THE KISSING OF KISSING

THE KISSING OF KISSING BY HANNAH EMERSON

Read this book.

I’ve been obsessed with The Kissing of Kissing since I received an advanced copy early this winter. It took me three months to finish reading because I wanted to gnaw on each line. Mark Strand’s “Eating Poetry” comes to mind.

In the time you spend reading this review, you could order The Kissing of Kissing. Do that now, then please come back. You deserve a preview.

The Kissing of Kissing is the most original collection of poetry I’ve read in years. Emerson uses sparse language, repetition, and the imperative mood to create a rhythm that runs through the book like a heartbeat. She makes forms and breaks forms and in doing so lets loose the sounds of the universe.

I am biased. Emerson touches on many of my favorite subjects: water, soil, plants, fish, kissing, worms, poetry. Nestled in the middle of “Giveness,” she posits her theory on the work of the poet:

…The poets

here to keep telling the truth

of the keeping the life going

to survive. Poets give grounding

in helpful knowing the voice

of the universe. Please listen

In “A Blue Sound,” she enacts her theory:

Blue fish is swimming

jumping great keeping

the world from tilting

… I am

blue too. I help the fish

live in the keeping

of the sound.

Emerson’s poetry works simultaneously on the individual and cosmic scales. The rule of all for one and one for all is a constant theme and delight in her poems. Her ability to transmit the full-body experience of joy is rivaled only by Whitman.

Please, please read this book. Your mind and your poetry and your life will be better for it.

Milkweed Editions.

—Review by Ali Hintz

THE GIRL SINGER

THE GIRL SINGER BY MARIANNE WORTHINGTON

Marianne Worthington’s long-awaited debut poetry collection The Girl Singer catapults past readers’ already-high expectations. Worthington’s poems question what we owe our elders, our ancestors, our heroes, and ourselves. The text is split by subject into three parts: the first on women’s experiences in early country music, the second on the complexities of family and mourning, and the third on nature. However, through meticulous weaving, these themes radiate and converse throughout the whole book. This text may be the most finely sequenced poetry collection I have read. 

The Girl Singer acts as a witness to the sins of the past without falling into empty contrition. “Barn Dance (Chorus)” asks the reader to:

…Listen. If you want

us, say the names our mothers gave us.

Recall how we really were: rawboned,

standing spraddle-legged while we

headlined those mean stages. 

The Girl Singer hews to its creed and sings about both the beautiful and the ugly. Worthington does not mythologize the past. Instead, she confronts the sexism in the early country music industry in the “Barn Dance” series and the titular poem “The Girl Singer” and the speaker’s family’s racism in “War Story” and “James Brown Performs ‘Cold Sweat’ on American Bandstand, 1968.”

Form-wise, the collection is delightfully sprinkled with sonnets and includes a pantoum as well as its own take on the traditional murder story/ballad of Tom Dula. Worthington has a knack for choosing evocative verbs: “hills smear” along a highway, a stray dog “scratched up the ridge,” and “chrome / judder[s] in my ears” (italics my own). The musicality of Worthington’s verse is just plain gorgeous. “Strumming and plucking / then brushing and picking,” The Girl Singer is sure to croon its way into the Appalachian, and American, canons.

Fireside Industries.

—Review by Ali Hintz

DISCIPLINE

DISCIPLINE BY DASH SHAW

Dash Shaw’s tour de force of a comic book Discipline tells the compelling story of Charles Cox, a fictional Quaker teenager who runs away from his pacifist Indiana home to fight for the Union Army. From the first chapter I was entranced: I haven’t sped through a book this fast in years. The black-and-white illustrations are austere and fierce, conveying most of the action and setting the pace of the book. The writing, consisting mostly of dialogue, private thoughts, and letters between family members, fluctuates between lyrical and sparse, giving insight into Quaker society in the Civil War era and Shaw’s characters..

The Quaker faith lends a riveting cultural backdrop to the book. Shaw, himself raised as a Quaker, interrogates the faith and the culture surrounding it throughout. His hero Cox grapples with his teenage desire to fit into mainstream Indiana society and his faith that denies “the vain fashions of this world” like singing, dancing, and fighting. His dialect and inexperience set him apart from the other soldiers but he quickly learns to conform by playing cards, suppressing his “doth”s and “thee”s, and fighting in several battles. Neither Shaw nor Cox shy away from the horrors of war.

