A distress call that’s worth reading and heeding.
A collection of 57 poems that sound alarms about current ecological, political, and cultural trends.
Ungar (English/Coll. of Saint Rose; Immortal Medusa, 2015, etc.) provides helpful notes to explain her inspirations for this impressive volume of free verse, which includes transgressive female voices of the past and present; Cassandra, Emily Dickinson, and Audre Lorde make appearances. Alphabetical order is a recurring theme, as is Morse code. The title poem makes reference to rising, polluted seas; the placement of seven lines of “SOS” in Morse code seems to form waves. Environmental disasters are another urgent concern, as seen in “Endnotes to Coral Reefs” and “Naming the Animals,” a partial list of extinct species that ends with a gut punch: “Four species an hour.” Language is also under attack, as revealed in “Elegy,” which alphabetically lists words eliminated from the Oxford Junior Dictionary (“bluebell,” “buttercup”) and arrays them as if they’re drifting away. In contrast, newly included words (“blog,” “broadband”) are clustered in a solid block of text. Clever manipulation of language, space, and punctuation abounds. “Quoth the Queane” riffs on the letter Q, while “To You, U” explores the personal and linguistic history of Ungar’s initial. “Après Moi” offers 21 variations on the phrase “Let them eat cake”—with “cake” replaced by evocative signifiers, such as “bump stocks,” “the lying press,” “tax returns,” “opiates,” and “paper towels.” Dystopian poems will resonate with many readers, such as “The Woman With a Live Cockroach in her Skull” and its slippery preposition: “She wakes screaming / each morning at the news.” “Man Bun Ken” is a humorous meditation on the fate of the latest iteration of Barbie’s companion: “Future archaeologists / may stumble upon his simulacra / & mistake him for a shape-shifting god.” The book is full of keen insights regarding the passage of time, whether one is attending a wedding with one’s first boyfriend, taking a nostalgic walk through the West Village, or observing a spider and her web. Overall, Ungar suggests that language and memory are futile attempts to impose order on the chaos that surrounds us.
A distress call that’s worth reading and heeding.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-912592-74-9
Page Count: 71
Publisher: The Ashland Poetry Press
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An odd, nostalgic compilation, but a few poems about hospital patients see keenly into the condition of the individual body...
Wandzilak’s debut poetry collection spans a lifetime, musing on place, change, and mortality in light, occasional verse.
Built in the 1950s, the real-life East Deck Motel in Montauk, New York, was a mecca for beachgoers, surfers, and tourists of all stripes. But in 2015, its future was uncertain. In a sense, some of these poems, set at the motel, read as elegies—nostalgic celebrations of the seashore’s many moods. The title poem’s speaker reminisces about a night of love in the dunes, away from the crowd, and it’s gloomy with foreboding: “I could barely tell land from sea / I knew where I was, but not exactly.” With the lover’s “cold hand” in his, the speaker glimpses “the heart of a tear.” Other poems cast an eye over cultural high points, as in the longish poem “A Partial Autobiography.” The short, free-verse lines begin with oddity (“I was born with a remnant third nipple / I did not know what that meant for me”) but smooth out to more familiar touchstones: “I saw Yul Brynner play The King and I…. // I have seen the unicorns at the Cloisters //….I caught a wahoo in Turks and Caicos.” The oddity gathers and increases, however, in another cultural-event poem, this time on the occasion of seeing famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma in concert in 2013. The lilting cadence of “I ate elk with a runcible spoon!” proceeds to a playful but peculiar after-concert meal: “Later we fed Mr. Ma toasted farro / As he proceeded to eat my bone marrow!” Whimsy is one thing, but word-pairing for the sake of rhyme is another, as in this quatrain: “I have delivered fourteen lives / Each followed by fourteen placentas / Therein, I found elation upon this earth, / Unequaled to a dinner of lobster polenta.” The poet’s background as a surgeon also appears with a poetic nod to delivering bad news; in it, the narrator glances daily into a nearby cemetery, where a patient will soon be buried. A compilation of similarly medical-themed poems would be truly select.
An odd, nostalgic compilation, but a few poems about hospital patients see keenly into the condition of the individual body and soul.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5144-6727-5
Page Count: 54
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An ambitious collection—which asks the world to stop its destructive ways and recognize the importance of Africans—that...
A narrator rails against racism and ignorance in this debut poetry volume.
Celly’s book contains hundreds of poems, most of them quite short, that describe a man who is living in a universe full of unenlightened individuals who cause destruction because of their lack of knowledge. In particular, they do not appreciate the contributions of people of African descent and confound the narrator with their bigotry, murderous ways, and inability to become edified. Nevertheless, he is self-assured and encourages others to follow him. “I am the maestro without the orchestra,” he writes in the volume’s opening poem, “A Maestro,” but notes that humans won’t have the privilege of discerning what’s in his mind “until they stop killing each other.” As the many poems in the volume progress, he begins to refer to himself as “The Negus,” an African emperor or king. He has the “noble blood of the Kongo Kingdom” in “Legendary Blood,” descended from warriors, geniuses, and visionaries. The tone of the poems overall seeks to be high-minded, with references to The Prince by Machiavelli and the French Revolution. There is also a call to emulate African rhythms, such as the Congolese rumba or the songs of Bob Marley, in “It Must Rhyme and Flow.” A mysterious “they” is often mentioned, though it is unclear if this is a reference to Western society, racists, or uneducated people. Yet the narrator, who has a commanding presence, does describe an overall war on Africa and encourages Africans to rise up. Moreover, he transcends race and the color barrier and desires something mystical. “I am not a Negro. I am renegade. I am the Negus straight from heaven,” he writes in “Defined by Color Only Not So Fast!” Celly’s expansive volume, which aspires to thoughtful and strong lines about humanity and its failings, is not hostile but uses grandiose language to ponder and decree. While there are hundreds of poems, many are quite vague and are just one line or a short paragraph. The work is not entirely an exercise in self-aggrandizement, but the collection’s message can get lost amid the numerous ambiguities and repeated proclamations.
An ambitious collection—which asks the world to stop its destructive ways and recognize the importance of Africans—that remains hampered by nebulous and unspecified pronouncements.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68319-824-6
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Tate Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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