Hoagland and Stephen Dobyns and a sense of timing and elegance reminiscent of William Carlos Williams, Millar treats the reader to humor and poignant observations complimented by fluid lyricism and superbly orchestrated line breaks. Consider this first stanza from Sitting Bull in Canada, which is about as tight a stanza as any written in the English language:

It’s three years since Little Bighorn,
               the Month of Blackening Cherries;
Crazy Horse has been murdered
and civilization keeps rinsing its glittering face in the dawn,
               perfecting the treaties and blueprints,
while the railroad pushes its stained fangs
                                             west through the rivers of grass.

In just eight lines, Millar not only sets the stage but uses masterful alliteration and imagery to take a scene that might very well be cliché in the hands of another poet—the tragic mistreatment of Native Americans—and makes it seem not only engaging, but unexpectedly poignant. While some poets surprise us with lyrical end-runs, Millar utilizes an uncompromising, direct approach that sacrifices nothing and astonishes the reader with its heartfelt grace.

Though Millar’s poems often address the lives and attitudes of Middle America, they do so without that air of condescension often present in today’s socially conscious narrative poetry. Put another way, Millar’s poems are the antithesis of snobbery. For instance, in “Autumn Rainfall,” Millar describes a woman who “…makes her supper late, moving slowly / in the bare kitchen, between the entertainment channel / and the glass tray of leftovers bubbling in the oven.”

While these lines contain obvious commentary on the human condition, they provide said commentary in a way that resonates with tenderness and humility. Also, as a matter of style and craft, Millar knows how to calm the reader and engage him/her before elevating his language for the profound observation that follows in the next stanza: “To be brave is to be tired much of the time, / half stunned by the continual dusk.” Now, a lesser poet might have been charmed into beginning the poem with that line, based on its music and meaning, whereas Millar’s approach seems infinitely more affecting because he allows the poem to open with a character, relying on image and description rather than the ruminations of a heavy-handed narrator.

And when Millar does begin his poems with the narrator, he knows the best way to convey a serious point is not to take himself too seriously. One perfect example is “Sunday Night,” a poem about mortality and guilt, that begins on a humorous and unassuming note: “This is my first time trying to make beef stew / and I remember the Indian stories / about thinking kind thoughts while cooking…” Here’s another example from “Names I’d Forgotten”: “I used to get drunk in the morning, starting awake / in the sinister warmth of the couch, tangled up / in my raincoat and pants like a trapped animal.”

Millar also goes beyond the self with that same biting wit, as in poems like “Heart Attack”:

You’ve always suspected the voice of defiance
would carry you only so far, wondering
when your life might end
even as you lounged on the high school steps
smoking a Lucky Strike.
In those days you considered it honorable
to make yourself drunk with fear…

As much as I like Millar’s sense of humor, though, I think what’s most pleasing about these poems is their humanity, their blend of strength and vulnerability. “Somehow I’ve told her everything,” Millar writes. “In this bed I’ve exploded every grief into her body, one by one… the drinking, the failed marriages and jobs, / the weight of my children pressing me down.”

Joseph Millar’s Overtime is one of those rare books that combines narrative brevity with lush descriptions, the result being a book that is both accessible and joyfully, smartly lyrical. This can be seen in the opening line of “Love Pirates”: “I follow with my mouth the small wing of muscle / under your shoulder, lean over your back, breathing / into your hair and thinking of nothing” Another prime example is “Ed’s Auto Repair”, one of my favorites from this book, in which the narrator watches a mechanic’s “…torch flame splash / its lizard shapes onto the dark steel.” Like all of Millar’s poems, “Ed’s Auto Repair” resonates with visceral, luxurious descriptions: a shop “smelling of gas and iron,” “air hoses [hissing] in the corners,” “the shadows under the muffler, / the new metal ticking.”

I first came across Millar’s work in various literary journals and was immediately struck by Millar’s ability to accomplish some kind of lyrical feat in every line without sounding heavy-handed. I ordered this book and have been recommending it ever since. In short, Overtime is just a lovely example of wordsmithing at its best. Pick it up; your bookshelf will thank you!

____________

Michael Meyerhofer’s third book, Damnatio Memoriae, won the Brick Road Poetry Book Contest. His previous books are Blue Collar Eulogies (Steel Toe Books) and Leaving Iowa (winner of the Liam Rector First Book Award). He has also won five chapbook prizes. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, Arts & Letters, River Styx, Quick Fiction and other journals, and can be read online at www.troublewithhammers.com.

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October 25, 2010

Review by Michael MeyerhoferZephyr by Susan Browne

ZEPHYR
by Susan Browne

Steel Toe Books
Western Kentucky University
1906 College Heights Blvd. #11086
Bowling Green, KY 42101-1086
ISBN 978-0-9824169-4-5
2010, 92 pp, $12.00
www.steeltoebooks.com

The poems in Zephyr, winner of the 2009 Steel Toe Books Prize in Poetry (Editor’s Choice), by Susan Browne, reminded me right away of Bob Hicok’s work—and I mean that as the highest of compliments. Browne, like Hicok, is willing to take big risks in her poems. Unlike other established poets who begin to play it safe after awhile, Browne continuously pushes the envelope, betting the success of each poem on its next line. That makes these poems daring, authentic, and fun.

