Reviews of the Ephemeral

Posts Tagged ‘poetry’

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Review: Forget what you heard (about spoken word)

In Performance Poetry on May 22, 2013 at 9:30 am

- reviewed by Lettie McKie -

forget

9th May Ryan’s Bar, Stoke Newington

Poetry in London is a bit like flat-pack …

One of the most inspiring things about performance poetry in London is that it is very DIY. New events are constantly springing up in every borough because groups of poets, in love with the scene and the diversity of talent on offer, decide they want a slice of the action.

Of course the inevitable downside of this is that there is a fair amount of competition between event organisers to attract audiences. With so many performers trying to get their name heard you often need to have some sort of unique selling point to draw a crowd. A lot of the most popular long standing events seem to have an edge, for example: Bang Said the Gun is quirky and raucous, whereas Chill Pill is, well, chilled;  poetry served up to a mellow sound track and laid back hosting style.

And Forget What You Heard‘s edge is …

Started in January 2013 by Stephanie Dogfoot and Matt Cummins monthly Forget What you Heard (about spoken word)’s USP is its friendliness. Whilst hosting, Matt grins ear to ear and hugs each performer warmly on their leaving the stage! Unless you live in the area, then making the trek to Stoke Newington’s Ryans Bar for this event could seem like too much effort for a midweek poetry night, but the welcoming atmosphere more than makes up for any stress encountered on the journey.

While, like the vast majority of open mic evenings, it inevitably started late, once the event got going it stood out for its warmth and a consistently high quality of poetry. Stephanie and Matt’s openness soon infected the audience who laughed easily and fell silent in all the right places. This meant that the first few poets to take to the open mic were greeted with enthusiasm and this enabled them to relax into their performances.

A broad spectrum of high quality poetry, starting with Rik Livermore …

Stephanie and Matt showed they understand the art of a good line up with three feature poets whose work was contrasting but complementary.  Rik Livermore, Talia Randall and Lucy Gellman are all from very different poetic backgrounds but brought together their diverse performance styles made for a varied evening, consistent and compelling.

Rik was first up with an impassioned set of largely new poems written whilst he’s been living in Switzerland for the last six months. His poetry was thought provoking and drawn from some painful experiences.  His best poem of the night was probably also the hardest to listen to, as it was an achingly honest, but ultimately positive, account of overcoming panic attacks. Some more poems with a lighter subject matter could have benefited this intense set, but with his deeply personal poetry Rik made a heartfelt connection to the audience.

Moving on to an enthusiastic and bright-eyed open mic …

The open mic was interspersed throughout the evening and dominated by a table of student regulars about to leave London for home in the States. They were a bright eyed group all with different levels of energy and confidence; sharing a buoyant enthusiasm for all the performances they made the open mic experience for everyone much less intimidating. One open mic poet who was particularly exciting to watch was Jason, a regular on the London circuit. His performance style is somewhat alarming, he shouts and leaps around, wielding the microphone like a weapon, but he’s completely unforgettable. His poetry mixes unsettling imagery with euphoric rhetoric delivered at break neck speed, he is a very unique performer.

Talia Randall: natural and evocative storyteller …

Rubix Collective member Talia Randall’s feature was the highlight of the evening. She performed several pieces from her recent EP 3 mile radius which explore themes of childhood memories, lost innocence and growing up. Talia is a natural storyteller who commands the stage with an understated delivery style, her poetry is colourful and evocative of events drawn from her own life.

And ending on a high note …

With almost three and a half hours of performances this night was slightly too long for an audience to sustain high levels of concentration  and by the start of the final third it had dwindled to a handful of stalwarts. In her late night set therefore Lucy Gellman’s had to keep the audience engaged. She was very funny and her poetry, rich in descriptive detail, with sensitive and surprising imagery did the work for her. Errol McGlashan was notable as one of the last open mic’ers of the evening, his delivery of the brilliant When Love Beckons by Kahil Gibran was affecting and he is very skilful at getting an audience to listen attentively, but it is always slightly disappointing when a poet doesn’t perform their own work.

Overall … an incredibly friendly and wide-ranging night, with consistently high quality, if a bit too long.

As Stephanie is off to travel the world on a shoe string the future of Forget What You Heard (about spoken word) is as yet undecided, but watch this space!

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Review: Penning Perfumes – Oxford 21/02/13

In Pamphlets, Performance Poetry on March 12, 2013 at 9:00 am

- reviewed by Paul Fitchett -

SONY DSC

I had heard Good Things and exciting rumours about Penning Perfumes – the poetry and perfume mash up organised by Sabotage’s own Claire Trévien and perfume aficionado Odette Toilette – so it’s fair to say that I was looking forward to the event. 

And, with one “cheesy” exception (more of which later), I was not disappointed.

The Oxford leg of Penning Perfumes was in the Albion Beatnik bookshop, a suitably literary venue for an event that was to make poets and writers of all the attendees, because almost from the start it became clear that this wasn’t just an ordinary spoken word event.  No, in fact the event turned out to be akin to a workshop, as perfume samples were passed around the audience and people were encouraged to describe the smells.

Odette gives us the background

Odette was on hosting duties first and set out the background to the night – samples of perfume had been sent out to various poets to create works based on that scent.  She explained that the poets had been given a pretty much free range on how to develop their poems, and that came through in the different forms that the poems on the night took.

The format for the night was first half, poems based on perfumes, second half, scents based on poetry and then a haiku competition to win a bottle of perfume.  Interactivity and feedback were also to be key with question and answer sessions with the poets after their performances.

First Half – Poetry from Perfume

Claire introduced the poets in the first half with some humorous introductions and good patter.

  • The first poet of the night was James Webster, with a poem called “Flatpack Lover” based on the perfume Reverie au Jardin by Andy Tauer. It was a tale of creating a wooden man with the “still pulsing root of a sandal wood tree” and eventually a sentient army that led itself to emancipation.  He made full use of the depths of the perfume, mint and wood and flowers, resulting in a poem with a good mix of humour, politics and philosophy and excellent delivery. James’ poem was also the only one of the evening (by someone present) not to use the perfume as a leaping off point for reminiscence and so as the night went on his piece became all the more unique.
  • Next up was Valerie Laws. Her perfume was Smell of Weather Turning and is by Gorilla perfumes, who  supply Lush. The scents in the perfume to her suggested the colours green, white and violet (which were the colours of the suffragette movement) and memories of her childhood and grandmother. This inspired her poem: “Scent for a Suffragette”.
  • It had a structure to it that accented synesthesia throughout with repeated accent on the three colours and was a good example of the nature of this evening with smells translated to word.

