Monday, April 30, 2018

SUCCUBUS IN MY POCKET by KARI EDWARDS

EILEEN TABIOS Engages



succubus in my pocket by kari edwards
(EOAGH, Brooklyn, 2015)


Dear kari, Dear Marthe,

My dog Athena is dying. Not dying in the sense that we’re all dying but, quite specifically: she is dying and it will be a premature death. It will be as premature, I feel, as both of yours. The prematureness is significant—we will all die, but yours, like Athena’s, seem to be deaths out of sync with the lives that were supposed to unfold. Or perhaps not—but this dismay must exist initially in a flawed someone who loved you both.

My dog Athena is dying from a fungal disease. She is three years old. There is, as I write this, no known cure though we intervened more than any other human family has done for a dog so that, hopefully, her experience will add to the body of knowledge required for discovering a cure someday.  I’m going on too long about Athena, here, because it hurts to address the specificities of your two deaths.

My dog Athena is dying from a fungal disease that has spooked her doctors. When we brought her to the hospital, the doctors said she was the known third incident of such a disease brought to their hospital. But since seeing Athena, they now see a case every other day, “and the cases are accelerating.” Thus, my husband Tom has a theory: Athena is dying prematurely because of climate change. Warm weather increases the pathogens in the air and such has affected Athena—what she’s drawn into her body with each breath. Since Tom expressed his belief, I went online and, yes, there does seem sufficient research now to affirm his thoughts. For instance,

“climate warming tends to favor the geographic expansion of several infectious diseases. … Overall, climate conditions constrain the geographic and seasonal distributions of infectious diseases, and weather affects the timing and intensity of disease outbreaks…”
--ScienceDirect (a related article HERE)

Well there you go—the personal is the universal and vice versa, the body is the world and vice versa, to damage environment is to hurt the very flesh it’s supposed to be “around”, and I see you both—Dear kari, Dear Marthe—in your respective wisdoms nodding.

After you passed, Dear kari, I ordered your book succubus in my pocket. But this 2015 posthumous release from EOAGH remained on my desk, unread, for the past three years. It stayed on my desk, always inches from my fingers, but remained unread. It was too painful to open what would be another confirmation that you had passed.

But then, Dear Marthe, you passed. You passed just days before I had ordered a review copy from above/ground press of your chapbook, coastal geometries.  It arrived after your death. I haven’t yet opened it.

But your premature passing, Dear Marthe, turned my fingers towards kari’s book.  Because of you, Dear Marthe, I’ve begun to read kari’s book. I turned away from pain to another pain that time made incrementally more bearable. Thank you, Dear Marthe: kari’s book is a masterpiece. You can see the very physicality of its energy just from its first page:

(click on all images to enlarge)

Perhaps kari’s succubus in my pocket might become some “niche” read (due to its subject matter, due to the vagaries of publishing and its initial presence through a “small press”, due to the e-world’s short memories, and so on). If so, this fate is clearly temporary—it does not belong in some “underground.” kari’s words will muscle themselves out onto the larger universe as kari achieved something that compelling.  Here’s some sample pages from the book, chosen by opening it at random:


Rob Halpern provides an absolutely luscious introduction, Dear kari, to your words. Here’s an excerpt that I cite so that I don’t lapse to a pretend-objectivity in, for purpose of a “review,” attempting to analyze your words:



Thank you, Rob Halpern. I now can continue reading you, Dear kari, by not passively looking at your words but swimming in the spaces between them, then touching out to feel (nay caress) the words every time I’m moved to do so, and I’m often moved to do so because they are palpable. And they are convincing … and convincingly-beautiful. Here’s another sample for those reading me feeling you:


With your death, Dear kari, you continue to trouble habitual life stories. You’ve always wanted to be read but not be a consumable read in the manner of capitalism. Because your words are compelling, as also  affirmed by Trace Peterson’s moving Foreword, you will always be read even if it takes more readers three years or more to come to your stories.

And, Dear Marthe, someday I will read you again … past the initial hurt of your premature transition. I do miss you.











