ANIMAL

ANIMAL BY DOROTHEA LASKY

Diving into the trickster-like nature and imaginative qualities of self, ghosts, color, and bees, Dorothea Lasky’s essays within Animal invite “the I to be its own cool animal.” Like a gust of wind, Lasky’s first essay about ghosts prompts poets “to resist the traditional ways logic seeks to jail itself,” which forms the central call to action of the collection. Animal serves as a handbook to fortify the infrastructure of the city of Imagination.

Lasky crafts a dazzling testimony of color and its transformative role in how we perceive the world. She puts a light to prisms through discussions of synesthesia and Rimbaud’s disorganization of the senses, illustrating color as a “live wire that illuminates its frequency.” Referencing Daniel Tammet’s Born on a Blue Day, she shares “poetry can learn from others on the autism spectrum and those who sense the world differently because color is sensual.” Lasky champions for the inclusion of colors beyond ROYGBIV to convey an image's unique and iridescent brilliance.

And her navigation of creativity is a model to follow: to celebrate the inner spirit and personalities of each word. She advocates for naked truth and intuition: “our greatest gift as a humanity is the dance of the spirit through the imagination as manifest in language.” Speaking of a poem’s own manifestation, Animal features an elegy for bees: “what the bee makes, a set of containers of well-used space, is the nonsentimental machine of a poem.”

Throughout each essay, she draws curtains and attempts to undefine the spatiality of poems, weaving threads of liminality in order to navigate the spaces between the human and the animal, the real and dream worlds, the living and the dead.  Lasky unboxes the pigeonholes and Animal resides in a realm of poetic possibility.

Wave Books.

—Review by Samuel Binns

EYES BOTTLE DARK WITH A MOUTHFUL OF FLOWERS

EYES BOTTLE DARK WITH A MOUTHFUL OF FLOWERS BY JAKE SKEETS

In his debut collection, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, Diné poet Jake Skeets crafts an intimate portrait of his hometown of Gallup, New Mexico. Like fellow Diné poet Sherwin Bitsui, Skeets burrows and grounds the reader in image, sound, and movement: “Indian Eden. Open tooth. Bone Bruise. This town split in two.” Here, in “Drunktown,” a coal mine and a railroad splinter the community, where “gray highway veins narrow” and “sands glitter with broken bottles.” 

Skeets is unrelenting in his illustration of the relationship between the body and its environment: “broken / clouds sanded down / to metal teeth / carburetor muscle beneath combustion” and “each eye a coal pearl . . .” His queering and embodiment of landscape incites the reader to realize the shifting nature of the body: a body “undresses into nightjars” and becomes “a cloud flattened in my hand. // Your body coiled with mine. Air snakes / over ribcage, cracks into powder.” And, in the vein of the necropastoral, Skeets shines light on an environment saturated with trucks and gasoline, where “his mouth turned exhaust pipe / his veins burst oil” and “he swallows transmission and gasket / bonnet with full wings / torn from his burning back / an eye alters into alternator / the other a hub cap.” He contrasts the dark through his weaving of language into the natural world, writing: “an owl has a skeleton of three letters / o twists into l” and “the letter t vibrating in cottonwoods.” 

This collection’s sublime scenes reclaim visibility in varying degrees of blossom and ash; each poem swells with breath and exhaust. Skeets creates a sonic space of visceral images that smolder in the dark weight of toxic masculinity and the violence within his community. His intimate choreographies of the body, violence, and landscape strive to bridge coal and ash with glinting mirrors of compassion, masterfully traversing and affirming the chiaroscuro of community and self.

Milkweed Editions.

—Review by Samuel Binns

TSUNAMI FROM SOLARIS

TSUNAMI FROM SOLARIS: ESSAYS ON POETRY BY AASE BERG, TRANSLATED BY JOHANNES GÖRANSSON AND JOYELLE MCSWEENEY

Swedish poet and critic Aase Berg’s new collection, Tsunami from Solaris: Essays on Poetry, beckons readers into a mountainous range of essays covering poetry and the human experience. Edited and translated by Johannes Göransson and Joyelle McSweeney, each essay swells with an introspective metamorphosis. The collection features an expansive scope of enlightening ruminations, including musings of wounds and scars; pregnancy and motherhood (“that cute, paradisiacal madness”); subversion of the patriarchy and capitalism; playfulness; joy and suffering; adulthood; the awe-inspiring madness of children; and the nature of language and a poem’s landscape, all which offer readers new lenses and modes of thinking—to employ for the creation of poetry—to experience the world as a human being. 