After the first two poets with their “classic” pieces, we had the three new poems created especially for the Oxford event and it was revealed that they had all been secretly sent the same perfume (Hasu no Hana by Grosssmith).

  • First up, Lucy Ayrton with an untitled piece about memories of childhood, her mother and feelings of ‘having to be a grown up’.  A very sweet poem, well delivered and with lovely phrasing “slicked lipstick” and her mother’s make up not being “war paint” but rather “watercolour”.
  • Next, Dan Holloway who added another stimulus to the night by passing around photos of a street in Gdansk lit by cabinets full of amber.  I particularly liked Dan’s performance here:  rhythmic and subdued, he excellently reflected the themes of the piece – time, our connection to the past and repetition.  I would like to read through this piece as it sounded like it had a lot of depth to it.
  • The final poet in this half was Eloise Stonborough who had also been inspired to think of her mother by this perfume….but in a very different light to Lucy’s piece.  Eloise’s “All things nice” was an exploration of gender and how we know ourselves (in a more formal poetic style than the previous poets). There were parts of the poem that were almost post-apocalyptic in their imagery and this sense of loss was maximised in the final line which shall stick in my mind for a while – how the inside of her mouth is “still as pink as the girl my mother mourns”.

Odette then asked the three poets what they thought of each others pieces, and  I thought this was a bit awkward for the poets as they didn’t really seem very comfortable trying to read into each others’ pieces.  However, they all seemed more comfortable when talking about their own pieces and it was good to get an insight into their thought processes, the development of the poems and how they’d used the perfume.

  • The final fragrance of the first half was one created by perfumer Kate Williams in collaboration with Lindsey Holland, and her poem based on the scent was well read by Claire Trévien.  It was with some trepidation that I took a sniff of this perfume after Odette said that it wasn’t for sale….for a reason!  Actually, it wasn’t that bad, I thought it was sweet and sherbety.  Lindsay’s poem “Plantation” was a verbal recreation of a fairground on the frozen river where “wine and cider make petals on the ice”.  As it turns out, the perfume was apparently created to smell like the indolence of pre-raphaelite women surrounded by sweets but never happy.

Second Half – Perfume from Poetry

  • After the break we were told we’d get some very unusual fragrances and the first one certainly split opinions – I thought it was quite pleasant, with a smell something like new shoes or an unused sponge but others visibly recoiled from it.  The perfume was created based on a poem by John Clegg, called “Mermaids”.  I enjoyed this poem and the way it explored the crossover between taste and smell with mermaids “singing to each other in pheremones”.
  • Valerie was called to the stage again to introduce a perfume based on her “Remembering Love”, which had some lovely images of summer rain and the earth drinking its full, but I was distracted by smelling the scent and trying to figure it out – at times on this night there was a bit of sensory overload. 
  • The perfume: imagine vicks rub mixed with rosemary.  Valerie told us that the scent was designed to invoke memories of love, but it mainly invoked memories of having a blocked nose for me, but I suppose perfumery isn’t an exact science. 
  • The penultimate fragrance, created in response to a poem by Claire Trévien by Shropshire based perfumer called Chris Bartlett.  Claire admitted to trying to manipulate the outcome by giving him a poem that mentioned her favourite smell -leather.   The poem itself, “Listening to Charles Ives” was a self-described breakup poem, which I thought was great.  With a nod to pathetic fallacy, the poem talked of a crowd gathering and storming and delicately dealt with a relationship that was going nowhere that had ‘the promise of a tomorrow’.
  • And now it was the time we’d all been waiting for – John the Perfumer was to create some kind of scent live tonight based on a poem by Lucy Ayrton, which he’d been sent in advance.
  • But first, the aforementioned “cheesy moment”.  John split us in two groups, gave us both the same scent (but with a different description) and instructed us to rate how pleasant it smelt. It was like someone had eaten a whole parmesan and vomited it back up.  Bleuch.  Sadly, this smell lingered throughout the rest of the night and I had to forage for discarded scent sticks from earlier in the night to rescue my poor nose.
  • He then passed round a much more pleasant scent and there was much discussion among the audience about what it was – nutella or caramel.  It turned out to be prunes.
  • After this perfuming interlude we were back to the poetry with Lucy Ayrton performing “Bonfire Juice” – a lovely rendering of a happy summer that has been discussed before on Sabotage.
  • John Stephens, the Perfumer, discussed his choice of scent based on the smell and I must admit being slightly disappointed. We had been told that John would create something live onstage for the poem, but he just chose an extract that he felt matched it.  Admittedly, the choice mate (used as a tea itself in South America) was excellent – the woodiness really evoked the images in Lucy’s poem and he also passed around a “phonolic odour” that really did smell like the lapsang souchong mentioned in Bonfire Juice.  I combined the two smells to make something I thought was very pleasant!

The Haiku Challenge

The audience was given one last perfume to smell and then 2 minutes to devise a haiku based on it.  Some of the haiku were excellent and came from such different places and with great stories.  While I couldn’t quite hear them all, I did hear the winning poem as…. it was by me!  Which was a nice surprise and definitely not a bribe.

Overall, it was a very interesting event, very different from your average poetry night.  I really did enjoy the interaction between the audience, poets and hosts.

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‘mimesis, synaptic’ by Laressa Dickey

In Pamphlets on January 14, 2013 at 9:21 am

-Reviewed by Andrew Bailey-

978-0-9571859-4-4

So it turns out one way to incline this reviewer positively to your book is to pack it like the sweets I used to get from the corner shop. We know this thanks to Miel, from whom a pamphlet arrived that I wanted to praise even before seeing it, simply because it came in a white paper bag with serrations on the opening. What came out was Laressa Dickey’s mimesis, synaptic, which lives up to Miel’s mission statement by being “Difficult, interesting, intelligent, deeply felt”.