(on my desk)

Love,
Eileen


*****

Eileen Tabios is the editor of Galatea Resurrects (GR)She loves books and has released over 50 collections of poetry, fiction, essays, and experimental biographies from publishers in nine countries and cyberspace. Her 2018 poetry collections include HIRAETH: Tercets From the Last Archipelago, MURDER DEATH RESURRECTION: A Poetry Generator, TANKA: Vol. 1and ONE TWO THREE: Selected Hay(na)ku Poems which is a bilingual English-Spanish edition with translator Rebeka Lembo. She is the inventor of the poetry form “hay(na)ku” which will be the focus of a 15-year anniversary celebration at the San Francisco and Saint Helena Public Libraries in 2018. She also will edit three anthologies in 2018: Menopausal Hay(na)ku for P-Grubbers, HAY(NA)KU 15, and HUMANITYMore information is available at http://eileenrtabios.com.




Monday, April 23, 2018

OBJECTS FROM A BORROWED CONFESSION by JULIE CARR

KYLAN RICE Reviews


(Ahsahta, Boise, ID, 2017)

The difficulty of Julie Carr’s Objects from a Borrowed Confession is also its triumph. I don’t mean that Carr has written a book that is hard to read (though, in a gripping, psychological sense, it is). Rather, what I mean is that, in her book, Carr crystalizes a certain kind of difficulty. Having felt it, she tries to make it felt. This isn’t an easy task, since it exposes both the writer and her reader to a feeling that repulses: hating how easy it is, in the end, to overlook—that is, to resolve repulsion and what repulses in the same annihilating stroke. And yet, hating is never the aim of Carr’s Objects. In fact, in its labors to confess love’s difficulty, Carr’s is a book of awful, careful, agonized love.

In Objects, the specific difficulty to which Carr witnesses is that of witness itself. To make sure that this difficulty stays difficult—or, rather, remains self-critical—Carr strains at the limits of forms and forms of expression, deploying a hybrid mix of journalism, criticism, memoir, diary, and poetry. Using every available resource, then, Carr’s improvised but tireless efforts try to keep open the possibility of witness, while being honest about the risks—both the risks of witness, and the risks of witnessing witness.

For sure, like any job, even witness has its risks. Poetry, too. I heard the risks of writing poetry described once as “psychic.” There is a strenuous psychic exertion demanded in the attempt to keep open what—like the eye, like the I—wants to shut by itself. 

Maybe this is why, in the ninth section of Objects, an essay titled “By beauty and by fear: on narrative time,” Carr can’t fall asleep, can’t close her eyes to rest. In this essay, Carr confesses to some of the origins of her project, from which flow the origins of her insomnia, too:

“Back in the library sits a cart of photography books, each more gruesome than the last. I told the librarians I was researching violence, and am embarrassed by how seriously they took me. In fact, I am researching my own fears.”

And, since “insomnia plagues the fearful,” Carr’s decision to gaze fearfully at violence triggers the fearsome vigilance of gazing. Here the risk of looking is constant, sleepless looking. But, like the rest of Objects, Carr’s essay is not about—or, at least, not only about—the risks of witness. Instead, Carr pushes deeper, asking what happens when witness itself is witnessed. I read by “By beauty and by fear” as the attempt to initiate, enact, and offer a stopgap response to that question.

In the process, this essay (which I focus on because I believe it’s representative of key themes throughout Objects) also reflects on Carr’s mother’s dementia. Given this, Carr lays out for us the knot of fears she is, or has become:

“I could not sleep because of fear, because the year I spent reading websites and staring at photography books that featured some of the most monstrous things humans do to others was also the year my mother shat in the furnace room when she could not find the bathroom, the year she wandered the house sobbing ‘miserable, miserable’ to herself or to us. The year I lost her to miserable was the same year I spent in the archives of American violence, as if one set of fears might outshine another. Of course I feared losing her to misery. Of course I also feared losing myself, to her misery or to my own, or to the misery that is all of ours—a particular American misery. Perhaps not sleeping became a way to protect, with avid intensity, the fiction of the coherent narratable self, this temporary invention of the day.”

Irrupted by American misery and by her mother’s misery, Carr finds her insomnia is both physical and existential. By Carr’s writerly logic, insomnia is also the condition of the poet, who knows, perhaps better than anyone, that the “coherent narratable self” is a “temporary invention of the day.” If fear is what keeps the eye and the I open and protective and vigilant, then “there really is no poem outside of fear, no sublime on one page and beauty on the other. To write is to call to that fear, to lie down in it.” Of course, the ethical consequences of such a claim—the claim that the poetic I might only exist as a parasite of fear initiated by witnessing misery—are repulsive and devastating, and Carr knows it: “…[T]o put it more bluntly, the terror of the un-narratable, un-nameable ‘I’ that I encounter in my mother's mind full of holes, is fucking the beauty I want—the anarchic violent poem.”

