Description

In Adamantine, the poet explores the strength of stone and spirit, disarming hardness to explore the power of the human spirit to transform itself through adversity. Drawn from global news stories, the subjects of these poems range from the tallest man in the world, an Olympic medalist, and a burning monk to a family stranded in the Oregon wilderness. An ongoing investigation of the poet’s interest in the visual arts, a suite of poems contemplates the work of Goya, Warhol, Rothko, Cornell, and Calder, as well as master artists and craftsmen from the Eastern traditions.

 

 

“The freshness, luster, and charm of these poems derive not only from a superb and seemingly easeful craftsmanship, but indelibly from a generous infusion of the poet’s good heart.”  

                                    —Mike O'Connor   

 

 “Shin Yu Pai’s new collection Adamantine bristles with taut, startling language that continues to yield surprises even after readers realize that they are at serious play within the fields of the human heart, a realm in which "we must know when to give in." Diverse personae inhabit these poems, rendering insight into their traumas, sacrifices, and psychic pathos: from the "ruined man in a wheelchair" strapped in place on a city bus; to the Chinese migrant worker who suffered a brain hemorrhage that left her comatose, and who was almost cremated alive because her family couldn’t afford her hospital care; to the Vietnamese Buddhist monk immolating himself in protest at Indochinese oppression, "his heart refusing to burn"–this line repeated thrice like a mantra or prayer. This is poetry of compassion and clarity that "sees past the icon" as the poet makes a journey to China to explore her own ambivalence toward "traditions that constitute / a personal inheritance." These poems, "incised with oracle / markings" whose urgency is heightened in the poet’s ancestral legacy, both "crush illusion" and take "the Buddha back to his origins." Reading these poems, we are gratified that the poet has "come / to make this offering" of language to us.”

 

–Carolyne Wright

 

“The heart of these poems broke open even before this poet was born.  Shin Yu Pai has maintained a practice to keep it this way, so that she and all of us might live in that open, compassionate field with neither boundary nor end.  How wise of her to know that what is adamantine is the open heart. Fearless seeing, ancient mutterings on contemporary pathways and boulevards, inventive poetics, merciless memories and tender, knowing hands all take their proper place here, where she finds “every event a mirror / of mind & heart.”  Her eyes will help you open what you’ve held onto too tightly, too long, and her heart will open the rest of you from the first word to the last.”

—Peter Levitt

 

Reviews

Practice

 

Pema Norbu Gompo

shares with me a story:

at reaching thirty

 

thousand prostrations,

glancing into the vanity

to see a trimmed down

 

waist w/out love

handles – starting over

 

from zero, more than

once to better

polish his intent

 

my own practice:

carving holes in

poetry books w/

exacto blade & straight

edge, intervention as

design concept

 

a hole too uneven

a hole too big

a hole too ragged

a hole too small

 

every event a mirror

of mind & heart,

imperfect despite

a template for success,

but isn’t there

only this work?

 

day after day

heaps of words piling

up on my writing desk

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Accolades

Shin Yu Pai, born in 1975, is a second-generation Taiwanese-American poet and photographer. She grew up in Southern California and received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, with additional graduate level studies conducted at the Naropa Institute where she received the Hiro Yamagata and Zora Neale Hurston Scholarships. Currently, she is assistant curator for the Wittliff Collections.

 

Shin Yu Pai is the author of structure of the inner ear (Cinematheque Press, forthcoming), Haiku Not Bombs (Booklyn Artists Alliance, 2008), Works on Paper (Convivio Bookworks, 2007), Sightings: Selected Works [2000-2005] (1913 Press, 2007), The Love Hotel Poems (Press Lorentz, 2006), Unnecessary Roughness (xPress(ed), 2005), Equivalence (La Alameda, 2003), and Ten Thousand Miles of Mountains and Rivers (Third Ear Books, 1998). Her work is anthologized in America Zen: A Gathering of Poets (Bottom Dog Press) and The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry (Wisdom Publications).

 In addition to her work as a poet, Shin Yu has exhibited her visual work at The Paterson Museum, The Dallas Museum of Art, The McKinney Avenue Contemporary, and The Three Arts Club of Chicago. She has collaborated with individual artists and groups as diverse as Hedwig Dances and the Hudson Exploited Theater Company.

 

Description

 

“It's unusual to call a book of poetry a 'page turner,' but this collection, with the knocking and jostling of words that mark the peculiar rhythm and appeal of the prose poem, is just that. Holly Iglesias has an uncanny ability to capture whole sweeps of history in a few lines, while her eye and ear for the quotidian result in the characters pulling us from one remarkable incident to another as if they had physically taken us by the elbow, whispering urgently. Here is nostalgia without sentimentality, menace without despair, confession without bathos.”