It’s a pamphlet comprising ten brief prose poems, none troubling the lower half of the page, which distribute facets and glimpses disparate enough to feel the gaps in the sense, and close enough to fill them through inference. These electric connections are, I guess, where the title comes from, in their mimicry of the little leaps across synapses that make up the process of thought; not decisive, business-decision type thought, but a productive kind of dwelling without resolution. The gaps mean the synapses keep firing on re-reading, and I have been re-reading. They also mean the poems ask for enough readerly interaction to make this review more personal than usual – the backstory you bring means you may end up reading a noticeably different collection from me with mine. Which may be to spike my guns almost before I begin, but having done so, I quote:

‘Wind chill blows the crocus off its root. When will the women in this hollow
speak to each other? Even Rosie the dog has died. [...]‘

The opening sentence starts out descriptive, but is knocked into potential metaphor by the silent women, their coldness toward each other, if they are to be connected. What are we to make of the crocus, then? what is the tender thing if not literally a crocus? The dog, named as she was for a flower, resonates with that, but the “Even” makes her an addition to whatever fragility has suffered. The ‘When” is perhaps answered later in the piece, “when clouds relocate, and creek water quiets”, then again, “when gales skirt down hills, maybe then”. These are prophetic timescales, on the “till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane” level, which invite attempts, certainly from me, at trying to work out when this is – are we to think that clouds are constantly relocating, or are we after a moment to when all the clouds are gone, or the right clouds are here? Is the creek’s silence that is to go with it something that’s even possible, and does it matter when the second answer undermines the first, and itself with its “maybe”?

Count those question marks. As a reader, if you can enjoy this state of uncertainty, you can revel in it here – and I have, whilst being aware of friends who would be infuriated by its lack of resolution. It’s a state that’s enjoyed by both of the supporting statements on the back of the pamphlet and on its webpage, with Maria Damon calling the chapbook “pleasantly tentative” and Arlene Kim explicitly contradicting herself in each new paragraph. As a reviewer I feel a bit like I’m short-changing you by not pinning it down to a definite description, so it’s nice to have precedent.

And description isn’t everything. The second poem starts out by describing people in a market in terms of their poster-paint colours – “Three monks in tangerine robes walk in rain the market’s length… A man riding a red motorcycle wearing a sky-blue poncho passes” – and closes by noting that “When night comes, the colors will quicken, tangle.” The quickening is where the tentative note I’ve been enjoying comes in.

With the colours unreliable, it’s the weight of the body in the centre of the piece that remains – “Each step they step they step to gravity.” There’s several uses of the body in the pamphlet – a brother’s big arms, a schoolboy who “jabbed a pencil into the flesh above my left knee” (‘Every book a man book. In’), and the final poem’s “Gravity teaches the spine’s length”. Dickey’s biography notes that she is a somatic worker and dancer as well as a poet, which may be the source of the attention to the body, and refers in her interview at Miel’s site to becoming “interested in the process of acquisition of new syntax and new vocabulary and in my mind/body’s response to that—the disorientation that comes from total immersion.” Whatever the source, it shows a collection that knows the mind not only thinks, but responds to and steers the body, holds the personality, and thus invites readers to share the holistic experience.

There’s even a stage direction to the reader, which might move past an invitation to an insistence that the poem should be inhabited: “Cover the mind with a hat. Is it here (point to heart) or here (point to pelvis)?” That’s only one of the moments of direct address – there are questions, instructions, statements such as “You can’t keep saying you ate mackerel out of a can” (‘Cover the mind with a hat’). Judging by the previous appearance of the tinned mackerel in a poem at Cerise Press, the address of ‘you’ is also an address to the poet, and thus the poems offer a sense of inhabiting the poet herself.

If that sounds like overplaying the hand, it’s probably my reporting on where the collection has taken me, rather than on the thing that does the taking, as I ought. The closing poem does ask, though, to “say where you go if you know.” While I’m pleasurably unsure if I know for sure that’s where I am, it is where the poems leave me wanting to say.

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‘Loose Ends’ by Bernadette Cremin

In Pamphlets on November 30, 2012 at 10:20 am

-Reviewed by Strat Mastoris-

loose-ends

If they gave awards for books with misleading titles, Bernadette Cremin’s Loose Ends would be up there with the winners. These twenty four poems all have endings of one sort or another, but they’re anything but ‘loose’… Her endings are like the barbed hook at the end of a fishing line – you run your hands along the monofilament, everything’s smooth and running freely then suddenly there’s a sharp pain, blood on your hand, and you’re caught and can’t get away.

‘Black’, for example, opens with a woman who’s anything but competent -

‘Fumbling for keys in a black patent bag-

the only one I have with matching heels.
I bought them in the sales, a size too small,
a little too high, half price.’

which gets us a little bit exasperated at what’s obviously going to be a woman with no dress sense, but then six lines on she tells us about

‘the bouquets and wreaths
now left to death at the head of your grave.’

Ah!, so she’s newly widowed. Obviously things are all a bit much at the moment. So did she buy the black shoes for the funeral? Little domestic details are starting to concern us now, and we are given more of them as the woman clings to her dead husband’s memory in the intimate physical forms of

‘the pewter kidney-shaped lighter
that I had engraved for you with love’

and others, even more intimate, like

‘Your tobacco stained dentures,
an incisor chipped on a humbug’

This is starting to get just a tiny bit mawkish, as she finishes with

‘your stopped watch, wedding band
and the St Christopher that you drove
onto black ice.’

Damn. I didn’t see that coming. (but then neither did he …)

That last line gives us the whole story of this woman’s tragedy, jumps us back to the first lines, and completely alters our interpretation of the poem’s title. All in three words.

This is about much more than just last lines, though. The endings are often surprising, and Cremin has a confident mastery of setting and springing a trap, but the poems themselves are elegantly structured, beautifully realised portraits of people that we would like to know better. I probably mean ‘more about’ rather than ‘better’, because most of her subjects have pretty messed-up lives – they struggle against abuse, disease, even death itself – and usually they lose the battle. But the minimalist in the poet drip-feeds us details, line by line, so that we construct our own fully realised portrait of each one, and we feel that we know them well enough to be moved by their plight and to rejoice in their (occasional) victories.

All this is not to say that the collection is perfect – there are poems that don’t leave much of an impression. ‘The Morning After’ probably wasn’t the best choice for the first one. It’s full of these sort of comparisons:

‘Letterboxes twitch like expectant fathers’

and

‘gangs of windswept blossoms lurk
in gutters like pretty terrorists.’

that don’t really work, or take us very far. She seems to be trying too hard to look for links. The redeeming feature of ‘The Morning After’ is that it’s set in Brighton, and so it locates the poet in the city where she lives. It also gives us our first glimpse of the bus stops that seem to be one of Cremin’s obsessions

But then turn the page and you hit ‘Dead End’, and she’s on top form, with the sad musings of a middle aged man in a dull job in a dull office. Week after week

‘of feigned interest, anonymous mistakes’

while

‘My fat wife is fucking the butcher’

His constant, nagging memory is of a woman he met years before; presumably a holiday romance, because

‘I think of surfboards, the futility of regret but
I miss her too much on days like this.
I wonder where she lives, if she ever had kids?’