Shaw spent six years scouring through libraries to write Discipline, and it shows. He incorporates passages from “actual letters and diaries of Civil War-era Quakers and soldiers” into his text. His characters’ letters don’t just feel authentic—in many cases, they are. Part meticulously researched war story, part coming-of-age graphic novel, Discipline immerses the reader into Cox’s battles with his wartime enemies, his loving family, and his divided mind.

New York Review Comics.

—Review by Ali Hintz

WE THE JURY

WE THE JURY BY WAYNE MILLER

Wayne Miller seamlessly blends the domestic and the political in his poetry collection We the Jury. The first poem stakes out the territory of the book: “What are Death’s most notable exports? / Incompletion, oil, / and the arts.” Death pervades this collection in myriad forms including the process of aging, brain tumors, dog graves, and executions. Injustice confounds and confronts. Miller writes about the last man in the U.S. to be publicly executed by the government: “Why won’t they rush forward / to save him? Impossible / this doesn’t happen.”

Miller deftly balances the universality of death with the ways class, race, and circumstance impact it. In “Song from the Back of the House,” he ties the invisibility as well as the individual deaths of the working class to the enjoyment of the rich: “Soon we’ll scatter / like leaves across the lawns / of the powerful—lawns we’ll make / pristine by disappearing.” He investigates the complexity of his family’s close relationship with George Trabing, a murderous “racist travesty of justice” who taught young Miller how to sail.

That poem, “On History,” leads right into the titular poem which casts White people as both the defendant and the jury in the trial of racial injustice past and present. Even after “having come to comprehend the wrongs of which we stand accused / … / we know we will determine the facts / and those facts will become the surface / upon which the world rests… / … / not one of us / will truly understand what we have done.” When the defendants are the jury for their own trial, what justice can be served? Miller acknowledges that acknowledgement can only do so much. He doesn’t offer answers so much as indictment and conviction. In We the Jury, Miller grapples with his role in a world that is filled with death and injustice and yet still, somehow, tempered by love.

Milkweed Editions.

—Review by Ali Hintz

STAY SAFE

STAY SAFE BY EMMA HINE

Emma Hine’s debut poetry collection Stay Safe is a fiercely, lovingly crafted book that celebrates the endurance of the human spirit in the face of an ever-dimming future. Hine’s stable of characters includes three myth-making sisters, a mother with a brain tumor, suicidal suburban neighbors, a young couple in love, a lost astronaut from a post-Earth future, and a long-dead test pilot.

From a rather disorienting beginning, Hine’s myth-like world creates its own logic.  In “Selkie,” the speaker convinces her younger sisters that their mother used to be a selkie, a seal that can shapeshift into a human and back again using her pelt as one would a coat.  Her mother “wanted / to know what it felt like to be lost,” an urge echoed in other main characters. She would roam the beach at night, thinking how “the land was what remains / when the sea goes missing: the driftwood / remembered the water, the sand in the ground / remembered the ocean floor. Her body / always remembered her pelt.” This remembrance, whether of the sea in the mother’s case or the Earth in the astronaut’s, both haunts and humanizes Hine’s characters.

Perhaps the heart of the book lies in the lyrics of the pop song playing on the radio in “Hotel Sisters:” “We love each other, / we lose each other, we can’t / let each other go.” Hine reminds us that loss can’t be felt without love, that love is worth remembering. That love makes us human no matter how far we travel from home.

Sarabande Books.

—Review by Ali Hintz

LESBIAN FASHION STRUGGLES

LESBIAN FASHION STRUGGLES BY CAROLINE EARLYWINE

Lesbian Fashion Struggles is a humorous, heartbreaking, deeply personal collection of poems about growing up and living in the rural South as a conventionally-attractive blonde lesbian. Earleywine uses fashion as a lense through which to view her struggles with self-expression. The first poem of the book, “Where I Come From,” investigates Earleywine’s ancestral queer history of “women / from the Old South who never married / who lived in their aprons and their closets.” In a way, this poem reads as a dedication: “I talk and I talk and I open / my mouth because they couldn’t, / because they can’t / anymore.”