                                   —Marie Harris

 

 

“Reading Angles of Approach is like getting out of the car after a road trip, having followed a map of blue highways through places both strange and familiar. The poems uncover the peculiar, contending histories of transplanted cultures that shape the American landscape, and a resilient self in the midst of conflict. Through a sensory weave of rich detail and intimately exhilarating language, Iglesias places us in the light of those small answers that mean the most.”
                       —Gary Copeland Lilley

 

“The cumulative effect of Holly Iglesias’ gorgeous prose poems in Angles of Approach is both hypnotic and disturbing. She is witness and actor alike, a citizen of American soil both running from and caught deep in its grand mistakes and its sharp-edged minutiae. There is humor to keep us from despair, and there is a dark vision that begs questions. Iglesias, as a lover of history and a chronicler of its shared and intimate details, pronounces no judgments with her trim elegies. She simply renders them musical and faultless, places them side by side, and invites us to listen.”

 —Maureen Seaton, author of Cave of the Yellow Volkswagen

 

Reviews

RHETORIC

You avoid breezy questions, the musings they call forth that do not pass for answers but nod, rather, toward some small intimation of a reason to be here, the black tulip plucked from a neighbor’s yard, or jottings on note paper the color of dusk when you nursed a carafe of vin ordinaire until the light completely faded and it was no longer safe to walk back to the hotel. You shun the phrase body of work, buckling at the image of your words in a satin-lined box, the family gazing at sentences, paragraphs, grief-struck but composed as they recall your writing implements, their evolutionary path from crayon to pencil, typewriter to laptop, a series akin to the March of Progress in school books that always started with an ape at the left margin, walking toward the low-browed homo sapiens, then an erect Neanderthal, his posture promising years of hunting and gathering, the mastery of tools that will spawn pyramids, aqueducts, monasteries sacked by barbarians, Scripture translated into vulgar tongues, kings with their own churches, conquistadors claiming entire hemispheres in the middle of the page, then bolts of textiles, kegs of rum, leg irons and cotton gins, belching smokestacks and fireproof safes loosed upon the world by titans of industry, and finally, the barrel-chested man in a homburg checking his pocket-watch as a locomotive called The 20th Century edges toward him from the right.

PROJECTOR

Motor whirring, screen emitting a smell like floor wax, Brother’s fist in front of the lens, blotting out Aunt Ruth’s head as she extends the pickle dish for the camera to see. Dust in the tube of light, antic as 8 mm film.

Children in the dark, untouched by war and all the parents know but never say. They stare at the rush of images—birthday cakes, Mother’s prize roses, a red Schwinn—jittery icons to comfort them in some future Babylon.

SERMONETTE

This morning I take as my text the third book of Ralph, where we learn of his wanderings and the conversation with demons on the open road that led to his first conversion—yes, his first, for there were to be many more, and yes again, because for him conversation was The Way, not the books by which we remember him, those most silent of conversations, but the garrulous meander that flowed so easily in the presence of strangers, that river of words with no apparent source which was—amen—the route to redemption as surely as Paul’s fall from his horse or Thomas’s probe of the Most Precious Wound.

 

SAINT OF SHENANIGANS  

On the lip of dark ages, a canker, a queen of deceit, her felicitous tongue but babble to boys fattened on empire. Fidgety quick, she feeds a hem inch by inch to the ravenous needle, hair littered with pins and lint, shirtwaist crusted with starch for modesty's sake. The sass of that girl, a mouth that won't quit. Barbarians, the lot of them, filthy Harps, always drunk or saying their beads.

 Oh Bridget, we pray ye, spare us the Know-nothings, their nativist spleen. Grant us patience to soothe the rage-racked heart. 

 

Accolades

Holly Iglesias is the author of Souvenirs of a Shrunken World (Kore Press), a collection of poems focused on the 1904 World’s Fair, and a critical work, Boxing Inside the Box: Women’s Prose Poetry (Quale Press). She teaches at the University of North Carolina -Asheville and has received fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council, the Edward Albee Foundation and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. 

Description

Good poetry contains the kind of knowledge we search for, the kind that resonates in the heart as well as the mind. The poems in this anthology are timeless, spanning two millenniums, and drawn from many different centuries and cultures. The voices range from ancient China, Japan, and India to contemporary America and Europe. What they share is a living spirit that can help us change the way we see ourselves, and the world.

 

As Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer says in his poem about the painter Vermeer, “ I am not empty, I am open”.  A good poem may open a door or window we didn’t know existed.  

In this age of the twenty-four/seven media assault from all directions good poetry has the capacity to slow us down, make us listen and pay attention. For the reader this book gathers unique selection of direct and accessible poetry that can awaken and transform. For the poet it is perhaps a source book from which to draw inspiration. The great Japanese poet Basho referred to his practice as Kado, the way of poetry. He thought of poetry as a way of life and source of enlightenment. He also suggested that as poets we ”don’t follow in the footsteps of the masters but seek what they sought.”