‘Futility’ is the perfect word here. A choice was made, an opportunity wasn’t taken, and the whole track of this man’s life took a different route. That was years ago, though – years in which he’s had to

‘pay off the mortgage, put my fat daughter
through college, afford a red car.’

while his wife has been constantly unfaithful with the butcher.

Interesting that the car is red. Red cars and sex – what every advertiser knows. He still feels himself to be ‘a player’, and he preens himself a little for a pretty sandwich assistant at Forfars the bakers.

He and his wife still have sex occasionally, it seems. Though

‘When I fuck her
I think of the butcher,
The pretty girl at Forfars

and surfboards.’

A two word ending this time, that takes us back almost to where we came in, with beautiful symmetry. But also, those last four lines together are a little gem of compression, summing up all we have learned about his unhappy marriage, his current fantasies, but mostly his long term (futile) regret.

For we care about this man. We feel for his hopeless regrets. Just as we were moved by the husband’s crash in ‘Black’. Cremin creates believable subjects in her poems, and breathes enough life into them to make them worthy of our concern.

I was first introduced to Bernadette Cremin’s work with ‘Altered Egos’, a one-woman performance piece where she played six individual (and very different) women – women whose lives had been damaged in one way or another. She has a sure feel for the sadness that underlies a lot of lives, and she’s demonstrated that empathy again with these poems.

She has a sure feel for language too, both alliterative and forebodingly symbolic. Who else could end (another) poem by defining a woman’s wrist with the words? -

‘the soft inch
made for a bracelet,
a button or a blade -’

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Two Valley Press pamphlets: ‘Form’ by Carl Potter and ‘Phobia’ by Jo Brandon

In Pamphlets on November 22, 2012 at 9:05 am

-Reviewed by Judi Sutherland-

Form – Carl Potter

There are flashes of real originality in Form, a new pamphlet from Yorkshire poet and journalist, Carl Potter. The strong opening poem ‘Explaining to Joshua why Snowmen Have to Melt’ discusses the illusion of permanence: ‘Our victory was fantasy / snowblind I and loveblind boy’. Potter goes on to discuss marriage, urban decay, old age and modern culture and media, in a small gathering of fourteen poems.  ‘Imperfect German’ is a heartfelt account of an elderly person’s World War II ‘stories of heroes, courage and gin.’ ‘Tiger Hunt’ describes a mysterious encounter in the marshes that pivots around a lovely line: ‘The shock of claws on feather’. A banker ultimately ‘decides to invest in Lithium’ in ‘Stock Market Crash’.  Potter is alive to the wider world as well as to his own experiences and relationships.

‘Poor Horsforth’ is an elegy to a northern town that is being regenerated as a tourist destination. Potter likens it to a patient being resuscitated on a hospital bed:

Doctor, we’re losing him
the vital signs are flatlining!
Give me forty ccs of heritage stat!
Put plaques on the houses, drain the people,
put them in jars.
Flood it with formaldehyde.

Potter rapidly shifts his metaphor; it seems that the doctor’s efforts were in vain and the town, unrevived, now needs to be preserved in death.  For me, the extract quoted above gathers two possible metaphors and jumbles them together in an enthusiastic wish to use every good idea at once. His poems do suffer a little from an attempt to cram everything in.

Sometimes Potter’s tone lapses into an unconvincing vernacular. Potter uses a range of movie dialogue to comment on contemporary culture, as in the angry and disturbed voice of ‘Walter Mitty Character’, a poetic experiment that for me, doesn’t quite pay off:

I’m thinking everything’s different now, everything’s changed.
This abuse of my body must stop, every muscle must be tight.
As soon as I get out of here I’m gonna find you.
I will find you, I will find you and I will kill you.
I’m number one. King fucking Kong!

Potter is an observer of life and society.  His poetry as demonstrated in this pamphlet is a little raw in style; some clarity and organisation is needed, but this is a voice that, with time and maturity, should emerge as a lucid commentator on human nature and the world we live in.

 Phobia- Jo Brandon

Jo Brandon, a former editor of Cadaverine, the poetry e-zine for the under-30s, has published her first pamphlet, Phobia. She divides the book into two sections; ‘Fear’ and ‘Caution’. The opening poem, ‘These Bones’ is an account of the surreality of seeing one’s own body as an X-ray:

you expect to see your heart resting mid-chest
like a set of bloody, unfeathered angel’s wings
and you think you see your soul as a shadow on the film

Brandon goes on to consider the strangeness of adolescence in ‘Arachne-phobia’ and playground bullying in ‘Flying Bricks’ where; ‘her long smile hits you, just there, in that place you thought was safe’. ‘Gamophobia’ (the fear of marriage or commitment) is a succinct comparison of marriage to cooking, which can be haute cuisine or a cindered disaster. Then there is ‘Mottephobia’ which I had to look up, but it is a fear of moths; a poem occasioned by a visit to a butterfly house. This first half of the pamphlet deals with growing up and an uneasy transition to adulthood. Brandon is still only 26; it’s interesting to read her account of the strangeness of this metamorphosis.  Her poems give us a dispassionate account of the fears; displaying a welcome objectivity rather than a position of teenage angst.

‘Caution’ is a more varied selection of poems with a slightly lighter tone, many of which comment on what it is to be female.  ‘Our Lady’ questions a picture that the Bible and centuries of religious art has presented to us:

I commissioned her to paint me a smiling Mary
in red and black, Warhol style
give her the look, I said, she would have had
the day Joseph believed her story, lent his name.

Brandon provides portraits of a number of women; ‘Kathy’ from a dating ad, the first Lady Hamilton, and the demotic washerwomen in ‘Laundry’ who are somehow the moral guardians of their society, pronouncing on scandal and reputation. The conversation rings true.

Brandon’s language is clear and contemporary, and her images vivid and well placed.  In ‘Picking’ she recalls memories of ‘belly-cramps from overeating / berries sugared with mud’, in ‘Wool’ she pictures the ageing of women’s hands ‘days feel shorter, rings tighten, skin / eats up banded gold’.