Berg advocates for wonder and protests patriarchal seriousness. Provocative questions undulate throughout the collection: “is language a game?”; “should one in certain moments avoid writing about or depicting angst about mortality?”; and “why is the poem such an insult to the cruelty of life itself?” She leans toward a trickster poetics: “the poem is formless, a protoplasm, a jellyfish, an amoeba that glides around and ignores the human race’s grave chronologies.” As poetry is a playground and “language is a living being,” each essay is full of breath and enrapturing choreographies of meaning. Berg writes that “the playground is the garbage heap of the patriarchy,” and Tsunami for Solaris is a call to action for all writers to “steal back the yellow, happy, pathetic joy,” to play and play madly without boundaries or fear. 

Action Books.

—Review by Samuel Binns

SO FAR SO GOOD

SO FAR SO GOOD BY URUSLA K. LE GUIN

In So Far So Good, a master of the science fiction genre, Ursula K. Le Guin gathers poetry written in the final years of her life and leaves us a valedictory collection rich with wisdom. Here Le Guin paints images of wind, rain, seasons, sleep, darkness, old age and death—across seven sections—and with an omnivorous sense of language, music, and curiosity for the world. The poems are sonorous and spellbinding––flowing with a lingering cadence that echoes deep within the reader.  

Some poems wrestle with the journey and destination of the body and soul: “I think of the journey / we will take together / in the oarless boat / across the shoreless river.” In others, Le Guin yearns toward mysticism: “to your soul I say: / With none to hide from / run now, dance / within the walls / of the great house.” She reflects upon old age and affirms its ramifications, writing that “all earth’s dust / has been life, held soul, is holy,” and commanding the spirit to “rehearse the journeys of the body / that are to come, the motions / of the matter that held you.”

Each poem within So Far So Good is a journey that beckons its readers to set sail, to pay attention, and to flutter in the wind. Le Guin finds delight in the dark mysteries of life and conveys her own experiences with a kind of urgency. Her poems root themselves in the natural world to incite inner transformation: “The world may be as it used to be / but I am altered, I the eye that sees / all half known, half strange as if newborn / and fresh to its mortality.” Just so, Le Guin’s So Far So Good guides us, with dreamlike imagery, through the waters of mortality.

Copper Canyon Press.

— Review by Samuel Binns

HEARTH: A GLOBAL CONVERSATION ON COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, AND PLACE

HEARTH: A GLOBAL CONVERSATION ON COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, AND PLACE EDITED BY ANNICK SMITH AND SUSAN O’CONNOR

Hearth: A Global Conversation on Community, Identity, and Place is a multidisciplinary and multicultural anthology, edited by Annick Smith and Susan O’Connor, exploring the physical and spiritual manifestations of home in the era of the Anthropocene. This compilation of poems, stories, and essays—divided in three primary sections: “Heart,” “Earth,” and “Art”—moves us to rekindle our local and global communities. Dedicated to those who have lost their hearths and seek new ones, it explores themes of vagrancy, displacement, expatriation, immigration, family, climate change, technology, politics, loss, and discovery. Contributors include: Geffrey Davis, Gretel Ehrlich, Jane Hirshfield, Barry Lopez, and Bill McKibben, who provoke with questions of community and open doors to a wider discussion for making the world a more nurturing place. And a small but wondrous section of landscapes, from Brazilian photographer Sabastiao Salgado, supplements the conversation.