She goes on to write about a subject well-traversed yet still important, the (non)acceptance of LGBTQ+ folks among their own families. The speaker’s experience, like many others, is mixed: her 93-year-old grandfather “assured me he thought no differently / of me, he asked if I wanted any of his old clothes” yet her father “at the family reunion… / introduces [her and her lover] as roommates, friends.”

Some of her strongest poems use fashion to question the impossible tradeoff between being oneself and being safe. In “Lipstick,” the speaker confronts her internalized misogyny that makes her reject markers of femininity in order to feel strong. However, instead of feeling strong with short hair and lipstick the shade of “camouflage,” she feels “washed out and smudged, / worn down to a nub.” She dreams of a shade “bright as a dare, not a blushing / apology, a shade so loud it / breaks teeth.” In the end, it’s not fashion that lends the speaker strength; it’s the freedom to choose how to live and look without the burden of others’ judgement. I never thought a book with the word “fashion” in the title could bring me to tears, but that is because of my own miscalculated rebellion from society’s expectations about what a woman should be. I wish I had this book when I was fourteen and trying to come to terms with my own queerness, but I’m sure glad I have it now.

Sibling Rivalry Press.

—Review by Ali Hintz

STAY: THREADS, CONVERSATIONS, COLLABORATIONS

STAY: THREADS, CONVERSATIONS, COLLABORATIONS BY NICK FLYNN

Nick Flynn is, among many other things, a collagist. It should be no surprise then that his latest book is a collage of sorts— a selection of his poetry, memoir excerpts, interviews, essays, photographs, collaborations, and, yes, collages— from the last twenty or so years. In Stay, the reader gets as close as one possibly can to Flynn’s goal of “trying to know what [is] essentially unknowable— what it is like to be someone else.” When his words aren’t enough, he works in short pieces by other artist-friends such as Josh Neufeld’s comics and Zoe Leonard’s photographs.

 Flynn’s nonlinear narrative spans the themes of family, time, torture, death, birth, race, capitalism, becoming, war, and creation. The front half of the book gives the reader all the necessary information to begin to understand Flynn— his relationship to his mother, his father, his childhood, and his growing up. The sections that come after are the glue of the book, particularly “Ark/Hive.” Here, the tension running through the book is distilled:

…everything

is something else. This is the story

we’ve been telling ourselves

since we could speak. Possess

nothing, Francis says. Do good

everywhere. No one believes

those wings will lift you.

As a disclaimer, I have been meaning for years to (but have not) read Flynn’s work before Stay. Perhaps people more familiar with his writings would find this rehashing of his prior works redundant, but I doubt it. Personally, this book came to me when I needed it and detangled some of the loose threads balled up in my mind. This book is a self-portrait, a collaboration, and a piece of art. This book is essential.

ZE Books.

—Review by Ali Hintz

VALUING

VALUING BY CHISTOPHER KONDRICH

Christopher Kondrich’s second collection of poetry invites the reader to explore what it means to be human by going inside the speaker’s “asylum” of a mind. This experience is at once centering and disconcerting, captivating and uncomfortable, perhaps because Kondrich’s asylum is built out of the choice “to love” and “to value” in defiance of a hateful world. In the titular poem, Kondrich writes, “I dreamt that I was only, one / of one. I dreamt that I could tell you / and you would know.” The speaker yearns for a form of elemental understanding intrinsic to humanity. However, here, true communication is only possible in dreams. That doesn’t dissuade Kondrich to keep trying. 

Elemental understanding requires elemental language. Kondrich uses simple, elegant phrasing to illustrate complex philosophical concepts. Throughout the book, he plays with prosody, varying his line lengths and stanzaic forms to fit the message of each poem.

The inward gaze of the book pushes the reader to question where the self begins and ends. It also questions what the value of the self is, or rather, what gives value to the self. One poem posits, “We determine the value of a thing / by how much we owe to those who remove it.” Another, “I live as long as you are singing. / The end is a passage through another’s face.” Kondrich pushes to find the limits of his asylum—where the mind begins and ends, who the self is. Do not expect a clear answer.

University of Georgia Press.

—Review by Ali Hintz