Fontinel-Gibran has earned her poetic license.
In a literary landscape littered with ponderous rhymes and too-confessional verse, it is a joy to come across a strong collection of light poetry, works that flit across the world’s brighter surfaces while only occasionally sneaking beneath to peek at darker depths.
Fontinel-Gibran’s slick, slim new collection is a mostly gratifying sequence of what one might call diversionary poetry that delights even as it defies the genre’s subtle pull toward more doleful themes. The sense that this is a happier verse experiment is confirmed early, in adjacent works entitled “The Blue Law” and “Officially Desserted.” The first is a celebration and origin story of the ice cream sundae. The second is simply an unbroken, page-long list of sweets, from Bananas Foster to Burnt Sugar Marzipan to Coconut Glamour Cake—mouthwatering. Other poems take up or touch upon the joys of gustation, among them “Fringe Benefits,” “The Danes’ Delight” and “Make the Coffee!” Yet Fontinel-Gibran by no means confines herself to culinary themes. “Don’t You Remember; How to Play Flag Football?” sings the joys of gym class: “Even girls play football in gymnasium class; dreaming of wearing one day perhaps an amber football mum on Homecoming night.” “Geoffrey Gopher Would!” playfully laments the rodent tearing up the front yard: “There were just, no way to convey to him, to stop digging up those fucking mounds.” In most of these pieces, Fontinel-Gibran writes in line-less prose poetry, a daring choice, the only drawback being that it sometimes lets the author slip into purple language, as in “The Lonely Number”: “It’s true, by way of separating out from all other organisms, physical objects and realities, the enlightened being grows into a specified, philosophical, regular ‘unit’ on an everyday basis, that ultimately reveals itself through being at peace and in harmony with all other aspects of existence.” This abstraction threatens to fall away into drivel. But there’s more fun than philosophizing in this volume, and it’s well worth the read.
Fontinel-Gibran has earned her poetic license.Pub Date: April 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1496902818
Page Count: 142
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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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