A powerful, picturesque take on rural life from an authoritative new voice.
Custer presents a luminescent poetry debut set in a Midwestern landscape.
Over the course of 61 poems, the Indiana-based poet envelops readers in free verse that evokes images of farms, barns, cornfields, and livestock. They exist in a place where residents “drink whiskey / and say crick,” compost smells like death, a local possum gets nicknamed George Jones, and women knead dough at kitchen windows. This rustic setting, described delicately, is Custer’s turf, and she infuses her homeland with awe-inspiring expansiveness in lines such as “whisper good farmland / yawning before you like a parable” and “tonight it’s all moonscape / and drought-starved grass.” The author doesn’t ignore the sinister and sorrowful sides of people and nature, however, as she describes a gutted yearling (“dead eyes wide, front hooves scraping / the slatted floor”), the weather (“a repetition of lies”), and a man “standing / like a lament.” Along with these visceral details of people and places, she also delves within, seeking a spiritual source: “God / is in the monotony we might worship / if we could just learn to sit still.” In her desire to make prayer just as tangible as the worms a speaker digs up from the ground, she writes, “I want to find prayer in a hole in the dirt, in the emptiness of a / moment somewhere, I want to hold it again, if fearfully.” Poems such as “Colossus” and “Dope Sick Monday” veer into sociopolitical territory and briefly threaten to interrupt the collection’s dreamy progression. Overall, though, Custer’s poetry proves sparse but fierce; tender in its portraiture (such as a speaker’s sister “pretend-napping naked in the hay”) but brutally blunt when it has to be: “you fucked me for thirty-eight minutes / the exact length / of history’s shortest war.” The depictions of Middle America will resonate with those who’ve experienced that landscape firsthand and also appeal to those just vicariously passing through. It’s a journey that readers won’t soon forget.
A powerful, picturesque take on rural life from an authoritative new voice.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-944355-36-4
Page Count: 86
Publisher: Five Oaks Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A volume of poetry that shines when focused on the author’s experiences of race and culture.
A collection speaks in part to the poet’s Mexican-American heritage.
In these multifaceted poems, Mexico-born, Houston-raised Salazar (Of Dreams and Thorns, 2017) explores general human themes like love and war in addition to specific experiences as a person of color. The book begins with a sensual meditation on desire, featuring luscious descriptions of a lover, from lips “moist like youth” to the body’s “softest velvet” slopes. The poems shift to odes to cultural icons like the Tejano star Selena and Mexican-German painter Frida Kahlo as well as occasion pieces honoring his brother’s 40th birthday and a friend’s mother’s memorial service. The author hits his stride when he delves into identity. In “I Am Not Brown,” he contemplates the societal implications of skin tone and his inability to fit into the rigid category of Caucasian or Latino. “For white and black and brown alike / Are slaves to history’s brush strokes,” he writes. “Grateful for the Work,” perhaps Salazar’s loveliest poem, catalogs the day of a laborer, starting with an early morning awakening and following him as he toils in 100-degree heat, enjoys tacos from his lunch pail, buys beverages from a child’s lemonade stand, and returns home to an equally hard-working wife. The author then makes an abrupt turn toward Syria in a series of poems that condemn that country’s president, Bashar Hafez al-Assad. They serve as a rallying cry for Syrians and grieve for the murdered masses. Salazar’s closing poem, “Sons of Bitches,” is a clunky rant about a 20-year-old immigrant shot in the head by a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent. The gratuitous violence and political theologizing are ill at ease with the intimate, personal experiences that preceded them, such as the fablelike “A Mexican is Made of This,” in which Salazar beautifully describes the “rainbows, bronze, backbone, butterflies” that his people embody.
A volume of poetry that shines when focused on the author’s experiences of race and culture.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9991496-3-8
Page Count: 166
Publisher: Bronze Diamond Productions
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Poems and images that ask readers to appreciate a searching body for its beauty and grace.
Diehl’s debut poetry collection showcases the arduous search for human connection and self-understanding.
In free verse poems that combine strong metaphors with prosaic passages, the poet wanders along a lifelong path of self-knowledge. She first describes it as a “pilgrimage…to accept what’s been deemed unworthy inside us,” and the trail leads to important insights. In a plainly stated yet necessary reminder, the author asserts that being human, despite the loneliness one may encounter, “is not a solitary pursuit.” Above all else, the book voices a desire for transparency in the self and in others. In “Clear Stream,” moving water illuminates objects within it, even as mystery waits at the bottom, and the water’s clarity corresponds to the speaker’s offering of his- or herself to view: “Here I am. // Come see me if you want.” Sometimes the tumble of words in these short stanzas suggests a pouring forth of injury: “It’s the show-stopping blow of loss upending a heart pain over pain till capacity for love regulates its beating.” Readers will understand a back story involving love and loss, difficulty in communication, sadness, and acceptance of children growing up. The poems gain strength from well-chosen accompanying images, including sketches and paintings by Dimenichi and colorful works by Jamaican-born painter Powell that enrich the verbal landscape. Several full-page images by each artist appear, suggesting a thematic connection or amplifying an emotion in a given poem. A richly textured, grand illustration of a tree by Dimenichi, for example, appears alongside a poem that celebrates the inspiration of such towering entities. A poem concerned with self-reflection joins a Powell painting of floating, twinned female forms. The figures seem to both depict and satisfy the speaker’s need to be seen, with their emphasis on mirror images, body doubles, and echoes of shapes. Even the windshield of a car can be a “two way mirror” behind which the driver is “invisible to life outside.” An explicitly female body is glimpsed in the sketches, and the warm, dreamlike compositions give it substance.
Poems and images that ask readers to appreciate a searching body for its beauty and grace.Pub Date: July 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-304-13091-4
Page Count: 58
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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