Her blunt account of the poetics of fear refers back to a moment earlier in the essay where Carr allegorizes the story of Hephaestus, Aphrodite, and Ares. To simplify, Hephaestus gets figured as a writer, his wife Aphrodite as beauty, and Ares, her lover, as violence:

“Hephaestus, the ugly forger of technologies, was in a rage against his beautiful wife’s promiscuity. The net he wove of gossamer thin wire was meant to capture Aphrodite in the act of betraying him. But when he trapped her and her lover, the irascible and violent Ares, the other Gods gathered around and only laughed and laughed.”

The writer wants to do precisely what Carr does in this essay and recognizes as one of the difficulties of her book more broadly: “That gossamer net forged with precision is one way to understand narrative. And beauty, which rises out of foam, defies the traps narrative sets for it…And so beauty slips out of the grip of craft and into the arms of brutality.”

Or, to put it more bluntly, Carr seems to realize that, in searching to capture the beauty in misery—that is, in trying to write poetry, to find my “I” in the hole in another person’s head, to borrow objects from another person’s confession—the outcome can only be an anarchic fucking violent poem.

Carr does not stop at this realization. She implicates, but does not resign herself. Perhaps this is the truest, most difficult work of confession: self-indictment without the satisfaction of closure, of consequence or punishment. Unresigned, impelled to explain, to narrate, the confessor-poet speaks out of error in order to be countenanced in, and never retrieved from, their error. Redemption, if it can be called that, takes for its basic architecture this recoiling self-repulsion, this negative space—that is, the opening openness—of the erring I. The openness of witness redeems, even as it always nearly ruins, the witness, who has to confess to confessing in order to be redeemed in and from and wholly in spite of the witnessing self. Applying roughly this clement metaphysics, Objects from a Borrowed Confession factors confession as the necessary work of vigilant witness. To always attend, wary as a mother, which is not to overlook.

This task belonging to the poet is, of course, exhausting, which is maybe why Carr wonders out loud:

“But maybe it’s time to let all this go. The naming and the wrestling. (Judgment.) The naming and renaming of the self. Maybe it's time instead for the giving over of the self. (When will will myself?) I give myself to you, for you I must lie down and be quiet.”

Though it risks the tautological collapse of solipsism, true of every lyric enterprise, the great marvel of Carr’s book is the achievement of a radical self-rupture that nevertheless swerves to attend critically to that same drive toward radical self-rupture—that quiet impulse toward the “giving over of the self.” In the ethical universe of Objects from a Borrowed Confession, there is no such thing as an easy route or a straight line; there is no such thing as a monumental, unswerving I. There is only ever clinamen and curvature, just as the lens of the eye is curved, taking in light at an angle, always at a slant, as truth is told.

By my reading, in the effort of trying to understand why poets and philosophers are so drawn to “the giving over of the self” at the ransom of selfhood itself, Carr manages a more honest version of self-rupture, or—better put, perhaps—self-elision, eying the I. Pulling on her intimate relationship with the Romantic tradition, Carr spends time indexing and questioning the origins of the desire for oblivion. She asks:

“What makes poets in particular want to have or be or perform this ‘nothing’ so badly? 'I am nothing, who are you?' I read when I was eight and kept it by the bed. 'I nothing am' says Edgar, hiding in the body of another. Sometimes it's the freedom that comes with language, language's vapor-like qualities, how it's nothing and can be everything, that we start to identify with, want to not just use but be—like Keats climbing up to his muse Moneta and begging to peer into her hollow brain, to see through her eyes that see nothing, or like Plath on Ariel becoming foam.”

Carr observes that this desire is “a spiritual longing, but it's a political longing, too.” Addressing these meditations to her friend, the poet Fred Moten, Carr summarizes: “As you said, or as I think you said, in emptying out the self, in alchemizing it into vapor, we get to that complicated word: empathy.”

Carr extends the consequences of this process to confession—“those confessions of self-negation, self-effusion, and self-evacuation that so abound in poetry”—which “might serve a cathartic urge…, [and] serve a political purpose, too …, cutting us loose, even momentarily, from our steadfast attachment to being selves that the law names, granted the equivocal privilege of ownership, the uneven privilege of 'rights'.”