 

Contributors include Han-shan, Du Fu, Li Po, Lu Yu, Ryokan, Issa, Buson, Ikkyu, Chiyo-ni, Nanao Sakaki, Ghalib, Lai Ded, Rumi, Antonio Machado,Juan Ramon Jimenez, Miguel Hernandez, Luis Cernuda, Tomas Transtromer, Olav Hauge, Rolf Jacobsen, Francis Ponge, Charles Baudelaire, Rainier Maria Rilke, Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, Marjorie Agosin, Roberto Juarroz, Denise Levertov, Jane Hirshfield, Phillip Whalen, Gary Snyder, Lew Welch, David Budbill, Louis Jenkins, Cid Corman, Michael McClure, Peter Blue Cloud, Maurice Kenny, Joseph Bruchac, Sam Hamill, Joy Harjo, James Wright, John Brandi, Joseph Stroud, Ilya Kaminsky, Robert Bly, Chase Twichell, and many others.

 

 

 

Accolades

Dennis Maloney is the founding editor/publisher of White Pine Press. He is also a poet and translator. His works of translation include The House in the Sand by Pablo Neruda,  The Landscape of Castile by Antonio Machado and The Poet and the Sea by Juan Ramon Jimenez. His most recent volume of poetry is Just Enough. 

Description

 

Korea’s Zen tradition has always been vibrant and continues to thrive today. This book gives voice to the “Zen Mind” of Korea’s contemporary Zen Masters, articulated through koans and excerpts of conversations in the form of brief questions and answers with students and other teachers.

“Garden Chrysanthemums and First Mountain Snow is a delightful book that gives us the feel of the vital lively language of Zen in the Korean tradition.  The reader is offered a bird’s eye view of Zen dialogue, sometimes referred to as Dharma combat.  Included are vivid exchanges between Teacher and student as well as between various modern Korean Zen Masters.  A welcome addition to the growing body of literature on the Korean Zen Tradition.”

  —
Richard Shrobe (Wu Kwang) Guiding Teacher, Chogye International Zen Center of New York and author, Elegant Failure: A Guide to Zen Koans and Don’t Know Mind-The Spirit of Korean Zen.

“While reading this book of questions and answers, I stopped long enough to eat an apple and noticed that the seeds hidden inside were not really hidden.  And I wondered, are the enigmatic answers of these Korean Zen masters not also present in these rosy red questions?  The only way to find out is to eat the apple.  But if you do, why not spit out the seeds and plant your own tree? ”

                          —Bill Porter/Red Pine

 

Accolades

Ian Haight (editor): Ian Haight is an award winning poet and translator, and the co-translator of Borderland Roads: Selected Poems of Ho Kyun.

Park, Hongjin (translator): is a graduate of Seoul National University School of Law, and Deputy Director of the Korean Ministry of Strategy and Finance.

Eryn Michael Reager (translator): Was ordained as a Zen monk in both Thailand and Korea (1994, 1995).  Currently he is a nurse at Oregon University of Health Sciences.

Description

“These are poems of remarkable liveliness.  In their wide-ranging wit and passion for language, their surprising juxtapositions of the ordinary and the exalted, and their willingness to foreground doubt in a search for meaning, they show a fellowship with the work of Dickinson that is deep without ever being solemn.  Here is a fresh, distinctive voice that is consistently engaging and surprising.”

  —Carl Dennis 

 

“Kelli Russell Agodon writes, "When God knew the gifts He had given me / He said, No givebacks. " She asks, "Still, what can we substitute for childbirth? Bamboozle?  Inferno?  Divinity? "  

A black bra takes on the power of a celestial body--"no light can escape from it."  Playful and tormented, rich in wit, this poet questions the misunderstandings and the miracles all around us.   A wonderful book!”

— Peggy Shumaker

“Letters From the Emily Dickinson Room is a bright, funny, touching meditation on loss, love, and the power of words. Agodon's genius is in the interweaving of God and Vodka, bees and bras, astronomy and astrology, quotes from Einstein and Emily Dickinson, a world in which gossip rags in checkout lines and Neruda hum in the writer's mind with equal intensity. Self-help mantras resurface throughout as a reminder of the ways modern society chooses to deal with today's tragedies, a reminder that a cup of tea and a positive attitude are not always enough when struggling with life's bigger problems. Part of the book deals with the speaker's ambivalence towards marriage and religion, part with the death of the speaker's father, and part with the same themes that Emily Dickinson dwelled on: the natural world and its mysteries and ability to serve as a spiritual guide. This is a book that will linger in your mind with its humor, its honesty and insight, and its fervent belief in poetry and play.”

—Jeannine Hall Gailey, Author of Becoming the Villainess

 

 

Reviews

Being Called Back

Nevertheless its steps can be heard. . .