As the one-word title implies, there’s a certain directness to these poems, but it’s not the directness of Zen-like brevity; rather, it’s the directness of the snappy punch line; the elegant, quick turn of phrase; the wholly unexpected image that renders you unable to imagine a thing being described any other way. Take, for example, the everyday malaise described in “Mountain”: “Maybe a map is a good thing / On those days I feel / Like I’m riding a rhino up a mountain…”

Another fine example can be found in “Tuesday,” wherein Browne perfectly captures the combination of panic and numbness felt by someone who returns home to find her house has been broken into: “The front door’s smashed open, wood busted, / Hinges broken, a dusty space / Where the TV had been, / And what you feel is Oh. / ….Then the police arrive, their radios blaring. / Sorry, they say, but this happens every day. / Oh, you say. Just Oh, nodding, wearing all / your best jewelry at once.”

She is also a poet who knows how to use line breaks (to flush out double-meanings, to create tension, to set up a joke) in an era when many other poets struggle with basic punctuation. Take, for example, the first and last lines of “At Bloomingdale’s Grand Opening in San Francisco.” Here, the laugh-out-loud humor belies what seems to be a genuine, human struggle for identity in a postmodern world:

I can’t find my way out
of the new shopping center
which was added on to the old shopping center
and now covers two million square feet of earth.
….
I can never go outside again,
these doors only open onto other doors,
down into the funnel of more and more,
until I’m buried in denim, ten thousand different kinds of jeans,
a cross made of diamonds driven into my heart.

Further, the unexpected turn at the end is especially striking because it combines religious, commercial, and romantic imagery all at once (plus a nod to figurative vampirism); these lines simultaneously invoke a sense of tenderness and violence, humor and sadness, that could be seen as a microcosm of the entire poem (plus the entire book as a whole).

Another thing I admire about these poems is their sense of perspective. You get from Zephyr a sense that Browne is a poet who never pulls her punches; nor, though, is she a poet of glamorous self-indulgence and melodrama. Rather, she is able to strike right to the heart of an event, its deepest essence, by maintaining a multi-dimensional perspective—which is a fancy way of saying she takes poetry seriously but knows not to take herself too seriously. Take, for instance, these lines from “Sadness”: “You wanted to be happy / but got hooked on sadness. / ….Your one hope was to be the saddest person alive / and win an award,” or this opening from “To the Moment”: “Thank God you’re here, / eternal warrior who wrestles against the joyless / onslaught of mortal ugh.” We could use a lot more poems that poke fun at the need some (many?) artists have to outdo each other’s lamentations, to view their work as more pivotal than it actually is.

“Fairy Tale Elegy” (a poem reminiscent of Jeannine Hall Gailey) is another fine example: “Once upon a time in the Land of Sad, / a girl went on a journey. / She was not a princess, except to her mother… / Her father had vanished some tipsy moons ago, / kidnapped by the pirate Captain Smirnoff.” The girl goes on to find love, but reject it because “she had to return to the Land of Sad,” perhaps a roundabout acknowledgment of just how addictive depression and sadness are in the first place (especially for those of us who find themselves in this rather odd business of words).

Browne’s poems contain plenty of vulnerability, too, as in “Hard to Believe”: “We stood by our mother’s grave / in black silk sheathes…./ My younger sister couldn’t afford a dress / so had bought one at Nordstrom, / a store known to take everything back.” Here the humor, taken in contrast with the sadness of the opening, actually makes us feel a little guilty for laughing—which could itself serve as a metaphor for funerals, since everyone knows that it’s exactly when you’re supposed to be solemn that your lip starts twitching.

What I continuously return to in Browne’s poems, though, is her taut imagery, her imaginative leaps, as in her description of a dog’s fur “rippling in sunlight like black fire,”, or this ghoulishly awkward scene described in “On Our First Date”:

He ordered oxtail, heap of dark meat
he scooped with his hands off the white plate,
saying, The marrow has the best flavor

It’s not just the imagery but the fantastic use of assonance (especially the ominous long-O sound) plus the close attention to stressed syllables that makes these opening lines especially vivid.

Equally worthy of note are Browne’s wry observations—such as in “The Nose on Your Face,” which points out that: “In all your life, you will never see your actual face. / If you close one eye, you can gaze / at the side of your nose, but that’s it.” I think we all secretly crave a good dose of wisdom from the poems we read; wisdom starts with observations, and the wryer the better. The trick, though, is finding a poet who won’t turn you off with their own sense of self-importance, their haughty overuse of language. No such concern with Browne; here, we have a smart poet who seems to genuinely care about her readers, who hopes (rather than insists) that we leave her book just a little better off than how we arrived.

____________

Michael Meyerhofer’s second book, Blue Collar Eulogies, was published by Steel Toe Books. His first, Leaving Iowa, won the Liam Rector First Book Award. He has also won the Marjorie J. Wilson Best Poem Contest, the James Wright Poetry Award, the Laureate Prize, the Annie Finch Prize for Poetry, and four chapbook prizes. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, Arts & Letters, River Styx, Quick Fiction and other journals, and can be read online at www.troublewithhammers.com.

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