Book Reviews

Dave Mehler is a good writer, a good poet. He writes about his life as a long-haul truck driver. He writes about people struggling with a real life of sequential cigarette breaks between stretches with a hand truck or a forklift, lifting with their arms and backs. Nothing grand. No Great Captains of Industry, no millionaire heart surgeons, no war heroes.

The epigraph, “I am haunted by waters,” from Norman Maclean’s masterpiece novella, A River Runs through It, prepares readers of Gary Lark’s Daybreak on the Water for a book about fishing and family. As in Maclean’s book, the water is fresh and, in Daybreak’s case, so is the Umpqua River and its tributaries in Southern Oregon where Lark grew up. Water in various locations––rivers, estuaries, the Pacific ocean—runs through all of Lark’s books of poetry. In fact, four of the seven include water in the title: Tasting the River in the Salmon’s Flesh, River of Solace, Easter Creek, and Daybreak on the Water.

Callie Comes of Age is a haunting coming-of-age story that could fool you with its lyrical, almost casual language. Prepare your heart. It is full of a staggering anguish. When significant people die, it is a shattering experience for Callie, the young protagonist of Dale Champlin’s collection, who had already lost the three great loves of her life/and she’s just turned fifteen (“Callie Writes the Novel of Her Life”).

In Stealing Flowers from the Neighbors, Portland poet Sherri Levine proves that she understands the Rumi epigram that introduces her book: You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens. The result is a series of 53 poems that testify about difficult themes that include mental illness and the death of a parent.

Like the horrific tragedy of 9/11, everyone will remember where they were when Covid19 shut down the globe. In early March 2020, days before nation-wide school closures, I was standing in a room full of maskless high schoolers, reviewing for the upcoming AP Language exams. We were studying the rhetorical concept of exigence, the idea that writers often come up against a situation that demands action or remedy. It is this impulse, this urgency, that often calls us to act, that prompts utterance, that begs us to better understand our place in the world’s vast and complicated chess game.

Reviewed by Paul Telles This Swarm of Light by Suzanne Sigafoos I-Beam Books (2020), 65 pp $16 ISBN #: 978-1-938928-10-9 Available at: https://shop.spybeambooks.com/product/this-swarm-of-light In her first full-length collection, Portland poet Suzanne Sigafoos delivers on her book’s title with an enchanting swarm of poems that moves fluidly through a garden of themes that include mortality and

Reviewed by Paul Telles What She Was Wearing by Shawn Aveningo SandersThe Poetry Box (November 5, 2019), 48 pp, $12ISBN #: 978-1-948461-32-0Available at: https://thepoetrybox.com/bookstore/what-she-was-wearing In What She Was Wearing, Portland poet Shawn Aveningo Sanders bravely reveals her experience as a rape victim. In a series of 29 muscular poems, Sanders recounts the horrific experience of

The Barbie Diaries by Dale Champlin Just a Lark Books (November 17, 2019), 65 pp $14 ISBN #: 978-1708450267 Available at: [email protected] Is it possible to say anything new about Barbie? Since her introduction in 1959, the PVC fashionista has been reviled and revered, loved and loathed. Her literary footprint includes adoring preteen blogs, scathing

The Leaf by Nancy Christopherson Nancy Christopherson (July 13, 2015), 66 pp $8 ISBN #: 978-0-692-42433-9 Available at: http://www.nancychristophersonpoetry.com/ In her 2015 book, The Leaf, Oregon poet Nancy Christopherson showcases uncommon poems about one of the most common human sufferings—the loss of a parent. In poems deployed throughout her self-published collection, Christopherson builds a loose