            —Pablo Neruda, “Nothing But Death”

 

 

In case of accident, call a priest,

or so reads the back of

my Saint Christopher medallion.

 

And I want to engrave:

Or 911. Or an ambulance,

but not just the priest. 

 

I know the priest would come,

offer everlasting life and pray

over my body, but I’m betting

 

on the medic, the EMT, the blonde girl

            who works weekends at the fire station 

to keep her daughter in private school. 

 

I put my faith in the hands of these saviors

before I’ll kiss the white collar

of the man who loves God the same way I love life.

 

I’m not ready to be called back.  Not now. 

Maybe when my body begins to crumble

and needs every speck of energy to leave

 

a chair or revise a poem, then I will say:

Just the priest please. 

But for now, call anyone

 

you think could help, anyone

who could pull me from the land of afterlife

where “eternal bliss” sounds lovely,

 

roaming the clouds with dead relatives

or wandering a white fog

near the wings of a friend who died too young.

                                                           

I imagine yards of cotton unrolling.

God is remodeling the space

for the eighty million new souls

 

who will visit this year, souls climbing

the new spiral staircase.

It be enchanting to encounter people

 

who have passed before me.  I’ll make a point

to ask Neruda about death

dressed as a broom, as I keep believing I’ll be swept up. 

 

 

 

Preparing Lucky Pea Soup in the New Year

 

She dices the peppers.  Forty

degrees and falling.  Last night,

her birthday and the woman she was

 

raised her pen to the moon,

crossed out another year, wrote loss. 

 

She sees her body in the curve

of letters and not the words.

 

She sees the letters

she never wrote in the chili powder. 

 

She places bacon in the skillet

and the pop of grease

surprises her; a celebration of heat.

 

She cannot tell you why she cried

in the spice aisle of the grocery store,

 

why she turned away

when she saw a friend she knew.  

 

It’s easier to suffer alone,

with a cold night and diced tomatoes. 

 

It’s easier to suffer when the moon

is your best lighting, when fine lines

appear near an open window. 

 

She cannot imagine her life

without black-eyed peas, without

 

someone to share them. 

She knows her husband

 

will return soon.  She knows

she cannot push away what’s already lost.

 

She adds a dash of cumin

because it keeps the chickens

and lovers from straying. 

 

All of this, she stirs.

 

From the Handbook For Emergency Situations

When we were in love

I read you How to Survive

If You Fall Through the Ice.

 

You were determined not to

listen.  You plugged your ears when I read,

Face the direction from which you came.

You told me love could be confused

with drowning.  I said, Use your elbows

to lift yourself onto the edge of the hole.

 

You never wanted to live

that coldly.  You moved close, drank

peppermint tea. I read, Reach out

 

onto the solid ice as far as possible. 

You said our chances were slim,

we lived in a temperate climate.

 

What if you knew then

that later we’d find reasons to dislike

each other’s sentences,  how many times

 

I’d look away when you wanted most

to meet my glance?  What if we knew

the instructions—Kick your feet

 

as though you were swimming and pull yourself up

—could be useful when we were breaking up? 

Or later, when we tried to reunite

 

how we should have listened—

Once on the icy surface, stay flat,

roll away from the hole.

Accolades

Kelli Russell Agodon was born and raised in Seattle and educated at the University of Washington and Pacific Lutheran University's Rainier Writers Workshop where she received her MFA in creative writing.  She is the author of Small Knots (2004) and Geography, winner of the 2003 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award.  

Her work has been appeared in literary magazines and anthologies such as the Atlantic Monthly, Prairie Schooner, Notre Dame Review, North American Review, Image, 5 a.m, Meridian, Crab Orchard Review, Calyx, The Seattle Review, Poets Against the War edited by Sam Hamill, as well as on NPR’s “The Writer’s Almanac” with Garrison Keillor and in Keillor's second anthology, Good Poems for Hard Times (Viking Press).

 

Kelli is a recipient of three Washington State Artist Trust GAP grants, the James Hearst Poetry Prize, the Dorothy Rosenberg Poetry Prize, the William Stafford Award, the Carlin Aden Award for formal verse, a Soapstone Writer's Residency, and a grant from the Puffin Foundation for her work towards peace and as a poetry editor for the broadside series: The Making of Peace.

Currently, Kelli lives in a seaside community in the Northwest with her family.  She is the co-editor of Seattle’s literary journal, Crab Creek Review.  Visit her website at: www.agodon.com

 

 

Description

 

“In her new book of very short stories, Kim Chinquee works the flash fiction form in much the same way that Raymond Carver worked somewhat longer story forms: with a stunningly complex simplicity.  There is always a roiling subtext beneath the seemingly placid surfaces and tones of Chinquee’s stories, a dichotomy which speaks to deep truths about the human condition.  Kim Chinquee is a true artist with a true vision, and Pretty is a brilliant book.”