The anthology explores the full weight of the spaces we inhabit, the spaces of belonging. “Our hearth is our home in ever-expanding circles of connectivity—local, bioregional, continental, planetary, solar, galactic, and cosmic,” writes Mary Evelyn Tucker. It has always been a gathering place, a shelter, and a sanctuary that provides refuge. But from climate changes, wars, refugees, evolving technologies, to natural disasters, for many, the hearth becomes problematic. Here is a book for our real or imagined hearths, prompting us to discover and redefine them. Gretel Ehrlich offers: “Home is anywhere I’ve taken the time to notice. Where there is no ‘I.’ It shouldn’t be called a sense of place, but a flat-out, intimate sensorium where Emerson’s dictum suddenly makes sense: ‘I am nothing. I see all.’” Hearth serves as a guide and a tribute to our collective struggles and the many possibilities of home.

Milkweed Editions.

—Review by Samuel Binns

THE FINAL VOICEMAILS

THE FINAL VOICEMAILS BY MAX RITVO, EDITED BY LOUISE GLÜCK

In his second collection of poems, The Final Voicemails, the late Max Ritvo pulls back the curtains of the rooms that occupy his body and mind. Ritvo passed away after a long battle with Ewing’s sarcoma, but here, in these pages he still welcomes us into his home furnished with pain, loneliness, and joy all abound with his signature wry humor and transcendent hope. His poems are unapologetically vulnerable, and he champions for a deep richness of experience: “Let room mean death or room mean life, / but let the room always be full. / Down with the Landlord! / He is leaving you empty!”

In his struggle between his terminally ailing body and his distressed mind, Ritvo elevates and finds safety in the stillness of the body over the entropy of the mind. Though the mind can be possessed with self-pity, the body dances. As his mind becomes exasperated (“sometimes your brain is as unwelcome / as muscles or guns”), he pays more attention to the current that runs through the body, a “general current / one feels through all forms / of refreshment: the down of sleep, the up of water.” He finds solace and retreats into the meditative and miraculous nature of breath: “For a moment, my nose / had to deal with so much violence / just there, in the air trying to reach me, / that there was no time to think my violent thoughts.”

Ritvo calls us to celebrate life and tenderly affirms that all pieces of existence, no less his own, are vital instruments: “Sure my smile is useful, but a chair is useful too.” He fills an empty stage with music, composing his own afterlife and prophesying blissful reincarnations: “I’ll be chairs, and I’ll be dogs / and if I am ever a thought of my widow / I’ll love being that.” In The Final Voicemails, Max Ritvo, "carrying the words, / shaking with tears," sings with a language of love and generously invites us into the hospitable shelter he designed for himself.

Milkweed Editions.

—Review by Samuel Binns

BE WITH

BE WITH, BY FORREST GANDER

In his new collection of poetry, Be With, Forrest Gander overflows with vulnerability and brings forth "a eulogy, or a tale of my or your own suffering.” The title, stemming directly from the words of Gander’s life partner, the poet C.D. Wright, who passed away two years ago, tugs at the abyssal rift of a heart mourning over the loss of a loved one. As writing into grief is to write into a deep, raw silence, Be With begins with silence: “It’s not the mirror that is draped, but / what remains unspoken between us.” This silence echoes throughout the book as Gander navigates through a labyrinthine canyon of bereavement, where his “grief-sounds ricocheted outside of language.” Wallace Stevens, an influence of Gander’s, writes that “Death is the mother of beauty,” and Gander does not turn away from grief but dives into its awful and cathartic cascading beauty that wavers between gravity and weightlessness.

As the cover art and caesura within several poems illustrate, “Every event ⏤ drags loss behind it.” The absence manifests itself on the page as words reach and call out to each other across the chasm of white-space. Gander beckons us to cross a bridge to other ranges of his life, such as a handstone, the Mexico–United States border, his mother’s pain and lapses of memory, ultimately arriving at a littoral zone, a series of ecopoetical entrances and exits accompanied by photographs.

Be With serves as a memento mori as Gander asks, “You who were given a life, what did you make of it?” He prompts us to cherish our memories, which return “strangely as fog / Rising just to flatten ⏤ under the bridges.” Although he laments with a tightened throat, his lyrical heavings gush forth an intense beauty that affirms the struggle through life’s deepest hollows. Gander brings to light his efforts of “being with,” his listening into, his resilient conjunction against a fissure shaped by death confirming that there is nothing closer to grief than love.

New Directions.

—Review by Samuel Binns