American Songbook
Michael Ruby
Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013, $17
These brilliant, maddening poems deconstruct and reinvent familiar songs, riffing into the stratosphere. Fragmented lyrics run through each poem like magnets, drawing iron filings of sound to create new shapes: "Somewhere hurlers / Over the rainbow thick as pelts"; "I'm stuck in Folsom Prison opening oats and downing omnibus theologies." A concept book can wear thin, but Ruby's American songbook samples the DNA of everyone from Bessie Smith and Woody Guthrie to Tupac Shakur, recombining with the agile imagination that sired his genre-bending Memories, Dreams, and Inner Voices for Station Hill Press of Barrytown. Ruby's literary mixtape insinuates itself into the reader's experience: Maybe "O'er the ramparts bad taste and lovin' it" really does belong in "The Star-Spangled Banner." This land is his land. —NS
Chapel of Inadvertent Joy
Jeffrey McDaniel
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014, $15
Sarah Lawrence professor McDaniel's lavishly metaphorical, rollicking page-turner challenges—everything. Satan obeys God "with reptilian loyalty...so you (God) could hero in ..." The poems turn darkly ribald as a cuckold, "binoculars / trained on a red-feathered bird," titillates us with all his wife enjoys elsewhere. This bird, though, is the poet himself "flinging praise through the sky." At the centerfold, the speaker of "The Keeper of the Light," a compassionate Whitman-like visionary, accompanies night's inhabitants: "I read you / ...chart your coordinates. Note your howls. And no, / I cannot save you... (I) sit inside this giant candle and fling thimbles of light / in your direction, whispering, I hear you, hold tight." —LG
Door of Thin Skins
Shira Dentz
CavanKerry Press Ltd., 2013, $16
In a unique hybrid collection of poetry, prose, and visuals, poet-artist Shira Dentz guides us into the timeless "now" of a young woman psychologically and sexually manipulated by her 60-year-old psychotherapist. Language is continually plumbed for richer meanings. From narrative, resonating words and phrases break and recombine into lyric that evokes the broken psyche, the feverish state of trauma. "I had been woven. / seated in the maze tornado winding / back his schedule/ 6 years." Word-art is made from individual words and phrases; "slippery slope" arranged in a series of colliding perpendiculars suggests giant Xs. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professor Dentz's multilayered fractured narrative dazzles. —LG
Doris' Red Spaces
Gretchen Primack
Mayapple Press, 2014, $15.95
Gretchen Primack's third collection combines the insight of experience with the spontaneity of improvisation. The voice of the eponymous Doris, a zesty alter-ego, plays against and with that of the unidentified speaker, each yearning to fill life's empty spaces "the cozy napped / fabric of the lungs, the heart / all the unnamed brittle gourds rattling..." Poems devoted to everyday life are anchored in physicality. "Your neck was a spoon / so I balanced it on my knee and smiled into its / wonked mirror." At work, the exhausted clerk fills "her hand / with a shower of gold dried apricots." Stories "cook into red marrow," giving vitality to this wide-ranging volume from Woodstock-based Mayapple Press. —LG
Keeper
(2012 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize)
Kasey Jueds
University of Pittsburgh, 2013, $15.95
In Kasey Jueds's début collection, lyricism born of inventive syntax wedded to sharp-eyed imagery illuminates shadowy spaces where natural and domesticated worlds overlap. "First dark, then more dark / smoothed down over it," a bat circles a bedroom ceiling. Pressed like a leaf between pages of a book's "dark inside," a scrap of paper preserves a "lost friend's handwriting / in black ink." Youths who observe sharks, clustered in a "scummed tank" missing "the unbearable / sea," elsewhere age into museumgoers, arrested before Rousseau's lion or Mary painted among hollyhocks. Jueds credits Mt. Tremper's Zen Mountain Monastery for "keeping the ground under my feet." Memory and longing accumulate and expand as Keeper contemplates what to relinquish, what to retain. —PU
Living In Quiet: New & Selected Poems
David Kherdian
Tavnon Books, 2013, $20
This generous anthology gathers a lifetime of work between covers. Kingston resident Kherdian's early poems limn an iconic midwestern boyhood—drinking Horlick's malted milk, fishing in the aptly named Root River—with a twist: his parents were uprooted Armenians, burdened by "homesickness /brought on by my English." As a young New York writer, he meets soulmate Nonny Hogrogian, an illustrator who gives his nose to her fairytale characters. They move to New Hampshire, where Kherdian's detail-rich lines shorten and simplify ("cup your hands / they will hold / this poem.") Living in a Gurdjieffian farm community in Oregon adds a touch of the mystic-ecstatic ("There is a beauty in all this / beyond the telling"). Here are the fruits of "a lifetime of acquainting." —NS