—Robert Olen Butler

 

“Kim Chinquee writes with remarkable heart and grace.  Her wise capsulizings of love’s devastations and of life’s roil and disappointments come at you with a sorrowing precision that comforts even as it haunts.”

                                    —Gary Lutz

 

“These brief snapshots of conversations in specific settings manage to seem not like fragments of lost wholes but like vivid distillations of essential dramas, each a variation on the shared subject of thwarted intimacy. Though each snapshot is complete in itself, the book gathers mass and momentum, and so achieves a singular power.”

 

                                    —Carl Dennis

 

Accolades

 

Kim Chinquee was raised on a dairy farm in rural Wisconsin. She served as a medical lab tech in the Air Force, and was stationed in Mississippi, Texas, England, Germany and North Dakota. She received her M.A. in creative writing from the University of Southern Mississippi's Center for Writers, her M.F.A. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Henfield Prize. She lives in Buffalo, New York, where she teaches creative writing.

Oh Baby is her first book of flash fiction. 

 

Description

The excitement of prose poetry is that it transgresses the rules to catch a glimpse of what could be called the true life of the imagination. Here is a rich helping by one of the true innovators of the form.

 

“These are poems of everyday miracles. The excitement of prose poetry is that it transgresses the rules to catch a glimpse of what could be called the true life of the imagination. This is what Peter Johnson gives us. What more could we ask of a book of poems?”

― Charles Simic

 

“These poems are comic, sexual, and endlessly inventive. They are poems of appreciation and discovery; poems that prove there is such a thing as the American prose poem.”

― Russell Edson

 

“Johnson’s clear-eyed explication of our sad, bruised, fallen world becomes a celebration, an elation. Johnson shouts, “Hallelujah!” in one of his poems. Read Rants and Raves and you’ll be shouting it too.”

― Gary Young

 

“These poems fuse artifice and sincerity, rage and humility, golf balls and comic missiles to create an astonishingly funny yet serious book of prose poems, characterized by jovial cynicism and skeptical faith.”

― Denise Duhamel

 

 

Accolades

Peter Johnson has published four books of prose poems: Pretty Happy!; Miracles & Mortifications; Eduardo & “I,”and Rants & Raves: New and Selected Poems. He is also the author of a book of short stories, I’m a Man (White Pine Press, 2003), and two novels: What Happened (Front Street Books, 2007) and Loserville (Front Street Books, 2009). For his poetry, he has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Rhode Island Council on the Arts Fellowship, and his second book of poems was awarded the 2001 James Laughlin Award by the The Academy of American Poets. This award is given to honor a second book by an American author. His novel, What Happened, received the Pat­erson Prize for young adult fiction and was named the Rhode Island Book of the Year for secondary schools. He founded The Prose Poem: An International Journal, which he edited for nine years, and he is a contributing editor of The American Poetry Review, Sentence, and Slope. He lives in Providence, RI with his wife and two sons.

Description

In The Alchemist's Kitchen we accept that mortality seems cloistered as a pinecone. The world as Rich describes it, sparks ideas both dark and delightful.  Whether her subject is “Food for Fallen Angels” or the history of tulips in “Tulip Sutra,” the freshness of her style remains constant. Her lyrics travel both backward and forward in time encompassing ekphrastic poems on the photography of 19th century secessionist  Myra Albert Wiggins as well as lyrics that speak to imagined future dreamscapes of an aging self. This is her most ambitious book to date.

“This is art in the light of conscience, as Marina Tsvetaeva has written, voicing the sufferings of Somalia, Sarajevo and Screbrenica, history and its black ash of question marks yet it is also an art of praise.  From The Alchemist’s Kitchen spills an abundance of the world’s fruits, herbs and pastries, gestures of hospitality and regard, for Susan Rich is a poet who writes in the midst of things, and out of a searing awareness of loss and obliviousness to loss, desire and its absence, what it means to be spiritually awake, to behold human life in all its possibility, pathos and transience and yet say yes."                

   —Carolyn Forché

“ Susan Rich’s THE ALCHEMIST”S KITCHEN:  Kaleidoscopic curiosity, powerfully kinesthetic language, and an encompassing compassion range this abundant collection, in which personal and public realms serve as equal alembics for the  distillation of both materia and light. “                                                              --Jane Hirshfield

 “These are poems of praise and wonder graced by a delicate touch. In this, her third book, Rich examines and recognizes the constructed geography of our interior lives. And, as a result, we are given mid-life’s mature and Unexpected Song.”

—Brian Turner

Reviews

DON’T READ Susan Rich’s latest book on an empty stomach. Although The Alchemist’s Kitchen contains a wide, intelligent, and thought-provoking variety of poems, it does food better than most of the restaurants I’ve been in.

