THUNDERBIRD INN

Thunderbird Inn by Collin Callahan

I’ll begin on a personal note: I was still an undergrad at the University of Arkansas when Collin Callahan was here completing his MFA in poetry. I remember his fourth-year reading well. I marveled at how his work invited ordinary elements—roads and motels—to be bound tightly together by his contained lines and lyrical language. But this review is special to me for another reason: Collin was one of the Arkansas International’s founding members.

In Thunderbird Inn, the speaker tells a story of a bender across America. We traverse at their side, along with their friend Richard, across desolate landscapes, zooming in on lackluster places: tunnels, motels and inns, buses, jail cells, parks, and more. Destinations like the Twinkling Cow in “Dreamland” break open a curious brand of love. “The wind is / a milkshake / blender cup,” the speaker recounts. Within the collection, love is inextricably tied to place, but the link is troubled. Many of the poems are shaped like coffins; death-stricken structures with startling descriptions like “razorblade shadows,” “scarecrow of rabbit bones,” and a nacho machine that “vomits gold,” revealing the collection’s devastating truth: that this love comes with its risks.

In “Milk Tooth,” the speaker tells how “a mouse / gnaws its pink leg,” and desperately pleads, “Look at me. / Tell me I matter.” This desperation is what drives the collection toward not so much a hopeful triumph over decay, but rather an opportunity to examine the many places on a map overlooked. And like the tired driver remarking at some motel off the side of the road, we become part of a collective of passersby, leaving behind parts of ourselves with the things we pass.

Conduit Books & Ephemera

—Review by Elizabeth Muscari

THE ESSENTIAL JUNE JORDAN

THE ESSENTIAL JUNE JORDAN BY JUNE JORDAN, ED. JAN HELLER LEVI AND CHRISTOPH KELLER

The Essential June Jordan, edited by Jan Heller Levi and Christoph Keller, has exquisitely and intentionally curated late poet June Jordan’s work. Boiling down the poems of such a prominent writer and activist is no easy task, but Levi and Keller have selected poems that will make readers think, explore, and admire Jordan’s legacy.

Her poems prompt both action and thought. Jordan’s signature arresting voice admits to us, “These poems / they are things that I do / in the dark / reaching for you / whoever you are / and / are you ready?”

The poems span decades, all detailing Jordan’s tireless work for justice through her writing and activism against racism, violence against women and minority groups, police brutality, and more. While the poems were written in the twentieth century, they are still painfully relevant. 

It’s evident in this collection that Jordan was a master of using language and form as vehicles to protest injustice in America. For example, many poems contemplate racist undertones in language, combating it by using Black English and by pushing traditional poetic forms beyond their usual appearances. 

The poems’ subjects aren’t sugar-coated and their messages aren’t hidden behind winding metaphors or abstract language—they are sure, direct, and concrete: “I will no longer lightly walk behind / a one of you who fear me.” Oftentimes, the poems echo and speak back to one another, demonstrating Jordan’s lasting legacy. 

The Essential June Jordan proves the power in June Jordan’s work. Her work called for us then and calls for us now, asking us to fight for each other and against what tears us apart, all while believing in the possibility of a better world.

Copper Canyon Press.

—Review by Elizabeth Muscari

WATER I WON'T TOUCH

WATER I WON’T TOUCH BY KAYLEB RAE CANDRILLI

Tender and brave, Kayleb Rae Candrilli’s poetry collection Water I Won’t Touch asks us to consider “Haven’t we all chewed / through something tough and survived?” Candrilli blends gentle love with brute force, detailing a transgender experience in insensitive and intolerant spaces.

This vibrant collection bursts with all kinds of life: flowers and the arctic and animals and rural America and a transforming physical body. It also details what challenges life: intolerance, a volatile childhood, a family’s dysfunction, and addiction.

In the opening poem, “Sand & Silt,” a boy yanks the speaker’s ankles, touching them “as he shouldn’t have,” the violence deeply affecting them. In this poem and elsewhere, the speaker contemplates how a story of violation can stay “spurred into our bones.” 

Candrilli constructs these story-spurs with precise, emotional narratives inextricably tied to the natural world and its inhabitants. 

From the shorelines of New Jersey to the mountains of Appalachia, these poems are tightly woven with geography and memory–the heartbreak that drowns us in sorrow and the hope that keeps us afloat. One moment the speaker describes alcoholism and drug abuse, another they discuss wanting to marry their partner on a beach.

Life blends with loss such as in “Water We Won’t Touch.” The speaker details their father’s history of addiction, and the impact it has had on their sibling: “For years my father had my sibling / water-locked, drug-spun– / surrounded by the Pacific / and saline-flushed needles.” 

In “On Having Forgotten to Recycle,” we see a fascinating relationship between the speaker’s body post-double mastectomy and the earth: “I have cleaved whole mountains from / my chest and sent them to soak in an offshore landfill.” Like the Arctic, the speaker notes their body is smaller, but their heart is “much closer to the sun.” 

Candrilli’s language is precise, contained in unrhymed stanzas and bold in its use of space–one moment a poem details addiction in couplets, another, horizontally oriented, stretches across pages. 

Stakes are certainly high in this collection, and there’s a brave sense of hope that surfaces from pain. In “Echo,” the worried speaker compares their partner’s abnormally beating heart to an orchid, an unlikely and gorgeous comparison–it veers from the anxieties of the body, and invests in the beauty found within it. 

The compassion found in these poems paired with heartbreaking and violent images show how such elements can exist in the same space and body. They interact with one another, shaping our worlds and identities. 

Kayleb Rae Candrilli’s brilliant collection is full of passion and ache. It’s full of heart. It’s courageous. Water I Won’t Touch names the beauty and ugliness of our world. Primarily focusing on the trans experience, this collection holds both love and loss in the same light, showing the joy and possibility that emerges. 

Copper Canyon Press.

—Review by Elizabeth Muscari

WATERBABY

WATERBABY BY NIKKI WALLSCHLAEGER

Waterbaby, Nikki Wallschlaeger's third poetry collection, bravely dives head-first into tough waters. The collection navigates subjects like family, Blackness, womanhood, motherhood, and how moments can drown us in grief and loss and challenge us to stay afloat.

Wallschlaeger's poems sing of love and pain, overflowing with an unflinching voice, packed with musicality and varied rhythms and inventive and precise language.

Readers immediately witness this mastery in her opening poem, "Nobody Special," "I'm nobody special, nobody special / waiting for some answers tonight / hoping somebody will hear me out / while the light keeps flickering, flickering" and we continue to hear this voice echo and boom throughout the collection.

Wallschlaeger weaves life with life's source, belting stories of what it means to live as a Black woman and mother in America. These poems detail the hard work of keeping oneself and others anchored to life, and the fears of sinking in the process.

Her poems ooze with the blues. Refrains and verses of sadness are anchored throughout the work. "Blue Flame of July," for example, leaves readers with emotional yet resounding lines like "Can't fix what's beyond repair / baby I know the feeling." 

Wallschlaeger argues that to examine these emotions is to sing of them.

Like blues songs, these poems are populated with life: buildings and bathtubs and children and houses and families. These moments lend readers bustling images of the very things that make up ordinary life, and also shed necessary light on some of the world’s most precious members who sustain life and bloodlines.

This collection is one for this moment. It details hardship, identity, grief, and loss, themes we have become familiar with amidst our distanced, chaotic year. However, this collection includes messages of hope, observing the love it takes to believe in change and healing. Wallschlaeger's musical and lyrical depths sing of our world, showing us the poetry that exists everywhere around us.

Copper Canyon Press.

—Review by Elizabeth Muscari