Book Reviews

As a poet astutely aware of the challenges facing 21st century America, Emmett Wheatfall has never shied away from the in-your-face-truths all of us need to hear. With Extreme Prejudice, Lest We Forget is his latest foray into truth-telling. This collection bears witness to the history of the COVID-19 pandemic which Wheatfall elegantly describes as The greatest hitchhiker on earth…/making its rounds (“Every Nation Under The Sun”).

In Transition Thunderstorms, Beth Bonness offers breathtaking insights into life events we find hard to talk about with the people we love most. This book is a tender and honest lifeline to reconnection.

In her collection, Perígee Moon, Margaret Chula invites us closer into the luminous light of tanka, a poetic form rooted in the Japanese Heian era (790 –1180 A.D.) Tanka, meaning literally “short song,” has captured the imagination of lovers, warriors, and emperors over the centuries. Today tanka remains popular in weekly Japanese newspaper columns and as a mainstay in imperial family customs.

Fans of Michael Hanner’s earlier work, Alice—What I Heard, will be pleased with this charming and inventive sequel, More Alice—Further Fragments. The main character, Alice, is a chimera whose mini adventures coalesce to form a whirligig of her life.

Dervish Lions is divided into three sections: “Kingdom of Wind,” “Countries of Origin,” and “Province of Saints.” The first two sections land themselves more firmly in the environment: the first section mostly in Oregon and the second section in ancestral lands which include the more exotic locales in which Ansari spent much of her youth.  These sections employ many of Ansari’s regular devices, including simple narrative, mostly declarative sentences, and a flatter diction; for example, For some time I’ve wanted to climb the Marquam Trail/to the top of Council Crest (“Death on the Marquam Trail”). The third section contains most of the more spiritually yearning poems and lifts the book to another level.

Caroline Boutard’s Each Leaf Singing is a feast for the senses. The cover feels good in your hand, the paper has high rag content, the print is elegant and light. It’s a collection to envy, from the woodcuts on the cover—contributed by the poet’s husband––to her calls back to him from within the poems. This little book is bursting with beauty, love, and first-rate poetry, all without excess. Spare, lean, filled with heartbreak and delight, Boutard’s poems introduce a world we come to know and love.

Pattie Palmer-Baker knows how to tell a story. In The Color of Goodbye, the story begins with her parents dancing while her father is home on leave in 1943. Yes, he’s going to war. He’s going to see livid things there ––and during later work in Iraq–– that he cannot forget. He will live them and relive them and will look for escape in a bottle of Jim Beam. And his story will inevitably become the story of his wife and his two daughters.

AE Hines’s first collection, Any Dumb Animal, is a heartful lyrical memoir that centers around three pivotal “Phone Call” poems that open sections entitled “Revival,” “Regret,” and “Rebirth.” Hines revives a myriad of memories: growing up gay with a father who fails him, revisiting his own relationship that ends in divorce, and the wonders of his own adopted son. His unflinching exploration results in self-illuminations that leap off the page touching all that is human.

Everybody has a love life of some sort. If you’re a poet, you are in an excellent position to write about your own version in a way that might be helpful or interesting to others going through the joys and agonies love always provides; comparing notes, so to speak.

Gary Lark has long been a favorite poet of mine, starting over 20 years ago when I heard him at a reading. Lark read one of his poems “Fishing” and another by Clemens Starck. I thought it generous of him to spend some of his time celebrating another poet’s work. Lark’s poetry also has this kind and accepting spirit, a heart-softening quality that embraces the humanity of even those who err.