A sample from the Kitchen’s kitchen:

“. . . a spoon glistening with pomegranate seeds. . .”

“. . . we’ll sip cups of Arabic coffee, linger with lavender chocolate. . .”

“. . . Vietnamese coriander, Thai basil, Chinese leaves. . .”

“. . . taste cheeses lined up like small children: asiago, machango, a drunken goat spread from Spain. . .”

My favorite food poem in Rich’s collection is “Chanterelle,” which asks the reader to compare poetry to a “gourmet grocery shop.”  Poets can experiment with forms whose traditions they may not know well, just as chefs can make use of herbs whose names they cannot pronounce. But a poem will never be something it’s not. The reader — “the check-out girl” in the poem’s extended metaphor — will see to this, ringing it up accurately. Nevertheless, it is the poet’s obligation — like the gourmet shop’s — to offer the unusual and the exquisite and to resist “the safe way” (which, if I’m reading Rich correctly, is a play on Safeway, where my mother used to shop in Washington, D.C., before Whole Foods came to town).

The last line of the poem — “Bring home a mango/muddle it with Kosher salt”-speaks eloquently to the intentions of the collection as a whole. This isn’t a book with a single focus, although if Rich wanted to write an entire collection about food — heck, about a salted mango alone — I’d read it. No,The Alchemist’s Kitchen is indeed a muddle — a fortunate muddle, a compelling muddle. In addition to poems about food, The Alchemist’s Kitchen contains poems about the wars in Bosnia and Somalia, about the photographer and painter Myra Albert Wiggins, and, perhaps most winningly, about love and growing old.

Favorites:

“An Army of Ellipses Traveling Over All She Does Not Say…” leaves readers to fill in most of the horrors of the war in Somalia, but includes this poignant, un-elided image of a woman sitting by the open window of a bus who:

lost her bracelets, and her wrist
to the handiwork of bandits.

“Not a Still Life” is a summing up, in loose sonnet form, of Myra Albert Wiggins’ rich life and art. But as successful as Wiggins’ career was, the poem tells us:

. . . what she wanted most has all but disappeared.
The museum walls, the fame — the name not written here.

When reading poems about visual artists’ work, one is often tempted to look up the original work, which of course I did. But truth be told, Rich’s descriptions of Wiggins’ photographs and paintings are vivid enough to make this exercise redundant.

In addition to her descriptive powers, Rich handles psychological portraits with aplomb. While she credits Carole Glauber’s The Witch of Kodakry: The Photography of Myra Albert Wiggins, 1869–1956for informing and jumpstarting her Wiggins’ poems, it’s hard to imagine Glauber’s biography being both as succinct and insightful as, say, “Mr. Myra Albert Wiggins Recalls Their Arrangement”:

. . . And so if there were men
of Salem, Toppenish, Seattle, lovely and rich-
who snickered at our last-season suits
and sequined gowns, who hinted not infrequently —
that a husband should not be so happy
packing picture frames and mounting
photographs. Christ. They knew nothing.

My favorite of favorites? “At Middle-Life: A Romance,” whose energetic, imperative opening — “Let love be imminent and let it be a train” — sets the appealing, optimistic tone. Oh — and there’s a (scrumptious, of course) food reference (”Let love be a breakfast of crème cakes, pomegranate juice, a lively Spanish torte”).

Given the menu, who wouldn’t want to indulge?

 Mark Brazaitis - Peace Corp Worldwide

“If food be the music of love, play on!” is how this poet intentionally misremembers the first line of Twelfth Night, revealing a preference for word morsels over traditional meter: raspberry crèmes and Christmas mandarins, gorgonzola prawns and Dreamsicles are just a few that excite her lines. In her third book, Rich (Cures Include Travel) riffs on Seattle’s organic splendor with the distraction of one who has seen other worlds—“The seasons clock on/ redecorating the light we crave/ like a dim sum tray—and who can’t forget that beyond this one is a heartlessness beyond words.” She sees middle age (and class) as a ripe place sweetened by pleasant if minor choices, where we find ourselves “staving off loss/ by narrowing what we need.” Yet, within these constraints, our conjured joy might still be limitless: in “Daphne Swears It off,” the nymph desires the fruit more than male flesh (“if only/ you were sea salt, if only/ an apricot tree”). VERDICT Rich’s airy poems move from politics to aesthetics to personal ruminations; a number pay homage to Oregonian photographer Myra Albert Wiggins, and few stand out. But what’s constant is a lovely, ragged texture woven from the dissonance of body and mind.—Ellen Kaufman, Baruch Coll. Lib., New York - Library Journal 

 

 

 

Accolades

Susan Rich is the author of three collections of poetry, The Cartographer’s Tongue / Poems of the World, Cures Include Travel, and The Alchemist’s Kitchen. She has received awards from PEN USA, The Times Literary Supplement, and Peace Corps Writers. Her fellowships include an Artists Trust Fellowship from Washington State and a Fulbright Fellowship in South Africa.