Madonna Comix
Dianne Kornberg & Celia Bland, foreword by Luc Sante
F8 Franklin Beedle Press, 2014, $75
Upon a ground of erased Little Lulu cartoons, Kornberg's luminous images of the female body come alive, each sensual curve precisely drawn, then "muddied" for emotion. The smart-alecky '40s Little Lulu is an unexpectedly apt adolescent Madonna, a figure who, in Bard professor Bland's startling poems, ages into Everywoman, her voice surreal, funny, heartbreaking. As object: "... quick tug / of these yellowing knobs....Ka-ching! / Sweet contraction and release, then a book of matches..." As mother: "...the crown/ of his head peaks then slips back / from the eyelid of my gate...He blinks / He blinks / But it is me who cries." In loss: "...getting down the body, unhooking his hands / like drapes from a rod..." Visually and verbally, an extraordinary achievement. —LG
My Clone
Will Nixon
Post Traumatic Press, 2013
Dusted with surrealism, personal history shades into a love letter to late-20th-century suburban pop culture in Woodstock poet Nixon's latest outing. Against a backdrop of disco balls and "Farrah Fawcett curls," a chronicle of "firsts" unfolds, from apartment rentals to meals eaten in fish joints. A witty ode to "driveway basketball" dribbles nearby the "strangely American" sighting of "Hoboken Rimbaud," embodiment of the rags-to-riches creed. Equally mindful of an autumn leaf destined "to become parchment, / a curled shingle in the roof," or given to birding on walks from the commuter train, our narrator doubles as "Registered Pagan," one who "voted for campfire sparks / flocking to replenish the stars." —PU
Niagara Transnational
(2013 Michael Rubin Book Award)
Sarah Heady
Fourteen Hills, 2013, $13
A time capsule preserving a fading Americana, Sarah Heady's volume tilts and whirls like a traveling-carnival ride. Crisscrossing vacationlands—tawdry yet redeemed—stretching from Honolulu to Lake George, it forms a series of outrageous postcards, featured attractions including "Mackinac fish with four heads" and a biblical wax museum where "Job is covered in open boils leaking cheesy pus." The Beacon native's staccato phrasing is interspersed with lettrisme refashioned for the emoticon age as words jump their tracks mid-line or punctuation marks are reduced to visual encounters, as with an asterisk-spangled page. The book's motto, "take your stand or lose your reputation as a tourist," dares readers onward. —PU
No Passing Zone
Donna Reis
Deerbrook Editions, 2013, $16.95
Warwick Valley poet Reis begins this indelible book by recalling the stillness after a near-fatal accident: "I want snow / to light on my face / the way it did as I lay / that night like a fallen tree, / an ailing wolf," ending with the "spiked beauty" of loosestrife. In between, a home is repainted and sold, a marriage dissolves and another begins. It's a saga of surviving with humor intact, full of phrases that startle and glint. On the way to a funeral in Texas, "Parched prairie grass / flutters along highways like mourners. / A crow whines from a steeple-top"; at home, "There is always a reason not to sleep. / Eyelashes net the sky. Nails pop / from walls like typos." Yet despite life's hardships, "There's no use in stopping. / I will make up for my husband's fallen life / by loving someone else." —NS
A Splendor Among Shadows
Michael Perkins
Bushwhack Books, 2013, $14.95
Lines from its opener, "Like Russian dolls, / We slip inside our ancestors," encapsulate how greater wisdom nests within koan-like imagery throughout Woodstock walker Michael Perkins's new collection. Sparse yet profound, conceived "To show us how / Change may flow," this meditation on mutability brims with self-awareness gained from aging, as assuredly as an oak may furnish "a century of acorns." Hiking Ohayo Mountain and beyond likewise has provided graceful impressions, as in: "Deer leap in flooded meadows / Like spectral dancers at dawn." Perkins boldly confronts mortality, "Beyond the certainty of loss / And the hope of resurrection." —PU
Waiting at the Dead End Diner
Rebecca Schumejda
Bottom Dog Books, 2014, $18.00
In her last book, Cadillac Men, working-class shapeshifter Schumejda celebrated the denizens of a down-at-heels Kingston pool hall. Now she turns her empathetic eye to the everyday extraordinary lives of diner workers and their "Counter Congregation." You just have to dive in /with your heart first, a veteran waitress tells a trainee. These compact poems do that and more, distilling whole lives in incisive, deft strokes: the hothead cooks, the owner's vile wife, a devout Pakistani dishwasher and his starry-eyed son, a flotilla of struggling waitresses. If you've ever done restaurant work, you'll recognize the constellations of Schumejda's grease-spattered universe. If you haven't, this book will make you a better customer. And that is high praise. —NS