Brandon’s work is vigorous and well-observed. It will be interesting to see how her style develops in future poems.

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Armchair/Shotgun: Issue 3

In Magazine on November 5, 2012 at 9:30 pm

-Reviewed by Rory O’Sullivan-

Had you the misfortune, lack of foresight or ignorance to miss either Issue 1 or 2 of Armchair/Shotgun, all is not lost: for the Brooklyn-based magazine has returned and has come up trumps again – surpassing the expectations laid down by the first two instalments, as this literary compendium continues to go from strength to strength.

The cover of Armchair/Shotgun 3

An issue of Armchair/Shotgun is a gathering of bite-size literature, poems, visual art and authorial insight. The latest issue features four short stories, as many miniature clusters of poetry, a photo-essay, a collection of Steve Chellis paintings and an interview with writer Reif Larsen – a piece on which the issue, and the magazine at large, appears to hang its hat.

One of the magazine’s managing editors, John M Cusick, extracts some of the madness behind Larsen’s method, revealing some genuinely interesting thoughts about what authors have to go through in their lives and the lengths it can sometimes take in order to craft a story. Budding writers should take note, but Larsen also fits neatly with what Armchair/Shotgun are all about – and understanding why Cusick speaks to him is to understand the magazine’s philosophy.

Their dialogue delves into a number of concepts that are clearly important to the magazine: the relationship between content and form; the doors that post-modern art has opened for the traditional writer, the roles that marginalia and visual art have to play within the written form; and the importance of telling a story for storytelling’s sake. The penny drops, and suddenly the many components of Issue 3 fall into place – that the purity of story is at the heart of what this magazine stands for.

And they really commit to it. Fiction submissions are stripped of their signature and sender, and the strength of a candidate’s submission is based on the strength of their piece alone; the veil of anonymity is only lifted when the editors have settled on the issue’s content. Once the names behind the short-form prose were finally revealed, Issue 3 threw up a fascinating coincidence: the entirety of its contributors form an all-female cast.

Of those, J.E. Reich makes a stunning debut with ‘Days of Sound’. It tells the story of a British journalist whose quest to find out more about an Islamic terrorist – responsible for assassinating an American journalist live on the internet – whom he knew from his school days, takes him down the avenues of a North London upbringing. The assignment ends – in the story, at least – by telling us how this British reporter came to lose his hearing. The power of the human faculty is brought into focus, as the journalist tries to find something in his home environment – the same home in which he played chess with the future terrorist – to trigger a lead. In the years following his ‘days of sound’, we are not only left to wonder if his other senses will one day lead him to an answer, but feel sympathy for a man who is unable to fully communicate with the woman he loves.

The primary senses are also the thrust of Debbie Ann Ice’s amusing and heart-warming tale, ‘Scrabble’. Young girl Liz is brought over to see her mother’s friend’s daughter, Elsa. She and her mother both think Liz is deaf, but their deadpan visitor can actually understand everything they are saying perfectly well. Liz doesn’t play this to her advantage as mischievously as we might hope or expect, and only does so once she’s reunited with her mother at the end of the story. Liz’s time with Elsa starts with a game of Scrabble. Like her hearing, there’s little wrong with her literacy, either, for she thrashes her opponent. That’s despite the condescending interjections of Elsa’s mother:

“Malefic?” Her mama continued, still behind me, still eating. “Is that a word? I wonder if she meant malleable. We’ll let it go. It’s best maybe to let her win.”

They then head out for an afternoon swim at the local pool. Liz manages not to react when a boy repeatedly shouts “I want to fuck you” at her, much to the amusement of everyone around them. But once out of their earshot, she’s the one who has the last laugh.

A young child is also the subject of Sarah Goffman’s ironically-titled ‘Eddie by Himself’. The story is a snapshot into the the struggle of Eddie’s parents to manage his wandering tendencies – accompanied by his imaginary friend, Hansel – and unpredictable reverie. Unlike his surly sister, Eddie eagerly anticipates the family’s camping trip to the woods. Before they set off, we are given clues about Eddie’s affinity for the natural world and all things outdoors – something that gets the better of him when he wanders into the thick of the forest. It’s a charming tale of an innocent mind giving into curiosity, and one that wonderfully conveys the power of the imagination.

So far, the short-form prose largely goes against the tone of Issue 2. There, the reader was largely greeted with a succession of stabbings, trailer park strife, motherfuckers and car chases.

But those impatient to uncover Armchair/Shotgun‘s sinister streak will be satisfied after reading ‘Pick Up’ by Diana Clark. Sharing a similar feel to the tale that closes Issue 2, it charts the journey of a troubled soul behind the wheel of a motor vehicle. A woman is ostracised from her husband since he got a fifteen-year-old pregnant, and after driving off in her former man’s uncomfortable pick-up truck, depravity ensues as she undertakes (not all willingly) a number of bizarre and sick sexual pursuits. From masturbating while driving through the provincial night, to offering one’s body to get out of prison, the closing piece of Issue 3 will raise a few eyebrows and turn a few stomachs.

Another parallel with Issue 2 is Andrew Wertz’s photo essay, ‘Twelve photographs’. Twelve urban landscapes situated in towns between Massachusetts and Pennsylvania provide a haunting journey through places devoid of any human life, as if in a post-apocalyptic silence. Fans of The Walking Dead and 28 Days Later will enjoy this inclusion. In almost all the photos, something appears in the image that does not actually stand in front of the camera – such as a reflection, a light source or a shadow. For example, the silhouette of a street light and telephone wires lean eerily across the photo of an empty sidewalk in Schuylerville, New York state, a photo that bleaches across the front cover of this issue.

The second piece of visual art comes from Steve Chellis, whose seven paintings and illustrations are introduced by a helpful few paragraphs by managing editor Laura McMillan. One’s instinct is to decipher the story behind each piece, which range in style from Impressionist to Gothic. Fathoming the story behind the painting is, of course, a major reason we enjoy art at all – but Chellis appears to derive pleasure out of the futility of this search: “parts don’t always add up, but why should they?”, he asks us.

Elliott BatTzedek, Daniele Lapidoth and Alison Campbell make multiple contributions to poetry, while four more poets (Liana Jahan Imam, Alanna Bailey, Genevieve Burger-Weiser and Inge Hoonte) each earn a solitary inclusion.

Campbell’s two poems come off the back of Reich’s life-affirming ‘Days of Sound’ and this is an intelligent placement, for ‘Body’ and ‘Cemetery’ each deal with human functions and senses. True to their word after Sabotage recently interviewed Armchair/Shotgun, the poetry included in Issue 3 supports their view that the difference between free verse and traditional form should be recognised. Lapidoth’s ‘Neither’ and ‘Both’ appear somewhere betwixt the two because they are presented in organised stanzas yet still convey a loose structure, while BatTzedek couldn’t strike this balance better, with the sombre ‘After pain has taken you’ erring on the classic and contrasting heavily with ‘Earth Day’ – a lightning-quick, stream-of-conscience consideration of the relationship between a man and his pets.

Like Issue 2, the sections of poetry, prose and visual art are punctuated by agreeable etchings and illustrations. The space occupied in the last issue by old-fashioned maps is now filled with drawings of animal anatomies, parts of the human skeleton, a cross-section of half a tree trunk, and a detailed illustration of the human ear – each providing something unexpected, quirky and interesting to linger on before absorbing what comes next in the magazine.

It is this marginalia that adds to the significance of Larsen’s interview and brings home what Armchair/Shotgun are trying to do. The magazine manages to embrace so many art forms and yet remain a predominantly literary offering; storytelling is at the heart of literature, and indeed central to this publication’s mission statement. But by including the minutiae and everything outside of the verbal domain, Armchair/Shotgun show they really know how to enrich a reader’s experience.

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‘Catechism: Poems for Pussy Riot’ edited by Mark Burnhope, Sarah Crewe & Sophie Mayer

In anthology on October 24, 2012 at 10:45 pm

-Reviewed by Harry Giles-

Catechism is a broad, open-hearted project, an anthology of poems for Pussy Riot, to which 110 poets donated their work in solidarity with the imprisoned protest group. As the editors say, it is “a cornucopia of approaches to freedom and to feminism” – a project which glories in and suffers from its wide range in equal measure.

George Szirtes’s questioning introduction claims it is “a political act in poetic form”, while the editors call it an “offertory” – that is, a collecting of alms. This uneasy dichotomy between charity and protest runs throughout the anthology. Szirtes’s benign bemusement is a good case in point: while in a two-sided war he knows he would stand with Pussy Riot, he is unsure what he as an older male British-based poet is doing introducing the anthology, or what the anthology itself is doing when “it is unlikely to affect the course of events in any measurable way”.

Answering this question, on the one hand, are poems like The Gingerbread Tree’s punk visual ‘This is a free riot’, which claims it has been illegally billposted over Manchester. Then there is Sally McAlister’s rousing and up-front The Queendom of Revolution which calls “For freedom // for feminism // For Revolution”, and Chella Quint’s In Vogue, which mocks the fashionable appropriation of Pussy Riot (“This is a serious cause, guys. My look has to rock.”) alongside instructions for illegal solidarity stencilling. These are punk poems, protest poems, political acts.

Scattered throughout are more oblique poems, poems riffing on the punk and feminist themes. Often these are the more experimental works, which could be seen as punking the poetic form. Karen Press’s Strange is a fine example here, as an erasure which pulls from another poem the lines “Strangers ate my cunt / asking a thousand questions as to its use” and “My word. / A rough demand. / I told them it was a weapon”. Jon Stone’s Balaclavas are also delicious: concrete poems in balaclava form in which “I raise the petrol-soaked / air to my lips and drink it”, as if the poet were downing a molotov.

On the other side of the question, there are poems like Tony Walsh’s Because the Poets Know, a simple, almost truistic list of reasons poetry and speech are important, asking us to join him in saying “Your pressure and violence / will beat neither silence /nor soul from a poet.” Similarly, Karen Connelly’s ‘Here my love, listen.’  says of a Pussy Riot heroine:

“you forsake
every weapon but the hand
thrashing a guitar.
And the voice, the unruly voice,
raising its riot
of song.”

These poems are written in solidarity, praise Pussy Riot’s speech act, and simply call for their release – they are more offering than protest. What coherent political platform there is in the anthology thus reduces to a call for freedom of speech. The poems are often also in solidarity with Pussy Riot’s feminism – but rarely are in solidarity with Pussy Riot’s wider political project: a call for autonomist (often armed) insurrection. The riot in Pussy Riot is not a floating signifier: it is a very real riot indeed. Their own words give the lie  to Laurence Ebersole’s “Pussy Riot sing civil – never violent” (Lyrical Catapult):

“Spend a violent day among strong women
Look for scrap on the balcony, raze the pavement”
– Raze the Pavement, Pussy Riot, translated at freepussyriot.org

“The knuckle-duster’s ready, feminism’s sharpened
Take your soup away to Eastern Siberia
So that Riot will become rough enough”
–  Kropotkin-Vodka, Pussy Riot, translated at freepussyriot.org

If the poets honestly face the meaning of Pussy Riot’s words, then this anthology of solidarity rarely stretches farther than the Evelyn Beatrice Hall’s apocryphal Voltaire, which with grim inevitabiltiy we find paraphrased in John Ennis’s For Nadia, Katya, Masha in Prison: “I will defend to the death your right to say what you will”. This is an admirable project, but one that seems a little limp in the face of Pussy Riot’s punk.

Some of the poems understand the situation with gorgeous poetic clarity, as in Charlotte Geater’s Avoid Using the Word ‘Pussy’, which confronts the liberal interpretation of Pussy Riot head on, asking difficult questions:

“the punk rock girl band / stop bitching
whose name we can’t say / i call them bitches
on morning television / because they are bitches

the girls are sinners, they’ve made their
choice against christ & real madonna
what pussies, when riots?”

The uncomfortable reference here is to Pussy Riot’s refusal of Madonna’s and Bjork’s financial solidarity: “We’re flattered, of course, that Madonna and Björk have offered to perform with us. But the only performances we’ll participate in are illegal ones. We refuse to perform as part of the capitalist system, at concerts where they sell tickets.” (Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, August 28th 2012)

But alongside these more riot-aware poems, some of the pieces seem bizarre in the Pussy Riot context. In Veronica Zundel’s Prayer and Pussy Riot Have Three Letters in Common, Mennonites, a fairly archetypically patriarchal religious sect, pray for Pussy Riot’s release  and supposedly “God is smiling”, as if Mennonites and God were not high on Pussy Riot’s hit-list. Or there is Tom Spencer’s Dear Pussy Riot, which reduces the group’s protest to a message to “keep at it, no matter what”, a moral no less asinine for all that the author admits that he is “a prick and a jerk” and “angry and bitter / at my failure to finish this work”.