Carr’s realization that the alchemy of self-elision can result in empathy on personal, social, and political levels triangulates her in the long tradition of French and British Romantic poets and writers with whom she engages throughout Objects, including Keats, Wordsworth, Carlyle, Rousseau, and Flaubert—some of whom were responding to eighteenth-century moral philosophers like Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. Smith and Burke wrote extensively about sympathy, but describe it as a kind of repulsive body-snatching. Here’s Smith on the psychological process of sympathizing, employing language similar to Burke’s account of sympathy in his own book A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), published two years before Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments:

“Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers.…[But] by the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations… His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have thus adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels…”

As I have tried to show, much of Carr’s book is an attempt to perform and critique what Smith sketches out: what happens when we respond to other peoples’ misery and suffering. Carr’s intervention in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century figurations of interpersonal sentimentality or sympathy—and its more rarefied expression, empathy—is to try and achieve the sentimental, confessional self-voiding that Moten implies and that witness requires. In other words, instead of sympathetically entering into and extracting from another person, empathy happens when the other person enters us. As Carr confesses: “A self possessed, not self-possessed. It's what I've wanted to be.” Elsewhere she reports the effects of empathetic love on the self in similar terms; Carr describes the self in love “as a space for longing, a place for the other to reside, even in her absence.” The hollowed-out self becomes a “passage”—cervical, and also textual: “I'd say in some moment I've known myself as a passage through which others move.” Indeed, Carr compares the feeling of self-evacuation to child-bearing and raising, saying, like Donne, “that you’re a space for another, the hole that can hold someone, not just in arms, but in the belly, or the ass—this shame-infused space of desire that can’t really ever be is what I'd call the fantasy of motherhood. Which I continue to choose.”

In Objects from a Borrowed Confession, motherhood (both being-mother and being mothered) becomes a subject of meditation that refracts questions of witness, confession, subjectivity, empathy and poetry. It’s worth pointing out that, because she is also working so closely with nineteenth-century Romantic writers, when Carr foregrounds motherhood, she manages a critique that subverts, revises, and updates what has otherwise gone down in the textbooks as a male-dominated literary tradition. She provides a sentimental poetic alternative that makes it possible to read Objects from a Borrowed Confession in the context of nineteenth-century women writers like Felicia Hemans, Lydia Sigourney, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Susan Warner, and Julia Ward Howe, among many others. Like the hard and sometimes unforgiving work of mothering, Carr’s quiet, brutal distillation of sentimental concerns chooses to dwell inside the difficulty and consequences of care—whether that’s care for a child, your own or a stranger’s, or for a mother, or for a country.


In parting, I want to submit that, while it’s fashionable to lyricize about the lyric, Objects from a Borrowed Confession is one of the most rigorous, critical, and innovative expressions of that trend to date. For this reason, Carr’s book lays out a definitive turn for both the House Lyric and the House Confessional—here configured as one and the same.  


*****

Kylan Rice has an MFA from Colorado State University, and he is working on his PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His book reviews have been published by Colorado Review, West Branch, Carolina Quarterly and the Emily Dickinson Society Bulletin. Some of his poems can be found at Kenyon Review, The Seattle Review, and elsewhere. 






Sunday, April 22, 2018

A DOG LOST IN THE BRICK CITY OF OUTLAWED TREES by GEOFFREY GATZA

EILEEN TABIOS Engages


(The Mute Canary, Lockport, N.Y., 14094)

Geoffrey Gatza’s A DOG LOST IN THE BRICK CITY OF OUTLAWED TREES offers an interesting premise: presenting as poems what are actually scores for performance. That is, inspired by “change ringing” which Gatza explains to be “an English method of ringing church bells to produce a rich cascade of sound set in a predetermined series,” Gatza wrote poems “set up for performance. They are scored for people in place of bells.”

These poems range from pieces set for three readers in a “plain hunt” up to an hour-long “quarter peal” set for ten readers. The number of performers can range from three people all the way up to twelve. A plain hunt is the simplest method where all the voices “hunt” in or out, following the idea of odds out, evens in. “In” refers to going down to the lead (the front), the first word is the second, “out” refers to going up to the back, and the first bell to reach the back is the fifth. Then they all plain hunt up to the back and down to the front in turn. The first section is set in colors to illustrate how the patterns function and weave in and out. The other sections are set in black text so that the group of performers can find their own way in the pieces.