She has worked as a staff person for Amnesty International, an electoral supervisor in Bosnia Herzegovina, and a human rights trainer in Gaza and the West Bank. Rich lived in the Republic of Niger, West Africa as a Peace Corps Volunteer, later moving to South Africa to teach at the University of Cape Town on a Fulbright Fellowship.

Rich’s international awards include the Times Literary Supplement Award, a residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Ireland and a residency at Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain. Other poetry honors include an Artist Trust Fellowship, a 4 Culture Award, a Seattle CityArtist Project Award, a GAP Award, and participation in the Cuirt Literary Festival in Galway, Ireland. 

Her poems have been published in the Antioch Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Christian Science Monitor, Harvard Review, Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Northwest Review, Poetry International and The Southern Review.  Anthologized poems and essays are included in Best Essays of the Northwest, Poets of the American West, Poem Home: An Anthology of Ars Poetica, I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poets in Defense of Human Rights, Poem Revised: 54 Poems, and The Working Poet: 75 Poetry Writing Exercises. Susan is an alumna of Hedgebrook, the Helen Whiteley Center and the Ucross Foundation. She serves on the boards of Crab Creek Review, Floating Bridge Press and Whit Press.

Educated at the University of Massachusetts, Harvard University, and the University of Oregon, Susan Rich lives in Seattle and teaches at Highline Community College where she runs the reading series, Highline Listens: Writers Read Their Work.

Her website is http://poet.susanrich.net/bio/ 

 

 

 

 

Description

 

In The Dark Figure In The Doorway: Last Poems, Morton Marcus concludes his lifelong reflections on human folly, cruelty, greed, our obligations to the past, and his belief in the power of the imagination and the spiritual redemption of art. Retracing the themes that have most concerned him over the years — art, violence, war, love, women, mortality, and his concepts of our place in the universe —, Marcus writes about the world in a variety of attitudes and tones of voice in these, the final poems composed during the last years of his life.

 Some Critical Comments on Morton Marcus’s Books of Verse

 “The spiritual nature of Marcus’s prose poetry is obvious even in the shortest and simplest pieces of the volume which, far from resembling mere journal entries, seek to describe a different kind of intimacy that exists at a slight angle from what we often take for granted as the true nature of subjective experience… Marcus’s capacity to unskin the reader’s eyes is truly remarkable, and so is his capacity to avoid the risks and dangers of excessive self-consciousness.”

—Michael Deville, Sentence 6: A Journal of Prose Poetics

 

“Morton Marcus has been hailed as ‘one of America’s hidden literary treasures,’‘superb master’ and ‘marvelous godfather’ of the prose poem. What you have heard is true….For Marcus’s world is large, and he invites the reader to share in his wide-ranging knowledge of myth, history, literature and philosophy.”

—Rebecca Spears, Sentence 2: A Journal of Prose Poetics

 “Morton Marcus is a poet at the top of his form…[who] has concentrated on prose poems in recent years, but it’s good to see he can still turn a line with the best of them.”

—Robert Hershon

 “Marcus’s great gift is his ability to nudge us into imaginary worlds by enlarging our expectations of language and metaphor. Simply put, Marcus is writing some of the best prose poetry being published today. His sensibility and poetics have influenced, and will continue to influence, the next generation of prose poets and fabulators.”

—Peter Johnson, Editor: The Prose Poem: An International Journal

 

 

Reviews

PRAYER

 

There is a story in an upraised head,

an averted eye, a wavering smile;

in an angry shout and rolling laughter.

 

There is a story in a rusty coat hanger,

a discarded shoe, a faded tapestry;

in a broken cup, a wedding ring.

 

There is a story in a wolf, a cow, a bee,

a flowering honeysuckle, a brittle weed;

in a rock, a pebble, a grain of sand.

 

Whoever or whatever You are

that resides in the center of the universe

with lightning, static and whirling dust,

 

permit me to retell these stories

without meanness of spirit

or self-serving words.

 

 

AT 31

 

At 31, I entered Miguel Hernandez last year,

having outlived Keats by five, Shelley by one.

Rimbaud, six years ahead in Africa, watched

his right leg swell like a giant asparagus;

and Crane, his drowned eyes full of fathers,

dragged chains of seaweed only two years away.

 

That night, my brothers, when I was almost asleep,

I heard you call from the road, throwing

your words like stones at my window.

But when I came to sill and looked out,

you didn’t ask me to follow, just stood mute:

hands open, heads upraised in the moonlight,

as though waiting for something I was expected to say.

 

 

 

LIVING WITH SU DONG-PO

 

for Deng Ming-dao

 

For years I’ve served him,

the houseboy who snored

like thunder and didn’t wake

when, drunk, he banged

on the gate with his staff

to let him in; the boy he leaned

against tipsily as he stood

on East Slope, watching

the moonlit river far below

and the little boat unmoored

and drifting into the distance.