Amongst these are better but still problematic works, like Jack Underwood’s Our Glorious Leader Putin. This piece is a brilliantly-assembled satire of Putin the macho man and throbbing phallus of oppression, but this is Putin as easy target, Pussy Riot as easy cause celebre – the dictator too internationally loathed, the artists too passionately eloquent. It is uncomfortable to find so many British and Western poets condemnding a despot overseas while forgetting the despots at home. Why, for example, is there no 110-poet feminist anthology calling for Barack Obama to free CeCe Macdonald, the African American transgender woman imprisoned on a suspect manslaughter charge? CeCe is not so easy a cause.  And why does America’s kill-ordering, executive-expanding, citizen-murdering President not appear in Philo Ikonya & Helmuth A. Niederle’s Dictators Never: Roll Call, which approves of riot only when the bogeyman is unambiguous. Obama is not so easy a target, and not just because he is more metrosexual than shirtless Putin. But poetry should not just stand up for easy causes and pick on easy targets – that makes for easy poetry.

In short: Catechism risks, in its liberal call for freedom and human rights, being co-opted by a Western-centric anti-Russian sentiment. Unless poets are careful, we can be led to implying that terrible oppression only occurs “over there”, and never where we are standing. In an anthology as various as Catechism, of course,  some poets do square up to this very problematic. Jeff Hilton’s ‘With my Pussy Riot shorts on let me’ speaks of “the Russian the complicated anonymous / Russian” but is “sick of writing about Russians.” Sandra Alland’s Weapons of Minor Destruction concerns itself as much with domestic oppression as international violence and complicatedly says “All the people like me/ are thanking / all the people like you.” In Alex Macdonald’s Please Welcome to the Stage an apparently Western MC talks of “Where brown bears eat cats in dark alleyways” but says “ladies, please put your hands together /And keep them where we can see them.”

Catechism is uncertain what it is doing, but it is a beautiful book. Working rapidly, the editors have anthologised generosity, anger, satire, experiment, hope, and more. But what it captures is less a coherent outcry, protest, thrown brick or prayer, and more a spectrum analysis of (mostly) British ideas, interpretations and appropriations of Pussy Riot. Nevertheless, while its problematics and inconsistencies are important for all readers to understand, it is probably only curmugeonly anarchists like me who are likely to complain very deeply about them: in the grand liberal tradition, the anthology contains something for everyone, which is perhaps precisely my problem.

Catechism can be downloaded by donation or ordered print-on-demand at http://www.englishpen.org/the-poems-for-pussy-riot-project/. Pussy Riot can be followed and supported at http://freepussyriot.org/. CeCe Madonald can be followed and supported at https://supportcece.wordpress.com/, and if you’d like to work on an anthology for her then Harry would like to hear from you (www.harrygiles.org). The editors of Catechism were interviewed by Sabotage here and here.

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Review: Brand New Ancients – Kate Tempest

In Uncategorized on October 11, 2012 at 9:00 am

19/09/12 @ The BAC

- Reviewed by Dana Bubulj -

What is Brand New Ancients?

It is a modern poetic epic, written and performed by Kate Tempest (performed with backing musicians),  that follows the lives of several young people as they grow up, their paths crossing occasionally within a tight and heart-breakingly human narrative.

The band, whose music is similar to The Cinematic Orchestra, is illuminated on their stepped stage by light streaming in through small windows. They work well both as support for Tempest’s words and in their instrumentals. Only in the show’s refrains did they become a bit too loud for the vocal. Distress, frustration and hope were all straining through the instruments, with each character given their own clear musical voice that enhanced the storytelling.

Who are the Brand New Ancients?

“We are all still mythical”, Tempest starts, with the theme of the show. This is conveyed well, through her “epic narratives” of several, regular people whose characters are so familiar that they almost become archetypes. Perhaps, in less skilled hands, characters like Clive (whose abusive childhood taught him that violence was a way to get your point across) would have been undeveloped stereotypes, but in Tempest’s hands they are shaped into the modern, almost mythic, and oh so real characters that burst out of this piece. Periodically, Tempest weaves in Classical references (a Diana here, Pandora there), that help add to a sense of shared patterns of behaviour. “Your fears, your hopes are old”, she says, a comfort, perhaps, that the gods who “walked among us” (as well as, she acknowledges, periodically turning into animals and raping us), “fought for us” and were full of “imperfect”, human traits (“the gods can’t stop checking Facebook on their phone”).

It is the vividly drawn characters that makes this show so powerful. Tempest has a way with creating such believable people with humour and empathy (for example, Kevin, a “testament to the cavalry of men”), crafting conversations that sound authentic and paint the scenes as vividly as her narration (“prayers were not spoken in a silence like this”). Indeed, her words paint the awkwardness of youth with knowing brush-strokes, just as she also captures the flaws of their youthful reasoning (such as testing someone’s fireman skills with arson).

The “two man nation” of Clive and Spider, who “might have been warriors” in the olden days but now have nothing but each other to fight for, resigned to their fate as “the bad guys” and act accordingly, driving forward the plot’s violent climax with Gloria at her pub after last call. In a nice change from conventional narrative, Tommy, Gloria’s boyfriend, returns from his own crisis of faith (“by my love I am saved”) to see her rescue herself from Clive’s assault, buoyed by anger at a life of  past abuses.

What’s behind the Brand New Ancients?

Another facet to the narrative is that of the dangers of fame. Not a new concern, by any means, but Tempest takes it on well, panning out and tying the Cowell-led hunger for fame and fortune to her theme: “the gods are on their knees in front of false idols”. In almost a plea to return to the gods “among” rather than those “distant”, Tommy follows the convention of getting what he wishes (a job in the city as a graphic artist), to finally realise the unpleasant nature of his colleagues, all “overblown gestures like mime artists” and regret his decisions.

The conclusion seems to fit the themes of the narrative: the possibility to dip into a plethora of individual stories. Moving to years later, in the skin-crawlingly awful voice of Clive’s father, an alcoholic, abusive man now emigrated to Thailand (“out here, pension is riches”) where he’s surrounded by “men like [him]“, left wondering about what had happened to the central characters, we are distant once more to these ‘gods’, and encouraged to find our own.

Brand New Ancients ran from 4-22nd September at the BAC. 

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‘turn push | turn pull’ by Kit Fryatt

In Pamphlets on October 8, 2012 at 9:43 am

-Reviewed by Suzannah Evans-

Corrupt Press is a Paris-based press run by Dylan Harris, who is particularly interested in publishing poetry in English by poets for whom English is a second language. Kit Fryatt’s pamphlet collection  turn push | turn pull uses a mixture of tongues to truly take apart language as a form of expression. For example in the poem slobpaedar; ‘marbh | Tod | mort |wan’. From their own knowledge the reader has to piece their understanding together, which de-familiarises language and questions the experience of drawing meaning from the words themselves.

Dreams are used as inspiration throughout the collection. I particularly enjoyed BoHiCa which has the weird familiarity of a dream sequence and  accurately captures the feeling of waking; ‘relief I have not confessed myself / to someone I don’t fancy in awake-life’. There is humour here too and a witty turn of phrase; ‘spft | grnk says the coffee machine. It is the cartridge sort’.

Plurality is central to this collection and several of Fryatt’s poems could be read in a variety of ways; the format of the text does not always suggest an obvious reading. I’m unsure of how successful some of these poems would be in performance because of this  as the simultaneous arrangement of words and phrases seems vital to the poetry as it appears on the page.

The poem it does not exist by a play of words reads as two separate texts interwoven with each other:

‘It was an ATR 72, turboprop,
some recent research suggests maybe
twenty-some rows of seats two by two
conceptual thought is anterior to language’

The poem plays with the problem of discussing language in poetry, concluding that poems about language ‘need to be about something else too’ which, through the alternating lines of text, this poem achieves effectively, forcing the reader to search for coherence in a poem that holds together and pulls itself apart simultaneously. It can also be read as a mission statement for Fryatt’s collection, which embraces ambiguity and celebrates the plural possibilities of language.

Initially I found the ideas in this poem difficult to grasp of and it felt a little like solving a hard clue in a cryptic crossword. There are other aspects of the puzzle to be solved here; the contents page lists titles which are not printed with the poems themselves so the reader constantly turns back to the front of the book almost as if looking for the answers or clues. However there is far more than just novelty value to Fryatt’s work; what she achieves here is discursive and subtle rather than gimmicky.

There’s no denying that Fryatt’s poetry could be described as difficult and I did require access to a search engine at all times, confident as she is in  throwing in references to mythology, history and using snippets of other languages. However, when poetry is engaging it becomes necessary to do the required research. This is a collection that encourages re-reading through its beauty and strangeness.

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‘Oh-zones’ by Elizabeth-Jane Burnett

In Pamphlets on September 28, 2012 at 9:30 am

-Reviewed by Afric McGlinchey-

Elizabeth-Jane Burnett is a performance poet, and there is something of the immediacy of the spoken word in this chapbook.  But while the spoken word relies on an instant connection, not only to the words, but to the physical presence of the poet, here, we simply have the words on the page. Burnett has used the visual space of the page well, however, offering poems of different shapes.

In the Preface to Oh-zones, Burnett refers to the poems as ‘sensory-zone-poems: ‘inhaling, releasing and resonating through stress’. We are also told that ‘whords’ – words experienced as chords – ‘explore simultaneity in perception and identity’.

In the opening poem, ‘available sky’, the lines are short, the images accessible. The poem manages to convey the sensory overload of living in an urban environment through interesting line breaks and juxtapositions of sales-pitch phrases with nature elements. There is a sense of disconnect between urban and rural. There’s also a bitter wit:

’1/3 off hugs with your son
if you see
something suspicious press the
sky sags with
trees bedecked with plastic bags
from costcutter’

The third line, ending in ‘the’ both cuts off a connection, and also runs on, to a new tangent. The assonant ‘a’ sound of ‘sags/bags’ is effective, and the repetition of ‘with’ adds to the weight of  the sagging sky. The idea of the sky ‘sagging’ with trees is quite arresting and this image certainly stopped me in my tracks, physically inaccurate though it might be. Where daylight fades, ‘gusting neon super / market lights’ root ‘every item to the earth / discounting nature ducting.’ Again, ending the line with ‘super’ is beautifully ironic.

Continuing the theme of neon lights, and equally humorous, is ‘villanelle in green’:

‘asda, with your green light
I prefer you to lidl’

and later:

‘it irons the air bright
yellow with red middle
bricks of sick light’

While I feel that the poem was let down by the word ‘sick’ (too telling), the ending redeems the poem:

‘I look out of light
it is april

the sky is an apple’

These are the poems of an eco-warrior, and  the poem ‘sharks, in their absence’ reveals how the absence of sharks near a coral reef shows that ‘the entire system is under (dressed/duress…’

The poem keeps interrupting itself with bracketed asides and indentations, and the repetition of as…as…as… shows the simultaneity/consequences of every action upon our environment:

‘at 30 degrees these deeds
seethe (look up
controlled environment
marigolds) as the soft
collapse of coral
barely registers as nudity
washes backless
over water freshening
as one thing becoming another’

The oil companies get a battering of course, although ironically, ‘…who funds ethics, but oil)’. And poets are clearly as essential to the ecosystem as (the good kind of) sharks. Because:

‘in their absence
sharks.’

My favourite poem here is ‘refuge wear’, where ‘disturbance is routine’, such as the air ‘unblueing’, causing the narrator to ‘chafe across car parks searching for / a blue fix’. The shape of the words on the page is like a broken up prose poem, effectively conveying the ‘disturbance’. There is a sense of unraveling with all the negative words: ‘unchecked’, ‘unbuttoning’, ‘undoing’, ‘unblueing’.

The last two poems are ‘breath-chords’ and ‘sun-chords’ – in the first, there are lists of words in columns across the page, while the second begins like a kind of yoga class instruction:

‘begin with inhale
together breathing syntax
we arrive at words

The words follow, in small blocks, or in a paragraph of words and phrases. And yes, there is tension, and stress, in the juxtaposition of ‘hot, low, clouds, litter, filter, cost, traffic, sunflowers’. The final three lines don’t save the day either:

‘warning hot shiver
shimmer and lift open pink
unbuckling clouds’

but perhaps, the pink helps us to ‘inhale, release and resonate through stress.’

All in all, the chapbook offers a pleasing soundscape, and impressionist impact. While the poems are political, they are not stridently so, and yet there is substance and innovation too. I would love to see them performed.

 

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