Here’s the beginning of the collection’s first poem:

SPIRA, SPERA, BREATHE, HOPE
Plain Hunt – for Three Voices

Spira Spera Spiral
Spera Spira Spiral
Spera Spiral Spira
Spiral Spera Spira
Spiral Spira Spera
Spira Spiral Spera
Spira Spera Spiral
Spira Hope Spiral
Hope Spira Spiral
Hope Spiral Spira
Spiral Hope Spira
Spiral Spira Hope
Spira Spiral Hope
Spira Hope Spiral
Spera Hope Breathe
Hope Spera Breathe
Hope Breathe Spera
Breathe Hope Spera
Breathe Spera Hope
Spera Breathe Hope
Spera Hope Breathe
Spera Spera Hope
Spera Spera Hope
Spera Hope Spera
Hope Spera Spera
Hope Spera Spera
Spera Hope Spera
Spera Spera Hope
Hope Hope Breathe
Hope Hope Breathe
Hope Breathe Hope
Breathe Hope Hope
Breathe Hope Hope
Hope Breathe Hope
Hope Hope Breathe
Breathe Breathe Spera
Breathe Breathe Spera
Breathe Spera Breathe

Gatza says readers can read his poems any way they wish but, for this first poem that suggests “For Three Voices” and presents the text in the book in three different colors, one can certainly envision three readers reading from their “assigned” places. What results, then, is sound poetry … even as what’s being sound-ed are not sounds (as with church bells) but words with meaning.

It’s interesting to consider the effectiveness of this approach. I, for one, recognize the poems as poems but am I going to sit through the pages reading each word? I didn’t. I didn’t so much “read” as “scan” several of the poems in the book. But my behavior does attest to how the poems are “scores.”

(Btw, I once created a sound poem based on using words from a language in which I or my anticipated readers are not fluent; I published the text in one of my books but had/have no expectation of readers literally reading the words which were/are meant to sound out sounds in that the letters (deliberately) produce no meaning to English readers. Gatza’s project, by offering comprehensible words, offer up a tension between meaning and sound, a difficulty similar to that tension between meaning and design when using words/letters in visual art.)

And yet. Perhaps “scores”—even though the term itself is used in the book—may be a tad simplistic as to what these poems are/become.  Epigraphed by this wonderful quote from Victor Hugo—

And if you wish to receive of the ancient city an impression with which the modern one can no longer furnish you, climb – on the morning of some grand festival, beneath the rising sun of Easter or of Pentecost – climb upon some elevated point, whence you command the entire capital; and be present at the wakening of the chimes. Behold, at a signal given from heaven, for it is the sun which gives it, all those churches quiver simultaneously. First come scattered strokes, running from one church to another, as when musicians give warning that they are about to begin. Then, all at once, behold! – for it seems at times, as though the ear also possessed a sight of its own, – behold, rising from each bell tower, something like a column of sound, a cloud of harmony. First, the vibration of each bell mounts straight upwards, pure and, so to speak, isolated from the others, into the splendid morning sky; then, little by little, as they swell they melt together, mingle, are lost in each other, and amalgamate in a magnificent concert. It is no longer anything but a mass of sonorous vibrations incessantly sent forth from the numerous belfries; floats, undulates, bounds, whirls over the city, and prolongs far beyond the horizon the deafening circle of its oscillations.

Nevertheless, this sea of harmony is not a chaos; great and profound as it is, it has not lost its transparency; you behold the windings of each group of notes which escapes from the belfries.
Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

—the book shows that the poems are not just sounds but words and, yes, narratives… in the manner of how, in Hugo’s description, one can see/hear not just a “sea of harmony” but also “the windings of each group of notes.”  Because I am a reader too tied to meaning when I look at words, a poem that straddles sound but also a more complicated narrative works more effectively for me than others. It’s no coincidence that I prefer the poems meant for “Eight Voices” over the ones meant for “Three Voices” with their resonances based on meaning. You can get a gist of what I mean by the titles of two poems:

I HATE CAPITALISM BUT I WANT TO FUCK SANTA CLAUSE

YOU CAN’T DESTROY TIME; IT HAS NO PLACE TO GO


The former poem has text like this—

I Hate Capitalism but I Want to Fuck Santa Claus
Yorkshire Surprise Major – for Eight Voices

I hate capitalism but I want to fuck Santa Claus
I but to want Santa Claus fuck

I to but Santa Claus want fuck
to I Santa Claus but fuck want

to I but Santa Claus want fuck
to I Santa Claus but fuck want

to I Santa Claus fuck but want
to I fuck Santa Claus want but

—while the latter has text like this—

You Can’t Destroy Time; It Has No Place To Go.
Yorkshire Surprise Major – for Eight Voices

