THE WHEEL BY AM RINGWALT

AM Ringwalt’s The Wheel is a prism: a treatise on temporality, resilience and psychic acuity that yields light at every poetic turn. This turning is part of the project’s meditation as well: “The wheel turns. The wheel turns.” This movement, rendered as meditation, guides us through the pages. We travel across the States and across Europe, making stops in California and Indiana and Massachusetts as well as a recording studio in Rome, a park in Trastevere, and the precipice of the Spanish Steps around Gucci-clad tourists. From the beginning, the speaker’s mission is clear: “I wanted to explore resonances between and beyond Christian and Pagan systems of meaning-making” in the birthplace of Tarot, Italy. In enumerating these resonances, The Wheel becomes the fruit of its own exploration.

Ringwalt navigates conversations between the artist as self, the artist as extension, and the artist as an influence; a dialogue that is rendered seamlessly. The Italian history of Tarot speaks to W.S. Merwin’s melodious translation of Dante’s Purgatorio (from which the book takes its name) and Alice Notley’s epic critique The Descent of Alette. An insistent verse from Colleen’s A flame my love, a frequency and the voices of Nina Simone and Devendra Banhart resonate in their midst. Everything is a point of influence. In acknowledging this, The Wheel creates language to speak on the very poetics that brought it into being.

Perhaps one of the most spellbinding aspects of The Wheel is its ability to portal through time without betraying a sense of its passing. The reader feels suspended in a mythos of place and witness. Poetic fragments of memory and song bookend scenes of listlessness, scenes of vulnerability and survival, scenes of longing.

Throughout, Ringwalt treats us to an accumulation of her longings: “I only want to fill this space with bells, with olive trees, with stone pines, white pillows.” The statements ring as mantra, a self-fulfilling prophecy that harnesses art as a mechanism for healing.

Each page is a spoke in The Wheel’s poetic apparatus, spinning a poetics of equilibrium and wonder that makes the reader feel as if they are held in confidence by a close friend.

Spuyten Duyvil.

—Review by Vasantha Sambamurti

RECONSTRUCTIONS BY BRADLEY TRUMPFHELLER

“Nothing worth saying stays still long enough to say it.” From the first line, Reconstructions announces its vibrance. Sharp, sophisticated, and effortlessly tender, Bradley Trumpfheller’s debut poetry collection palpably evokes sensations known to the scrutinized body: “Hips, clotted, / raw, unbuckled into boyhood.” Central to each sensation is a story, the fraught seed at the fruit’s center: lovers in the parking lot, “cousins slow-dancing in their cowboy boots & antlers,” navigating sexuality and gender in the American South, counting the things effaced and ornamented through heritage: “My aunts spell / around the vanity mirror / & centerpiece me, my lips plummed, / my neck belled mid-flight”. Each poem explores a chameleonic act of being: as daughter, child, lover, boy, other. In effecting a literal reconstruction of these roles, the speaker acknowledges the bloodwork they entail: “I’m trying I’m trying I’m trying I’m trying / to write a history of us / without writing a history of us / being harmed.” The language guides us through the process of learning, unlearning, and reinscribing the acts of every “good” body and “any good daughter.” Implicit in this: a song of personal reckoning and awareness: “I’ll be a girl & you can be anything alive.”

To live is to yearn. To be a body is to straddle belonging, wherever that belonging may be. Tensions between friction and desire throw the body into sharp relief: “my legs the body / at last a negative / of herself”. Reconstructions is an anatomical feat: severing and reattaching meaning to the flesh while rigorously envisioning its immunity.

Sibling Rivalry Press.

—Review by Vasantha Sambamurti