“Master,” I said, “you’ll catch

your death.” He didn’t move,

just stood and watched,

and I watched with him.

I held the reins of his horse

when he dismounted that day

in the snow-tumbled village

where everyone was dead

or gone. He was surprised

because the first snow

had fallen like blossoms

on the other side of the ridge.

I remember his expression:

it was as much incomprehension

as sorrow, the same expression

that creased his features

eight years later, when he realized

he hadn’t the inner strength

to free the convicts

as a New Year’s gift.

 

I’m 67 now,

but he hasn’t aged a day.

I squat in a corner of the room,

waiting as he sits at the table

beside the lantern, leaving

in the wake of his brush

fins and flukes, shiny and black,

an orderly school of glossy backs

Swooping across the page. “More ink!”

he’ll say, or “Tea!” but mostly,

“Wine, boy: where’s the wine?”

When I placed the wine jar

near the lamp the other night,

I thought I saw the little boat

among the dolphins and dragons,

adrift among whirlpools

and lashing tails. I said nothing;

I never do. It is enough to be there,

to have him every now and then

hand me the reins or lean

against me high above the river,

both of us silent, watching

the water swirl and eddy

as it slides to the sea.

THE ROSHI’S REPLY

 

Dreaming? Yes, you are dreaming.

This world is a dream, but not a frivolous one.

Each of us dreams a part of this dream

which was dreamt before our parents were born,

and each of our dreams, opening ahead of us,

hollows out a little more of the universe,

until a network of paths radiates among the stars,

paths like shafts of light, like facets in a diamond.

 

The entrance to your path is anywhere you turn,

and each step along it as natural as breathing.

Follow this path and soon it will seem

as familiar as the garden walkway behind your home,

for you will have found your path in the original dream

where all paths are contained and revealed as One.

 

It is like a cut-glass bowl on a moonlit night

when we can no longer tell the sparkling container

from the glittering water it contains.

Do you see? There is nothing to get excited about.

We are talking about an ordinary glass bowl.

Just a bowl. And water, just water. And yet, and yet…

 

Accolades

Morton Marcus was the author of eleven volumes of poetry and one novel, including The Santa Cruz Mountain Poems, Pages From A Scrapbook of Immigrants, Moments Without Names: New & Selected Prose Poems and Shouting Down The Silence: Verse Poems 1988-2001. In 2007, he published a new volume of prose poems, Pursuing The Dream Bone, and in 2008 his literary memoirs, Striking Through The Masks, was published. He passed away in October 2009.

He had more than 450 poems published in literary journals,his work was selected to appear in over 90 anthologies, and he read his poems and taught creative writing workshops at universities throughout the United States and in Europe. Marcus taught English and film at Cabrillo College for thirty years before his retirement in 1998. In 1999, he was selected to be Santa Cruz County Artist of the Year, and in 2007 he was a recipient of a Gail Rich Award for his contributions to Santa Cruz culture. For twenty-four years, he was the co-host of The Poetry Show, the longest running poetry radio program in the nation. A film historian and critic as well as poet, his reviews appeared regularly in West Coast newspapers, and from 1999 to 2010 he was the co-host of a television film review show called Cinema Scene, which broadcast in the San Francisco Bay area and on the pod (CinemaScene.Org). His website is www.mortonmarcus.com.

 

 

Description

Vasko Popa was one of the great post-World War II European Poets. Building on surrealist fable and traditional folk-tale, personal anecdote and the tribal myths of his Serbian homeland, he created one of the most original poetries of the twentieth century. Cosmic in setting, his work seeks nothing less than taking the comic blunderings, tragic sufferings and senseless ironies of human experience and loosing them like endless dreams throughout an indifferent universe. 

 

 “As Popa penetrates deeper into his life, with book after book, it begins to look like a Universe passing through a Universe. It is one of the most exciting things in modern poetry, to watch this journey being made.”

—Ted Hughes

 

 

 “Poets have the gift to speak for others, Vasko Popa had the very rare quality of hearing the others.”

—Octavio Paz

 

 

 

Accolades

 

Vasko Popa (1922-91) was born in Vrsac in the Serbian Banat. He was elected to the Serbian Academy in 1972 and the Académie Mallarmé in Paris in 1977. He lived in Belgrade where he worked as an editor for the publishers Nolit.

 

 

Morton Marcus published ten volumes of poetry and one novel, including The Santa Cruz Mountain Poems, Pages From A Scrapbook of Immigrants, When People Could Fly, Moments Without Names: New & Selected Prose Poems, Shouting Down The Silence: Verse Poems 1988-2001 and  Pursuing The Dream Bone. His latest book is Striking Through The Masks: A Literary Memoir.