You Can’t Destroy Time It Has No Place To Go
Time Destroy No It Has To Go Place

Time No Destroy To Go It Has Place

No Time To Go Destroy Place It Has
No Time Destroy To Go It Has Place

No Time To Go Destroy Place It Has
No Time To Go Place Destroy It Has
No Time Place To Go It Has Destroy
No Time Place To Go Destroy It Has Time
No Place To Go It Has Destroy

You get the gist. But while my brain stayed with the words of the first poem—“Spira,” “Spera,” “Breathe” and “Hope”—my thoughts continued past the texts on the page for the two poems for “Eight Voices.” The latter two poems made me think past the words I read as I considered their presented thoughts on capitalism, Santa Claus’ becoming a symbol for commercialism rather than … whatever Santa was before, and then all sorts of cogitations arose at the idea of destroying time or the impossibility of such.

And yet. Having said all that, let’s say that Gatza went to a poetry reading with this book and perhaps some friends to help him “read” from the book. Who knows? It may be that the poems with more emphasis on sound may be more effective live performances.  In a performance venue, it’s possible that (some or many of) the audience members are more focused on the moment and thus can attend to each sound as it occurs, versus mentally pausing to consider the meaning/implication of narrative while the performance is continuing past that narrative.

And yet.  I am writing this review concurrent with reading through the book and so, after I’ve stated what I’ve stated above, I then come onto a poem on Page 87 that shows that I’m also presenting a binary that doesn’t always hold. That is—and this attests to Gatza’s wisdom, and certainly sophistication, as a poet—on Page 87 we come across a poem that begins as such:

When a Poet Dies An Entire Library Dies As Well
Cambridge Surprise Maximus – for Ten Voices – for Tom and Norma

When a Poet Dies An Entire Library Dies As Well
When An Library Poet As a Dies Entire Well Dies
When As Library An Well Poet Dies a Entire Dies
When Well Dies As Entire Library Dies An a Poet
When Dies Entire Well Dies a Poet As An Library
When Dies a Entire Poet Dies An Well Library As
When Poet An a Library Dies As Entire Dies Well
When Library As An Poet a Well Dies Dies Entire
When As Well Library Dies An Entire Poet Dies a
When Well Dies Entire Dies As a Library Poet An
When Entire Dies Dies a Well Poet An Library As
a When Dies Poet Entire An Dies Library Well As
An When Poet Library a As Dies Entire Dies Well
As When Library An Poet Well a Dies Dies Entire
When Well As Dies Library Entire An Dies Poet a
Dies When Well Entire Dies a As Poet Library An

Like the other poems, this poem goes into various permutations of the words that make up the title. But there’s something about that line, “When a Poet Dies An Entire Library Dies As Well,” that makes the reader (me, anyway) consider its truth, its complicated truth. And I can easily envision myself at a live performance continuing to mentally ruminate over the phrase’s implications while enjoying the sounds being voiced by the performers.  Perhaps it’s the articulation of a particular line whose effect breaks down my earlier-described binary that makes a great poem in this particular style. While I get this effect from “When a Poet Dies An Entire Library Dies As Well,” I don’t receive a similar transporting effect from, say, “A Dog Lost in the Brick City of Outlawed Trees.” But if it’s this perspective that determines the “analysis” of Gatza’s collection, then we can say that identifying which line works better than another is subjective so this paragraph is not identifying a flaw per se in Gatza’s project.

What we do know is that Gatza has taken an inventive approach towards making his latest poetry book such that the mind is not only appreciative but would anticipate a chance to see this book performed in such a way as to please other senses besides sight.


*****


Eileen Tabios is the editor of Galatea Resurrects (GR)She loves books and has released over 50 collections of poetry, fiction, essays, and experimental biographies from publishers in nine countries and cyberspace. Her 2018 poetry collections include HIRAETH: Tercets From the Last Archipelago, MURDER DEATH RESURRECTION: A Poetry Generator, TANKA: Vol. 1and the forthcoming ONE TWO THREE: Selected Hay(na)ku Poems which is a bilingual English-Spanish edition with translator Rebeka Lembo. She is the inventor of the poetry form “hay(na)ku” which will be the focus of a 15-year anniversary celebration at the San Francisco and Saint Helena Public Libraries in 2018. More information is available at http://eileenrtabios.comShe is pleased to direct you elsewhere to recent reviews of her work: MURDER DEATH RESURRECTION (MDR) was reviewed by Zvi. A Sesling for Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene.